Public School Professionals by Groff Schroeder

Quick! What is the product of seven times eight? What is the square root of forty-nine? Who delivered the Gettysburg Address? Where is Mount Everest? How do you spell blueberries? What equation defines the area of a circle? What is an adjective - a noun? Who was the third President of the United States? What is the capital of Oregon - of France? The list is endless.

Chances are you know the answers to these questions and countless others because of public education and professional educators. For most Americans, property taxes paid by the People of your state provided you with free educational services for 13 long years (longer in California). Story problems, the once-dreaded nemesis now comprising virtually every calculation in the real world of adulthood, were probably first solved by your developing brain in the public schools, courtesy of one of America's dedicated public school teachers.

Chronically underpaid (a few years ago starting garbage collectors in New York City were paid about the same as starting public school professionals), often maligned and even hated, public school teachers, administrators and staff provide a safe haven and rich educational experiences for millions of American schoolchildren every day. Like physicians and lawyers, public school teachers are true professionals, holding both bachelors and graduate degrees, passing an examination for certification, facing penalties for ethical misconduct and participating in continuing education. Many complete specialized educational curricula, and most spend their own money supplying their classrooms and students in an environment of chronically sheared budgets. Public schools provide the best meal of the day to many children.

Well fed and independently funded, powerful federal politicians openly disregard Constitutional restrictions and federal law, punishing mediocre performance in the public schools with counterproductive testing requirements and other unfunded mandates. Expecting the highway department to improve highways by cutting funding for repairs and improvements would be laughable to them, but somehow they think this will work (as opposed to investing in infrastructure, personnel and new technologies) with troubled local public schools. Repeated local attempts at emulating international educational successes with extended school days or years usually ignites great opposition and resentment, often from the very people whose children would benefit most from longer school days, extended school years and increased afternoon supervision.

For the most part, Americans love their local public school and their kid's teachers, but somehow appear to dislike public school teachers in general and public education as a whole. Some complain about paying taxes to educate other people's children - even though taxpayers of generations passed funded their education. Others may oppose aspects of the science curriculum, like the foundation of modern biology, evolution. While one parent, religious or political group advocates teaching their religious beliefs in public schools and works to exclude other beliefs and even possible contradictions, yet another may prefer the teaching of a different religious doctrine. Often, a neutral position excluding all systems requiring faith and focusing instead upon the verifiable, repeatable methods of science founding modern technological society, pleases neither.

In the middle, local public schools and professional educators soldier on, doing the best they can with minimalist budgets and what they provide for themselves and their students. While some citizens may dislike public schools and their teachers, without them America would be a very different place, and we all owe them professional respect, and a great deal more.

Skepticism: The First Rule of Freethinking by Louis Guzman

Once you have read Terence Hines' Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003, Prometheus Books), you'll hardly believe any popular story fed to you as truth. It turns out that much of what we hear and read is not much more than fairytales. Why it must be so is a matter for future research. In the meantime, we labor under the misconceptions of what Hines calls pseudoscience and the paranormal, the latter a subset of the former. Of course, Hines' effort does not represent the end of such stuff. In 13 chapters, citing specific topics, he lays out a persuasive panorama of junk often called fact. Much of it is the product of what he calls the "constructive nature of human perception." Essentially, the human brain will invent as fact any story that is even circumspectly suggested to it. He didactically digs into the nature of evidence in laboratory parapsychology and finds it wanting. Importantly, he cites a plethora of scientific evidence to support his conclusions.

Take Freudian psychology. It was fed to me as reliable social science at UCLA in the 1950s. Hines debunks it as bad science, right along with psychoanalysis, Jungian thinking, humanistic psychology, spiritualism, psychic readings, psychic crime detection, prophetic dreams, thought pictures and demonic possession. Ghosts, poltergeists, near-death, out-of-body experience and reincarnation receive no better treatment. Astrology, moon madness and biorhythm theory are more of the same ilk. As for UFOs and related phenomena, such as close encounters, photo evidence, abduction, ancient astronauts, pyramid power, Von Daniken, the Dogon and, gasp, the Bermuda Triangle, forget about 'em.

Faith healing drives Hines bonkers, so much so that he lectures the reader on the nature of disease, reminding us of its factuality. Thus faith healing techniques, along with psychic surgery and the role of shrines have not even chance value. Alternative medicine, featuring homeopathy, therapeutic touch, countless herbal remedies and other alternative techniques get no better treatment. Collective delusion, mass hysteria and environmental health scares, often relentlessly driven by media hype, are unsupported by scientific testing. In Chapter 13, "Special Topics," facilitated communication as a cure for autism is thrown into the dust bin, joined by creationism, cryptozoology, dowsing, the magic pendulum, fire-walking, graphology, Kirlian photography, polygraphy, and, of course, the Shroud of Turin.

There are undoubtedly many more untrue presumed phenomena to record, but that will be for an avid author to vacuum up and offer in an ordered compendium for popular use. What Terence Hines does is arm the freethinker, the secularist, with the philosophical underpinning, the scientific methodology and the rhetorical firepower with which to manage the daily grind.

There are undoubtedly many more untrue presumed phenomena to record, but that will be for an avid author to vacuum up and offer in an ordered compendium for popular use. What Terence Hines does is arm the freethinker, the secularist, with the philosophical underpinning, the scientific methodology and the rhetorical firepower with which to manage the daily grind.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS

The religious right doesn't want you to see this movie. The Catholic Church has mounted an expensive organized campaign against the film. What better reasons to take the kids to the theater this Friday?

This mystical spiritual epic is based on one of a trilogy of children's books by Philip Pullman. It takes place "in a world where people's souls exist outside their bodies in the form of animals called daemons, and a global evil threatens to dominate all thought and belief. That evil is embodied in a political/religious dictatorship referred to as the 'Church' or 'Magisterium.' " (Kansas City Star) The author never calls the organization "Christian," but the Catholic League may feel the similarity is too close for comfort. "It's not just atheistic," said Kiera McCaffrey, of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "In these books everyone associated with Christianity is a torturer of children, a liar, power mad." (Kansas City Star)

Director Chris Weitz said that the film would make no direct mention of religion or God, two of the key themes of the books - a decision attacked by fans of the trilogy…However, Weitz reassured fans…that religion would appear in euphemistic terms. (imdb.com)

Pullman is a 61-year-old Brit - the grandson of an Anglican parish priest - and is an honorary associate of the Secular Society (a British organization that promotes secularism)…But he maintains the His Dark Materials books target not any individual religion but rather totalitarianism in all its forms, from communism to theocracy.

While the "Magisterium" of his novels may resemble the Roman Catholic Church (it has bishops and monks and an executive committee called the Vatican Council), Pullman never describes its theology or identifies it as Christian. Instead he presents it as an authoritarian entity that attempts to control all aspects of individual's lives through assassination, kidnapping, torture and strict control of information.

"It doesn't matter to me whether people believe in God or not," Pullman has written. "What I do care about is whether people are cruel or…kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded inquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression."

"Good things have been done in the name of religion and so have bad things; both good things and bad things have been done with no religion at all. What I care about is the good, wherever it comes from." (imdb.com)

Focus on the Family joined the Catholics in fearful censoring of this work of fiction. Adam Holz, associate editor for Focus on the Family's Plugged In magazine…called the series "heretical."

"Pullman has been openly hostile about C.S. Lewis, and has been pretty clear about his desire to offer an alternate fantasy series based on what he would describe as humanist principles," he said. (citizenlink.org)

Yes, it's true that Pullman's books promote such humanistic values as opposition to organized dogma and totalitarian concentrations of power, and support of intellectual curiosity, kindness, love, courage, and courtesy…for the Catholic League and other opponents of the film, being critical of religion or just being atheist is analogous to being immoral. We know that that just isn't so.

For Pullman…his books are a positive Humanist response to the C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia and their thin, black-and-white Christian morality. (American Humanist Association)

Go see this movie with your kids. If you like it, tell your friends, buy the books and support Pullman and his novels against hostile anti-humanist campaigns.

"One Nation Under God" is Not Religious? - by Becky Hale: Freethought Views March 2010

In a decision that may have serious implications for church-state separation, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled that the governmental use of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance does not violate the U.S. Constitution. The court stated that the phrase does not endorse religion in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The court held that the Pledge does not violate the Establishment Clause because "Congress' ostensible and predominant purpose [is] to inspire patriotism and that the context of the Pledge--its wording as a whole, the preamble to the statute, and this nation's history--demonstrate that it is a predominantly patriotic exercise. For these reasons, the phrase 'one Nation under God' does not turn this patriotic exercise into a religious activity." Thus, a California statute permitting teachers to lead students in recitation of the Pledge does not violate the Establishment Clause.

Does this mean that only Americans who believe in a big "G" god are expected to be patriotic or perhaps those are the only ones for which a pledge of patriotism is necessary as they are the ones with a suspected divided loyalty? I am certain that anyone following current events and trends within the evangelical and Dominionist movements will agree with me. We have seen time and time again where these folks have determined that their God's will (or their interpretation of their God's will) takes a supreme position over the laws of the land. Certainly these are the very children of the homeland that need to be constantly reminded by a call to patriotism that the rule of law not the laws of Abraham or Allah or Jehovah reigns supreme in the United States of America. I want them to follow the laws of our land more closely than they do their lord's (he commands them to kill people and beat their children). I'd sleep more peacefully at night if I could assume that these equal handed non-political judges of the 9^th circuit court of Appeals had these folks in mind when they made this ruling.

If on the other hand the court meant to exclude me from patriotic representation and inclusion (since I do not believe in big or little “g” gods) am I then pardoned from other even less enjoyable patriotic duties? May I pick and choose which forms of patriotism to participate in, just as they have chosen where the separation of God and government may or may not apply? May I forgo that annual income tax ritual like churches do? I'd really rather not pay for all those military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq or that Wall Street bail out.

Well, now that I really think about it, I guess if the courts want to exclude me from full participation in American society maybe that's ok. Since religion is expanding itself into government and forcing our children to participate in religious activities, maybe I should devote my time and energy to picking up where the church has left off; like feeding the poor and caring for the homeless. Chances are many of the downtrodden are as tired of performing hollow religious rituals as we are.

Published March 18, 2010 in the Colorado Springs Independent accompanied by the following quotation.

"I have a right to bring up my daughter without God being imposed into her life by her schoolteachers."   Michael Newdow

"Terrorism" by Richard Hiatt

What the prevailing Washington think tanks will not acknowledge is the reality that you can't declare war on an abstract noun. You can declare war on personal pronouns (embodied, sentient beings), but not a noun.

If Jack and Jill climb a hill and Jack steals a bucket of water from Jill, Jill doesn't get mad at the act of stealing. She gets mad at Jack.

So why such enormous efforts placed into what could be construed as psychological indoctrination to lead the public down the path of a false premise? Quite obviously there is a sinister rationale by the Bush administration (whose ideology depends on fear and intimidation) that also depends on keeping the concept of "terrorism" eternally abstract.

The advantage is that a noun is chameleon-like, able to change form and substance, appearance and meaning at the drop of a hat - i.e., in response to the day's political agenda.

It's a scenario of Jill knowing Jack stole her bucket but then letting him go while deciding to hate everyone else resembling Jack - via political/religious affiliation, in manner of dress, business circles, friendships, or where one travels abroad. Compare Bush letting Bin Laden go and then hating (declaring war on) everyone else resembling him. He frees the real Bin Laden and creates "thousands" of Bin Ladens at the same time. It's also akin to not recognizing nuclearized nations (e.g., North Korea) while fearing nuclear terrorism (in the abstract). What could be better for the "war on terror?"

The given pretext of "keeping flexible" with terrorism is of course being able to identify the many disguises terrorists use. But the truth, as usual, is the other way around.

If the US caught all of Al Qaeda tomorrow absolutely nothing would change - except the definition of terrorism. And with each re-definition the burden of innocence simply lurks closer and closer to home, finally on "us" (as we are all "suspect" according to the Patriot Act). Eventually "terrorism" becomes anything that opposes the government. It becomes a world defined by neo-conservatives who are a) predisposed to distrusting in the first place, and b) cannot exist without a projection of "evil" eternally lurking about, like Satan himself..

Hence the advantage of keeping the nation's #1 arch-enemy safely abstruse and untouchable - until its time to cherry-pick "it" through the aperture of a person or group affiliation. It is also the reason the entire world sees itself "judged" by this administration as a "terrorist stronghold." Bush has virtually the entire globe swimming inside a cauldron of pre-stirred, hyphenated stereotypes. No wonder the US is the target of such "blowback" from every direction.

Bottom line: The problem of ending terrorism as officially defined is futile. It is designed to never end since it will simply leap from one form to another, ad infinitum (to the delight of those who profit from this - politicians, prisons, private paramilitary groups, drug enforcement agencies, war merchants, religious fanatics, etc). We're brainwashed to see terrorism "out there" versus within our own mind-frames, our attitudes, and in the rhetoric/spin that perpetuates it.

For anyone truly wishing to end terrorism the problem is, as always, one of perception. In fact it's easier to see this entire self-serving framework as a "terrorist stronghold" itself manufactured inside the boardrooms and think tanks of Washington every day. Getting a realistic grasp of the real roots of terrorism is the first step to ending it.

A Christian Nation? by Groff Schroeder

Like many of history's archetypal religious leaders, Jesus Christ lived a non-violent philosophy and taught universal affection through statements such as "Love thine enemy." Encouraging forgiveness, mutual support, self-sacrifice and reciprocity, Jesus taught us to "do unto others as we would have them do unto us" and to "turn the other cheek" to those who would harm us.

In a nationwide survey of 113,000 Americans in 1990, more than 75% of Americans identified themselves as Christians. Although America's founding documents appear to preclude the official advancement of Christianity, they do establish a democratic republic allegedly led by her People. Therefore, one would expect America's actions to comply with the teachings of "The Prince of Peace."

Jesus taught that it was right to pay taxes. Yet it seems that at least 90% of Americans complain about taxes - some even cheat. Though Jesus' churches, ministers, pastors, bishops and popes usually pay no taxes, they may become annoyed at the suggestion that they should "give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." While only 75% of Americans might be expected to follow Jesus with their wallets on April 15th, shouldn't 100% of Christ's churches be following the teachings of their namesake, perhaps only refusing to pay the portion of their taxes destined to fund war, nuclear weapons and capital punishment?

His teachings and actions during arrest before execution suggest that Jesus would probably not take up arms against others - no matter what. Like Jesus (apparently), some people are pacifists - who, despite the power to kill, would allow others to kill them before they would kill another human being.

In a Christian nation, wouldn't about 75% (or at least some significant proportion) of Americans be reluctant to support the use of violence in international relations, be unwilling to participate in activities that might contribute to the death of another human being and be completely unable to act as soldiers? Wouldn't some proportion of Americans refuse to design, create, manufacture, market or even own machines designed to kill human beings? Wouldn't huge segments of the population vehemently (or at least modestly) oppose procedures that dispense wholesale death to innocents, such as conventional or, especially, nuclear war?

Perhaps more than any politician in history, George W. Bush has rested upon (and benefited mightily) from his Christian "donors," connections and pronouncements, repeatedly invoking alleged "Christian" ideals (such as prohibiting gay marriage) and "faith-based" policies (abstinence-only sex education, for example). However, while Jesus was clearly a man of peace, George W. Bush is clearly a man of war. How can a man who allegedly worships the "world's first non-violent revolutionary" threaten a nuclear strike or start, and stubbornly prolong, a horrific, illegitimate war based on "bad intelligence" (apparently willful misrepresentations)?

If America were a Christian nation, she probably would not spend more money than all other nations on earth combined on weapons and "defense," her treasury might overflow with tax revenues from her churches and her armies could be waging peace, love and non-violence throughout the world. Instead, America appears to be accumulating massive debt, waging aggressive war, threatening unprovoked attacks, systematically revoking "God given" freedoms and torturing people suspected of merely thinking of committing a crime.

While televangelists and politicos often state that America is a Christian nation, precious little evidence exists in support of their claim.

Abortion Revisited - by Phil Stahl: Freethought Views August 2008

Abuse of Reason: Propaganda by Groff Schroeder

Before 1939, the brutal war enthralling Europe between July 28, 1914 and November 11, 1918 was not called World War I. "The Great War," "The War to End all Wars" and "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy" for the first time employed modern technologies including airplanes, tanks, chemical weapons and submarines, killing more than 7,000,000 and wounding more than 21,000,000 worldwide.

Trench warfare near the border of Germany and France yielded almost unimaginable casualties (sometimes thousands dead in a single day without an inch of progress), and we still use idioms from this war, including "over the top," "business as usual" and "last ditch." Excluding the missing, more than 1,500,000 dead and more than 4,000,000 wounded soldiers purchased Germany's defeat. No records of German civilian casualties exist. The chemical weapons employed in the war were so ghastly that a new Geneva Convention defined their use as a war crime.

Despite this gruesome history of carnage and defeat, just 20 odd years later a former soldier named Adolph Hitler led the highly educated and egalitarian people of Germany into an even more disastrous Second World War.

How? Many would cite the humiliating Treaty of Versailles and the worldwide depression that characterized the 1930s as reasons for the Germans' gullibility. However, despite previous imprisonment for an attempted military coup, Adolph Hitler and his cronies rose to power by methodically manipulating, and ultimately controlling virtually all of the information the German People received.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched form of life as paradise." Propaganda tools such as the broken record (relentlessly repeating something until it becomes common "knowledge"), ad hominem attacks (kill the messenger) and false dilemmas (i.e., portraying proposed solutions as worse than the problem) are not necessarily dishonest. However, propaganda's most effective forms, the big lie (the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed), half truths (i.e. lies by omission) and fallacies of logic, often are dishonest.

Propaganda is a general term describing communication meant to persuade. In late 1930s Germany, Nazi Riechsminister for Propaganda and National Enlightenment Hermann Goebbels literally elevated political propaganda to an art. Cynically applying advancements in marketing and public relations, the Nazi propaganda machine created celebrated films and apparently staged shocking events like the Fire in the Reichstag. Instead of selling shoes, propaganda systematically deceived and controlled the German People.

Buttressed with peer pressure, nationalism, intimidation, imprisonment, torture and assassination, Goebbels' comprehensive propaganda co-opted and manipulated virtually every form of communication in Germany, keeping the German People terrified, confused, misinformed and above all obedient in the face of incrementally increasing criminality in their alleged democracy. Eventually, countless German citizens rationalized, accepted and even participated in horrific war crimes, including the enslavement, starvation and execution of millions of innocent men, women and children.

Like fascism, propaganda did not die with the Third Reich, and both can thrive quite successfully behind a patina of respectability. Perhaps the only defense against propaganda is gathering as much information from as many sources and points of view as possible, then applying critical thinking in its analysis. If 1930s Germany is any example, unquestioningly believing what you are told is a recipe for disaster.

by Groff Schroeder

Amendment 48 - Muddled Thinking - by Douglas Schrepel: October 2008

Amendment 48 - Muddled Thinking

 by Douglas Schrepel

This November voters in Colorado will be faced with the prospect of extending the notion of “personhood” to the moment of human conception.  Amendment 48 is the result of a petition drive headed by Kristi Burton and a group calling themselves Colorado for Equal Rights.  According to Burton, amendment 48 would, “…guarantee every person, at every stage of life, the right to life, liberty, equality of justice and due process of law.”

Opponents to Amendment 48 are justifiably concerned.  Amendment 48 would open the door to banning or extensively limiting all abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), in-vitro fertilization (due to the large number of wasted embryos necessary for a successful pregnancy), and stem cell research, as well as eliminating many commonly used birth control methods.  In addition to these concerns, fears abound surrounding the governmental infringement on a woman’s right to privacy in determining when and how to bear children.

Amendment 48 once again highlights the failure of the courts and lack of full debate in the public square to address the key issue of the moral status of a fetus.  In the United States, this failure goes back to at least the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973.  If the fertilized egg cell truly does have the same moral standing as a fully adult human person, abortion, current methods of in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research and many methods of birth control, are moral outrages and should be halted.  In addition, a woman’s right to privacy (and the risk involved in pregnancy) is a small price to pay to protect a “person” from a certain death.

The problem with amendment 48 is not that it would limit our ability to engage in many socially important and accepted practices; the problem with amendment 48 is that the doctrine of early fetal personhood is false.  (See The Secular Conscience (2008) by Austin Dacey for more on this line of argument.)

Personhood implies that a being has interests.  Interests are not the same as needs.  A tree has needs in the sense of sunshine, water, and minerals from the soil.  Yet a tree is not a person, it has no interests.  That is, it has no sense of awareness, no ability to feel pain, no sense of a future, or any of the attributes that we might associate with personhood.  Any moral responsibilities that we may have are not directly related to the tree, but rather to our fellow human beings, and perhaps other sentient creatures that may depend on or care about the tree.  A fertilized egg cell and early fetus demand only the same degree of moral consideration as other life without interests.

To argue that a fetus is a person because it was made in the image of God or has an immortal soul are religious arguments for which no shred of evidence exists.  In a pluralistic society in which we embrace people of differing religious or non-religious persuasions, religious arguments, with no evidence, should not be the basis of our criminal law.  (See the work of Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer for more along this line of argument.)

Amendment 48 is muddled thinking and would make bad law.

Douglas Schrepel   October 2008

Amendment 62 - Part of a Holy War? - by Jan Brazill: Freethought Views June 2010

Most Americans are not aware of the current Holy War engaging our country. This is not our nation’s battle against Muslim Al Quaeda and the Taliban, but another quiet war being waged as a “birthing contest” between Christians and non-Christians.
 
“Quiverfull” is a movement among conservative evangelical couples chiefly in the United States. It promotes procreation, seeing children as a blessing from God. It believes that the Bible mandates the role of wives as bearers of children and workers in the home under the authority of a husband. Shunning all forms of birth control, followers call themselves a "quiver full," "full quiver," or simply "QF" Christian. This movement has well-known followers, one being Michael Farris, advocate for home-schooling. Doug Phillips, son of U.S. Constitution Party leader Howard Phillips and president of Vision Forum Ministries, advocates for Biblical patriarchy, creationism, homeschooling, and Quiverfull. 
 
These people hate birth control! So could they be behind the effort to force Coloradoans to vote on a new “Personhood” Amendment in November? Amendment 62 asks Colorado voters: Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution defining the term "person," as used in those provisions of the Colorado constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law, to include any human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being? If passed, this law would ban all abortions and most forms of birth control, quite in keeping with the objectives of Quiverfull.
 
Or could the Catholics be trying to make law reflect their doctrine? Papal directives prevent Catholic hospitals from performing abortions or vasectomies or tubal ligations. Nor will they dispense contraceptives. Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted recently excommunicated a Catholic nun who, as top administrator at a Phoenix hospital, permitted an abortion to save a woman’s life when her pregnancy caused severe health problems. Doctors told the woman, who suffers from pulmonary hypertension, that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of death was close to 100 percent -- and the baby would die as well. Despite this, she, along with other Catholics involved in the decision, including the patient, were automatically excommunicated by the Catholic Bishop.
 
Whatever their religion, Amendment backers who attempt to codify religious opposition to birth control as a basis to our laws represent a Holy War against American families. During these difficult economic times, the last thing families need is to be denied the capability of deciding their size.
 
Many families, whose well-being depends on both parents working, have seen one of those parents lose employment. Another mouth to feed would have devastating effects on the children already living, so contraception is essential to that family’s survival. Women with pre-existing health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and epilepsy, or women receiving chemotherapy or taking medications, rely heavily on the availability of birth-control.
 
If Amendment 62 passes, Colorado will soon resemble Nicaragua and El Salvador, where women routinely die because doctors, unlike the brave nun excommunicated in Phoenix, are too afraid of punishment by religious authorities to use abortion to relieve the complications of childbirth.
 
With similar attacks upon reproductive freedom being made in other states, our nation, once a World Leader in human equality, is in danger of regressing to medieval times when religion ruled the world!"

An Atheist’s Foxhole in the Sky - by Louis E. Guzman, Ph.D.

Unlike the legendary battlefield foxhole, mine was in the sky - the rear seat of a Navy carrier based divebomber with my cockpit canopy opened for action. In it aerial combat never frightened me, never caused me to call for succor by man or spirit.

At times, moments in the air were even thrilling. I recall during our first attack looking down from 25,000 feet at the Japanese ships we were to attack in a Philippine island bay just before Holt, my pilot, pulled us into a graceful wingover, starting a perilous dive behind the section leader as he settled on a target. Soon, Holt caught on to the intended target of our 500-pound bomb.  

As Holt corkscrewed the plane seeking an optimum bombing attitude we plummeted over 20,000 feet like a falling rock. Facing upslope, I was at first assured to see the remaining bombers strung out behind up into the infinite blue. But then I noticed the following bombers unsteadily deviating from a single column, causing them to momentarily lose position in an otherwise neat formation. We were now in the whistling silence of a deadly dive-bomber’s equivalent of the fog of war.  Worse still, at times the following plane would drift into our recovery path, precisely where the 500-pounder, if released early by the plane above, might land in my lap.  My head shuddered but held its cool.  

Not being a mere passenger on a joy ride, I was ready to use my twin 30-caliber machine guns to ward off enemy aircraft. An equally critical task was to monitor the altimeter over my left shoulder and at 2,000 feet to sharply alert Holt of that critical height by calling, mark, mark, mark, on the intercom. It was time to release the bomb, following which he was to begin our brain stunning pull-up. My eyelids soon weighed a ton as the high-G pressure took its toll. I felt several times heavier, hardly able to move. I could at best hang on to the gun ring.  I turned laboriously to watch the bomb, as it struck the enemy ship’s bow. 

Instinctively, Holt shoved the throttle forward for maximum speed and quickly flipped the perforated diving flaps switch. The engine roared away the silence, as we turned to exit the battlefield..  I closed the rear cockpit canopy. Swinging toward the pre-designated rendezvous direction, Holt started a quick run out of danger.  

I paused for a deep breath, but soon tracer bullets were flying by. Abruptly, the massive aircraft began shuddering, as if we had been hit. I sensed Holt fighting the flight controls. Then the shattering vibration ceased. I reported no observable damage that might have caused the instability. Later, aboard the carrier Yorktown we found a deep indentation at the leading edge of the right wing. Apparently, a shell had embedded itself in the wing, and then had been shaken loose by the buffeting motion.  

Fortunately, Holt and I were unharmed. I took my belated deep breath and congratulated him for a safe and successful dive. We still had to join our squadron and make our way aboard the carrier in one piece.   

I thanked my atheist foxhole in the sky while patting our plane for bringing us safely through our first combat.

Are we equal yet? - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views August 2010

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  So wrote America’s founders on July 4, 1776.  Despite the good intentions, many signatories of the Declaration of Independence would vote in 1787 in favor of a Constitution that kept millions of slaves in bondage, initiating the many long years of toil, brutality, and war that lay ahead before even the basic concept of equality would gain acceptance in the United States.   

It took almost 100 years before slavery led to war, and even the Civil War did not end racial inequality, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution notwithstanding.  In many ways, the involuntary servitude prohibited by the 13th Amendment lived on in southern states through economic policies such as sharecropping for almost 100 years after the end of the Civil War.  Most former Confederate states used state and local “Jim Crow” laws to deny former slaves equality in virtually every aspect of life, including the right to vote.  

Between 1941 and 1945, some ten years after the construction of the Supreme Court Building with it’s two inscriptions “Equal Justice Under Law” and “Justice, the Guardian of Liberty,” Americans of color faced rampant inequality, discrimination, and segregation in America’s armed forces as they fought the Nazis, who wrote discrimination, racial hatred, and even mass murder into law.  After the war, African American veterans returned to segregated and racially discriminatory states, where their military service freeing those facing racial inequality overseas meant nothing. 

In the 1960’s, Martin Luther King and many other extraordinarily courageous individuals gave their lives fighting for the equality that had supposedly been granted by a creator and guaranteed by America since 1776.  It took incredible patience, relentless hard work, inconceivable sacrifice, economic boycotts, non-violent actions, riots, assassinations, and countless individual epiphanies to end America’s intergenerational nightmare of racial hatred, segregation, and discrimination.  Even after their victory, discriminatory stereotypes, symbols, and laws quietly lived on.  Interracial marriage remained a crime in South Carolina until 1998. 

Despite America’s proud traditions of freedom and many religious institutions’s alleged adherence to the ancient “Golden Rule,” We the People of the United States once again hear the voices of fellow citizens apparently denied equal justice under law.  Another unpopular minority now seeks the equality allegedly enshrined upon the very walls of America’s Supreme Court Building.  As in the past, those facing discrimination seek redress in the courts and with their representatives, while others seek to codify inequality into state, local, and even federal law. 

It took some 200 years of strife for the US to create at least the appearance of racial equality (many statistics suggest true equality has yet to occur).  Will it take another civil war and 200 years of assassinations, devastation, hatred, murder, and tragedy before the freedoms allegedly granted by the Constitution and its Amendments actually exist?  Will the courts honor America’s proud traditions of equality and equal justice under law?  No matter what the courts decide, it appears that until citizens opposing equality agree to treat others in the way that they expect to be treated, the “inalienable” Rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness will not exist.

Born again Atheists by William Edelen

My friend Herb Caen, the late Pulitzer Prize columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, made the following observation in one of his weekly columns, "the trouble with 'born agains' is that they are a bigger pain in the ass the second time around."

An interesting thought to go with your morning coffee. If we were REALLY born again, we would return to atheism. We would all be atheists…because that is how we were born the first time around. All babies come into this world with no belief in God… Goddesses… Jesus… Buddha… Lao-Tzu… Shiva… Muhammad… or anything else until we indoctrinate them into some adult belief system, usually the same one we were brainwashed into as children. Religious beliefs are an accident of birth.

Through enculturation we become something other than what we were at birth. The only reason you are a Methodist Christian is that you were born in America. I used to ask students in my university class, "Why are you a Methodist Christian?" They would say "… my parents were Methodists and they made me go to Sunday school and church with them from the time I was born." Then I would say, "Right…you are an enculturated Methodist …you did not choose to be that…you were born into it."

...they did not study all of the other great religious traditions of the world and then make Christianity their choice. They did not choose to be a Methodist after they had studied all of the other 400 Protestant denominations.

Had you been born in Japan, you would be a Buddhist. Had you been born in Israel, you would have been a Jew in Judaism. Had you been born in a Muslim country, you would be Muslim.

You were born an atheist but through enculturation, by indoctrination and coercion, you become something else.

I do not know of any phrase that is more meaningless and nonsensical than a "bible Christian." To illustrate this point, I used to invite representatives from ten different "Christian" groups to speak to my university class about their beliefs.

I would begin with a Christian Science practitioner…next would be the Jehovah's Witnesses…then Seventh Day Adventists…Mormons…Pentecostals…a Roman Catholic priest…a Unity minister…Greek Orthodox…Missouri Synod Luther…and Methodist or Presbyterian. They ALL quoted the bible to affirm and justify their positions. The students soon realized they were listening to TEN TOTALLY DIFFERENT RELIGIONS, all calling themselves "Christian" and all reading from the same book, the bible, to "prove" their beliefs.

No other religion studied by historians has been…or is…so completely fragmented as the one we call "Christianity." Protestantism alone has more than 400 different denominations, all quoting the bible to validate their beliefs.

Perhaps it was this quagmire of babble that moved nationally syndicated conservative columnist William Buckley to write a recent column asking, "Are Churches No Longer Relevant?" documenting their impotence.

So now…over your morning coffee…you might ask yourself an honest question…"if I were really born again…is it not true that I would be a born again atheist…since that is what I was when I came into the world…back before all the childhood indoctrination and brainwashing of my parents' religion…and my country's religion…do I dare to face that question…?

You may need to get up and get a stronger cup of coffee.

Bring on the 'Singularity' by Janet Brazill

It helps when one finds a book that can dispel the sense of impending doom surrounding those discouraged with the current state of the world. Ray Kurzweil's book, "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology," offers new hope for the human race, now bogged down in the mire of religion.

The war in Iraq, reduced to a clash of sectarian interests, demonstrates the disastrous effects of religious fanaticism. Americans may scorn the beliefs of young Muslim suicide bombers who are willing to sacrifice their lives for fanciful rewards promised in the afterlife, but America has its own radicals. According to Sam Harris, writing in Newsweek magazine, 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and they hope to "be raptured into the stratosphere by Jesus so that they can safely enjoy a sacred genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history."

Many believe our president, himself a born-again Christian, bases his policies on this vision, hoping to bring about the battle of Armageddon, the clash of cultures that will trigger the Rapture.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslim zealots insist that civil laws be based on the Shi'a interpretation of the Koran, while Christians attempt to enforce Biblical law in the United States.

Between Muslim extremism and Christian fundamentalism, much of the world is regressing at a shocking rate.

But there may be hope. While religion tries to stop the trains of Progress, determined to turn all trains back to the ignorance of past ages, there is an express whizzing by on a separate line, too fast and too powerful to be stopped!

The destination is the "Singularity," described by Kurzweil as an expansion of human intelligence through merger with non-biological forms. Based on developments in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, he sets the timetable for this event as early as the year 2045, and insists that the non-biological intelligence created will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. He provides much technical data to back up his claims and projects possibilities that seem incredible by today's standards.

One key to this accomplishment will be study of the human brain, which has had billions of years of evolutionary trial and error to build its high level of intelligence. The author shows that scientists are quickly acquiring the tools to develop detailed models of human cognition and will soon be able to reverse engineer the brain, to understand how it works. These principles can then be modified and refined to apply to computational technologies that will be far more powerful than the electro-chemical processing that takes place in biological neurons.

Because the required knowledge for all this is available worldwide through the Internet and other technologies, this anticipated event is inevitable at some point in time, even if temporarily sidetracked. This is reassuring, considering that in the past, religious fanatics destroyed threats to their beliefs by burning the library at Alexandria and silencing scientists during the Inquisition. Modern science has now outdated, if not religious fanatics, at least their ability to destroy the knowledge of their time.

Our world has the choice of using modern technology to wage wars between primitive ideas of gods or using technology to create an earthly paradise of unimaginable marvels.

Challenge Your Religion by Marsha Abelman

Religion needs its followers to be trusting to the point of naiveté. When things don't make sense, religion soothes the furrowed brow of the believer with such clichés as, "don't worry about that, it's not pertinent to your salvation." When others are stubbornly refusing to be evangelized, religion offers pat explanations such as "someone in the church must have hurt you in the past for you to hate God so." When a busload of innocent children is killed by a drunk driver, religion offers as solace "God needed them more than we did."

The truth would be dangerous to religion's continuing grip on humanity. Could religion continue if people thought "perhaps religion doesn't make sense because it is illogical, antiquated and made up by humans?" How could churches prosper if they admitted that people don't attend church because they studied the Bible and found only ancient history, inconsistencies and errors? And what good is religion to those who lose children if people accept that children die because life is random?

Scriptures, ancient writings by ancient men, have become clichés in our modern world. Rather than educate themselves in the classic skill of logic, rather than wrestling to understand physical reasons for things that happen, many people prefer to rest in the religious land of "God said it." And in that land, religious people believe things that don't make sense. The Christian writer Paul forbade women to speak in church. Fundamentalist groups have enforced that rule on women for hundreds of years since. Does it matter that Paul probably was writing to a specific group of people about a specific problem in their group? No, the cliché has been carried forward, generation to generation, whether or not it makes logical sense.

Religions generally teach that homosexuality is bad. Do they do so after engaging in logical debate and research? No, they accept the ancient clichés handed down to them by previous generations. In our country, religions are granted the protection of government, and if they want to believe that "God" is against something, that's their right. But religion is not content to believe "God said it." Powerful religious leaders strive to legitimize their platitude with created arguments such as "homosexuals target children," "the radical homosexual agenda is to destroy marriage," "what's at stake is the forced normalization of homosexuality," and "words like diversity and unity are covers to push homosexual rights."

If religion truly allowed itself to examine the history and reality of homosexuality, in an unprejudiced and logical manner, the only argument left would be that "God doesn't like it." Homosexuality has always existed in humans. Homosexuality exists in the animal world, though fundamentalists have been known to say it does not. Heterosexual parents may have homosexual children; homosexual parents may have heterosexual children. People who abuse children are called pedophiles, and there are heterosexual and homosexual pedophiles. We allow consenting adults to engage in whatever sexual behavior suits their fancy, in the privacy of their own homes. If sodomy is okay for heterosexual couples, where's the logic in saying it's wrong for homosexual couples? Married couples divorce at the rate of almost 50% today. Logically, it would be only fair to allow homosexual couples to experience the same "sanctity" of marriage!

Challenge your religion! Don't be at the mercy of illogical preachers and ancient, unproven clichés.

Checks and Balances by Groff Schroeder

Centuries of unchecked power wielded by oft-feuding English kings, church leaders and wealthy landholders led eventually to the need for limitations on regal power, and thus the Magna Carta Liberatum, the Great Charter of Freedoms of 1215. The Magna Carta founded basic human freedoms such as habeas corpus, which compels any power holding a person for a crime to bring that person to a court, and show them the evidence against them.

America's founders appear to have opposed great concentrations of power and held great respect for the ideals of human freedom, creating a Bill of Rights defining the freedoms of the People, and a Constitution employing numerous checks and balances such as a "Separation of Powers" among the legislative, the executive and judicial branches.

The executive branch, led by the president, enforces the law. Article IV defines the "…Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…and…Treaties…under the Authority of the United States…as the…supreme Law of the Land…any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

The Congress' Senate and House of Representatives declare war, write legislation, and check presidential power through the "power of the purse," or control over the money. The judicial branch checks power by interpreting legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. The Supreme Court decides cases related to the Federal Government and interstate disputes and can declare legislation or executive action unconstitutional.

Article II, Section 4 states, "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

In 1861, with battle lines at Bull Run just 30 miles from Washington DC, President Lincoln revoked habeas corpus. Although the Supreme Court ruled the revocation unconstitutional, Lincoln denied habeas corpus until Congress legalized the revocation in 1863 (apparently without consulting Article I, which prohibits "ex post facto" laws). Unlike President Lincoln, President Bush's claims of extra legal power are numerous, and extend beyond the Constitution, violating US law, international law, and ratified treaties. Not even tenuous precedent allows Congress to retroactively legalize President Bush and Vice President Cheney's violations of the Geneva Conventions forbidding aggressive war and torture, both of which the conventions define as "war crimes."

Sadly, the legislative and judicial branches have not challenged President Bush's astonishing violations of the rule of law, his regular use of "signing statements" documenting his intention to ignore (and ostensibly violate) legislation he signs into law, or the numerous actions through which his administration appears to recklessly and contemptuously violate the Constitution, US and international law. In contrast, President Clinton faced impeachment, (not conviction) for allegedly lying in a lawsuit about consensual sex.

Could the founders have imagined one president being impeached for lying about a personal matter in a civil suit while his successor appears immune from any responsibility whatsoever after being repeatedly caught red-handed in appalling official lies and egregious violations of law?
Just as the impeachment of President Clinton exposed other politicians' extra-marital affairs, the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney might finally collapse the apparent concerted destruction of all checks on governmental power by corrupt "representatives" and judges who appear to be systematically destroying America's most basic founding ideals.

Christian Terrorism - by William Edelen: Freethought Views May 2010

My step-daughter works for Planned Parenthood. She asked me to tell my readers about Christian terrorism right here in the United States.

She said: "Do your readers have any idea what it is like to go to work day after day wondering if there is some Christian nut waiting with a bomb or gun for you?" "Do your readers have any idea what it is like to get obscene and threatening phone calls every day, to get threatening letters in the mail every week?"

Her office has been hit once with a bomb.

Here is what she is talking about. Listen to Randall Terry, founder of the violent anti-abortion terrorist group they call "Operation Rescue" -- "You abortion people better flee, because we will find you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it. I have made it a part of my mission to see that you are tried and executed. I am a Christian Reconstructionist. I believe the Christian church should run this country. Let’s get the State out of the Church’s business. The Christian bible is the center of civilization."

Listen to Clayton Lee Wagner: "God called me to make war on his enemies...and it does not matter to God or me if you're a nurse...receptionist...bookkeeper or janitor...If you work for a murderous abortionist, I am going to kill you."

Listen to Jerry Falwell: "I really believe that the pagans...and the abortionists...and the feminists...and the gays and lesbians...as well as the ACLU and People For The American Way...all of them...should take the blame for God allowing this to happen [the World Trade Center disaster]. I point my finger in their face and say that to them."

And then there is the anthrax scare currently alarming the whole nation. Few people realize that abortion providers had been victims of at least 80 anthrax threats since 1998. On October 15, following this new wave of actual anthrax cases, more than 100 supposedly tainted letters flooded family planning clinics across the nation. Some of the messages inside said they were from the "Army of God" -- the underground antiabortion group in whose name a 20-year crime spree of arson, assassination and bombing has been carried out against abortion providers -- and announced "We are going to kill all of you." The spokesman for the group, Donald Spitz, denied having any knowledge of where the hoax letters came from, but he cheerfully announced that the flood of potentially life-threatening mail "made my day."

This is Christian terrorism in America. Convicted bomber Mahmud Abouhalima, a Muslim, and Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham's son, Franklin, all sound exactly alike using the same kind of terrorist language.

Do you understand what my step-daughter is talking about? What she fears daily, with Christian fanatics on the loose in our society? Forget about the Muslims for a day or two and become concerned and informed about the Christian terrorism in every state in America.

Do you understand why my step-daughter asked me to write about the terrorism she experiences every day? If you do not, she invites you to join her for a week and ride to work with her...wondering...wondering...wondering...what Christian nut might be waiting with a bomb, or a gun put to your head.

Closure? - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views September 2011

Closure?

by Groff Schroeder

While some suggest we “look forward not back¹," it appears some events, both before and after September 11, 2001, are important not to forget, but to remember.

In early September 2001, a new President of the United States faced increasing public discomfort over his bizarre electoral victory², controversial initial act³, “saber rattling,” planned unilateral withdrawal from a ratified nuclear weapons treaty⁴, and redirection of an inherited national surplus⁵⁶ from continuing debt reduction to massive tax cuts⁷. The attacks gave the president immediate legitimacy⁸⁹ and “gravitas,” and intense secrecy, government expansion, and invasive new - and often unchecked - executive powers followed. Four days later, the secretary of defense advocated attacking Iraq¹⁰¹¹ in a cabinet meeting¹². Meanwhile, America's legislative branch was apparently abandoning all checks and balances¹³ on the executive, including the responsibility to declare war.

The result was the oxymoronic global “war on terror¹⁴¹⁵,” America's longest (declared or) undeclared war. The commander in chief attacked¹⁶ Afghanistan, “graveyard of empires,” and later Iraq, even though 17 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia¹⁷ - many on incomplete US State Department passports¹⁸. While disputing the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, the president appeared to violate the United Nations Charter¹⁹ (“preemptive” war), the Geneva Conventions²⁰²¹²² (torture^2324252627), and numerous civil and human rights. More than 7,000 coalition troops have given their lives, and more than 200,000 people, including innocent civilians, have died overseas.

Aggressive cleanup²⁸²⁹ of “the site” began on September 22, 2001, initiating a long series of actions (eventually annoying even Walter Cronkite³⁰) appearing to obstruct investigations^{31323334353637}. Although the senate majority leader received an anthrax³⁸ mailing³⁹ in October, in January 2002, the president personally asked him not to investigate the attacks. By May 2002, virtually all evidence⁴⁰ from the site had been disposed of or “recycled.” In March 2003, “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States” launched hearings⁴¹⁴². Accused of withholding documents, the president and vice president refused to testify unless they were: together, in secret, not recorded, and not “under oath.”

The absence of traditional due process, forensic, investigative, and legal procedures limits public access to verifiable factual information, and many aspects of the attacks remain unexplained, uninvestigated, or “redacted.” Time Magazine apparently focused upon “whistleblower” Coleen Rowley⁴³ as “Person of the Year⁴⁴,” instead of her allegations that repeated FBI abrogation of standard police procedures prevented timely searches of hijacker property after Zacharais Moussaoui's August 16, 2001⁴⁵ arrest. Translator Siebel Edmonds⁴⁶⁴⁷ remains⁴⁸ muzzled⁴⁹⁵⁰, and the “Project for a New American Century⁵¹⁵²,” WTC building seven, and hijacker flight school(s?) appear as “third rails” to the 9-11 Commission and the press. Even the National Transportation Safety Board appeared to discard standard procedures⁵³ used on every plane crash since 1967, apparently failing to thoroughly investigate not only four airliner crashes killing 2,996 people, but also the apparent complete destruction of 7 of the airliner's 8 flight data recorders⁵⁴⁵⁵⁵⁶.

Until new information explains puzzling facts, they present an attractive nuisance to skeptical minds, and missing information can both inhibit and unleash imaginations. The publication of a complete, objective, official, and verifiable compendium of all evidence possibly related to the mass murders of September 11, 2001 is essential, especially in light of the Initial Complaint⁵⁷ and related proceedings⁵⁸⁵⁹⁶⁰ against American political leaders in the International War Crimes Tribunal.*

Published September 15-22, 2011 with the following quotation.

We cannot explicitly link the recent terrorist attacks to the September 11 hijackers.

John Ashcroft

*Note: The Initial Complaint⁶¹ and Final Judgment⁶² in the International War Crimes Tribunal concern the execution of the war on Iraq waged by a previous President of the United States whose name is almost identical to the name of the President of the United States involved in the actions above. Similar actions against the president involved in the actions above might also someday exist, but will require complainants meet challenging technical issues under Swiss Law.

Common Arguments for Religion - Bill Carson: October 2008

Common Arguments for Religion

by Bill Carson

Numerous people feel that religion is a good thing even if it is not true.  Good has come from many different religions, but perhaps the world would be better off with no religious beliefs.  Many people have suffered or been killed because of those who follow the teachings of the Bible and the Koran.   A human being is probably less likely to want to hurt another person unless there is a book they think comes from the word of God that tells them to kill people that have different religions or work schedules that require work on Sunday, etc.  Some argue that only radicals have done bad things in the name of religion.  Are you a “radical” or an “extremist” if you are just doing what the Bible said to do?

Here is a common point in favor of Christianity. Something had to have created all this.  That may be true.  Maybe something did create this world.  But, how do you know anything after that premise?  Maybe this world was created by a few gods working together.  Maybe the god or gods that created this are not interested in being worshiped.

Worshiping is kind of a strange concept.  If you had the power to create an earth with human beings, would you require that they all had to worship you?  Also, to give severe punishment to those who do not worship you is a scary concept. Maybe whatever created the earth is not paying much attention to us anymore.  Even if it is true that something created all this, we know virtually nothing about how this something wants us to live our lives. 

The Bible is certainly not a consistent, moral or practical guide to live by.  There are so many problems with the Bible that it is unlikely an all-knowing and all-powerful god had anything to do with it.  It is difficult to respect this something if it has the power to stop really bad things from happening and does not bother to do it.  Why don’t the creators or creator make it easy for a rational thinking person to know they are around?  Is it maybe because they are not involved here on this earth or maybe do not exist at all?

Another common argument is “what if you are wrong?”  If you want to believe in a religion just in case it might actually be true, how do you decide which one to believe in?  Should I believe in the Greek gods just in case they might be true?  How can people pretend to believe in a religion if deep down they really do not think the religion is true. 

What are the chances that the religion someone chooses to follow is actually truthful?  Out of the thousands of religions that have been started throughout history only one could be completely true, and probably they are all wrong.  No one really knows what created all this and what happens after we die.  It is amazing how many religions are flourishing when there is so little evidence that any of them are telling the truth.

Bill Carson  October 16, 2008

Correction in Order? - by Groff Schroeder: August 2008

Correction in Order?

by Groff Schroeder

The August 20, 2008 Colorado Springs Gazette “Our View” column[1], “Dems Dismiss the Atheists” appears to contain numerous factual errors, logical fallacies and personal criticisms.  This advertisement addresses several.       

Almost 2500 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Socrates laid the foundations of freethought by defining the principles of rational thought, ethics and morality.  At about the same time Gautama Buddha advocated not accepting something as true just because someone or something claims it is true.  Many believe modern freethought began with the execution of Giordano Bruno (in 1600 during the Catholic Inquisition) for refusing to recant statements that the earth orbits the sun.  Freethinkers have varied personal philosophies yet are generally skeptical of claims, scriptures, testimonials and traditions as sources of information.  Furthermore, despite organized competitive experimental reproduction and intergenerational cross checking, many freethinkers remain skeptical of theories derived from the methods of science until after about 100 years of scholarly validation. 

The Freethinkers of Colorado Springs is neither “atheist” nor a “club” belonging to anyone, but a Colorado nonprofit corporation holding a 501(c)3 exemption letter from the United States Internal Revenue Service since 2006.  The Freethinkers of Colorado Springs was founded in 1993 in response to Colorado's infamous Amendment Two, which would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, employment etc., and would have made it illegal for them to petition their government for redress of grievances.  The Gazette “Our View” column supported Amendment Two, perhaps due to their published “Principles of Freedom,” which appear to have more to do with belief in god than belief in freedom.  In either case, journalists, editors and publishers in a republic (or even a theocracy) should be accurate, honest and fair – even on the opinion page. 

The Gazette cites “case law that defines atheism as just another religion.”  While the author appears to define reality by current legal precedent, freethinkers eschew traditions, scriptures, claims etc., researching documents, facts, evidence and points of view which may be verified independently.  In these strange days of “representative” government by institutionalized bribery, monopoly dominated “free” markets, for profit health care “slavery,” political religiosity and “war” on an emotion (terror), it appears that most anything can become case law – even defining a word whose rhetorical definition is “without religious belief” as a religious belief. 

While “from the objective, legalistic view of government, one belief is no more valid than another,” the beauty of the methods of logic and science is that there is no need for belief – it is possible to know.              Humans have collected data and used geometry for more than 5000 years and modern (post dark age) science employs repeatable, verifiable experiments to produce mathematical relationships with which humans have been correctly predicting the future behavior of materials, structures and systems for at least 400 years.  Despite this rich history, most freethinkers do not rule out the possibility of gods.  However, they realize that after countless generations of careful searching, not one repeatable experiment supports the existence of omnipotent, omniscient beings be they human, extra-terrestrial or divine. 

Freethinkers trust verifiable sources, scientific experiments, engineering and a system of personal morality predating many religions, and have every right to expect fair treatment – especially in official political contexts in the United States of America. 

Could the "Personhood" Amendment kill Christmas? by Janet Brazill

This is the time of year we hear religious groups demand that their legends be given space in the public square as it is being decorated for the winter holiday. When taxpayers - people of all faiths and those with no faith - who pay for the public square object to funding religious themes, Christians claim that secularists are killing Christmas.

How ironic to realize that Christians, in their zeal to legislate their religious beliefs, could be the ones to actually kill Christmas!

Consider the Ballot Initiative-36 that opponents of legal abortion are proposing for next year's election. Determined to ban both contraceptives and abortion, which they oppose on religious grounds, proponents have defined fertilization, the joining of the sperm and the egg, as conception, claiming the fertilized egg is a "person" because of its unique combination of DNA inherited from both parents.

This is in direct contradiction to medical science, which does not consider a pregnancy established until the fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus about two weeks after fertilization, a period during which many things can happen. Up to 60% of fertilized eggs may be eliminated by natural bodily functions. Those eggs that do make it to implantation can undergo a split during this time, creating identical twins, or two eggs can fuse into one individual. Science therefore defines conception as the successful implantation of the fertilized egg. It takes no position on personhood before birth.

Besides banning contraceptives and abortion, granting legal "personhood" from the moment of fertilization would also severely restrict in-vitro fertilization and completely curtail embryonic stem cell research.

This far-reaching opposition stems from one important pivotal point: the 1966 Papal Conference on Population and Birth Control, which debated changing the Church's opposition to contraceptives. A change, it was decided, would mean the Pope was not infallible.* So because of that religious dogma we now have a worldwide population problem intensifying global climate change.

Since proponents plan to use churches for collecting signatures for this proposed Initiative, potential signers should consider the theological implications of granting "personhood" to fertilized eggs. With fertilization the point of ensoulment, what happens to the many soul/persons that never get implanted and therefore never get born? The Catholics recently abolished Limbo, so where do those unbaptized egg/person souls go now? And what about the fertilized eggs that do get implanted that have split into twins - are they only half-persons or half-souls each? Do the fused egg pregnancies contain double-persons? Double-souls? Voters need to consider the dilemmas caused by using religious dogma as a basis for laws.

But even more challenging is the fact that redefining personhood has severe implications for the Christmas story of the Virgin Birth. If Jesus was conceived immaculately, as the story says, with no sperm present to fertilize the egg, was he really a human person? And if not human, did he truly suffer on the cross? That possibility would call into question the whole theology of redemption. On the other hand, if Jesus was indeed human, as defined by this Initiative, then the story of the Virgin Birth cannot be true, because male sperm had to be present to supply the unique DNA necessary for creating "personhood."

Religionists who insist on turning their beliefs into law may be doing more harm to the Christmas legend than secularists ever could!

* Read "Why the Pope can't change the Church's Position on Birth Control" at http://www.population-security.org/STLouis99.html

Demons Haunt My Dog!! By Douglas Schrepel: May 2008

I have a boxer named Rainer. I think demons have possessed her. Sometimes she runs wildly around the yard, for no apparent reason. On more than one occasion, I have seen her twitching and paddling while sleeping. Once she collapsed while on a hike. She could not pull herself upright for several minutes. At least twice, I have seen Rainer looking at me with a perplexed expression while her head quivered with small tremors. Maybe an exorcism is in order. After all, during The Early Show on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008, Mark Phillips of CBS News reported that the number of exorcisms, both in the U.S. and worldwide, were on the rise.

Being inquisitive about the alleged increasing number of exorcisms and the underlying reasons for these rituals seems reasonable. Such social phenomena raise interesting questions into human nature. However, to my dismay, the news media was enthusiastically reporting on, and legitimizing the absurd belief that powerful evil supernatural entities have the ability to possess, haunt and otherwise terrorize humans, dashing my hope for enlightenment. Interviewing Father Thomas Williams, Dean of Theology at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome…whew…was the best CBS could do in their anemic effort to elucidate?

According to Williams “there may be two reasons” for the rise in exorcisms. The first is that there is increased interest in the occult and Satanism. The second is that people are “less careful,” praying less and “playing around with things they shouldn’t play with” (whatever that means). These reasons necessarily imply that the increasing number of exorcisms is due to an increasing amount of demonic possession, and this is the substance of Williams’ claim. Should we take such a claim seriously?

Williams provides no evidence for the claim that a demonic possession is a true phenomenon. In fact, he admits that distinguishing between legitimate psychological problems and demonic possession is a challenge. This does nothing to deter his conclusion. He has no doubt that, “the spiritual demons, or bad angels, do exist”. Williams’ unsupported belief should not count as evidence for any rational thinker.

Are other hypotheses available that may help in illuminating the reasons for increased exorcist activity? How do they compare to Williams’ claim of demonic possession? I think there are several. Perhaps there are a larger number of people afflicted with psychological disturbances, seizures, drug use or amplified suggestibility. Possibly a larger labor pool of self-deceived exorcists is the explanation. I have no more evidence than Williams, but unlike Williams, these hypotheses are testable and potentially verifiable or falsifiable. In addition, these claims do not appeal to an unwarranted extraneous hypothesis such as an unknown supernatural force. Finally, these hypotheses are consistent with our wider body of knowledge about human nature and pathology.

The unsupported belief of Williams seems wholly inadequate when one thinks critically. CBS commits the logical fallacy of an appeal to an inappropriate authority. Williams is not an authority in psychology, psychiatry, human behavior or sociology.

As with my dog, Rainer, the possible explanations for the observed phenomena go well beyond demonic possession. The result is that I have gained no knowledge that might help explain why exorcism is on the rise, and I wasted fifteen minutes of my morning watching The Early Show.

Douglas Schrepel  May 2008

Designing the American Burqa by Janet Brazill

The Taliban has been notorious for its treatment of women in Afghanistan. Whenever they appeared in public, women were forced to wear a burqa, an all-enveloping garment that covers the wearer's entire body except for a small region about the eyes, which is covered by a concealing mesh or grille. Women were not allowed to work or to be educated after the age of eight. They could not be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male chaperone, which meant that many illnesses remained untreated. They faced public flogging and even execution for violations of the Taliban's Islamic laws. The burqa effectively assigned Afghan women to a secondary status in society.

American women may soon be required to wear the Burqa being fashioned by religious forces in our country. This will not be the confining garment favored by the Taliban, but a network of restrictive laws that will accomplish the same objective of placing women under male control.

Make no mistake, this garment has been in the making for a long time. And now its shape can be clearly seen with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in which five Catholic men who formed the majority opinion now permit a particular abortion procedure to be banned with no exception for a woman's health. The case itself was based on a law passed by Congress where Roman Catholics are the majority, a law which sought to overturn a previous Court ruling that determined the health provision was necessary.

This effort to oppose women's reproductive rights began shortly after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. In his 1980 ruling on the Hyde Amendment (which denied federal funding for abortions for poor women), Federal Judge John J. Dooling referenced the Pastoral Plan which he concluded had been implemented. This was the 1975 "Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities," a detailed blueprint created by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at the local, state, and national levels to favor Catholic policy on birth control and abortion. In 1980 this infrastructure helped elect a president. The Reagan administration, overwhelmingly the most Catholic in American history, assigned an ambassador to the Vatican, and instituted the "Mexico City policy," reversing U.S. commitment to international family planning. William Wilson, the first ambassador, told Time magazine on February 24, 1992, "the Reagan Administration agreed to alter its foreign-aid program to comply with the church's teachings on birth control." Since then, the NCCB has become a powerful lobbying group in Congress.

To reach the public, fundamentalist Protestant ministers were cultivated, none of whom had shown a previous interest in abortion. Catholic Bishops helped finance the Moral Majority (started by Paul Weyrich, a Catholic) after Jerry Falwell agreed to oppose abortion, a new topic for him. Now, with the Supreme Court on their side, these allies hope to pass many more laws restricting abortion. Will America eventually join El Salvador in prohibiting abortion altogether, even to save a woman's life? There, women suspected of having abortions are examined by forensic vagina inspectors, and if guilty, can be imprisoned for up to thirty years, along with family members who help them.

This holy war on women's independence may be creating an American Burqa fully as terrible as the Taliban's.

Details, details... - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views June 2009

     Pregnancy is perhaps the most personal and private human bodily function imaginable.  Conception occurs after ovulation when a sperm and an egg fuse in the fallopian tube forming a zygote, which divides into16 cells, becoming a morula.  About four days after fertilization, a central cavity develops in the growing mass of cells, forming a blastocyst.  Five or six days after ovulation, the blastocyst implants in the wall of the uterus becoming an embryo.  Incorrect implantation in a woman’s fallopian tube, cervix or abdomen (ectopic pregnancy) usually induces life-threatening hemorrhage.  Only emergency abortion can save her life. 

     After implantation, amazing microscopic, genetic, biochemical and biophysical events occur as the embryo undergoes gastrulation, forming three tissue layers called endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm.  The endoderm eventually forms digestive tract and the linings of the lungs, tonsils and bladder.  The mesoderm gives rise to muscles, bones, lymphatic and excretory tissues.  The ectoderm yields the skin, hair, nails and nervous system. 

     About 21 days after ovulation, two tubes of mesoderm form and later fuse into an S shape that contracts rhythmically.  By day 29, the brain differentiates into three parts, the heart has valves and limb buds are forming.  For the next two months, every part of the embryo undergoes rapid genetic and location-directed cell division.  By week 7, the heart has four chambers, intestines begin development and brain waves begin.   Heart development ends at about 9 weeks, and the brain can move muscles.  The embryonic phase of development (and the first trimester) ends at 12 weeks.  The embryo becomes a fetus. 

     At 16 weeks, the circulatory system is complete and the 24^th week marks the end of the second trimester.  At 30 weeks, rapid brain growth begins, and the rate of formation of interconnections between individual nerve cells increases.   At 40 weeks, the fetus is “full term” and the development of the nervous system (and the third trimester) is complete.  At birth, fetal passage through the birth canal interrupts blood flow from the umbilical cord and initiates the newborn’s heart and circulatory system function.  Soon, the newborn becomes an infant, baby, toddler, child, adolescent, teenager and eventually, an adult. 

     While amazing, complex and beautiful, pregnancy can be deadly.  Accidents, diabetes, hypertension, gunshot wounds, malnutrition, vehicle crashes and numerous medical conditions of pregnancy often make abortion a life-saving necessity for pregnant women. If medical emergencies happen late in pregnancy, viable fetuses (~5 months) can survive – even if the mother dies - although the earlier the premature birth the more severe the related medical and developmental problems.  Before viability, maternal death due to injury, illness, pregnancy or any other reason kills the embryo or fetus too. 

     Whether legal or illegal, abortion always exists and some women choose abortion as a means of birth control, especially in cases of rape, incest and extreme familial, financial, medical, social or psychological duress.  Unless physicians commit crimes, when abortion is illegal women facing pre-viability medical or obstetric emergencies will lose their lives – ostensibly to save the life of an embryo or fetus unable to survive without the mother.  Prohibition leads to “black market” and self-induced abortions, both historically deadly to women.  Ironically, more than 50% of abortions are spontaneous (miscarriage). 

     Science suggests the most effective way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies by improving access to birth control information, devices and pharmaceuticals.  Once pregnancy occurs, parents (especially pregnant women) and their physicians must have the freedom to address the complexities of each case individually, including the ability to terminate pregnancies as a means of protecting the life and health of the mother.  Although current law appears to meet these goals by allowing wide access to medical and first trimester abortions and limiting those in the third trimester, significant opposition remains to not only all abortions, but also the birth control so successful in preventing them.

     Apparently indifferent to personal and religious freedoms, numerous life-saving aspects of abortion, the epidemic of hunger[1] among America’s “born” children and unable to overcome America’s Solomon-like abortion laws and strong Constitutional, practical, medical, legal and societal support for privacy and reproductive freedom; it seems at least some abortion opponents turned to political violence.  Sadly, it appears that terrorism including arson (175), attempted murders (17), assassinations (3), bombings (41), clinic blockades (763), harassment (>100), murders (5), stalking (525) and vandalism (~1400)[2] has already achieved almost everything America’s “non-violent” “Pro-Life” movement seeks since “87% of US counties lack an abortion provider.”[3]  Paradoxically, this decreases access to birth control, increasing the number of unintended pregnancies and thus abortions.  How convenient. 

     Everyone wants to decrease the number of abortions – except perhaps those benefiting from abortion or using abortion to divide America against herself.  A powerful church dominated by “celibate” males and plagued by child sex abuse scandals appears to lead this attack upon religious and reproductive freedom, repeatedly and forcibly introducing themselves into other people’s sex lives and demanding that everyone obey their sexual mandates.  Although unable to limit access to birth control and abortion through ethical and legal means, their leaders cite “great strides” toward their goals – and appear to downplay (not condemn) the role that terrorist acts such as arson, bombings, intimidation and most recently assassination, so obviously play in their achievement. 

     It appears that Dick Cheney is not alone in his discovery of the power of the “dark side,” where “plausible deniability” and immoral means lead to the realization of unlawful goals. 

[3] Fausset, Richard, A history of violence on the antiabortion fringe, June 1, 2009, Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-abortion-violence1-2009jun01,0,1335069.story, referenced June 9, 2009. 

Groff Schroeder holds a Master of Science in Basic Science degree and worked in emergency medical services in ambulances, emergency departments, fire rescue squads and intensive care units for seventeen years.   

Disaster Capitalism - by Richard Hiatt: January 2008

Does Our God Have a Future? by Charles Hedrick

It sounds like a dumb question. How could God not have a future? If anyone or anything has prospects, surely God does!

From the perspective of world history, however, the question is obvious, for history is littered with decayed temples dedicated to obsolete gods whose religious communities did not survive the passage of time. In Judeo-Christian tradition, and modern popular imagination, all other gods are "false" or imaginary gods, created in the minds of ignorant and misguided people. In their heyday, however, these gods were powerful and controlled the lives of masses of people for many years; they were loved, feared, and their grace invoked through prayer just as devoutly as the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is today. Their believers were as convinced in their faith as devout believers of the Judeo-Christian God are today.

Every religion assumes that its god has eternal prospects. But the idea that "our God is eternal" is not true, as history shows. A particular god's character and personality exist principally in the mind, apart from any existence the god may have as an objective reality.

For example, the Protestant God did not exist before the 16th century. He was conceived and born along with Protestantism. The Roman Catholic God was very different - and still is. God as he exists in the minds of Episcopalians today is essentially different from the God of Protestant fundamentalists and Unitarians. The gods of these groups have different views on required ritual, ethical values, sin, forgiveness and the future - provided we assume (as each group tells us) their teaching derives from God.

If tomorrow, fundamentalism, for example, ceased to exist, the God of fundamentalism also ceases to exist. Since no group would exist to serve his interests, his rites would no longer be available in the marketplace of religions. To be a force in society he would need to be rediscovered all over again.

So it is with all religions and gods. All gods share a potential for obsolescence. Apollo and Zeus are no longer invoked in the warm language of faith as once they were. Their oracles are silent. Mithras and Dionysus once possessed the keys to eternal life and graciously bestowed that gift throughout the ancient world. Their altars are now cold, their temples empty, their rites abandoned. Yet in the day of their popularity, their believers would have been shocked at the idea their god would one day be obsolete.

Does God have a future? Clearly belief in God has a definite future. If history shows anything, it shows human beings as incurably religious. We likely will always have a greater power we worship and serve. Too many mysteries exist in the universe and our scientists have been unable to answer them all.

Yes, "God" has a future. Only so long as a god has believers will he influence society. Thus a god without temples and worshippers to remember his holy days does not exist, at least not in any practical sense. And this observation raises an annoying question: Does the demise of even one god foreshadow the eventual demise of all gods?

Reprinted with permission of the author.

Don't tell me what God thinks by Carol Tavris Ph.D.

Reprinted from Redbook, June 1993

First, I want to make this clear: I respect people who have an abiding religious philosophy that guides their lives - whether they're Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Methodists, Hindus, Muslims, or Protestants. My gripe is with extremists in any religion who presume to tell me, and everyone else, what God wants. Here's just a sampling:

- Saudi Arabian fundamentalists "know" that God doesn't want women to drive.

- Jewish fundamentalists in Israel know that God disapproves of a Jewish state. Others… "know" that God [wants] Jews to expand the territory to include the West Bank.

- Traditional Catholics "know" that God doesn't want women to be priests. Austin B. Vaughan, auxiliary bishop of New York City, said, "A woman priest is as impossible as for me to have a baby…This is the way God made it."

- Protestant fundamentalists, such as Reverend Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland, "know" that God wants Protestants to maintain control over Catholics.

- Iran's Muslim fundamentalists "know" that God was so angry at Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses that they…issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his death.

And no nation has ever gone into battle without claiming that it was only doing what God wanted. The motto of the Crusade of 1096 was Deus vult - God wills it. God seems to have willed every war on behalf of every cause ever since. "Who says I am not under the special protection of God?" said Adolf Hitler.

From India to Eastern Europe to the Middle East, we are witnessing renewed barbarities in the name of religious righteousness. In the United States, "stealth candidates" of the Christian right wing - so called because they hide their religious agenda from voters during campaigns - "know" that God wants them to get evolutionary theory and sex education out of schools and prayer in…

Of course, there are many Jews who would trade land for peace…Catholics who are pressing for women priests, Muslims who are appalled by the fatwa, and people of every faith who oppose…wars. All of them consider themselves religious, too. But…we need to be skeptical of those who claim to have a direct line to the Almighty. We need to notice that when religious extremists invoke with smug certainty positions they claim are the will of God, these positions conveniently support their own secular views and agendas.

As women, we should be especially concerned about the way religious extremism serves to keep us "in our place." The Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann, in her book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, shows that it is what men want - not God - that has shaped church doctrine over the centuries.

Anyone who studies the history of any religion will find that not one has remained constant in its understanding of "God's will." For example, despite what many Catholics today think, Church teachings about abortion have changed over time. Until this century, the Church held that the abortions of an "unformed" embryo was not murder. (An embryo was said to be "formed" at 4 days if it was male and at 80 days if it was female.) Individuals may decide to support or oppose abortion, but they don't get to claim they know God's opinion on the matter.

The public should be especially wary of politicians who tell us they know God's opinion. The great principle on which this nation was founded is the separation of church and state, the celebration of religious diversity, and tolerance of all beliefs - not the imposition of one group's beliefs on everybody else. That principle is rare among the nations of the earth, and we must cherish it.

…As for me, I'll tell you what I think God wants: for human beings to show a little more humility about the mysteries of life, and a lot more tolerance for other human beings' way of thinking.

EC- The Best Kept Secret - by Lenox Powell

     What is considered to be the best kept secret in reproductive health care? Don't know? It's time to let the "secret" out so that women, and men, can be better informed. The secret is "EC" and stands for Emergency Contraception. It was once known as "the morning after pill." However, emergency contraception can actually be taken up to 120 hours (5 days) after unprotected intercourse. Despite its enormous potential to reduce unplanned pregnancies, anti-choice groups, whose goal it is to eliminate abortion, oppose its use, falsely claiming that it is an abortifacient. In fact, EC, if widely available would reduce the rate of abortion in our country by fifty percent.

      If you are a fan of the show Felicity, you may have seen the episode where the character Julie is a survivor of date rape. After her consultation with a nurse she is given two pills, one of which she takes 12 hours after the first pill. This, unbeknownst to most people, is EC. Women who have been sexually assaulted have a particularly compelling need for quick and easy access to EC. Approximately 700,000 women are raped each year in the United States, and about 32,000 will become pregnant as a result (Holmes, et al., 1996). Alarmingly, there is mounting evidence that some hospitals, especially religiously affiliated hospitals, are not providing EC to sexual assault survivors. This practice is counter to the standards outlined by the American Medical Association, which state that women who have been sexually abused should be counseled about the risk of pregnancy, and offered EC (AMA, 1995).

     Emergency contraception pills (ECPs) - the most common method of EC - contain hormones (progestin) that reduce the risk of pregnancy when taken in two doses, 12 hours apart, after unprotected intercourse. The sooner the medication is taken, the more effective the treatment. ECPs are safe and effective at reducing the risk of pregnancy. ECPs have been found to be 75%- 99% effective depending on method, where the woman is in her period cycle and length of time after the unprotected sex.

     Despite its long history of safety and efficacy, knowledge about EC is woefully limited among the general public. Nine out of 10 American women do not know enough about EC to effectively use it - unless hospitals advise women who are brought to the emergency room following sexual assault about EC, women will be unlikely to know enough to ask for this vital treatment.

     So remember, if you, your partner, or someone you know has sex without using protection, if the condom breaks, or if sexual assault is a factor, Emergency Contraception is here and has been here for a very long time. Now, the "secret" is out, so spread the word!

Originally published December 2002.

Evolution is just a theory … like gravity - by Douglas Schrepel: January 2008

I love a mystery, not simply for mystery's sake, but for the challenge that I see in it. This is the challenge of finding an explanation leading to something that I love at least as much as mystery - knowledge and understanding. This is why I find it so difficult to understand why many persist in their denial of the incredibly well-supported theory of evolution.

Evolution is an elegant explanation of the origins of the biodiversity of life on earth and unifies our knowledge in a way that few other scientific theories have. So well confirmed is the scientific theory of evolution by the accumulated evidence of 200 years of biology and geology, that to deny it in the 21st century is as irrational and unreasonable as to deny the theory of gravity.

An oft-repeated misconception by evolution deniers is that there is disagreement among professional biologists. There simply is no disagreement with the basic notion that modern day species are the result of descent with modification from ancestors. Furthermore, the process of natural section is the key driving mechanism for such modification. It is disingenuous to claim that technical interdisciplinary disputes regarding the details of genetics, selection pressures, and the like challenge this well-established consensus.

Many deniers of evolution continue to claim that a lack of intermediary fossils in the paleontological record justifies skepticism. This claim is mistaken and tired. Many intermediary fossils do exist, and more are found on a regular basis. Even if no intermediary fossils did exist, our recent knowledge of genetics, including junk DNA and pseudogenes, provides superior evidence to the fossil record.

While the fossil record fully supports the theory of evolution, is a welcome addition to our accumulated knowledge, and is important in its own right, evolutionary theory would be strongly upheld without that record's contributions. Evolutionary theory is a well-supported scientific explanation for the biodiversity of life on earth. It is not a political or ethical philosophy.

We should inform our challenge of deciding how we ought to treat other people, other sentient creatures and the environment with a clear understanding of our evolutionary origin and nature, but it need not be dictated by it. For that, we must use the reason and the emotion with which the course of evolution has endowed us.

For many, evolution flies in the face of their deeply-held worldview. Looking critically at one's worldview in the face of a perceived threat is a difficult task. Developing a worldview that includes an understanding and acceptance of evolutionary theory is more than just an aesthetic exercise. Evolutionary theory is the underpinning of much of our children's future. Policies concerning commercial fishing, agriculture, global warming, antimicrobial treatment, gene therapy and so much more depend on such a worldview and understanding.

As biologist Julian Huxley and his brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley, remind us, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." If your worldview has no room for a scientific theory that is as certain as Newton's apple falling to earth, then I suggest that the effort in reexamining such a worldview will be well worth the struggle.

Douglas Schrepel   January 2008

First Freedom First by Janet Brazill

Sadly, some people elected to run our government do not understand that our country is built on the separation of church and state. An illustration is Rep. Virgil Goode (R- Va.), who criticized a newly elected Congressman who took his oath of office on the Koran, the holy book of his religion.

Rep. Goode appears not to have read the Constitution of the United States, whose Article VI states that "…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." Indeed, no one is required to affirm on any holy book, though many opt to do so.

Ironically, the Muslim who took the oath in question did it on a copy of the Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation's founders. Jefferson would have understood the intolerance this criticism showed. Nearly two hundred years ago, he wrote: "Our laws have applied the only antidote to [religious intolerance], protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting all on equal footing."

He was referencing the First Amendment, a document often misunderstood in modern times. To counter this, The Interfaith Alliance Foundation has joined with Americans United for Separation of Church and State to establish a project called "First Freedom First." Petition signers will call upon elected and appointed officials to reaffirm America's religious freedom.

THE PETITION

The founders of our nation believed that all Americans should have the right to worship according to their own beliefs, or not to worship at all. So strong was their commitment to religious freedom that they enshrined it in the first sentence of the Bill of Rights.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

This constitutional guarantee is often known as the "first freedom."

Religion is a deeply personal matter. Americans must be free to practice their religion without coercion. Government exists to provide for the general well-being of all people, and its workings must be independent of specific religious doctrines. Simply put, there must be a separation of church and state.
If we do not stand together as a nation, we stand to lose this fundamental freedom.

We, the undersigned, call upon elected and appointed officials to join us in reaffirming America's religious freedom by demonstrating a commitment to the following:

-Every American should have the right to make personal decisions -- about family life, reproductive health, end of life care and other matters of personal conscience.

-American tax dollars should not go to charities that discriminate in hiring based on religious belief or that promote a particular religious faith as a requirement for receiving services.

-Political candidates should not be endorsed or opposed by houses of worship.

-Public schools should teach with academic integrity and without the promotion of religious preference or belief.

-Decisions about scientific and health policies should be based on the best available scientific data, not on religious doctrine.

We join together, as the most diverse nation in the world, to commit ourselves to defending and preserving this freedom.

==========

Please go online at http://www.firstfreedomfirst.org/ to sign this petition.

Food for Thought on Independence Day 2007

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect - that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of injustice.

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the First

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living or the dead?

Ibid.

Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind. In England the punishment in certain cases is by hanging, drawing and quartering; the heart of the sufferer is cut out and held up to the view of the populace. In France, under the former Government, the punishments were not less barbarous. Who does not remember the execution of Damien, torn to pieces by horses? The effect of those cruel spectacles exhibited to the populace is to destroy tenderness or excite revenge; and by the base and false idea of governing men by terror, instead of reason, they become precedents. It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.

Ibid.

For as long as men have sought to be free, arbitrary arrest has been a mark and measure of despotism.

Alan Barth

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property, and in their management.

Thomas Jefferson

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

Benjamin Franklin

Forbidden Love - by Charlie Webb: November 2008

Forbidden Love

by Charlie Webb

Why are so many "Christians" so eager to outlaw gay love and gay marriage? Some even claim that marriage is a "sacred" institution. Yet the average marriage lasts less than eight years, while half of all marriages end in divorce. Ambrose Bierce defined love as a "temporary insanity curable by marriage."

Many protest that same-sex relations are "unnatural," which is to say that they don't occur in nature. Mother Nature says otherwise. The Bonobo chimpanzees (our closest living genetic relative) enjoy sex all day long, with the majority of action being between same-sex partners. If nature is to be our guide, then the most unnatural of sexual perversions is celibacy. Others claim that marriage is meant for child bearing. Yet increasing numbers of newlyweds choose never to have children. And who dares to say that sterile men and women should be banned from marriage? No one. Open bigotry is reserved for other minorities (such as Moslems, atheists, and gays).

Most gay-bashing Christians use the Bible as their excuse, just as slave-holders once used the Bible to justify slavery. They must never actually read their Bibles, since they completely neglect to enforce the other crazy rules of Exodus and Leviticus -- like killing anyone who works on the Sabbath (really); or killing their own children for cursing Mom or Dad (how unnatural can you get??). If you "believe" in the Bible, either you swallow the whole impossible "word of God" propaganda line or else you pick and choose your Bible beliefs and practice selective moral hypocrisy. And "what would Jesus do"? The Jesus of the Bible hated one thing above all others: hypocrites. He tended to favor love over hate. And he was very fond of saying, "Judge not, that you be not judged." How strange it is that this advice never caught on with his followers.

In the greatest forbidden love story of all time, Romeo and Juliet are driven to suicide. This is what bigotry has wrought in the USA, with teenage gays having by far the highest suicide rate of any minority. Their blood is on the hands of the self-righteous.

What would we lose by allowing gay lovers to marry? Nothing. And what would we gain? Citizens who knew they were respected and valued, who could finally enjoy the same rights already possessed by everyone else. After hundreds of years of oppression, it's time to end what Jefferson called "this loathsome combination of Church and State."

Does anyone "choose" to be gay or straight? Of course not. No one chooses the insanity of love. Love chooses you. It is up to each of us to make the most of our wonderful affliction.

Charlie Webb   November 2008

First published October 2003. 

Freedom, freedom, who gets the freedom? - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views August 2011

Freedom, freedom, who gets the freedom?    - by Groff Schroeder

We hear a lot about the getting government “off our backs,” but not so much about the relentless march of government – especially government sponsored religion - into our pants. Although the 1965 Griswold vs. Connecticut Supreme Court Decision declared a state's arrest of married couples using birth control unconstitutional, the unparalleled successes of “pay for play,” and “pray for play,” politics suggests that birth control opponents could soon return state policing of reproductive practices to the marital bedroom. Meanwhile, despite birth control's proven ability to prevent abortions, opponents successfully employ apparently unethical tactics that deny countless Americans access to birth control every day, no matter what their marital or religious status.

Alleged “conscience rights” grant medical care providers godlike power to provide, or deny, birth control to any patient(s) they choose. These previously unknown “rights” also apparently protect the caregiver from any consequences, be it loss of pay, the assignment of a lesser hospital accreditation – or even the need to provide informed consent. Having a medical provider cite religion while taking control of your most personal medical, sexual, and religious decision-making by denying birth control devices, procedures, or services – then having to pay that provider - appears as a particularly egregious form of forcible financial, religious, and sexual assault.

Although “conscience rights” appear to violate not only religious freedom, but also patient autonomy, medical self determination, and sexual privacy, many pharmacies, religious hospitals, and health care corporations insist that their "religious freedom" trumps the rights guaranteed to the patient by not only numerous medical ethics, but also the Consitution of the United States.  

So who's freedom of religion should be protected in the health care marketplace, the patient's or the caregivers?

Medical caregivers can choose employment situations not involving birth control, are paid, have professional responsibilities, and often have the literal power of life and death over patients. In contrast, patients rarely have choices about seeking medical care, the identity of their caregivers, or the location at which the care is given. Patients are often in plentiful supply and rarely in a position to defend, or even request, their human or civil rights due to illness, financial limitations, and other issues. Furthermore, providers expect patients to pay – even when the provider denies services sought by the patient.

The denial of medical care and the denial of informed consent appear to violate medical ethics. Exercising one's power as a medical care provider to force your patient to comply with your own religious beliefs appears to violate not only medical ethics, but also religious ethics, especially in the context of caregiver power, professional responsibility, and patient trust, helplessness, or imminent death. The practice of granting full accreditation to hospitals denying reproductive care appears deceptive at best and fraudulent at worst. Hospitals and corporations providing health care using admitting contracts omitting the provider's “conscience rights” or other claim(s) of primacy with regard to religious freedom, appear to violate not only the ethic of informed consent – but also the law.

Medical professionals, hospitals, and health care corporations are healthy, paid, and able to defend themselves. In contrast, patients by definition neither paid nor healthy, and as people (not paid professionals or non-human entities), patients rightfully deserve the religious freedoms guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

Published August 17, 2011 with the quotation below.  

Those who inprinciple are opposed to birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life. 

Bertrand Russell 

Fruits of the Culture of Life - by Jan Brazill: October 2008

Fruits of the Culture of Life

by Jan Brazill

"By their fruits ye shall know them." As Matthew 7:16 further explains, "every good tree gives good fruit; but the bad tree gives evil fruit."

Our country has many religions calling themselves "Christian." But the denominations with greatest influence with government officials, the ones helping set the policy of our present leaders, are Catholic and Evangelical. These two groups, diverse in ritual and doctrine, have joined in advancing their concept of a "culture of life," demonstrated by their devotion to the unborn of the human species.

This concern for the unborn consistently takes precedence over the needs and welfare of the born, leading many to question whether such teachings yield good or evil fruit. Let's examine the evidence.

In the 1960's, as world population grew at a phenomenal rate, straining resources and creating more poverty and suffering, scientific research derived a solution -- the birth control pill. Had it been promoted worldwide, it would have enabled couples to match the size of their families with their income and space out their children, improving both maternal and infant health. It would have reduced consumption of scarce resources and lessened the present effects of global warming.

The Catholic religion, which had fought early contraceptive measures in this country, actually considered changing its stance, convening the 1966 Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control. A lay member told the Catholic Reporter that the Commission's tacit purpose was to find a way for the Church to approve contraception without undermining Church authority. Even though the Commission voted overwhelmingly that a change was both possible and advisable, some Cardinals convinced the Pope to retain the ban against artificial contraception. The resulting ''Humanae Vitae'' encyclical forbade ''any action which either before, at the moment of or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation.''

Fast forward to the 21st Century. The Church's opposition to contraceptives has required it to redefine the medical definition of pregnancy, naming the point of fertilization as the beginning of life rather than implantation of the fertilized egg. But now clinics performing in vitro fertilization are left with thousands of excess fertilized eggs. Limited by the self-serving definition it created, the Church must oppose any use of these excess eggs that doesn't lead to birth.

Scientists believe that by extracting stem cells from these eggs, they have the potential for curing many of our worst diseases and even reverse spinal cord injuries for our Iraq veterans. By opposing such use, the Church shows that it values a 5-day-old clump of cells more than a suffering human being.

Religion, traditionally considered to help people cope with illness and inspire concern for one's fellow humans, does neither when it demands adherence to this "culture of life" thinking. This mindset opposes anything that would threaten its religious authority, even research to cure disease. It insists that sexual acts be unrestrained by artificial contraception regardless of personal consequences or the devastating effect population growth has on our planet.

Helped by Evangelicals, the Church gradually acquired influence over high government offices, blurring the line of separation between Church and State. Since 2001we have seen embryonic stem cell research effectively halted in this country, cuts in our nation's aid to family planning programs worldwide, and HIV-AIDS programs diluted with religious requirements.

"Evil" fruits, indeed!

Jan Brazil  November 2008

This article was originally published in June of 2006. 

Give Unto US? - by Groff Schroeder

Although the United States Constitution was established to create a “more perfect union” of “We the People,” some citizens seem to prefer “privatization” by for-profit businesses to the government the Constitution creates, and act as if government and taxes constitute evil and theft respectively. While “Support the Troops” bumper stickers seem popular, the taxes supporting our armed forces, nation, states and communities, clearly are not. Some opponents, such as Americans for Tax Reform's Grover (“I'm not totally against government, I just want to shrink it down small enough that I can strangle it in a tub”) Norquist, appear uniquely unconcerned about the result of their opposition to taxation upon the nation they claim to support.

Simple morality requires helping and sharing with others. Furthermore, most religions advocate “alms,” and since primary deity figures appear to directly instruct followers to pay taxes in Abrahamic belief systems like Christianity and Islam, it seems odd that believers are not as insistent about paying taxes as they are about other things, like not selling cars on Sunday. Are modern taxes so different that believers must reject divine teachings or commit questionable evasions? Are taxes such a threat to national security that we must fund common defense and general welfare with credit rather than pay them?

Consider Townburg, populated by 7,000 people who, due to growing population, need $100,000 for an [insert public asset(s) here]. Other possibilities exhausted, Townburg's leaders ask 5000 taxpayers for $20.00 over one year (about $1.66 a month, $0.38 per week, or $.05 a day).

If the Townburgers are to experience theft, their representatives must collect the $100,000, not provide the [insert public asset(s) here] (or anything else) and run off with the money. However, if the revenue is spent as promised, within one year each Townburger gains access to $100,000 in shared public assets. Other probable results of their investment include longer life (for public health assets) improved property values (infrastructure), lower insurance rates (police and fire) and economic stimulus (project spending, employees etc.). Although implementation of the tax might evoke disagreement, resentfulness and unhappiness among citizens supporting, opposing, unable to pay the tax comfortably etc., this level of return on investment appears remarkable, widely beneficial – and quite different from “theft.”

Dishonesty, incompetence, inefficiency, waste and theft happens (even in the private sector), so tax funded government provides citizens with recourse in the the criminal and civil courts (where punishment is often more severe for those in positions of responsibility). Furthermore, for elected perpetrators, citizens unsuccessful in the courts can still “throw the bums out.” Try that if your for-profit health care insurer denies care.

Although our nation is deeply in debt, waging at least three wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, “on drugs” etc.) and faces serious economic, environmental, and public health crises, many Americans appear deeply resentful about taxation. A late 60's “establishment” bumper sticker read, “Proud US Taxpayer.” While such pride may be long gone, it may soon become essential that more of us, perhaps even churches and non-profits, again support our nation, states, communities, and especially each other with our tax dollars.

God and the Stockholm Syndrome by Jan Brazill

The news was recently dominated by the story of Shawn Hornbeck, allegedly kidnapped by a man who held him captive for four years. He was discovered when the man kidnapped another boy who was subsequently rescued.

Many were puzzled by the fact that Shawn was reportedly given much freedom as well as access to the Internet, but reporters, knowing he had mentioned threats that his captor would use a gun, immediately mentioned the possibility that Shawn was under the influence of the Stockholm Syndrome.

This Syndrome is a survival mechanism common to many hostage situations and comes into play when a captive cannot escape and is isolated and threatened with death. It allows the victim to bond with the captor, and occurs when the following conditions are met:

- Perceived threat to survival and the belief that one's captor is willing to act on that threat.

- The captive's perception of small kindnesses from the captor within a context of terror.

- Isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor.

- Perceived inability to escape.

As I listened to news reports, I realized that these symptoms fit (and explain) another phenomenon - how people can subscribe to the terrible doctrine of damnation and still believe they are worshipping a "loving" god.

Consider the "perceived inability to escape." An essential part of the god religions is that the god is said to have the power to read one's thoughts as well as actions. God becomes the ultimate jailer. He needs no chains or material boundaries, because one can never escape this mind control.

There can be no threat worse than eternal damnation, and hell-fire preachers seem to enjoy threatening listeners with the assurance that their god is quite willing to act on that threat. Only belief and good behavior can prevent your consignment to hell.

These same preachers, however, seem to instinctively realize that small kindnesses on the part of their god help further the Stockholm Syndrome, as they assure the believer that this god can dispense happiness and wealth through prayer to those he favors.

And of course, "isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor" insures that the hostage will remain under the captor's influence. Hence many religions preach that theirs is the only correct belief system.

People often make a total investment in religion - emotionally, socially, and financially. This makes them more likely to adopt an unreasoning belief to support and justify that investment. Studies show we are more loyal and committed to something that is difficult, uncomfortable, and even humiliating, such as initiation rituals of college fraternities or Marine boot camp. These can create a strong bonding - even if the bonding is unhealthy.

The Stockholm Syndrome, first named for a hostage situation in a Swedish bank where the captives bonded with the robbers, doesn't occur in every hostage situation. In another bank robbery, a police sharpshooter shot and wounded the terrorizing bank robber. After he hit the floor, two women picked him up and physically held him up to the window for another shot.

This shows that hostages can resist establishing a psychological dependency on a captor. If my theory that god-religions represent the Stockholm Syndrome is correct, it also indicates that religionists can and should resist the idea of a god who holds them hostage.

God's omnipotence - by Hugh Noe: Freethought Views June 2011

God’s omnipotence

By Hugh Noe

Probably the most difficult aspect of organized religion to "swallow" is the concept of god's omnipotence. Believers will often tell you that god is omnipotent – all powerful. Their god is responsible for every occurrence on earth, all the good things and all the bad, every birth, every medical condition, and every death that occurs. It’s all within god’s control, and part of god’s plan. And, if you want a particular outcome, just pray to god, and your chances are good, because god loves you, and he can make it so.

So let’s look at god’s handiwork. On the afternoon of May 18^th, 2011 a local TV station’s web-site offered two prime examples of god’s omnipotence, or perhaps the absence of a god.

One story discussed the death of a 3-year-old boy, who fell into a grease pit outside a southern New Jersey food market. Store employees who tried to get him out were unable to find him. The NJ EMS Chief and two firefighters removed the boy from the grease after two to three minutes but were not able to revive him.

The faithful say this is all part of their god’s plan. “He” had a reason for taking this young life so roughly – a reason that we could not possibly understand – a reason we MUST take on faith. Amen! If god did have a plan for this young lad, a reason why he had to be removed from this earth - perhaps to “be with his father in heaven”- could “he” not have chosen a less bizarre method to take the boy? Ending up in a disgusting pit of grease and choking to death drastically increased the grief his parents suffered when compared to a simple, instantaneous, and kind brain aneurism.

This family's story was much luckier than that of the following girl. Her mother and her aunt are charged with attempted murder and felony child abuse. Police say they bound the toddler's wrists, eyes, ankles, and mouth with tape before leaving her in a tub with the shower running. When police arrived, the little girl was unconscious and not breathing and had black tape marks on her wrists, ankles, eyes, and mouth. She was pronounced dead at 3:10 pm.

Certainly the women involved had “free will” to do what they did. An omnipotent and loving god has a motive and the power to intervene. But what happens next? Just after 4 pm., detectives were told the child was breathing again. Oh my god, a miracle. “He” must truly “be at work.”

However, the “rest of the story” is as follows. According to case workers, the little girl is in a persistent vegetative state with no likelihood of improvement. She is unresponsive and cannot communicate in any manner. She is being fed and hydrated through a nasal tube. She cries and moans non-stop. They also say she has severe brain damage and will most likely never have any higher brain function. Her father, who is seeking custody of the girl from his estranged wife, will probably have to care for the child for decades to come.

All of these travesties can always be explained away. “It’s god’s will!” “It’s all part of god’s plan!” Is such a line of reasoning really tenable?

Published in the Colorado Springs Independent June 16-23, 2011 with the following quotation and footer.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.      Jules Renard (1864-1910)

"Hugh Noe" works in the Colorado Springs defense community and chooses not to reveal his identity due to the possibility of professional repercussions.  

Hallowe’en Horror by Janet Brazill: October 2011

Hallowe’en Horror  by Janet Brazill

This Hallowe’en, October 31, 2011, is an especially scary time! It’s the symbolic date, declared by the United Nations, when the world’s population reaches the 7 billion milestone!

Why scary, you ask? Well, as grownups we should be worried about the earth we live on—the only spaceship we have. Such population growth stretches the available natural resources of our spaceship to their limits. Deforestation, climate change, and food and water shortages are all intensified by the addition of nearly 80 million people a year to the world's population.

The rapid population growth of recent decades can be attributed to lower mortality rates, longer life expectancy and large youth populations in countries where fertility remains high.

Luckily, science (or God for those who prefer divine intervention) devised the birth control pill just when it was needed. Unfortunately, some who saw its use in family planning as an affront to their God, intervened and have fought through the years to make it unavailable. Their religious and political opposition has curtailed our country’s aid to the developing world, thus resulting in the huge population that now burdens our world and threatens our national security.

While children may enjoy the make-believe-world of goblins and ghosts this Hallowe’en, we grownups should be aware that we live in a very scary world!

Published October 20, 2011 with the quotation below.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio.    Robert Thomas Malthus

Health Care: Human Right or Profit Center? by Groff Schroeder

In 1948, the Charter Members of the United Nations adopted the legally binding United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not legally binding, it initiated a series of treaties defining an international standard for human rights. Article 25 addresses medical care specifically.

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." [1]

In 1976, Article 12 of the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights extended the concept of medical care as a human right to include mental health care and, "The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness." [2] The covenant's comment on implementation states, "Health is a fundamental human right indispensable for the exercise of other human rights." [3] The United States is a signatory of this covenant, and until just recently, was the world's undisputed champion of human and civil rights.

Virtually every developed nation successfully and economically provides this human right with not-for-profit "single payer" systems, in which the government pays the People's medical bills with tax revenues. Paralleling the "third world" medical care's nonexistent, inconsistent or unequal access due to lack of personnel and technology, America's schizophrenic not-for-profit (Medicare) and for-profit (insurance based) paradigm generates unequal access and substandard quality. Despite record health care expenditures, American morbidity and mortality statistics are among the poorest in the world.

Medical care is a basic human need and "Do no harm" is a founding medical ethic. Minimizing access to medical treatments clearly harms patients, especially in the context of profit. Another key medical ethic is informed consent. Americans are rarely informed of, or consent to, the profit stemming from the pain and suffering experienced due to treated and or untreated illness or injury. Furthermore, growing health insurance premiums lead to growing numbers of uninsured workers [4] and children, [5] ; medical bills, whether uninsured or insured, are America's leading cause of bankruptcy. [6]

Enterprises profiting from health care hold significant conflicts of interest. Insurers frequently reject applicants likely to need medical care, and deaths of insured clients benefit insurers, who rarely participate personally in the sometimes messy process. It appears the best way to profit from health care is to deny it. Since the denial of medical care maximizes profits, for-profit health care systems promote, if not constitute, a market in human suffering.

In addition to significant expenses stemming from profit itself, for-profit medicine generates competition, duplication of services and administrative and marketing costs. Even brilliant advertising rarely induces illness, injury, or the rejection of insurer reimbursement guidelines.

America's for-profit medical system fails to provide quality medical care for all and prioritizes corporate profits over basic human needs. This violates medical ethics, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights and other international treaties designed to define and ensure basic human rights.

Extending Medicare coverage to all, boosting caregiver reimbursement rates and retraining health insurance workers as health care providers could solve these problems, restore our human rights and end America's for-profit medical nightmare.

REFERENCES

[1] United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948, http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm , accessed November 12, 2002.

[2] United Nations, International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm , accessed November 12, 2002.

[3] United Nations, International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, The right to the highest attainable standard of health : . 11/08/2000. E/C.12/2000/4, CESCR General comment 14, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(symbol)/E.C.12.2000.4,+CESCR+General+comment+14.En?OpenDocument , accessed November 12, 2002.

[4] American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine, Achieving Affordable Health Insurance Coverage for All within Severn Years: A Proposal From America's Internists, April 9, 2002, http://www.acponline.org/uninsured/afford_7years.pdf , accessed November 19, 2002.

[5] Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Covering Kids, http://www.neahin.org/resources/docs/coveringkids_factsheet.pdf , accessed November 19, 2002.

[6] Wordsworth, Araminta, US Study: Medical Bills Main Culprit In Bankruptcies, National Post (Canada), http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/042700-03.htm, accessed November 19, 2002.

This column is a condensation of an article that originally appeared at www.undercovermedicine.com in 2003.

If Abortion Became Illegal - by Janet Brazill: May 2008

If the "Personhood" Amendment makes it to the ballot this fall, voters should be aware of the unintended consequences that will follow.

The Amendment's goal is to nullify the Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion nationwide back in 1973. Opponents dramatically refer to the time since then as a "holocaust," claiming that 43 million children have not been born because of this law. They picture these as all bubbling, healthy Gerber babies cruelly aborted by unfeeling women.

Most of us recognize, of course, that many of these abortions were medically necessary, preventing maternal deaths or lifetime impairments. We know, also, that the lives of desperate women, unable to face an unplanned pregnancy, were saved when abortion became a fully legal, safe medical procedure.

However, another result of legalized abortion goes largely unrecognized by the general public, and it is something that affects all our lives, regardless of our opinion about abortion.

To understand, we need to look at the latter part of the 20th Century. As described in "Freakonomics," by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, crime had been rising relentlessly. By the early 1990's, violence had become commonplace -- death by gunfire, carjackings, crack dealing, robbery and rape. Media wrote about the thousands of so-called superpredators, described as scrawny, big-city teenagers with a cheap gun in their hands and nothing in their heart but ruthlessness.

Everyone expected it to only grow worse. A 1995 report for the U.S. attorney general grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers, forecasting a rise in rate of teen homicides between 15 percent and 100 percent over the next decade.

This sentiment was shared by other criminologists, political scientists and even President Clinton, who said, "We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around, or our country is going to be living with chaos."

But then, surprisingly, the crime rate began to fall. It continued decreasing each year, and with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. By the year 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years, as had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.

Experts were baffled. Some credited the roaring 1990s economy, or the proliferation of gun control laws, even innovative policing strategies in New York City, for the crime drop, even though none of these applied equally across the country or to all crimes.

One factor, however, explains it all, once you consider that decades of studies have shown that criminal activities are often the consequence of a bad home environment where unwanted children are neglected or abused. For the previous twenty years, since the Roe decision had legalized abortion, millions of women were no longer forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers, for whom illegal abortions had previously been too expensive or too difficult to obtain, were not having as many children -- children who would have been the most likely to become criminals.

Wanted children had made the difference. Today society seeks to achieve this goal through effective and affordable contraception along with good sex education, with abortion retained for backup.

The Personhood Amendment would make abortion and many contraceptives illegal, reversing all these advances.

Janet Brazill    May 2008

If Abortion becomes a Crime - by Groff Schroeder: November 2008

If Abortion becomes a Crime 

by Groff Schroeder

It is hard to think of anything more deserving of privacy than the human reproductive process. Intimate, beautiful, rewarding, personal and sometimes tragic, human sex and reproduction are among the few places where the government has yet to insert its sticky fingers. Still, a small but historically violent group of what appear to be religious fundamentalists demand that the government codify their religious beliefs by regulating the reproductive processes of the People of the United States.

Perhaps the most detailed analysis of the abortion question was performed by Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, and can be accessed at http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml. While the abortion debate often involves religious and scientific interpretations such as the point at which "life begins," the day-to-day legal aspects of life in a society in which certain reproductive acts are criminal are rarely considered. There are many infamous historical examples where governments have taken control of the reproduction of its citizens through the criminalization of abortion, such as the brutal Ceaucescu regime in Romania that outlawed any and all forms of abortion and birth control, and the racially selective ban in Nazi Germany.

In the United States the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, creates a number of important civil rights that help to protect the accused from the government. In the context of the abortion debate and possible enforcement of anti-abortion laws, it is important to understand just what police powers would be required to enforce the criminalization of abortion.

If abortion becomes a crime, the government will be required and empowered to search for evidence to prosecute the accused. If a woman is seen in the company of a suspected abortionist, this is not proof that an abortion occurred. The only place where that evidence can be found is within the human uterus. Therefore, the only way that the police can collect evidence useful in the prosecution of alleged abortion crimes is through direct visualization of the uterine wall. This suggests the police, or their agents, will have to perform a gynecological exam on the accused in order to gather photographic evidence regarding innocence or guilt.

What level of evidence will be required for a grand jury to issue a warrant to search the human uterus? Will the accused have to have visited a known abortionist? Suddenly be no longer pregnant after a positive workplace pregnancy test? Or is the anonymous complaint of that cranky elderly lady across the street enough?

Who will perform these searches? If physicians have to search the uterus, the costs to law enforcement could be staggering. So police officers perhaps, with a special van, a speculum and a warrant.

There are many types of abortions and many misconceptions about abortion. But history does tell us this: abortion always exists no matter what its legal status. This is due in part to the fact that a woman can perform the procedure by herself in the privacy of her own home, albeit unsafely. Even if the government places cameras in every bathroom and bedroom in America, abortions will continue.

The question is not which interpretation of the beginning of life we want to enforce as law. The question is how much power do we want to give the government over the most private parts of our bodies and the most intimate aspects of our lives.

Groff Schroeder   November 2008

Imagine No Religion - by Jan Brazill: January 2008

Imagine No Religion

by Jan Brazill

The appearance of a billboard on North Academy with these words has inspired a Gazette editorial in opposition. As support for the idea of a world without religion, we offer the following, adapted from a 2006 article by Janet Brazill, originally titled, “Wishes.”

Just imagine that everyone in the world suddenly decided they would no longer rely on undetectable, unseen beings to control their lives!

The absence of religious differences in beliefs would mean an immediate end to many wars including the Israeli conflict between Jews and Palestinians; Muslims fighting Christians in Africa and Indonesia; Muslim and Hindu sparring in Bangladesh; battles in Sri Lanka. There would no longer be a basis for hostilities between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

And think of the worldwide “war on terrorism” -- without religious fervor there would be no more suicide bombers or 9-11 attacks!

Sometimes wars are fought to acquire necessary resources. Whether the goal is obtaining oil or gaining territory for “lebensraum,” war is caused by the needs of a populace that has exceeded its native resources. World population, now roughly 6.6 billion, is heading toward 8 billion by 2025, requiring yet more space, more food and more resources.

If religious opposition to birth control suddenly ceased, our government could address this exponential population growth, resuming its commitment to providing adequate family planning to the 201 million women worldwide who lack it now. Poverty would be reduced, as well as environmental degradation and resource depletion.

Good health could become a reality for many if research on embryonic stem cells were not frustrated by religious extremists - fanatics who resist many medical advances as thwarting God's will. The same mindset once opposed anesthesia.

Politically active religious followers delayed research into cures for the new disease of HIV/AIDS in the 1980's because it was initially thought to be God's punishment for what they considered sexual deviancy. Although the HIV/AIDS crisis has killed over 20 million people and currently infects more than 38 million men, women and children, religious opposition to condoms and the diversion of funds for teaching “abstinence” still impedes efforts to control one of the most destructive health crises of modern times.

Judgmental condemnation of homosexuality, prevalent in Catholic and Evangelical religions worldwide, also causes untold discrimination and emotional distress. Without religion, the persecution of gays, lesbians and transgendered people would end and the debate about gay marriage would vanish.

One of religion's most potent weapons to maintain control over the lives of its congregations is the fear of everlasting punishment in the afterlife through burning by fire, a doctrine that could be considered child abuse when it terrifies young children.  Computer websites, which any child can access, quote Bible passages and vividly describe the eternal torments awaiting transgressors in Hell. Without the protection society now automatically affords religion, we could classify these sites as obscene, as well as the book that preaches a god engaged in such sadistic torture. With religion gone, both Hell and the Devil would disappear.

A world without religion could concentrate on the greater good for humanity, employing science and logic rather than dogma. The time, energy and resources now expended on religion could be devoted to preserving our fragile environment for future generations, and ensuring that every individual has the means to experience the fullness of the life we're given.

Jan Brazill    January 200

Is There a Personal Trolley in Your Future? by Len Schwee

Since we have come to the end of cheap oil, it is time to plan for the future.

A problem with heat engines is that they are only about 30% efficient. This is not because the oil companies are in cahoots with the car companies, but because of thermodynamics, a branch of physics. Even if we can make ethanol cheaper than it is, we will waste about 70% of it. And it takes more energy to make ethanol than one can get out of it. So it doesn't look very promising. On the other hand, electric motors can be about 98% efficient, and electric motors can become generators when a vehicle is braking.

We should consider switching to personal trolleys that we can drive right into our garages. To generate the needed electricity, we can use nuclear power, solar power, wind power, or hydroelectric power. Trolleys can be made much safer than autos. A trolley can be automatically switched onto tracks leading to a destination. It can be sent to a distant parking garage without a driver. It can use a laser beam to keep itself at a safe distance from a preceding trolley. No one has to steer it.

The personal trolleys that I have in mind will not look like the old streetcars. The wheels will be as far apart as the wheels on our autos. And they can look much like our autos. Perhaps a hot conductor buried between the tracks would be the safest. The destination desired can be typed into the trolley's computer when the driver is ready to go.

For long distance travel, we should consider a large trolley that resembles a small cruise ship and would carry personal trolleys. Our present interstate highways could be converted to tracks about 25 feet apart. At a station, the personal trolleys would drive off one side of the carrier trolley just before the arriving trolleys drive onto the other side. One could dine, watch a movie, frequent a lounge, or sleep in one's own car aboard the carrier.

Nuclear power has had a rather safe history in this country, and France has used it very successfully for most of its power generation for a long time now. The cost of our nuclear power plants has been high because all of our plants are different. By now we ought to be able to decide on a safe plant design that can be duplicated as often as needed. This will hold down design costs, and when an improvement is made to one plant, it can be made to all. Maybe some day we will begin to use the South Pole to store the nuclear waste.

Global warming will become a much larger problem the more we burn fossil fuels. All the forms of power suggested at the beginning of this article can be used without adding to the greenhouse effect. The longer we stick with oil from the Middle East, the richer our radical enemies will become, and the poorer we become. We are funding our own demise, and ruining our planet. This is a very costly and dangerous course to follow. There is nothing to lose and much to gain by changing directions, and vehicles, now.

James Madison - by John Patrick Michael Murphy: Freethought Views December 2008

James Madison

by John Patrick Michael Murphy

James Madison, the Father of our Constitution and our fourth president, went to Princeton at 18 to become an Anglican minister and came back to Virginia a freethinker. At age 22, he wrote, "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded project." He then fought for religious liberty for all, believer and disbeliever, which was no easy task - then or now.

In his day, the notorious "Dade Code" was part of the Virginia statutes, and he could have been executed for his efforts. The code was written in London by Anglican bishops who laid out a tidy list of prohibitions and punishments which were meant to keep people from thinking and speaking their honest thoughts and to mold the citizens into conformity. The code provided the death penalty for anyone who "spoke impiously of the Trinity or one of the divine persons, or against the known articles of Christian faith." The same went for "blaspheming God's holy name." If you were new in town, you had to report to the nearest Anglican priest who would put questions to you to see if you were holy enough to stay. Arguing with a clergyman could get you jail time. If you missed church without good reason on three occasions, the death penalty could be imposed. The Code excluded all other religions from the colony.

These laws were fought by Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and freethinkers. They sought to disestablish the Church of England from the colony and to allow all other Christian religions equality. Patrick Henry joined with George Washington, John Marshall, and other prominent leaders to propose that one could pay the annual duty to the Christian church of one's choice, or a like amount to the school fund. This alarmed James Madison and caused him to write his famous A Memorial and Remonstrance. He looked at the history of the western world from Constantine to the Reformation and summed up what had occurred - "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution."

He argued that Pennsylvania, New York, and Rhode Island had no church tax whatsoever and their citizens seemed moral enough. He stated that our courts should not be deciding which churches were Christian and which were not. The 1785 legislature of the State of Virginia removed the church tax completely and in its stead enacted the law that Thomas Jefferson had proposed a decade earlier, the Religious Freedom Act, which in turn was incorporated into our Bill of Rights.

James Madison succeeded Thomas Jefferson as president and continued to champion separation of state from church and church from state. As president, he vetoed a bill to provide free lands to a Mississippi Baptist church, and spiked a bill to establish the Episcopal Church in the District of Columbia. He could not understand why our country should pay for a chaplain to pray before Congress.

Madison had no trouble at home being a man without religion. He and his beautiful wife, Dolly, pursued happiness together in this life and found that to be fulfilling enough. James Madison is a Founding Father the religious right seldom mention when they tell us how good it was when we were a "Christian nation."

Originally published in June 2005.

Lack of Cause by Martin Foreman

Believers defending their faith give five primary reasons for the existence of God.

One is personal experience - God has spoken to me. Another is the existence of miracles. The third is the First Cause argument. The fourth is the apparent impossibility of evolution. The last is the stability of the universe.

The first two arguments are easily demolished. The last three appear to be on stronger ground but their foundations are illusions.

Personal experience is just that: personal. No matter how strong the presence of God in our lives, no matter how convinced we are that that presence comes from outside us and exists independently of us, at the end of the day, all experience of God comes from within and is nothing more than self-created delusion.

Miracles are equally irrelevant. Miracles were frequent in ancient history when events were rarely and uncertainly recorded and people were more credulous. Over years stories grew and changed in the telling and small incidents or outright lies metamorphosized into interventions of the almighty.

As we learn about the world about us and record our history better, miracles have shrunk. Instead of global floods and plagues of locusts, John Paul II's claim to sainthood is based on the fact that a nun prayed to him after his death and her Parkinson's disease disappeared.

Two facts: the cure appeared inexplicable and she prayed to the late Pope. Ergo, she was cured by a miracle. Any ten-year-old with reasonable intelligence and a decent education would spot the fallacy in that argument, but sound reasoning is not a trait normally associated with the Christian faith.

With dissension truly suppressed, God moves on to common law. Commandment five tells us to honor our parents, six not to murder, seven to abstain from adultery, eight not to steal, nine not to bear false witness and ten not to covet our neighbor's possessions.

For the benefit of nine-year-olds who may be reading this column and uncertain of the illogicalities, let me make it clear.

Start by asking for the medical evidence, including dated and witnessed brain scans pre- and post-"miracle" that prove both that the condition was Parkinson's and that it has been permanently cured. Prove that no other condition could produce the same symptoms and disappear in the same way.

IF the disease was Parkinson's and it has been cured, examine all the circumstances in which the disease pro- and re-gressed. Compare other potential contributing factors such as diet, sleeping habits, chemicals in the environment (eg from cleaning fluids or nearby factories) and so on to eliminate all other causes of regression.

Compare this case with other situations where patients have unexpectedly made a recovery without resort to prayer.

Compare all other prayers made to John Paul after his death, no doubt with equal or greater fervor, and ask whether they have been granted - particularly those that would qualify as miraculous. Explain why the dead Pope would single out Marie Simon-Pierre for work of wonder.

And if after you have done all this and are still convinced that God, or one of his saints, has performed a miracle, explain why God and his saints ignore all the pleas of the millions of other human beings who suffer illness and tragedy on a daily basis.

In short, recognize that two events may be connected (prayer and cure) but connection is not proof of cause.

God, of course, might exist and be very different from the miracle-working deity pictured by the Catholic faith.

Among other arguments for his existence is the First Cause - God caused the universe to exist.

For centuries philosophers and scientists have looked into the origins of the universe. As we explore ever deeper, our understanding continues to develop, change and confuse.

All very interesting, but not very relevant. Underlying all the debate and scientific evidence, at the end of the day, there are only two key points.

The first is our ability to understand the universe in which we live is inherently limited and our concept of "cause" may be flawed or meaningless.

Given that caveat, we move to the second point: we have to decide whether all entities can or cannot exist without a cause.

If some can exist without a cause, we accept that the universe does not need a creator.

If all entities must have a cause, then God created the universe. And something created God. Something else created the creator of God and so on into infinity.

In short, recognize that two events may be connected (prayer and cure) but connection is not proof of cause.

The argument that the universe needs a cause but God does not is both poor and hypocritical.

Given these two choices - a godless and a god-created universe - the more intellectually honest conclusion is that the universe makes more sense without God.

Two arguments remain - the apparent impossibility of evolution and the stability of the universe (the fact that a few minor alterations in the physical structure of the universe would make it impossible to exist).

Superficially, these arguments are attractive, but close up, they're hollow. We'll take a look at them next week [at www.godwouldbeanatheist.com ]

© Martin Foreman, all rights reserved

Let's stop this liberty stuff before it gets out of hand - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views April 2010

Let's stop this liberty stuff before it gets out of hand

by Groff Schroeder

“Liberty” is a political concept describing acting with free will.  Although America’s foundations appear associated with the establishment and defense of liberty (not capitalism, campaign donations, corporate power, free markets etc.), some Americans look down upon - and even villainize “liberals” – while claiming to support liberty itself.  It is one thing to defend, earn, maintain, enjoy or exercise liberties, and quite another thing to take liberties with facts, political systems, the rule of law or other crucial foundations of freedom and democracy. 

Apparently unaware of our common bond as American citizens, so-called “conservative” broadcasters, corporations, lobbyists, and politicians appear to support the liberty to attack those not sharing their “right wing” ideals.  Employing “wedge” issues, they appear bent upon dividing American citizens against themselves, often in the context of surprising detachment from demonstrable reality.  Widespread, one-sided, anti-“liberal” “free speech” (commonly broadcast by “Rush” Limbaugh, so-called “hate radio” and “conservative” television such as Fox “News” Channel’s “Glenn Beck”) appears to continually “spin” news, incorrectly report facts, intentionally avoid inconvenient facts, ignore moral responsibilities, evade legal responsibilities - and even broadcast rhetoric against their fellow citizens historically associated with incitement to violence. 

Similarly, conservative religious institutions also appear to exercise numerous rather dubious liberties in pursuit of church political goals or institutional autonomy.  At times appearing obsessed with sex, politically active religious leaders routinely ignore inconvenient medical facts including the ineffectiveness of “abstinence” based sex education, the existence of spontaneous abortion, the medical need for legal abortion in emergency obstetrics (ectopic pregnancy etc.), and the reality that most embryos “rescued” from stem cell experiments die in trash cans after being discarded. 

Despite one major church’s serious problems with celibacy and becoming legendary for an apparently continuing pattern of international, intergenerational facilitation and cover-up of the sexual abuse of children, powerful religious conservatives continue to insist that their religious liberty exists only when all Americans abide by conservative religious beliefs.  The exercise of political “liberty” by religious conservatives (including ethical and unethical means such as lobbying and serial assassination) has successfully forced many American citizens to surrender not only the freedom to exercise their own moral (and religious) liberty – but also the freedom to control their most intimate reproductive and interpersonal functions.  It seems the folks who want government “off our backs” will do anything to move it into our pants. 

It is easy to believe we know what is best, easy to blame others for problems, easy to ignore our own failings and easy to forget that we are all American Citizens with common rights and responsibilities symbolized by the national motto, E Pluribus Unum (from many one).  Although we face many problems, our nation remains strong and it appears the only way to defeat America is to destroy it from within.  Sadly, revoking personal freedoms though raw political force, “wedge” issues, labels and the divisive inflammatory rhetoric flooding America’s newspapers, radios and televisions appears to turn our neighbors into our enemies and divide America against herself. 

History shows that America and her People can overcome virtually any hazard.  Unfortunately, learning to cooperate in service to the common good, sharing our dwindling resources fairly, recognizing our shared citizenship and abandoning the labels that turn our fellow citizens into our enemies may be the most challenging issues America has ever faced. 

By Groff Schroeder

April 22, 2010

Original version

April 19, 2010

Let’s stop this liberty stuff before it gets out of hand

“Liberty” is a political concept describing acting with free will.  Although America’s foundations appear associated with the establishment and defense of liberty (not capitalism, campaign donations, corporate power, free markets etc.), many Americans today look down upon, and even villainize “liberals” – even as they claim to support liberty itself.  It is one thing to earn, maintain or enjoy liberties – and quite another thing to take liberties with facts or other crucial foundations of freedom and democracy. 

Sadly, widespread distribution of one-sided anti-“liberal” rhetoric by so-called “hate radio” and television programs (e.g. the Fox “News” Channel’s Glenn Beck program) appear bent upon dividing American citizens against themselves, often in the context of surprising detachment from the facts.  In many cases, it appears as if American corporations, opinion makers and their followers alike take improper liberties – intentionally avoiding facts incongruent with their point of view, evading legal responsibilities, or employing rhetoric historically associated with the incitement of violence. 

For example, opponents of abortion sometimes appear to avoid learning inconvenient medical information – such as the fact that about 50% of abortions are “spontaneous” – even as they brand “abortionists” as “murderers.”  Without such important facts, they insist that their liberty exists only when everyone complies with their beliefs – forcing other citizens to surrender not only the freedom to exercise their own moral (and religious) liberty – but also the freedom to control their most intimate bodily functions.  Ironically, it seems folks who want government “off our backs” seek to move it into our pants.  

Not just humans appear to feel that their “liberty” to do what is good for them trumps the liberties of others.  Recently, a corporation (whose CEO called safety violations “…a normal part of the mining process”) refused to pay fines and clogged the mine safety regulatory system with appeals.  No one seemed to care until an explosion in one of the mines took not only the liberties, but also the lives of 29 miners.  Paradoxically, many representatives and the Supreme Court insist that “campaign donations” (even from those with conflicts of interest including corporations, foreign governments and unions) are corporate liberties of “free speech.” 

There is more to being free than having liberty and more to having liberty than being free - with liberty and freedom come responsibility.  Not enough of us appear willing to shoulder the responsibilities associated with defending, maintaining, protecting, and using our freedoms in a nation where inflammatory rhetoric, “campaign donations” and corporate power seem more important to our courts, press, and representatives than the basic ideals of human freedom. 

Since America’s founders created a democracy with regular elections, citizens need not turn to violence in order to protect their freedoms or their nation.  Perhaps the most pressing problem is for all citizens to focus upon the identification of facts.  Considering numerous points of view and accessing multiple, opposing sources of information can help identify verifiable facts.  A simple polite phone call can remind representatives that liberty and freedom correctly belongs to citizens, not corporations.  Perhaps the most important thing we citizens can do is to vote for candidates who place the interests of the People (for whom liberty was ostensibly won) over the interests of The people (corporations, etc.) who currently take liberties because they have the power and ability to do so. 

Life of Reason: Charles Darwin - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views February 2009

Life of Reason: Charles Darwin 

by Groff Schroeder

The father of modern evolutionary biology finished 10th in Cambridge University's Christ's College class of 1878, graduating in Theology, Euclid and the Classics. At a time when most theology graduates became clergymen, Charles Robert Darwin became a naturalist and author, laying the foundations of modern biology and becoming one of the most famous scientists in history.

Charles was born in Shrewsbury, England, February 12, 1809, into an accomplished family. His father Robert and paternal grandfather Erasmus were esteemed physicians, and his maternal grandfather was the innovative Josiah Wedgewood, whose achievement in measuring temperature in kilns earned him membership in the prestigious Royal Society.

Erasmus Darwin was one of England's leading intellectuals who abandoned medicine for science and writing to become an internationally famous naturalist and author. He was a prominent proponent of transmutation (the belief that organisms change over time), and his well-received poem, "Zooonia, or the Laws of Organic Life," discussed the concept of evolution, foreshadowing the work of his grandson. Both of Charles' grandfathers participated in the "Lunar Society," a monthly gathering of scientists, inventors and intellectuals who supported radical religious and political ideas such as free markets and opposed the control the Anglican Church held over intellectual life. Erasmus' influence was apparently instrumental in creating a family environment that placed great value on questioning established ideals.

At 16, Charles entered Edinburgh University to study medicine. Finding medicine uninteresting, the sight of blood unpleasant and the practice of amputation without anesthetic untenable, he refused to complete his studies in medicine. Back home in Shrewsbury, he began a process of self-education as a naturalist. In 1827, Darwin gave his first talk at the Plinian Society, a science club that emphasized the study of nature over idea of the supernatural.

Charles enrolled in Christ's College of Cambridge University in 1828 with the goal of becoming an Anglican clergyman. But when he read a book by John Hershel about the possible future of scientific knowledge, he decided he wanted to be part of the future of scientific discovery. After graduation, he eventually won an unpaid position as ship's naturalist for the five-year voyage of The Beagle, a refitted Royal Navy ship set to sail around the world. During that voyage, Darwin collected evidence that finally convinced first him, and later the scientific world, that the concept of evolution through means of natural selection was the guiding principle through which organisms changed over time.

However, Darwin was not insensitive to the disruptions his discoveries would incite and withheld publication of On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection for 20 years. In 1880 he wrote, "Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity or Theism produce hardly any effect on the public, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual advancement of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science."

Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882, perhaps unaware that his name would go down in history among the giants of scientific discovery.

Little White Lies - by Groff Schroeder: October 2008

Little White Lies

by Groff Schroeder

Many use deception daily, often for personal benefit.  They might tell their boss that her trendy outfit “looks great” - though they think it ridiculous.  Confronted about a discriminatory joke they might say, “one of my best friends is [insert stereotyped group here],” when a correct response would be, “a person at work is [insert stereotyped group here] and we sometimes say hi.”  If you believe and repeat a falsehood – is it still a lie?  Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.“   

We call these “little white lies,” but are they not still lies?  Those abhorring dishonesty and misdirection often find maintaining personal integrity in a society routinely practicing “polite” or “convenient” deception challenging.  Not participating in the “little” deceptions of daily life can be difficult, isolating and damaging, especially at work. 

Many rationalize larger deceptions.  Some might say, “Traffic made me late to work” instead of “I stayed out and slept late.”  Both drivers in a crash at an intersection might claim - and even believe - they had the green light.  Unless the light malfunctioned, only one of them can be truthful.  The driver who accelerated into the yellow light profits from believing the light was “green,” while lying harms the driver whose light was green.   

Parents all over the world deceive children about assorted magical beings associated with various holidays.  Although religious systems often forbid the telling of lies, some appear to tolerate and even celebrate institutionalized deceptions regarding the most basic tenets of their faith, such as the birth date of their most important figures. 

False analogies, like comparing abortion to the holocaust, posit compelling, but misleading arguments.  Those practicing abortion are usually women or couples controlling their most personal bodily functions; terminating the expression of their DNA, embryo or fetus in consultation with a physician, often reluctantly and under extreme financial, medical and or personal duress.  In the holocaust, a belligerent military dictator employed propaganda (systematic political dishonesty) and commanded brainwashed soldiers (under penalty of death) to summarily execute people of all ages from targeted racial (and other) groups. 

Omitting information can also deceive.  Few stories about New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s prostitute mentioned Spitzer’s prosecution of the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame – or the alleged gay prostitute posing as a journalist who apparently repeatedly spent the night in “W’s” “conservative” White House. 

Some accept certain deceptions while rejecting others.   Many demanded the impeachment of one president for lying about rather private matters in civil court.  It appears the following president repeatedly and knowingly lied about Iraq’s involvement in 9-11 and weapons of mass destruction, initiating an apparently illegal and unjust war.  How can the same pundits, politicians, reporters and citizens who demanded impeachment over rhetorical sleight of hand in a lawsuit exposing consensual sex accept more malevolent lies (previously publicly disproved by Valerie Plame’s husband) in the Presidential State of the Union Address resulting in the deaths of countless soldiers and civilians?

When do little white lies become big black lies?  What separates “harmless” deceptions from those producing or protecting dire societal consequences such as bribery, corruption, fraud, totalitarianism and war?  Can lies ever serve the “greater good?” 

If you cannot lie to yourself, to whom can you lie?

 Groff Schroeder    October 2008

Manners, Morals and Lemon Chess Pie - by Sam Singleton "Atheist Evangelist" January 2008

Manners, Morals and Lemon Chess Pie

by Sam Singleton

The world is full of folks who think that believers have a monopoly on morality. Not long ago, Sister Singleton and I were sitting around the dinner table with some nice folks when one of them just upped and asked how we could have any morality without God. Can you believe that? And before either my beloved or I could empty our mouths in order to set this particular ninny straight, she follows up with “You’re too nice to be an atheist.” And she was looking at Sister Singleton. Brother Sam felt downright omitted.

Now, my true love is the kind of atheist you see every day without knowing it. Since she doesn’t wear her atheism on her sleeve, and is everybody’s idea of a very nice lady, some folks just assume that she must be a believer. So they feel at liberty to speak openly about nonbelievers around her in the way that, say, women talk about men when there are no men around. A lot of the time, she’ll just let things pass unremarked. But some stuff will flat get a rise out of her. And she got at this dinner guest of ours before I could swallow.

“I’ve got a better question,” she says. Oh Sister Singleton stays cool. Not a bit like ol’ Brother Sam. Real polite and all. She says, “How can you have any kind of morality with God?”

This dinner guest didn’t say a word, just fiddled with the last little dab of her second slab of Sister Singleton’s lemon chess pie. Lord help me! Goddamn that’s good pie! Anyway, she doesn’t say anything, so Sister Singleton goes on, very calm, respectful.

Says, “I hope that you realize that when you say that your morality comes from God, that you can’t possibly back that up. And no matter how much I love you, there’s just no way in the world that you can expect me to accept something as wild as that. Why, that’d be just as unfair as if I insisted that you believe that I can read minds and see through walls. I wouldn’t presume on your good nature that way. Wouldn’t be respectful. I’d hope I’d have more sensitivity than to put one of my friends in such an awkward position.”

The dinner guest made like she was about to interrupt, but Sister Singleton wasn’t ready to yield the table.

“You're basing your morality on something false. Falsehoods and moral truth are— "

That was my cue to pipe up with "Irreconcilable!" Goddammit.

And Sister Singleton just says, "You want some more pie?”

I do love that woman so. And anybody says you can’t be an atheist and be good and honest and honorable; well, just mind your Ps and Qs, that’s all.

Sam Singleton, “Atheist Evangelist” brings his “not for the easily offended” one-man show to Colorado Springs Municipal Auditorium's Lon Chaney Theater at 221 East Kiowa Street on Thursday, December 18 at 7:00 PM. Tickets are $15 or $10 for students. Please arrive early and purchase at the door or call 719-570-9887 for advance tickets.

Sam Singleton   January 2008

Misconceptions of Intelligent Design - by Phil Stahl

     Over the past ten or so years, I’ve debated a number of proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) in various venues. One thing they all have in common is the acceptance of certain serious misconceptions that are casually invoked as a basis for argument. Let’s take a look at 3 of the major ones:

     1)ID is a bona fide scientific theory.

     Not even close. First, a proper theory must at least identify the claimed “designer”, to formulate a positive hypothesis. But ID’ers haven’t done that. Is it some kind of deity? (If so, they are definitely in the realm of religious dogma). Is it a highly advanced species of space alien from Tau Ceti, or Zeta Reticuli? Is it an invisible, inter-dimensional “essence”? They won’t say!

     Second, a genuine theory must set up its own positive formulations of the natural world based on its own observations. It can’t just dwell on the deficiencies of evolution and call itself an independent theory. It would be analogous to me picking supposed holes in Einstein’s General Relativity – then asserting I’ve formed my own theory of space-time. No, I haven’t, I just have a collection of issues with Einstein’s theory! Third, a valid theory makes its own predictions (as evolution has – just Google ‘29+ Evidences of Macro-evolution’) and also applies tests for its own falsification. But so far as I know, ID proponents have never attempted tests of falsification. Again, how can they, when they are not even sure what it is they are falsifying? A God? An Alien? An Inter-dimensional Being?

     2)Evolution cannot be valid since it is based on random chance.

     This, unfortunately, is a bugbear that bedevils almost every debate between ID’ers ad evolutionists. Often too, the latter group falls into the trap laid by the former – by speciously conceding evolution is indeed predicated on chance. But in fact not! Biologist and author Richard Dawkins once referred to this as “the single most unfortunate misunderstanding of Darwinism – that it’s a theory of chance.” I suspect the misconception arises because one input for natural selection is mutation, and it is largely governed by random chance. For example, up to 60% or more of mutations may be caused by external factors such as cosmic rays interacting with DNA - but who can say when or at what frequency these interactions occur? However, natural selection itself is anything but random.

     We can see this simply by doing simple experiments, as with fruit flies, and examining the emergence of specific traits over generations – governed by gene frequency. It can be seen that over time there is a genetic "favoritism," as it were, for certain traits or characteristics to be passed on or selected out of a group of competing traits in the gene pool. Thus, what natural selection does is to consolidate particular random mutations into a more stable, adaptive adjustment – governed by deterministic factors and inputs in the organism’s environment.

     3)No evolutionist has ever created life in a lab.

     This is totally irrelevant because the demand imposed is excessive, beyond the bounds of acceptable testability. It would be analogous to demanding a cosmologist create a mini-explosion to mimic the Big Bang in a physics lab. In addition, it conflates the theory of the genesis of life, with evolution by natural selection.

Neanderthals Among Us - by Janet Brazill: June 2008

Neanderthals Among Us

by Janet Brazill

Those of us who spent most of our lives in the 20th Century looked forward to the marvels the 21st Century was sure to produce. After all, space travel had accomplished travel to the moon. Could Mars be far behind? Medicine had made enormous strides, solving the secrets of the genome and discovering the life-saving properties of embryonic stem cells. Would diseases be eradicated and longevity extended to unimaginable limits? Surely, only more wonders lay ahead!

Alas, we hadn't taken into account the Neanderthals among us. Especially not the possibility that they would gain political power from greedy, unprincipled politicians. Now we realize that the 21st Century may well see a regression comparable to the Dark Ages of history.

Who would have believed that after a century of such scientific progress there would be people doubting the truth of evolution because they think it conflicts with the Biblical account in Genesis? By one count, more than half the American population believes the entire cosmos was created a mere 6,000 years ago! The only explanation for such credulity is that the idea of evolution threatens their conviction that they are Special Creations of God.

To support their belief, they conduct "biblically correct" tours of museums for home-schooled Christian children to dispute the fossil records on display. Access http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/80595 to view their tour of the Denver Museum showing how they misinterpret exhibits to promote their propaganda.

These Neanderthals have even invaded the entertainment world with a movie released in April called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." A promotion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, the film blames evolution for a range of modern movements from Nazism to Planned Parenthood.

As far back as the 18th Century there were religious groups who were certain the world was coming to an end in their near future, so they abandoned possessions, taking "no thought for the morrow," as their Bible instructed. The world did not end. Today 44 percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. They therefore have no interest in combating global warming or correcting other conditions threatening our habitat.

The fact that our world is vastly overpopulated, creating environmental degradation and societal problems, does not concern them. Using every other wonder of medical science, they still oppose modern contraceptives because their Bible -- a book describing civilization 5000 years ago when population was sparse -- tells them to be fruitful and multiply. Currently, around the world, a woman dies in childbirth every minute -- more than 500,000 annually. One in three deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth could be avoided if women who want to plan their families had access to contraception. Neanderthals don't care. Professing to "hate abortion," they do nothing to stop the unintended pregnancies that result in 19 million unsafe abortions annually worldwide.

This same attitude prevails against educating our young about their sexuality. Even though one in four teen girls in our country -- more than 3 million total -- has a sexually-transmitted infection, these opponents stubbornly oppose efforts to reduce this alarming statistic with comprehensive sex education. Our Neanderthals evidently feel that the resulting effect on their lives is just punishment for their "sin."

The only hope for the 21st Century is if today's Neanderthals, like their primitive ancestors, are finally replaced by a reasoning species.

Janet Brazill    June 2008

Newdow – Leland Debate by Marsha Abelman: May 2008

Newdow – Leland Debate

by Marsha Abelman

A formal debate on the subject of church-state separation between an atheist and an evangelical was unprecedented in the Springs until April 23, 2008. The willingness of both Focus on the Family and the Freethinkers to cooperate in sponsoring the debate was commendable. A reviewer on Focus’ website called it “historic” for Focus, and it is equally historic for the Freethinkers and for the city. It’s rare in this era for such opposing views to be aired in the same arena, so that citizens can listen to a well-moderated and civilized discussion of the facts.

Michael Newdow is carrying a banner. It’s a banner for the separation of church and state, and for freedom’s sake, we should all hope he is able to make the reasons clear in his upcoming court cases.

Newdow’s relaxed yet persuasive manner as he opened the debate at Focus on the Family on April 23 was impressive. Using no notes, he presented a multitude of facts about the founders and our country’s history. His calm demeanor belied the great passion that Newdow feels about the vital issue of the separation of church and state. A local reviewer wrote, “Newdow has no lack of confidence.”

His great understanding of the law and our country’s history gives him that justified confidence. Fellow debater Chris Leland is a senior fellow for Christian Worldview Studies at the Focus on the Family Institute. Leland also carries a banner – the banner of Christian soldiers everywhere who earnestly believe there is “one way” in life, and that others should be persuaded to believe in that one way. He said the “sacred and the secular” cannot be separated, and that the issue “isn’t about the letter of the law” but about whether you believe in God or not.

However, the issue to atheists and to Newdow isn’t about belief in God. (Newdow surprised many when he fiercely defended the right of valedictorians to speak about Jesus, saying it’s their first amendment right.) He also gently refused to be drawn into a “do you believe in God?” discussion by a question submitted from the audience; he instead brought the subject back to whether or not governmental endorsement of God is Constitutional. He emphatically made the point that any governmental endorsement of the Christian God is truly about the letter of the law and how each and every citizen should be equally represented under that law.

Leland once used the “slippery slope” analogy: if God is “removed” from the Pledge and from our money, soon euthanasia, sex and drugs will be encouraged. (One wondered if the slippery slope doesn’t work both ways: when government and religion mix, doesn’t that often produce dangerous power?)

In answer to the written question, “How does leaving ‘under God’ in the Pledge allow for equality?” Leland said, “the question assumes there can be equality – it’s a myth that there can be absolute equality.” However, he also stated that there is absolute truth, saying the word as if capitalized: “…[without using Christianity as a standard] how do we come to a consensus of The Truth?” It appears that absolutism is sometimes relative.

The debate was well-attended and was well worth the time spent listening to the discussion. Open dialogue is the only way to shed light on such vital issues as equality.

Marsha Abelman    May 2008

Nontheists to Contribute to Religious Respect Training Development at the Air Force Academy - by Jason Torpy

On the 15th and 16th of November, the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers (MAAF) will have a seat at the table to participate in the shaping of the religious respect training curriculum at the Air Force Academy (USAFA). This is an unprecedented outreach action on the part of the Academy to expand their diversity training to nontheists.

MAAF represents nontheists including atheists, Humanists, agnostics, and others across military branches, components, operational specialties, duty locations, and ranks. MAAF will bring to the table the needs and challenges that nontheist service members face on a daily basis. MAAF will also attempt to bring the civilian perspective of major national nontheist organizations including the Secular Coalition for America, the American Humanist Association, and American Atheists. Through its relationship with interfaith advocacy groups including the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and Americans United for Church & State, MAAF will be certain to highlight ongoing, real-world issues that can no longer be ignored. MAAF's contributions, from the perspective of the civilian and military nontheist community as well as separation of church and state advocacy organizations, will provide key ingredients for measurable, positive changes in the religious command climate at USAFA.

This conference provides the opportunity to move forward from a military that hasn't yet gotten religious accommodation right. USAFA has been the target of years of allegations of misconduct from cadets, faculty, graduates, and outside watchdog organizations. The 2009 biennial climate survey was kept from public release until October 2010, and Academy officials have attempted to minimize real problems especially in the area of religious respect. 41% of respondents indicated they had been targeted for discrimination and 33 cadets indicated they fear for their safety. The Academy has declined to invite the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization whose efforts, more than any other factors, are leading to reform at the Academy. The religious respect conference is part of the Academy's plan to improve the climate, but there must be a public recognition of the severity of the problem and of the comprehensive changes needed for reform.

The conference is focused specifically on "religious respect training" that MAAF has already reviewed presented back to the Academy for feedback. The training had consistent and inclusive references to nontheists and addressed the requirement that leaders express no religious bias in their discussions. Fundamental changes needed include a need to recognize the establishment clause as well as the free exercise clause of the 1^st Amendment. Leaders cannot pick and choose from the Constitution. Secondly, the training currently includes situations for the cadets to discuss but limited guidance on the acceptable and unacceptable responses.

Without explicit guidance from Academy leadership to cadets, cadets are likely to leave training with reinforced bad behavior. These changes, presented publicly in advance of the conference at the MAAF website, should help jump-start the discussion to ensure the Conference itself provides the opportunity for substantive and detailed discussion.

One Commandment is Enough by Martin Foreman

Isn't it time to ditch the supposed link between ethics and religion?

Religion is supposedly the source of morality, conveying God's instructions to the world.

In Christianity, the big picture - God's constitution - comes in the Ten Commandments, which offers such basics as "do not steal". The details - God's law - comes in Deuteronomy, Leviticus and elsewhere in the Bible.

Most modern Christians respect the constitution but are picky about the laws. Pat Robertson frequently condemns homosexual acts but I cannot remember the last time he reminded us not to keep different sets of measures in the house. That's a big problem for God, according to Deuteronomy 25:14.

Altogether there are about fifteen Commandments, repeated with slightly different wording in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Most Americans are familiar with the Protestant version.

The first four come in a bunch. Make Yahweh Top God; make no idols; do not blaspheme; keep the Sabbath holy.

There's a reason for these priorities. Having usurped his father El and siblings Baal and Asherah, Yahweh is still not secure in his position as The One And Only God. He needs to enforce loyalty in his worshippers. In modern terms, commandments one to four are martial law - military decrees after a coup d'état.

With dissension truly suppressed, God moves on to common law. Commandment five tells us to honor our parents, six not to murder, seven to abstain from adultery, eight not to steal, nine not to bear false witness and ten not to covet our neighbor's possessions.

They are a curious mix. We must respect our parents "so that our days may be long", but the link between the two is not explained. And no exceptions are allowed for abusive, criminal or neglectful parents.

Adultery appears here but pre-marital sex and homosexuality are only condemned elsewhere in the Bible.

Prohibiting theft and murder seems logical while the ban on bearing false witness against neighbors appears unnecessarily narrow. Who can we lie to? Who can we lie about? And when can we do so?

I am also confused by the last commandment: no coveting. If it is a warning against stealing, it simply repeats the eighth commandment. If it is a more general warning against envy, why are other negative states of mind, such as anger and sloth, ignored? Or is it proof that God is the ultimate capitalist who insists that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich?

However we interpret them, the Ten Commandments remain a hodge-podge of divine egoism and miscellaneous advice.

They are also inadequate for the modern world. What does God say about such issues as recreational drug use or loud cell phone conversations in restricted places?

Yahweh's heir Jesus clearly thought the constitution needed updating. His version was summarized in the phrases "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind" and "love your neighbor as yourself".

I'm with Jesus up to a point. I promise faithfully to love God the moment he, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny move in next door, and I do, in principle, love my neighbor.

In principle, that is, because I've never met my neighbors, but I like the basic idea. Be nice to people. It's short and sweet and covers every occasion. Forget the Ten Commandments. One Commandment is all we need.

© Martin Foreman, all rights reserved

Our Cosmic Conscience - by Louis E. Guzman Ph.D.: Freethought Views January 2009

Our Cosmic Conscience

by Louis E. Guzman Ph.D.

Speaking to his national audience, the television preacher sanctimoniously assured his listeners that humanists could not possibly have moral values approaching the Christian precepts established in the Bible.

In fact, he said, humanists had no basis on which to make claims to a moral code! After all, they are heretical materialists, relativists devoid of beliefs in a supreme being. As unbelievers in an all powerful "Creator" -- one who not only made the universe, but also gave humans the moral principles to which we must conform -- we were doomed to burn in hell.

What arrogance! But then I remembered my Mother's fears for me when I was young as she was convinced that I would meet a similar fiery end. Though I had not formed a moral code of my own, I felt that it could be found among earnest unbelievers, so I resolved to explore the secular world for the purpose of finding ethical precepts under which I could live a non-religious life.

I have since found the answers I sought. In the midst of World War II, H. Wilhelm Van Loon, a popular radio philosopher of the mid 20th century, once remarked on the air that Hitler was doomed to failure purely for the reason that his acts violated our universal cosmic conscience. This human collection of unconscious beliefs, he explained, was the universe of moral values, distilled out of social history, and occurring deeply set in the human conscience.

In fact, early last century the philosophical theme of natural law was in serious discussion, at least, among philosophers (John Dewey and others). More recently, the moral connotations of cosmic law, not very different from karmic principles, were to assure us that the highest of virtues will win in the end. And lately, the idea of a noetic reservoir of knowledge, or gnosis, akin to the second century C.E. gnostic thinking, has gained notice.

To take the idea of cosmic conscience seriously, we need to flesh out its principles. That's where writings of Paul Kurtz, Council for Secular Humanism and Peter Singer's, a creative writer on secular humanism, come into the picture. Taking them in reverse order, Singer's work, titled, How Are We To Live? ( Prometheus Books), scans the panorama of our ethical behavior, samples the ethics of another time, and points us toward a reasoned ethical life. Kurtz' Humanist Manifesto 2000 (Prometheus Books) expands our scope of humanistic interest to a planetary scale, and breaking away from our parochial view of reality, cites promising areas for an improved future. It ends with a list of elements for a "Planetary Bill of Rights."

More specifically, his editorial statement, "Without Religion," in the Winter 2002/03 number of FREE INQUIRY, enumerates four "Common Moral Decencies" -- Personal Integrity, Trustworthiness, Benevolence, and Fairness -- and ten "Ethical Excellences," Autonomy, Intelligence, Self-discipline, Self-respect, Creativity, High motivation, Affirmative attitude, Joie de vivre, Good health, and Exuberance.

For the moment, these will do for me as the content of our Cosmic Conscience. I find them far superior to the "Christian precepts" the television preacher was touting as a guide to "morality."

Louis E. Guzman Ph.D. was the first president of the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs.

Originally published in February 2003.

Parenting Beyond Belief - by Dale McGowan

Parenting is among the toughest of jobs.  Living secularly in a religious world is among the most difficult social choices.  When these challenges are combined, and a parent wishes to raise children without religious influences, the difficulties are compounded. 

Despite the difficulties, a large and growing number of parents are rising to the task.  In 1990, eight percent of Americans identified themselves as nonreligious.  By 2002, that sector had grown to 14.1 percent.  The U.S. Census of the year 2000 counted 37.3 million households in the U.S. with school-age children.  These numbers yield a conservative estimate of 8-10 million nonreligious parents in the U.S. today. 

Despite these statistics, it’s easy for nonreligious parents to assume that every parent on their block, everyone cheering in the stands at the soccer game or walking the aisles of the supermarket, is a churchgoing believer.  It isn’t true.  All that's needed is to realize that others are making the same false assumption about them.

Religion has much to offer parents:  an established community, a pre-defined set of values, a common language, rites of passage, comforting answers to the big questions, and consoling explanations to ease experiences of loss.  For most secularists, these benefits come at too high a price.  Many feel that intellectual integrity is compromised, the word “values” too often turned on its head, an us-vs.-them mentality too often reinforced.  Religious answers are found unconvincing yet are held unquestionable.  And so, in seeking the best for our children, we chart a path around the church – and often end up doing so without a compass.

My books Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers were written to demonstrate the many ways in which the benefits of religion can be had without the detriments.  Just as vegetarians must find other sources of certain vitamins, minerals and proteins, nonreligious parents must find ways to articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, talk about death, understand moral development, and find consolation, meaning, and purpose, all without the usual religious context.

At last this isolation is ending.  Millions of nonreligious parents are beginning to find each other, forming supportive communities at every level.   Some have called it a “secular parenting renaissance.”  Dozens of new nonreligious parenting resources have come into being in the past two years—discussion forums, blogs, books, and local nonreligious parenting groups in twenty cities, including Colorado Springs.

But “renaissance” isn’t quite the right term.  A renaissance is a re-birth—and nonreligious parenting is not born again by either definition.  It’s the birth of a nonreligious parenting movement we are witnessing.  Not that nonreligious parenting is new, of course, but it’s only now that we are finding each other, forming a movement and a community, learning that we’ve been living all along in neighborhoods and cities filled with parents who are grappling with precisely the same questions we are.  Even better, we’re finding a consensus on how best to answer those questions—how best to raise compassionate, curious, bighearted kids without religion.

___________________________

Dale McGowan is the editor and co-author of Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, the first comprehensive books on parenting without religion.  He was named Harvard Humanist of the Year for 2008. 

Play Fair on Elections by Janet Brazill

With the national election still many months away, we are already seeing examples of churches and religious organizations revving up partisan political machines in violation of the federal tax code.

Project Fair Play, which educates religious leaders about the law and pursues violators, has already filed two complaints. One concerns the Bill Keller Ministries attacking Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on its ministry website, telling people that supporting Romney is like voting for Satan. The other involves a Roman Catholic Bishop who used his diocesan newspaper to attack candidate Rudy Giuliani for his stand on abortion.

More recently, a Southern Baptist pastor in California used church resources to endorse GOP hopeful Mike Huckabee as God's Candidate.

As Project Fair Play points out, the First Amendment protects the right of all Americans to speak out on religious, moral and political issues. However, houses of worship and other nonprofit entities classified under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service Tax Code are barred from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office and may not intervene directly or indirectly in partisan campaigns.

The IRS recently announced a new plan of heightened scrutiny of non-profit groups and their political activity. The tax agency's "Political Activity Compliance Initiative" promises closer examination of non-profits and swifter actions against violators.

Any activity designed to influence the outcome of a partisan election can be construed as intervention and can result in the revocation of the institution's tax-exempt status or significant fines on the house of worship or its leaders.

A church should be especially wary of so-called "voter guides" which are often thinly veiled partisan materials. If the IRS finds that a violation has occurred, it may be the house of worship, not the organization producing the guide, that is penalized.

The projectfairplay.org website offers detailed information showing what activities are allowed and what constitutes violations. It offers a link to the IRS website, www.irs.gov to read the actual legislation. Basically,

Houses of worship may: " discuss public policy issues, " sponsor non-partisan voter registration and encourage voting as good civic behavior, " sponsor candidate forums as long as all leading candidates are invited and a broad range of issues is discussed, " urge congregants to communicate with candidates and make their concerns known to them.

House of worship may not: " issue statements endorsing or opposing candidates, " donate money to a candidate, " offer church space to one candidate and refuse it to another, " sponsor rallies for candidates in church.

The projectfairplay.org website offers a form for reporting suspected violations, which they will then evaluate and determine if further action is necessary. Since this non-partisan project began in 1996, it has reported church activities in support of Democratic, Republican and Independent campaigns.

The American people oppose politicization of our houses of worship. Survey results released in March 2002 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 70 percent of Americans said churches should not endorse candidates.

Readers are encouraged to educate themselves at the projectfairplay.org website and to be alert in the coming months for violations.

Presidential Candidates Vaporized? - by Groff Schroeder: February 2008

Presidential Candidates Vaporized?

by Groff Schroeder

 In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984,[1] an imaginary “Big Brother” terrorizes the People of Oceania with incessant, invasive surveillance, endless war and unyielding threat of arrest, imprisonment and execution for “thoughtcrime.”  The government controls and manipulates all information, and even unplanned facial expressions can betray thoughts supporting human freedom to omnipresent bi-directional “telescreens,” attracting the “Thought Police” who mete out personalized torture in the “Ministry of Love.”    

Working in the “Ministry of Truth,” Orwell’s party member protagonist Winston destroys inconvenient information, rewriting published newspaper stories to reflect government needs.  In addition to routinely falsifying “facts” about the war and the economy, he helps “vaporize” individuals, creating a “non-person” by erasing evidence of their existence from newspapers and written documents – and thus history.  

What if a horrific crime (such as September 11th) took place, yet you never learned it occurred?  Would you feel great outrage?  Would you be disturbed that those who failed to defend us received promotions, made inconceivable fortunes from the resulting wars – or focused upon permanently destroying Constitutional freedoms rather than finding the ringleaders of the attack?  

What if the President of the United States issued an Executive Order (Military Order Number 1, November 13, 2001 – now extended to US Citizens) granting himself unprecedented, complete, unchecked and sweeping police powers over every human on earth – then built secret prisons all over the US?[2] [3]  Without news about the order, could you realize that everyone, everywhere faced imprisonment (without the probable cause, due process or habeas corpus rights the president claims to defend), for mere suspicion of thinking about committing a terrorist act – no evidence required?   

What if the US House passed a bill to the Senate (S1959) criminalizing the use of “force” against the government (grassroots lobbying?, logical arguments?, union organizing?) and declaring those who use it unlawful combatants?  Is it possible to oppose (or support) something you know nothing about? If Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Richard B. Cheney (House Resolution 333) were raised in the House of Representatives (November 6, 2007)[4] and you never learned of them, could you support the impeachment?   

When the names and policies of numerous, fully accredited candidates for President of the United States only rarely (or never) appear in the news, can you weigh their merits?  If the presidential candidates whose names are in the press participate in “official” debates etc. that exclude the rarely mentioned candidates – would they deserve your vote?   

There are/were seventeen official candidates for President of the United States.  Is it an “election” if the news media and/or party elites declare the winner (or eliminate accredited candidates) before the vast majority of the People vote?  Have the eliminated candidates been “vaporized?”  

In Orwell’s Oceania, “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” “ignorance is strength,” and most everyone is so afraid of the Thought Police that they believe anything their telescreens say – even when it directly contradicts what was said the day before.   When accredited presidential candidates withdraw before most people vote, the president summarily revokes hundreds of years of human rights precedent, and the House passes a bill to the Senate capable of criminalizing almost any form of political opposition, how far can we be from Orwell’s dystopia, where disinformation, peer pressure, fear and torture led Winston to “love” Big Brother - and admit that 2+2=5?   

Principles of Rationality by Phil Stahl

I've often been asked how one rationally arrives at a position of atheism - as opposed to say, agnosticism. The recurring questions set me to the task of identifying rationalist principles and then showing that if they were faithfully applied to most theistic claims, one would be led to a position of implicit atheism. This isn't the outright "denial" of a God, but rather the simple withholding of belief in such to render the claim and underlying entity redundant.

I'd like to outline the approach here, in terms of four overriding principles:

1) Ockham's Razor, which is the principle at the heart of scientific hypothesizing. That is, given two competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest ad hoc assumptions is closest to the truth.

2) The probability test of philosopher David Hume: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

3) The ignotum per ignotius test for logical fallacy. Ignotum per ignotius means [to explain] a thing not understood by one still less understood.

4) The fundamental principle for all exotic claims: "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence."

Let's now apply these principles to a number of cases to see how they work. I will start with the claim that humans have "souls." Given two hypotheses - one which uses simple observations of consciousness (as in Daniel Dennett's book, "Consciousness Explained") and one which posits "soul" in addition, which is to be preferred? Obviously, that which excludes "soul," since it unnecessarily complicates the issue. In addition, invoking "soul" violates the ignotium per ignotius test. Indeed, religionists have not even offered an operational definition for "soul." Until they do so, it is unlikely they can provide extraordinary evidence for it!

What about "God?" All the same aspects apply. Consider the question posed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan in the "Cosmos" episode, The Edge of Forever. He asks: "How did the universe begin?" He answers, "Some will say 'God made it', but then WHO made God?" He argues that rather than inviting an "infinite regress" of cause, the simplest action was simply to leave "God" out of the causal nexus. Thereby we satisfy all the principles (1) through (3).

Is Sagan's reasoning justified? Consider that adding "God" to the mix doesn't enhance cosmological data or predictions one iota. Nor does it refine the tensor equations. Clearly it amounts to a redundancy.

Lastly, consider the claim of a miracle, Jesus' walking on water. Professor Hugh Schonfeld has a simple explanation for this: a mistranslation of the Hebrew word "al" which can mean "by" or "on." So, when a scribe really wrote "walking by the water," it was translated to "walking on the water."

Now let us apply the Hume test (principle 2 above). Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water? It doesn't require a lot of thought to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is less miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than a man actually, literally walking on water.

Understanding these principles, one can see how a basis for atheism is rational.

Prohibiting Defamation of Religion: An Affront to Human Rights - by Douglas Schrepel

On December 10, 1948, the general assembly of the newly formed United Nations adopted a groundbreaking declaration sanctioning the human rights of all people, regardless of culture or religion.  For 60 years, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has provided a sound framework for a number of international covenants protecting the civil, political, economic, social, religious and cultural rights of individuals worldwide.

While the UDHR was passed with the endorsement of many Islamic nations, the last four decades have seen an accelerated effort by a coalition of Islamic states to exempt their version of religiously guided human rights from the goal of extending universal human rights equally to all people, regardless of culture or religion.  Known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) this coalition has, since 1969, subtly but effectively, introduced and secured acceptance of a number of “defamation of religion resolutions” in various UN councils.  The goal of the OIC is to prohibit criticism of religion, particularly Islam, though all religious belief is ostensibly included.  Such changes have now tainted the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What is “defamation of religion” and why should we care about its inclusion in the UDHR?  The appeal to prevent “defamation of religion” is an appeal to limit free expression out of respect for religious belief.  It presumes that religious belief deserves protection, not the believers.  It is a prohibition on blasphemy, which protects the belief itself.  The right that needs to be protected is the right to hold and express any belief that one wishes.  The notion that religious beliefs, not individuals, need protection restricts human rights by limiting free speech where it treads on cultural or religious sensitivities.  Sanctioning resolutions against the "defamation of religion" is dangerous to the noble cause of enshrining universal human rights. Such restrictions invite abuses of power and suppression of dissent through blasphemy prohibitions. They stifle legitimate criticism of practices and laws that may be in violation of human rights and punish dissenters, religious minorities, and atheists.

Not only are efforts to prevent the defamation of religion dangerous, they are unnecessary.  Feeling that one’s cultural or religious beliefs have been slighted does not create a right not to be offended.  Still, it is unacceptable for the speech of religious criticism to incite hostility, violence, or discrimination against believers.  Such limitations on free expression are well established in healthy democracies, and existing human rights instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognize these limitations.  The purposes of limitations on free speech are to protect individuals, not ideas or religion in general.

While a UN resolution does not carry the force of a nation-state mandate, it does validate the nation-state laws that follow its accords.  Making an appeal to cultural and religious respect as a method of legitimatizing practices that violate human rights is perilous.  The UN is wrong to succumb to the pressure of the OIC as it tries to protect its own special class of “Islamized” human rights.  Western democracies need to stand firm against such attempts if they truly value free speech and universal human rights.  For more information visit www.centerforinquiry.net/UN.

Protecting the "Right" to Discriminate - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views

Just as George W. Bush repeatedly found it convenient to violate the Constitution he swore to “protect and defend,” the Gazette simply abandons previously published positions when convenient. In the January 5, 2009 “Opinion” column, the Gazette rejects its allegedly cherished libertarian principles by cheering the latest attack upon the most basic of human freedoms – the freedom to control one's own body.

“Abortion is not an entitlement”¹ supports George W. Bush's “...late-hour lame duck edict,” the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) oxymoronic “Final Regulation to Protect Health Care Providers from Discrimination.”² The editorial (and the “edict”) hold that the rights of hospitals, administrators, employers and individuals providing medical services from positions of paid professional responsibility supersede the rights of individuals paying those providers for medical services from positions of medical need. Apparently, the medical provider's “right” to withhold medical services extends even to denying abortion in cases of ectopic pregnancy, in which incorrect implantation “ultimately ends in [the] death of the fetus,”³ and the mother faces emergent organ rupture, hemorrhage, sepsis and death – a situation some 73,700 women experienced in 1986 alone.⁴

The Libertarian Party Platform states, “...all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.”⁵ While almost everyone chooses their career and where they work, very few choose where they receive medical care, especially in emergencies. It is unethical for anyone to accept a position including responsibilities they have no intention of providing (such as a person opposing birth control taking a job as a pharmacist then refusing to dispense birth control), especially in professional medical settings. If a person opposes human freedom (such the right of women to control their reproduction), it appears unethical for them to claim to defend human freedom or accept positions including the responsibility to defend human freedom – be that at a newspaper or the White House.

This exact fallacious, spurious and illogical argument - the service provider's right to deny services to (discriminate against) [insert minority name here] trumps the [insert minority name here]'s right to purchase those services (not to be discriminated against) - litters history, often in conjunction with the most infamous examples of gross violations of human equality and civil rights. By employing this argument in support of Bush's HHS “final regulation,” the Gazette shatters its assumed facade of libertarianism, formally supporting a policy that would allow employees of the United States to discriminate at will (against those least able to defend themselves) by forcibly denying human beings' access to medical care. Historical precedents for such governmental policies are chilling.

The “Abortion is not an entitlement” column and its anonymous writer(s) at the Gazette demonstrate what appears as complete disregard for the foundations of their alleged philosophical framework and rejects basic human freedoms defined by the United States Constitution. The fact that this editorial aligns the Gazette with probably the most demonstrably unethical, incompetent and discredited presidential administration in history suggests that the writers of “Abortion is not an entitlement” are far more supportive of the discriminatory policies of George W. Bush than the libertarian principles they so often and so loudly proclaim.

This response was submitted to the Colorado Springs Gazette via email on January 12, 2009 but apparently was not published.

Radical secularists agree with Jesus by Marsha Abelman

"A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded," said Newt Gingrich in his address to Liberty University's graduating class last week. "We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator... In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms," he said.

The adjective "radical" is very popular with evangelicals lately: Dobson decries the "radical homosexual agenda," Phyllis Schlafly (among others) censures "radical activist judges" for doing their Constitutionally-defined jobs (hearing cases that challenge or require interpretation of the legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President), and now Gingrich blames radical secularists for the coming up with the idea that religion is divisive.

However, it was the founder and main deity of Christianity, Jesus Christ, who said it first: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters…he cannot be my disciple." It is human nature to love one's mother, father, wife, children, and siblings. However, just as the bumper sticker says, "Jesus Christ was a radical." He taught that religious belief must overcome secular emotions - familial love was no longer a good thing if it interfered with devotion to Jesus.

It is not hostile "to American history" or to world history to point out that religious belief has caused exactly what Jesus ordered it should: hatred of one's own kin if they do not believe as you do. Only Christians in extreme denial can say that religion has not caused some of the most evil human actions on earth. During the Inquisition one of the milder forms of persecution that the Catholic church practiced was to make certain believers wear yellow fabric crosses on their clothing to identify them to others. Strange. Why would Christians want to brand other Christians? Because they weren't "real" believers, they weren't Catholic. Even though belief in Jesus Christ is what makes one a Christian, that wasn't enough. Divisive religious doctrines made even the believers enemies.

In Mr. Gingrich's, Dr. Dobson's and Ms. Schlafly's worldviews, secularists are interfering with religion. And yet, no where else in the world are people as free to practice religious faith as here in America. Gingrich complains that schools do not "invoke a creator" officially, yet the Christian religion is alive and flourishing in schools. Drive by any high school in America and watch the Christian students praying at the flagpole. Go inside and see kids stop in the middle of the hall to pray aloud with their friends. Attend a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting conducted by a staff member/coach. Everyone may not agree with Christianity, but disagreement is not persecution.

Gingrich and his fellows don't seem to be happy with freedom to practice their religion; they want us ALL to practice their religion. They want the state to endorse their Christian religion as our national religion. But even if that happens, America won't be the heaven of harmony they envision. Even if they burn the heathens (again), all the believers won't be in agreement. Certain Christians will have to wear yellow crosses sewn to their vests. Secularists agree: Jesus Christ himself demands it.

Read the Warnings Before Taking: A review of: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everthing, by Marsha Abelman

It's probable that most conservatives won't read Christopher Hitchens' book. The title alone could prevent the superstitious from even touching the book in a bookstore. Hitchens may be the "village atheist" as the New York Times called him, but if religionists knew that Hitchens was hostile to Bill Clinton, is an anti-Zionist and is a supporter of George W's Iraq war, they might be intrigued enough to tackle this very educational read.

With chapters like "…Why Heaven Hates Ham," "A Note on Health, to Which Religion can be Hazardous," "Is Religion Child Abuse?" and "...Religion's Corrupt Beginnings," the book covers every aspect of religion's affects on humanity. It will inform believers and non believers of facts forgotten (or never learned), such as the list of nine virgin births in religions and mythology, not including Jesus (page 23). Think we're living in an enlightened age? In chapter four, the reader learns that Timothy Dwight, an admired minister and a president of Yale University, opposed the smallpox vaccination because it [was] "an interference with god's design." The same chapter tells of newborn boys who died in New York City in 2005, victims of herpes infections they contracted during religious circumcision rites.

Some information in the book will not be a surprise to the fundamentalists who pride themselves on scripture knowledge. Moses' order to parents to stone their disobedient children to death, orders to armies to kill conquered males but keep "women-children that hath not known a man by lying with him…alive for yourselves," contradictory commandments ("Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live") - these are familiar. However, few churches spend any time teaching how the book came to be "the Bible" - who decided which writings to include and which to destroy, when the Bible was put together (hundreds of years after Jesus allegedly lived), and the Gnostic gospels' existence.

After finishing the book, I went online to read some reviews. One wrote that Hitchens "demonized" religion, another that he was "picking a fight," and one reviewer said indignantly that Hitchens calls those he "wishes to ridicule by their zoological class…mammals."

Yes, Hitchens gives religion full credit for the bad it has done; however, the choice of the word "demonize" is interesting, as atheists do not acknowledge the existence of demons. The reviewer's word choice demonstrates religion's insidious influence, filling our world and language with supernatural references. Is Hitchens picking a fight? It seems that people knocking on doors to distribute unwelcome religious pamphlets to those who didn't ask for them are spoiling for a fight much more than a scholar who writes a well-researched book and leaves it to the public to buy the book or not. The complaint that Hitchens calls people "mammals" to denigrate them is just wrong. Humans are mammals, and Hitchens refers to himself as a mammal on page 76. Religionists might prefer to think of themselves as "immortal souls." But there is no empirical proof of a "soul," while there's no denial of our physical nature. Calling a human an animal is not an insult, it's a scientific fact.

Hitchens agrees with many of his contemporaries that religion is so deeply ingrained in societies, it is probably ineradicable. However, he clearly sees the dangers of this poison we ingest, and he writes to warn of its lethal properties.

People may choose to continue ingesting religion, but here's a chance for consumers to read the product's "warning label."

Reciprocity - by Groff Schroeder

Treat others as you would have them treat you.  Apparently predating modern religion, the Ancient Greek ethic of reciprocity is the mutual and cooperative exchange of favors, rights or privileges.  From Brahmanism to Zoroastrianism, virtually every system of morality ever conceived shares the basic ideal also known as “the golden rule.” 

This beautiful founding moral precept simplifies sometimes-complex moral dilemmas.  If you would not want others to lie to you, do not lie to others.  If you would not want your government to advance a religion in which you do not believe, do not work to advance your religion through government.  Just as personal morality and reciprocity should prevent minor immoral acts, they should also thwart immorality’s most infamous act, killing a human being.  Therefore, one might expect the ethic of reciprocity to avert war and its unethical sequelae such as profiteering and torture. 

Yet as human history evolved increasingly complex ethics, growing numbers of religions and divergent variations in religious belief, it has also witnessed apparently unbridled expansion of war and wars.  The unremitting application of science to the “art” of war relentlessly evolves ever more deadly weapons.  We the People of planet earth routinely expend unimaginable biological, chemical, economic, energy, engineering, food, fuel and water resources raising armies for the express purpose of killing people on the other side of the invisible lines dividing us against ourselves.  Armies and the wars they so often wage drain the life out of earth’s economies, environments, infrastructure, people and schools.  To quote perhaps the greatest general of the 20^th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Even this is not enough.  More than sixty years ago, humans first exploded single bombs capable of destroying entire cities.  Detonated above Nagasaki Japan on August 9, 1945 between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi Ordnance Works, one primitive plutonium fission weapon generated temperatures of 7000 F and winds exceeding 600 mph.  This single nuclear bomb had a “radius of total destruction” of approximately one mile, ignited fires two miles wide and apparently killed 40,000 to 70,000 people instantly, 80,000 by the end of 1945 and more than 145,000 by 2008.  By 1952, humans were creating “hydrogen” bombs thousands of times more powerful by applying a fusion process learned from stars. 

Twenty years after the “cold war” allegedly ended, it appears planet earth harbors about 21,500 nuclear weapons (Russia and the United States having about 10,000 each), with the vast majority apparently ready to fire from aircraft, artillery weapons, missiles, submarines and perhaps even briefcases.  The United States spends about as much on its military as all other nations combined and allocates almost half of all taxes to current and past military expenses.

No matter what the belief system (or lack thereof) it is easy to see ourselves as moral even as the nation we supposedly lead does apparently immoral things.  How much longer can we consider ourselves comfortable with these stunningly powerful weapons, shrug off war’s “unavoidable” “collateral damage” or believe that we are treating others as we would wish to be treated as we wield them? 

Reciting The Pledge by Janet Brazill

I don't like the Pledge of Allegiance -- at least not now. I used to like it. I liked the respectful mood we assumed as we all stood for the recitation in school. I considered it a beautiful affirmation of what our country represented - liberty and justice for all. That was back then, before President Eisenhower, during the Cold War in the 1950's, gave in to religious pressures and allowed them to override that precious liberty by inserting the words "under God" in the Pledge.

Now today, everyone saying the revised Pledge is forced to affirm a contradiction: there is no way you can have a nation "under God" and still call it "indivisible," because too many Americans are divided on their ideas of that God. Christians oppose allowing a Hindu to give the prayer in Congress or having a Muslim legislator take his oath of office on the Koran. Pope Benedict XVI asserts that other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches.

Our nation has a long history of religious conflicts. The Jehovah's Witnesses is a case in point since theirs is a religion that opposes saying the Pledge in general because they believe that saluting the flag amounts to placing another deity before God. They have borne years of shameful persecution for this sincere belief, even having the Supreme Court, during the days of pre-World War II patriotic fervor, rule that their children should be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag in their public school, thus violating their personal faith (Minersville School District vs. Gobitis).

This decision encouraged hate crimes against the Jehovah's Witnesses. In Texas their missionaries were chased and beaten by vigilantes. One Southern sheriff told a reporter why Witnesses were being run out of town: "They're traitors; the Supreme Court says so. Ain't you heard?"

A Kingdom Hall was stormed and torched in Kennebunk, Maine. Their literature was confiscated and burned and American Legion posts harassed Witnesses nationwide. Nearly 1,500 Witnesses were physically attacked in more than 300 communities, according to a report to the Justice Department made by The American Civil Liberties Union.

Partly because of this violent reaction to its decision, the Supreme Court reversed itself in 1943, and declared a beautiful affirmation of our First Amendment freedoms: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion" (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette).

This ruling reaffirmed the secular basis of our government - a stance that would protect the religious liberty of us all if truly followed. After all, there can be no freedom OF religion unless individuals are free FROM OTHER PEOPLE'S RELIGION. Too bad that President Eisenhower, and now today's religionists, insist on weakening that important principle by destroying government neutrality toward religion.

The ruling establishes the right of Jehovah's Witnesses children to refuse to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag in public schools. That wording also confirms my right, as one who does not believe in any god, let alone our nation "under God," to recite the Pledge as originally written - "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Religion - by Richard Hiatt

If the Supreme Court can manipulate the Fourteenth Amendment to endow corporations with the rights and attributes of a person, then people can aspire to the conditions of a corporation. And they do. People are bound to no purpose other than to serve themselves, untroubled by the nuisance of a conscience.

The analogy applies to organized religion and its believers. To understand religion is to understand the people behind it.

First, religion and spirituality are contradictions, and the first to clarify that was Jesus himself. Jesus spoke out against religious leaders and religion specifically. He warned not to repeat the same error in his name despite Simon (surname Peter, meaning “rock”) being the first to “convert.” But “conversion” means simply to “to know thyself” in ancient Hebrew. And Jesus’ “lost years” (in India, Tibet, and China) retrieved a lesson that stressed self-knowing (everyone “Christs”) as opposed to dependency, guilt, sin and redemption (as “Christians”).

“Organizing” a religion mandates efficiency, self-protection, control, profit, and “conversion” and thus operates, like any corporation, from the “top-down.” Divisions of labor and power justify themselves by a need for protocol. Apostolic succession (hierarchies), sacerdotalism (priestly powers), and supersessionism (discrimination, exclusivity) become essential institutional pillars. Meanwhile, one wonders what happened to original principles. Said one theologian, “Effectiveness and efficiency have nothing to do with being virtuous.” 

At this level, the word religion is used synonymously, and wrongfully, with faith (meaning, “opening up to”). Faith is also used interchangeably with “belief” (from the Latin, lief, “to hope for”) - two unrelated terms with opposing meanings and motives. Yet the distinction is kept conveniently obscure. Faith eliminates the need for belief (hope). But tell that to local Christians.

Religion implies “fulfillment.” And yet, said Reverend Northrop Frye, it’s “the voice of the lonely crowd.” It constantly seeks validation and reassurance from the chorus. Called “rejoicing,” in truth it’s a cry for constant reaffirmation – what Tocqueville observed as a particularly “American” weakness. Rather than inviolate, religion is fear rallied to stave off the “demons” of uncertainty. Readers are invited to Google “Pascal’s Wager.”

Christianity is “outer” and “future” referenced (i.e., “eschatological”) - predicated on an apocalyptic Dies illa coming “soon” and from “up there.” This, as opposed to “inner/center” referenced and “here & now” taught in other cultures. This is a deliberate reversal of principles which the West exploits. “Outer-future” perpetuates fear and helplessness and a symbiosis between clergy and laity; that is, one needs the other. John Bradshaw called it “spiritual codependency.” This strategy works particularly well around “death,” something veiled in darkness by clergy who remain woefully illiterate, vague, lachrymose, prostrate, and uncertain. Not in the East.

Quoting Martin Amis, “[T]he weaker pupils take the false comfort of belonging to a consensus.” While the arrogant hide behind cant, sanctimony, and melodrama. It comes down to “religious PC” which translates to “low, low church … the lowest common denomination.” 

Eastern religion wasn’t even a “religion” until Westerners grabbed it and reduced it to another “ism” (a philosophy, something speculative and academic). But for Buddhists/Taoists/Native Americans (etalia) spirituality is direct and experiential, a “psychology” said Alan Watts (Episcopal Priest). It is a way of Being. 

Hence the problem with religion. As Amis said, “If God existed, and if he cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.”

Religion – Still Crazy After All These Years Rick Baker: May 2008

Polygamy: the Bible condones it, the Ku’ran encourages it and Emirs and Sheiks throughout history have demanded it. Not a provincial sport, polygamy has flourished throughout the world and left its mark on almost every civilization.

The desperate desire to control, nay, to own women has been a fantasy of man since the first cave man whacked a local lady with a club and dragged her off to his cave to see his prehistoric etchings, whether she wanted to or not.

But of course, polite society frowned on this activity and even proposed that one wife was quite sufficient. But religion, over the centuries, has facilitated polygamy because religion is and has been a great place to hide many controversial activities. (Polygamy? Sure. Pederasty? Right. Theft? Oh, yeah. Subversion? To be sure.) Even the most favored of God, King David, possessed over a thousand concubines. Concubines, although sanctioned by custom and the temple, were a cut below actual wives but nonetheless prized by the powerful and rich.

Today, after experiencing our own close brushes with polygamy, America is at a crossroads. We vacillate between the free practice clause of the first Amendment and the obvious decadence of polygamy, animal sacrifice, sexist practices of some religious sects and some really outlandish practices such as the snake handler cult.

America is a forgiving country and our majority Christian population has managed to get our government to forgive a lot of seditious Christian activities.

Polygamy, however, has galled us to the bone, especially the involuntary kind we have witnessed of late in the Fundamentalist Mormon Church.

Warren Jeffs, polygamy cult leader was just sentenced to two life terms for rape and soliciting to rape in his polygamy trial. Polygamy is outlawed by American civil law. But it was also outlawed in the Mormon Church in the 1800’s. So why wasn’t Jeffs the end of the story?

Because nothing this attractive to determined rich men will pass that easily nor will its attachment to religion as a facilitator.

It seems other nests of polygamy have been constructed in northern Arizona and Texas. The most recent, as you have seen on your TV screens recently, is a sprawling 1700 acre tract in West Texas purchased by a Fundamentalist Mormon Cult member ostensibly as a “hunting reserve.” Hmmm.

However, we now know it was home to a slavery operation beyond that which we have ever witnessed, even in Mormon circles.

Following several telephone complaints of sexual and physical abuse, over 200 women and girls were rescued from the clutches of Mormon slave masters by Texas law enforcement officials. Better late than never, I guess.

The irony of this brave rescue is that a large portion of the rescued women and girls were placed in the custody of a nearby Evangelical Baptist church and were being fed by another fundamentalist group, the Church of Christ.

The Southern Baptist convention last year adopted the mission statement: “A woman must graciously submit to her husband in all things.” The Churches of Christ have similar, if not harsher, restrictions on women.

I am astounded that women and girls, having suffered the sexual dominance and abject slavery of a Mormon Cult, would be placed in the hands of groups with doctrines that vary little from theirs.

Religious Belief and Public Debate - by Doug Schrepel: Freethought Views December 2009

Religious Belief and Public Debate
by Doug Schrepel

Early in the recent deliberation over the Colorado Springs property tax initiative dubbed 2C, I penned an impassioned plea imploring us to look past our individual self-interest and reflect on the greater needs of our community. A few days later, before I had even poured my morning coffee, my ex-wife (with whom I have a good-natured relationship and share a surname) was calling me. The Colorado Springs Gazette had published my appeal and one of her clients had called her to share his annoyance.

This is how it should be in a pluralistic, democratic society. Moving my private beliefs into the public square necessarily exposed my ideas to criticism and debate. And so it should be with personal religious belief and the claims of religious institutions. Deeply held religious belief surely must carry political and policy implications for the wider community. If not, one wonders how deeply held such matters of conscience really are. Introducing religious claims into the public square, as arguments used to determine public policy, should subject these religious claims to unfettered examination by the public. After all, other deeply held moral convictions and claims of conscience are certainly not immune to criticism in the public square.

Regrettably, this is rarely the case. Instead, accepted etiquette requires us to defer to religious sensibilities. When pressed, the religious maintain that religion is a private matter, and admonish us when we demand good reasons for their claims. One’s individual faith is more important than evidence, rationality, consistency, morality, and legality. Those of us in the secular community have profoundly held beliefs of our own. It is presumptuous to think that secular political beliefs, notions of social justice, and moral convictions are held any less sincerely than the religious belief of even the most devout. Yet, secularists ask to be treated with civility, not with veneration.

Perhaps criticizing the religious beliefs of others is contrary to the spirit of tolerance that many in the secular community deem precious. This is mistaken. The liberal tradition of tolerance demands only that we grant others the right to hold and express diverse beliefs, freely and without fear of harm. It does not require us to hold such expressions to be free from criticism and debate. To allow religious belief a privileged status is demeaning to those holding such beliefs. Are the religious not as capable of offering persuasive arguments as the rest of us? Masquerading as tolerance, privileged status is in reality patronization.

While the U.S. Constitution protects our freedom of religious belief (or non-belief), it also protects our freedom of expression. To limit our freedom to criticize religious claims or religious matters of conscience is a dangerous precedent. It does nothing to strengthen our religious freedom, while seriously damaging our freedom of expression.
Criticism of religious convictions must adhere to the same standards of civility that we expect in other critical discourse. However, to fail to point out immoral, unjust, or simply nonsensical notions simply because the banner of religion flies over them can only result in harming the democracy and pluralistic society we all embrace.

First published November 12, 2009

Relying upon faith-based idealism by Bob Nemanich

Not long ago, I read a story in the Wall Street Journal about a faith-based physician. Initially I was curious as to its placement in the Wall Street Journal, so I was hooked. I found the article astounding on many levels, most importantly because this religious article was in the Journal, an embodiment of fiscal science in the world of business.

The article described the U.S. Government's investigation of a licensed California physician who has been marketing an herbal concoction and over-the-phone prayers as medical treatment for patients with advanced cancer. She sold this "medical treatment" on the Christian Television Network for $10,000! Unfortunately the patients' outcomes were devastating. One of her gullible patients was even a practicing nurse, educated and trained in life sciences, further testifying to the power of faith-based belief systems, even in dire and desperate situations.

This reading prompted me to conjure up two conflicting sayings: "There are no atheists in a fox hole" versus a doctor's saying, "Even the most religiously devout eventually come faithfully to science when faced with a life threatening illness." As for the first, I am acquainted with an atheist who "prayed" when he was forced to eject from his burning jet over Iraq. He now maintains that it was NOT a divine act that saved him but the technology developed by science and applied by engineers.

I also know an evangelical couple in which one partner faced a deadly form of cancer. Standard treatments promised little chance for cure, while cutting-edge stem-cell treatment offered a hope. Unfortunately, stem-cell treatment conflicted with their life-long faith. They chose science over religion and secretly received the stem-cell treatment that was both out-of-state and out-of-pocket. The sick spouse is in full remission, but the couple has kept the treatment a secret from their church.

Recently The American Heart Journal published the results of a study that found having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. Further, they found that patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications, as compared to patients who only knew it was possible that prayers were being said for them. One might conclude from this study that seeking divine intervention following a heart bypass surgery could complicate recovery.

In all cases mentioned, the sick or threatened persons desired to avoid death, a fundamental emotion in humans. As an agnostic, I don't know or suppose what comes after death. As a student of science, I do know that death is an integral part of life in the natural world. So how do superstition, mythology and divine intervention change this natural world? They don't.

While knowledge of the natural world doesn't preclude the existence of God, neither can it confirm it. Agnostics, atheists or humanists don't reject traditional American values; in fact, their values are traditional and have been around since the secularist foundation of this nation. What agnostics, atheists and humanists do in this post-modern world in which mythology and superstition have risen again is to remind the world that relying only on faith-based idealism can be quite deadly.

Saddleback Ride - by Groff Schroeder: August 2008

Saddleback Ride 

by Groff Schroeder

The “presumptive” 2008 presidential candidates first appeared together in the Saddleback Church's “Civil Forum on the Presidency” on August 18. No full text of the event exists online 48 hours later and no one appeared to use the word “Constitution” in the forum. Those of us sworn to defend the Constitution may find these facts and the event's sponsorship and administration by a probably biased Evangelical church (rather than independent journalists) very disturbing.

Saddleback Church is a US 501(c)3 corporation, whose stringent guidelines regarding political action usually preclude any appearance of support for any political candidate. However, “under Federal Election Commission Regulations certain non-profit corporations may stage or sponsor candidate debates ...” that “...must be staged so as not to promote or advance one candidate over the other.” ¹

After the introducing CNN journalist reiterated the event was “not a debate,” he paused “to let other CNN stations join our feed,” during which the statement “Now news... God who gave us life...” was clearly audible on CNN. Cac$hing! Advertisers would pay BIG $$ for a nearly subliminal statement kicking off such a massive TV event. God sure got lucky there, eh?

Shortly afterward, Pastor Warren quickly ended applause with “be seated,” and stated, “We believe in the separation of Church and state, but not we do not believe the separation of faith and politics...” (doesn't “give unto Caesar” mean more than just paying your taxes?) because “...everyone has a world view and it is important to know what they are.” Pastor Warren assured us of “identical questions” for both candidates - questions he later told us were probably written by those receiving the “daily devotional” from his website.

Pastor Warren appeared unable to deliver “identical questions.”

After interrupting Senator Obama, who had begun a compliment to the “nice crowd” as they sat down, Warren bizarrely asked, “How does it feel to be a tree? No.” Soon after he stated, ”I'm not going to do this in any other segment...as a pastor I've got a few verses.” Warren then read Senator Obama a Bible passage about fools and wise people. He then asked, “Who are the three wisest people you know in your life......and who are you going to rely on in your presidency?” Senator Obama expressed thanks for his invitation, complimented Warren's ministries and asked “Other than you?” He then cited his wife, mother and a table of experts. McCain was not interrupted or asked about being a tree and cited General Petraeus and a list of politicians.

Observers of “debate” video may evaluate the “identical” questions and identify what appears as strikingly different treatment of the candidates from both the moderator and the audience. Pastor Warren's introduction included, “We've got to learn to disagree without demonizing each other and we need to restore civility” to loud applause. Pastor Warren also asked both “What would you say to people who oppose me asking these questions?”

The problem is not asking questions, but by whom, where and how fairly they are asked. Houses of worship have no rational, legal or ethical business in politics because religion corrupts politics and politics sullies religion. Civility stems from verifiable facts, independent sources, demonstrable fairness and access to complete information.

It is difficult for one person to “demonize” another. However, people can easily do that to themselves.

Science and the Paranormal by Lynne Kelly

Science education is the best protection we have against being exploited by pseudoscientific claims. Every day, somewhere in the media, someone is claiming a wondrous feat or product that “defies known science.”

There is the psychic John Edward, talking to dead people using a sixth sense when science says there are only five. There are people levitating when we teach that forces need to be balanced for us to remain stationary. There are UFO sightings and aliens, crop circles and reports of ghosts, astrology and water divining. Explaining these phenomena in simple scientific terms can add relevance and interest to education.

Reports of UFO sightings enable us to differentiate between a skeptic and a cynic. Like most people, I would love to still be alive if contact is made with an alien intelligence. What could be more exciting? As a scientist and skeptic, I acknowledge the possibility, but I require some evidence before believing that contact has been made. Cynics dismiss aliens and UFOs as rubbish. Skeptics want to know more.

The Shroud of Turin is a great theme for explaining carbon dating techniques and hence the whole concept of half-lives. The Bermuda Triangle is a lovely example of the nature of evidence – a paranormal effect explained using anecdotal evidence alone, when there is no actual data to support the claim.

Then there is the language of science. Its abuse is rampant. Asking for the research papers and evaluating them is solid and important science that we need to be able to do for ourselves.

I do psychic readings using the psychology of human desires, generalities couched in specific-sounding terms, and statistics where I tell people things I “couldn’t possibly have known.” I claim science. Others claim psychic powers. I have a public claim out to replicate, using science alone, anything a psychic can do.

All this is fun and adds to the relevance of science education in the “new age,” but there is a serious side as well. John Edward’s TV show has a disclaimer that says that the show is “for entertainment purposes only.” He had people in the midst of grief, crying for the cameras, “for entertainment purposes only.” Some claim that clairvoyants using this mysterious sixth sense solve murders that the police could not manage with their mere five senses. Again, tragedy and grief is exploited for entertainment. Are there arrests as a result of these amazing insights using senses science does not acknowledge? No, and there is a reason why not.

Skepticism is simply a desire to believe in things that are real. Skepticism is applying scientific method to what we are told. Cynicism is the rash dismissal of all new ideas. We want skepticism without the cynicism.

Science is not all about the ancient discoveries of dead white guys. It is about the awesome world we live in right now. We don’t need to have it embellished with claims of the paranormal. What science teaches us - from the birth of a child, to the human brain, to the incredible dimensions of space - is way, way more astounding than anything the “new age” offers.

Secrecy by Richard Hiatt

Physicist Edward Teller once said, "Secrecy, once accepted, becomes an addiction." A high-ranking government official said, "When you give a small boy a hammer, there isn't much that doesn't need pounding…. If you are in a culture of creating secrets, you will advance accordingly."

The problem of living in a culture of secrecy is that "secrecy" loses all meaning. Those in charge of keeping secrets get confused over exactly what's worth keeping secret - since everything's "Secret." What results are lax attitudes and whistleblowers who let the public in on 'the news" anyway. Just recall the most "classified" stories (Enron, Hewlett Packard, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Valerie Plame, Halliburton, etc.) and the point's made.

It presents a dilemma. The Bush administration used 9/11 to create a paranoia, making declassification of any sort of secrets "suspect." And to cement this paranoia, the administration said the "war on terror" will be "without end." That means censorship, executive privilege (called the "unitary executive doctrine"), and outright refusal to even "show up" at hearings are to be considered permanent executive responses.

"Transparency" is now an artifact, a luxury that the world can no longer afford.

Bush uses as his rationale the possibility of another attack and the fear that "everything" is a potential target. That means everything public and private is now dragooned into the war against terror - "deputized" as it were - and expected to cooperate. "Security" has spread across the spectrum of civilian life, elevating even the most quotidian details (blueprints for a bridge, disposition of waste, one's private records) into the realm of "sensitive" information.

Once upon a time, before Bush, public knowledge was considered a strength of democracy, a chief corrective on corruption. Thoreau said "Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect," Madison warned of "gradual and silent encroachments," and Patrick Henry said "The liberties of people never … will be secure when the transactions of their rulers [are] concealed from them."

Today, there's near contempt for openness. If someone "leaks" something, there is an attitude that he is betraying the nation. Whistleblowers face serious retribution. And when corruption is exposed in government or corporations, instead of punishing the guilty, the government (or corporation) launches a criminal investigation to hunt down the person who leaked the story. The burden of proof is actually on the good guys (who become fall guys) and not on the government or the most corrupted CEOs.

The irony here is quasi-prophetic. First, there was the rush to classify information, which rendered those needing information for national security unable to do their jobs. Even Congress couldn't make intelligent decisions. Second, with virtually everything "secret" (even information about secret information) the word "Secret" has lost its cachet and is met with growing indifference, the same indifference that is given to "unclassified" information.

The new secrecy means the right people don't get the information they need because of restrictions at the most absurd levels, and the wrong people get information because nobody knows what's really secret anymore. As one journalist said of the Pentagon, "the one secret they would least like to have exposed is how few truly valuable … secrets they possess."

What has been lost in this paranoia is intelligent transparency. Just another piece of what needs correcting in the aftermath of Bush.

Several Observations and Facts - by Len Schwee: August 2008

Several Observations and Facts

by Len Schwee

When a lawyer enters a courtroom where an unpredictable judge presides, he warns his client, “Anything is possible.” But if you say, “Anything is possible” to a physicist, he will probably respond that most things are not possible. Unless something conforms to the laws of physics, it will not happen. It is far better in physics to say, “If something can happen, it might.” But if you say that to your wife, she might respond, “No kidding, Dick Tracy.” She will recognize that the statement is self evident, but may not notice it as a secret of the universe.

During the past 400 years of science, some very elusive things have been found like the neutrino. But no one has ever found a soul or any deeds caused by a soul. Souls are fabrications of ancient religions needed to survive a dead body so an afterlife is plausible. Without souls and an afterlife, the clergy would starve.

People often say, “God bless you.” What impudence! If I were God, I would get very tired of inferior creatures trying to tell me what to do.

Political leaders like to say, “Follow your faith,” or “Keep the faith.” But some faiths are immoral. Almost all faiths are enslaving and full of superstition. So people are encouraged to be immoral, enslaved, and superstitious. Faith is the acceptance of other people’s opinions, and such opinions are often ridiculous. Why should people be encouraged to believe such hearsay? Where is the leader that says, “Observe nature, use logic, and seek the truth.”

On earth, matter is made from three elementary particles--the electron, the up quark, and the down quark. Two up quarks and a down quark make the proton, and two down quarks and an up quark make the neutron. About a hundred atoms are composed of neutrons, protons, and electrons arranged differently. The atoms then are arranged to make up millions of gases, liquids, and solids. We also have light and other electromagnetic waves on earth that sometimes behave as particles called photons. All this diversity of matter and life is amazingly possible because of a few elementary particles in many different arrangements.

Science has holes in its knowledge every once in a while. For example, in the year 1900, all chemical elements up to the eighties were known except for number 43, which could not be found. It was finally made by man in 1937 and called technetium. It is radioactive, and has a half-life of 200,000 years. In other words, if you have a pound of technetium, in 200,000 years you will have half a pound, and the rest will be molybdenum, or number 42. If the bible is correct, the earth is about 6000 years old and we should have technetium in abundance. However, if the earth is 4.6 billion years old as scientists say, technetium would have been halved 23,000 times, leaving nearly none.

I once knew a rare physicist who thought that God made the universe 6000 years ago, but He made it look old when He created it. His God was very deceptive. It also means that he believed an old book more than nature itself. It is amazing how strongly many people are driven to believe superstitions instead of observations and facts.

Several Observations and Facts - by Len Schwee: August 2008

Shame on the Churches - by Jan Brazill: October 2011

Shame on the Churches

by Jan Brazill

September 28 should go down as a Day of Shame for churches—at least for those who participate in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” the Alliance Defense Fund’s scheme to politicize America’s houses of worship (http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4252/1/537).  

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) wants churches to renege on religion’s pact with government, insisting that pastors should be able to endorse candidates from their pulpits. This is both a Constitutional challenge and an affront to taxpayers.

Through tradition, churches enjoy a tax-exempt status, with taxpayers assuming the tax obligation of the churches in exchange for the promise that the churches will not attempt to influence politics, since that would conflict with some taxpayers’ positions. In other words, tax exemption is a benefit, but it comes with conditions. This seems only fair.

And actually, it’s the law. A New York church lost its tax exemption for partisan politicking. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour also had their tax exemptions revoked and were assessed monetary penalties for election activities.

Most churches respect the law and avoid endorsing or opposing candidates. But the ADF seems intent on misleading them into believing that they can engage in partisan politics. Perhaps ADF believes that if it can get enough churches to blatantly violate this restriction, someone will change the law. However, it will be the churches that will suffer by losing their tax-exempt status, while the ADF—the villain in the piece—emerges unscathed!

This is the same group that tries to inject fundamentalism into our public schools, roll back reproductive rights, deny civil rights protections for gay people and now they want to force taxpayers to support churches that will make their political decisions for them.

Any churches contacted by the ADF should do some research. A website called Project Fair Play has been set up to provide information (http://www.projectfairplay.org/). It clearly states that the Internal Revenue Code bars all non-profit groups that hold 501 (c)(3) tax status  from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office or intervening in partisan elections. Religious leaders may address political and social issues from the pulpit, but they may not use church resources to endorse or oppose candidates. Violations of the law can result in fines, assessment of back taxes, and revocation of tax-exempt status.

Since 1992, Americans United has asked the IRS to investigate more than five dozen instances of what were believed to be unlawful church electioneering. These have been races involving Democrats, Republicans and third party candidates. The Church at Pierce Creek near Binghamton, N.Y. lost its tax-exempt status for placing newspaper ads urging the defeat of Bill Clinton in October of 1992. (Aided by a conservative legal group, the church sued in federal court to have the revocation overturned and lost.) Other churches and religious ministries have faced audits, been assessed back taxes or received warnings from the IRS.

Federal law allows houses of worship to address social, moral and political issues. Churches may address ballot referenda and speak out on proposed legislation. What they cannot do is intervene in partisan races that involve candidates by taking actions that endorse or oppose anyone seeking public office.

Will churches take the high moral ground on September 28, or will it be a Day of Shame?

Shame on the Churches - by Jan Brazill: September 2008

Shame on the Churches

by Jan Brazill

September 28 should go down as a Day of Shame for churches—at least for those who participate in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” the Alliance Defense Fund’s scheme to politicize America’s houses of worship (http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4252/1/537).

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) wants churches to renege on religion’s pact with government, insisting that pastors should be able to endorse candidates from their pulpits. This is both a Constitutional challenge and an affront to taxpayers.

Through tradition, churches enjoy a tax-exempt status, with taxpayers assuming the tax obligation of the churches in exchange for the promise that the churches will not attempt to influence politics, since that would conflict with some taxpayers’ positions. In other words, tax exemption is a benefit, but it comes with conditions. This seems only fair.

And actually, it’s the law. A New York church lost its tax exemption for partisan politicking. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour also had their tax exemptions revoked and were assessed monetary penalties for election activities.

Most churches respect the law and avoid endorsing or opposing candidates. But the ADF seems intent on misleading them into believing that they can engage in partisan politics. Perhaps ADF believes that if it can get enough churches to blatantly violate this restriction, someone will change the law. However, it will be the churches that will suffer by losing their tax-exempt status, while the ADF—the villain in the piece—emerges unscathed!

This is the same group that tries to inject fundamentalism into our public schools, roll back reproductive rights, deny civil rights protections for gay people and now they want to force taxpayers to support churches that will make their political decisions for them.

Any churches contacted by the ADF should do some research. A website called Project Fair Play has been set up to provide information (http://www.projectfairplay.org/). It clearly states that the Internal Revenue Code bars all non-profit groups that hold 501 (c)(3) tax status from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office or intervening in partisan elections. Religious leaders may address political and social issues from the pulpit, but they may not use church resources to endorse or oppose candidates. Violations of the law can result in fines, assessment of back taxes, and revocation of tax-exempt status.

Since 1992, Americans United has asked the IRS to investigate more than five dozen instances of what were believed to be unlawful church electioneering. These have been races involving Democrats, Republicans and third party candidates. The Church at Pierce Creek near Binghamton, N.Y. lost its tax-exempt status for placing newspaper ads urging the defeat of Bill Clinton in October of 1992. (Aided by a conservative legal group, the church sued in federal court to have the revocation overturned and lost.) Other churches and religious ministries have faced audits, been assessed back taxes or received warnings from the IRS.

Federal law allows houses of worship to address social, moral and political issues. Churches may address ballot referenda and speak out on proposed legislation. What they cannot do is intervene in partisan races that involve candidates by taking actions that endorse or oppose anyone seeking public office.

Will churches take the high moral ground on September 28, or will it be a Day of Shame?

Shame on the Churches - by Jan Brazill: September 2008

Sin Against Humanity - by Janet Brazill

I have tried. But I simply cannot understand the religious opposition to stem cell research.  

How can concern for a 5-day-old clump of unfeeling cells outweigh compassion for the suffering of living children and adults, or deny cures to paraplegic veterans?  

Here we have what might well be the medical discovery of the ages-—the knowledge that early cells can morph into any cell of the human body. That one cell can become whatever is needed for the body to survive. How can anyone not want to pursue this to its full potential? Luckily, President Obama does want to!  

The problem may be that many people simply don’t understand the full promise of this research, giving opponents the opportunity to frame the debate. They talk about the horror of human cloning. That, however, is “reproductive cloning,” something opposed by all legitimate researchers, and controllable by law.  

“Therapeutic cloning” is different. It simply involves transplanting a patient’s DNA into an unfertilized egg in order to grow stem cells that could cure a devastating disease that patient may have. This is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Many of the most debilitating diseases and conditions are caused by damage to cells and tissue so SCNT could be used to replace those damaged parts and allow organs to function again.  

In this procedure, cells are transferred after five days—-long before the 14 days when they would become actual embryos that would be suitable for implantation in a human womb. With this research, there is no fertilization of the egg by sperm, no implantation in the uterus and therefore no pregnancy.  

Here’s how it works -- an unfertilized, donated egg has its nucleus removed, leaving it with no genetic blueprint (DNA) of its own. Scientists then obtain the patient’s DNA, say from a skin cell’s nucleus, and insert that into the egg making the egg capable of producing cells genetically identical to the patient's. Next, the scientists apply chemicals or electricity to make the cells divide, after which they are harvested, at about five days, when between 60 and 200 stem cells have formed. These are “pluripotent” cells that have the capacity to develop into any cell type the human body needs. These can be insulin-producing cells for diabetics, cells bearing mucous-clearing properties for cystic fibrosis patients, healthy nerve cells for the brains of Parkinson's patients or the spinal cords of paralyzed people, and much more. And since they contain the patient’s DNA, they won’t be rejected by the immune system, meaning that the patient will not have to be on anti-rejection drugs for the remainder of his life. Stem cell lines can also be used to test new drugs.  

“Adult stem cell research” has shown promise in some areas, but our nation’s top scientists, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Academy of Sciences all agree that embryonic stem cells have the greatest potential since they are “pluripotent” and can be grown in a lab indefinitely.  

It is shameful that self-serving religious leaders were able to convince a vote-hungry president to back their cause and ban this potentially life-saving research for eight long years. What will future generations say when they realize that “religion”-—of all things—-prolonged needless suffering?  

I believe they will call it a “sin” against humanity.

Some thoughts on Separation of Church and State by Susan Jacoby - Excerpt from Freethinkers

In his celebrated speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy declared unequivocally that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote - where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference - and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him." Kennedy went on to make it clear that he regarded the Jeffersonian wall of separation not as a flexible metaphor but as the foundation of the American system of government. He reminded his audience, composed heavily of evangelical Protestants, that Jefferson's religious freedom act in Virginia was strongly supported by Baptists who had endured persecution both in England and in America. With a nod to the non-religious, the candidate also expounded his vision of American as a nation "where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice." Kennedy's speech was widely regarded as one of the turning points of his campaign; he was addressing the fears not only of southern evangelicals, who in 1928 had rejected Al Smith because of his Catholicism, but of mainstream Protestants and Jews, who also had serious reservations about a Catholic in the White House. Norman Vincent Peale, the best-known Protestant cleric to voice his doubts, had flown in from New York for Kennedy's speech and press conference.

…today [JFK's] forthright support for a "wall of separation" would antagonize not only the evangelicals he won over in 1960 but the hierarchy of his own church. Kennedy's belief in an America where "no church or church school" would be eligible for tax support has been rejected by nearly all Republicans and a fair number of Democrats, fearful of being left behind as the faith-based bandwagon rolls on. As for the Catholic Church, the authoritarian Pope John Paul II …created problems for American Catholic politicians who thought that "dual loyalty" issues had been laid to rest in Kennedy's generation. In January 2003, the Vatican issued an innocuously titled "Doctrinal Note on Some Questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life," but the bland packaging was misleading. The "doctrinal note" was an order to Catholic officeholders to toe the line on abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and gay marriage - even if official church teaching conflicted with the politician's personal conscience and sense of public duty. (Senator Edward M. Kennedy, commenting on the Vatican effort to turn back the clock for American Catholic politicians, referred to his brother's Houston declaration that "I do not speak for my church on public matters - and the church does not speak for me.")

"…no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson, 1786

Supply Side - Again? - by Groff Schroeder: October 2008

Supply Side - Again?  

By Groff Schroeder

How many times have you heard it?  The best way to help the poor (economy, housing prices, stock market) is to give America’s wealthiest citizens and corporations US Tax Dollars.  Usually, those receiving such “richfare” appear to already have enough money to buy anything – including “representatives” of We the People.

America’s the long favored policy of welfare for the rich “supply side economics,” an economic “theory” rejecting common sense, logic and mathematics.  Sensationalized distractions, misleading “sound bites,” repetitive speculation, wishful thinking and deceptive “analysis” from America’s pundits, “professional” journalists and “representatives” have taught We the People to hate Our government so much that although we all “support the troops,” few appear to advocate increasing taxes (even by $0.10 per year) to actually support them.  Therefore, America’s leaders grant massive tax cuts to wealthy citizens (and tax subsidies to oil companies etc.) while funding (at least) two wars and a massive “military industrial complex” with “fiscally responsible” policies disturbingly similar to runaway credit card debt.

The logic(?) is that tax cuts will somehow stimulate the economy so much that tax revenues will increase  (i.e. 4 - 1 = 5).  Those receiving tax cuts allegedly invest in business, supposedly creating jobs that allow benefits to “trickle down” to the middle class.  Supply side advocates say, “a rising tide raises all boats.”  Unfortunately, not everyone owns a boat. 

Supply side’s newest incarnation is a massive “bailout” for America’s investment banks.  If We the People make bad business decisions, we go bankrupt and end up working in fast food.  If wealthy business people make bad decisions, they deploy multimillion-dollar “golden parachutes” – often landing in even bigger jobs.  Periodically, they herd “our” “representatives” into using We the People’s money for a “bailout” (even if they have to borrow it).  Bailout…, golden parachute…, handy eh? 

The Bush Administration says there is “no choice” (just as there was “no choice” but “pre-emptive” war, obstructing 9-11 investigations, revoking habeas corpus etc. etc. etc.).  However, there are always choices - and perhaps it is time We the People and our “representatives” examine President Bush’s “no choice” emergency plans with a bit more skepticism. 

Let us “do the math” on the proposed “bailout.”  The United States government has already allocated (borrowed) more than $900 billion to bailout “Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.[1]  There approximately 6.725 billion people on earth and 305.1 million citizens of the United States, so that is about $133 for every person on earth or about $2,940 for every US citizen.  Why rescue those who created the problem instead of the People who are its victims?  Why not rescue homeowners in foreclosure – which would save the bankers too?  Why should we trust those who made this mess with another dime? 

Supply side economics has repeatedly failed disastrously.  Each time, We the People paid for the cleanup, while those who benefited appear to have opened sweat-shops and dummy corporations overseas to avoid paying taxes or living wages.  Perhaps only when politicians face “hard time” for accepting “donations” and “liberal” journalists (i.e. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough etc.) are exposed and discredited for excluding key facts that deceive hard working Americans into voting against their own best interests will We the People begin to reverse the damage of “conservative” policies like “supply side economics.”

Supply Side - Again? - by Groff Schroeder: October 2008

Systems Thinking for Free Thinking about the 'Free Market' - by Bob Powell: Freethought Views February 2011

Systems Thinking for Free Thinking about the 'Free Market'

by Bob Powell, Ph.D.

Systems thinking is required to understand behavior in dynamically complex systems, systems with multiple feedbacks and long delays. Our economy is dynamically complex, with a vast number of feedbacks and delays of years and even decades. There's a saying: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It's quite literally true. That's because complex systems have emergent properties: properties of the whole that are not properties of the parts.

Peter Senge notes in The Fifth Discipline, an introductory book on systems thinking, that we can't cut an elephant in half and get two elephants. An elephant is more than the sum of its parts. Likewise, our minds aren't a property of the individual neurons in our brains; they're a manifestation of the interactions among them. What makes you "you" is an emergent property of the parts of you.

The same is true for nations, communities, economies, mobs, families, and military units; they are far more than the sum of their individual parts. We're part of the whole, not separate from it.

So we're not only "individuals" or only a "part of collectives". We're both. Either-or thinking -- the "false dilemma" logical fallacy -- leads us astray. Either extreme is a form of fundamentalism.

Thinking about anything, including religion or the "free market", is based on mental models. But our mental models aren't reality. They're simplifications, abstractions, inevitably incomplete, incorrect. They're wrong.

John Sterman, Director of MIT's System Dynamics Group, wrote in All models are wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist: "Fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, whether the unquestioning belief in an all-powerful deity, the all-powerful state or the all-powerful free market, breeds persecution, hatred and war" (http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/All_Models_Are_Wrong_%28SDR%29.pdf).

To understand the operation of the "free market", many invoke Adam Smith's "invisible hand" It's a dual feedback structure that balances supply and demand using price as an intermediating factor. It's correct as far as it goes, but it's a vast simplification; it's a model of only a small part of what's happening.

Adam Smith's most-cited passage includes: "... he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

This unintended societal benefit is an emergent property. It's the result of the whole, the collective, being greater than the sum of its parts. "Good-for-society" results can come from "self-interested behavior."

Unfortunately, the opposite can also be true: individually-logical actions can be collectively irrational. They can lead to price instability, speculative bubbles, inadequate investment in heath and education, pollution, a failing heath insurance system, extremes of wealth and poverty, enormous trade deficits, and infrastructure backlogs.

That's because many effects negatively impact the market's ability to effectively balance supply and demand and create a well-functioning economy. These include delays, inelasticities, externalities, adverse selection, and path dependence. With these systemic failures we get many individual failures despite individual best efforts.

Policies to address these failings are possible, but "free market" fundamentalists believe, like Niccolo Machiavelli, that when government interferes, it does far more damage than good. We now live in the 21st century, not the 16th. We know more than we did then, and this doesn't have to be the case.

Systems Thinking for Free Thinking about the 'Free Market'

by Bob Powell

Appeared February 17-23, 2011 in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs "Freethought Views" column in the Colorado Springs Independent (p. 7) with the quotation below.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche   

Bob Powell's web site is www.exponentialimprovement.com. 

Thank You and Goodbye - December 2011

When the Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado Office of the Gill Foundation (GALFFCOOTGF) opened in Colorado Springs in 2006, expanding marriage equality and the end of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” seemed highly improbable. Times change and people change – and people change times.

The FTCS wishes to thank the Gill Foundation - and everyone involved in its local office - for their services, their support, and for making this a more equal and better place to live.

The GALFFCOOTGF provided the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs (FTCS) meeting space, instruction, and other support services. Most of our previous seven “HumanLight Celebrations” have occurred within the GALFFCOOTGF, our cozy “freethinker shelter” from the holiday deluge. Chronically short of energy, money, leadership, and time, the FTCS often held both board and “fourth Wednesday” meetings at the GALFFCOOTGF, usually blissfully unaware of the foundation's preference for a single meeting per organization per month. Even if we added a “second Saturday” “pot luck” - or when sketchy internal communications led to repeated oversights of important details - the Gill Foundation still opened their doors wide. They endured our stumbles, always providing a wonderful happy person on site to help. We tried leave the building better than we found it and usually thanked the smiling person at the desk, but we never sent our thanks in writing.

It is difficult to express how much the FTCS benefited from the GALFFCOOTGF, how much we appreciate the foundation's contributions, or how much credit we think the foundation deserves for recent advancements in equality, human rights, and civil rights. You gave us so much. You helped us so much. You were like a suave and massive elder sibling who always knew what to say and do when things got interesting. You have no idea how much you contributed to the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs. We love you. We thank you. Good speed.  

The 4th of July - by William Edelen

     "Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth all the means. This is our day of deliverance. With solemn acts of devotion we ought to commemorate it, with pomp and parade…with shows and games, sports and guns, bells and bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other…from this time forward and forevermore…"

     So wrote John Adams about the 4th of July.

     On the 4th of July 1826, America celebrated the 50th anniversary of her Independence. John Adams, the second President of the United States, died on that day at the age of 90. His last words were "Thomas Jefferson still survives."

     But on that same day, Jefferson, too, died.

     There was something mystical about the relationship between Adams and Jefferson. It was these two giants who, with James Madison, set the direction and the philosophy of this great nation. 

     We are celebrating the Declaration of Independence. With only a very few word changes, that magnificent document was written by one man, Thomas Jefferson.

     I have one bust in my study. It is of Jefferson. On the base are these words: "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." He uses the word "God" as a Deist, not as a Christian. A vast difference. He made this scathing statement aimed at the tyranny of the Christian Church.

     American history scholars, writing for the "Encyclopedia Britannica" have stated that Deism was the religion of our first six Presidents, not Christianity. "One of the embarrassing problems for the nineteenth century champions of the Christian faith was the fact that not one of the first six presidents of the United States was a Christian. They were Deists." (Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968, vol.2; p. 420, Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, 'The Annals of America: Great Issues').

     Both men - Thomas Jefferson and John Adams - had total contempt for the Christian church and Christianity in general.

     President Adams wrote: "The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity." Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, with its Article 11, which began: "The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

     Jefferson said: "I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity, one redeeming value. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites."

     I am always overwhelmed with thanksgiving and gratitude for men of the stature and integrity of Jefferson, Adams and Madison.

     Jefferson and our first six presidents would find all of the God talk today coming from our phony politicians repugnant. They cannot end a statement without saying "God bless you"...or "God bless America". None of this comes from our founding presidents. It was only in 1954 that "under God" was put in the Pledge of Allegiance. And only in 1954 that "in God we Trust" was put on paper currency.

     When we celebrate the Fourth, may I suggest that we celebrate the brilliance of Adams, Jefferson and Madison. Will we ever again see politicians of their caliber in America?

Originally published in July of 2005. 

THE MILITARY, RELIGION AND NEUROSCIENCE by Richard Haitt

It’s no accident that the military targets adolescent males for recruitment. Physically mature yet mentally immature, when narcissism is highest and worldly experience is low, when “invincibility” is curbed by a strong (childhood) neediness to be forgiven by, and to impress, a strong father-figure.

But military tactics go a lot deeper. There are over 100 billion neurons in the brain constantly refining new pathways. Adolescence is a time when outside “stressors” reshape the prefrontal cortex, stressors that incline them to “high excitement and low effort” stimuli. And that can involve anything from drugs to violent video games (“video game brain”), from sex and power to celebrity status, to the romance of “hero worship.”

The brain is highly impressionable. But "impressionable" doesn’t simply mean being “easily persuaded.” It means being vulnerable to hard-wiring new circuits and creating neural pathways that last forever. To military recruiters, it’s a process of stopping the brain from developing naturally and being rewired for a world of control and submission, conflict and violence, the “romance” of war, heroism and martyrdom.

“Wired for war” is a loaded phrase. It means not just where “manliness” is equated with facing down danger, but a much deeper predisposition to “controlling” life in general – because life is dangerous and untrustworthy. This normally translates to a very rigid (“conservative”) approach to life, religion, society, politics, marriage and parenthood.

The Reverend Emmanuel Charles McCarthy gave the analogy of the early 4th century (Augustine period) of Christianity when new Christians were forced through “purgation rites” as a rite of passage for inclusion. The military training process was (unknowingly) used then: shutting down empathic pathways and starting new ones that went against the grain of natural development. Referring to then and now, McCarthy described it “from being Christ-like in the world to being extremely un-Christ-like.”

Experts call it “the priming of neurons” - refining neural pathways of the young and impressionable. In this manner teens are “primed” by way of violent video games with “paramilitary” themes. These games get the process started early, conditioning neurons several years before recruiters begin reading student records (violating privacy rights), weeding out likely candidates and approaching them at home, by mail, or at school (sometimes without parental knowledge) – then filling their brains with stories of “high excitement and low (mental) effort.”

The long-term consequences can be devastating. Violence is not just contagious, it dominates a young man’s decision-making process the rest of his life. What’s called “dominative power” (using fear and intimidation to get what one wants) continues on through marriage and parenthood. It becomes the ruling principle in “value clarification skills” and “conflict resolution skills” which becomes a multi-generational syndrome passed on to their children.

But ask the military if it cares. So entrenched in its “song of the sword,” war as “the father of all things,” that anything like neuroscience becomes just another weapon with which to exploit the unknowing. “Follow your left” when marching (the “receptive” side for right-handed people) is just a start to another neurological imprint - necessary in a world fraught with danger and evil.

But the worst tragedy of all is the indelible scarring this has on our young who, if left alone, would most likely follow their natural instincts, more natural “pathways” of higher consciousness and learning.

The Ouija Board Effect - by Douglas Schrepel: Freethought Views February 2010

Last November, with the Thanksgiving holiday bearing down on me, I awoke to a sensational media claim (again).  A 46-year-old Brussels man named Rom Houben, presumed to be in a coma for the last 23 years, had in fact been fully conscious for most of that time.  There was the evidence, right in front of me!  Mr. Houben was communicating with the aid of a computer.  Well, almost.  His right hand, firmly held by a “speech therapist,” with index finger extended, was typing on a computer keyboard.  The therapist was acting as a facilitator, sensing Mr. Houben’s fine motor movements and assisting him by moving his finger to the keys he desired.

As I looked closely, Mr. Houben’s eyes appeared closed.  Wouldn’t he need to see the keyboard? After all, he hadn’t had the opportunity to type in at least 23 years.  This all seemed to good to be true.  What was really going on here?

According to Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, this was nothing more than an ideomotor effect, similar to what one sees with Ouija boards or dowsing rods in search of water.  The ideomotor effect is a subtle and subconscious brain effect on skeletal muscles resulting in movement that, in this case, the facilitator is expecting.  Mr. Houben was not communicating.  Rather the communication was coming from the speech therapist, though possibly without her awareness.

As Shermer points out, there is a simple way to test the claims of the facilitator.  Simply show the facilitator and Mr. Houben different pictures, each without the knowledge of the other, and see what is typed.  It appears that no one attempted such a test in the case of coma patients. In the 1990s, with autistic children, such tests results showed that what the facilitator saw got typed 100 percent of the time, never what the child saw.  This gives us good reason to doubt the veracity of the astonishing results claimed for Mr. Houben.

Why should we care?  After all the facilitator may be acting in good faith, and the results, even if bogus, often bring hope to desperate loved ones.  False delusions often lead to unintended consequences.  Reportedly, facilitators are taught that around 13 percent of their clients have been sexually abused.  This bias increases the very real possibility of falsely accusing a friend or family member, unconsciously, by the facilitator.  How would one defend himself from such an accusation?  Even if one considers this a remote possibility, facilitation costs time and money, and eventually results in the deep despair and anguish of loved ones when they realize the spurious nature of their hopes.  It is far better to face reality square in the face.  Only then can one’s financial and emotional resources be focused on finding real solutions if they exist, or ways of coping with impossible tragedies.

See Michael Shermer’s blog post of November 25, 2009 at the Huffington Post for a more complete discussion.

Douglas Schrepel is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and President of the Board of Directors of the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs.

The Power of Hatred - by Jan Brazill

Recently, Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to die for the Oklahoma City bombing, requested that the government "hold a true public execution" by televising his death.

This reminded me of a short story by the late Steve Allen, still vivid to me after many years, called "The Public Hating." In terse, descriptive prose, Allen described a new method of killing those convicted of crimes. At a prescribed time, participants filled Yankee Stadium while those at home gathered in front of their television sets.

The event in the sports arena took on the trappings of public hangings in the old days -- a festive occasion the entire family could enjoy. Vendors in the stands hawked hot dogs. Small children sported balloons.

Suddenly the stadium hushed as the prisoner was solemnly led to the center platform. Spotlights illuminated him so that every facial expression could be observed, every movement recorded on the nation’s psyche. Then the execution began.

With focused attention, each viewer projected feelings of hate toward the condemned man. Children watched their elders’ intense expressions as they learned to direct their own emotions toward the target.

Soon they were rewarded as they watched the object of their hatred begin to shrivel and die, writhing with horrible contortions. They learned that their hatred had the power to kill.

Allen delivered a powerful message with this story. I am often reminded of it when observing the manifestations of hatred prevalent in our country today -- the violence of some religionists toward gays, culminating in the cruel and brutal death of Matthew Shepard; the persistence of racism, with the modern day lynching of James Byrd in Texas and the attack by a white supremacist against a Jewish day-care center; the prevalence of sexism, resulting in untold numbers of rapes, beatings and psychological scarring of women; and now the rise of denominational religious schools, teaching children that only their own kind are worthy of association. Religious hate groups, such as the KKK, World Church of the Creator, and Army of God, abound.

Steve Allen correctly perceived that hatred is a human failing, and that it is a powerful emotion that can be utilized to overpower logic and compassion in order to accomplish specific agendas.

The ability to hate is an undeniable trait of humankind. Although we often hear that Christian "love" can overcome all the failings we possess, in 2000 years it hasn’t happened. Instead, the Bible seems to intensify a believer’s own proclivities. It is used by a cruel person to justify more cruelty. A kind person finds completely different guidelines in it. Human nature remains essentially unchanged.

While Canada, all the European Union countries, and even Russia have rejected the use of capital punishment, many in the United States still cite the retaliatory harshness of the Old Testament -- an eye for an eye -- as justification for continuing it.

This is a nation that could, indeed, carry out a "public hating," were such a thing possible!

Perhaps it is time to try simple reason and compassion instead of relying on religion. As another author, James Baldwin, writes in "The Fire Next Time," "If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him."

Originally published in March of 2001.

The Power of Prayer - by Groff Schroeder: August 2008

The Power of Prayer

By Groff Schroeder

Surveys suggest 90% of Americans pray, 30-40% pray daily and some 70% believe prayer can help cure illness.¹ Even “common sense” suggests if prayers do not help, they cannot hurt – right?

How can we know?

Scientific medical studies divide participants into random groups of similar size experiencing similar conditions except for the treatment under study. For example, a study might divide 100 participants into two groups, one receiving a new treatment and the other receiving a “placebo,” a substance (such as sugar) administered by the same route with minimal known effect. The group receiving the placebo is the “control” group and provides a means of comparing data for participants receiving the treatment with similar participants receiving no treatment. Since participants can alter data (inadvertently or otherwise), careful studies are “blind” (most participants remain unaware of which group receives the treatment). Studies evaluating large numbers of patients at multiple locations also improve the reliability of the recorded data.

Medical researchers compare the “morbidity and mortality” data (rates of illness and death) associated with the treatment (or lack thereof) to assess the treatment’s value. If the group receiving the treatment experiences a statistically significant improvement after the treatment, the study suggests that the treatment might be useful. If there is no difference between the group receiving the treatment and the control group, the study suggests that the treatment is probably not useful. If the control group experiences less morbidity and mortality than the group receiving the treatment, the study suggests that the treatment harms patients – which is the surprising outcome of the “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer” (STEP).

The STEP was “…a multicenter, controlled trial of complications in coronary bypass surgery involving 1802 patients in 6 US hospitals, randomized into [3 groups].” “The goals of the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) [was] to evaluate the effects of receipt of additional study IP and awareness of receipt of additional study IP [intercessory prayer] on outcomes in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery.”²

Researchers told Groups 1 and 2 that they may or may not receive IP. Group 1 received IP while Group 2 did not. Three mainstream religious websites provided 14 consecutive days of Intercessory Prayer (IP) for patients assigned to receive IP, starting the night before their coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Researchers told Group 3 that they would receive IP and they received IP.

Employing Society for Thoracic Surgeons definitions, research nurses at participating hospitals unaware of patient group assignment reviewed medical records to determine whether complications occurred. Finally, a blinded nurse auditor reviewed every study patient’s data against the medical record before release of study forms.”³

“Complications occurred in 52 percent of those who received prayer (Group 1) versus 51 percent of those who did not receive prayer (Group 2). Complications occurred in 59 percent of patients who were told they would receive prayer (Group 3) versus 52 percent, who also received prayer, but were uncertain of receiving it (Group 1).”⁴

Surprisingly, those who knew they were being prayed for were more likely to have complications after surgery than those who were unsure and those who knew they would not receive prayer.

So when someone offers to pray for you or a loved one perhaps its best to politely decline – or at least try to forget about it.

The Real Objective - by Janet Brazill: Freethought Views March 2011

The Real Objective - by Janet Brazil

Americans should ask themselves--what is the real goal of Congress in banning both abortion and contraception? Any thinking person can see that the use of contraceptives will reduce the need for abortions. 

If you’ve kept up with actions of our new Republican Congress, you know that they have attacked abortion in the Health Care Plan. Now they have passed bills to defund Planned Parenthood, which does abortions but is the biggest dispenser of contraceptives, and even defund the government Title X program, which doesn’t cover abortion at all, but does provide contraceptives and other care.  

Cutting both contraception and abortion is not going to reduce the budget as they say, because experience shows this will only lead to unsafe abortions. A recent study in Nigeria found that the cost of treating complications from unsafe abortions was about $19 million, while it would have cost around $4.8 million to provide contraception preventing those pregnancies.

Those of us who have followed Catholic actions know that eliminating both abortion and contraception in this country has been the goal of the Catholic Church, starting with their Bishops’ Pastoral Plan in 1975 to organize and influence all three branches of government. They have been amazingly successful, since Catholics now make up the majority religion in Congress—151, with Baptists placing second with 71 members—and Catholics are the majority religion on the Supreme Court. 

Part of the Pastoral Plan was to create a non-Catholic movement to oppose abortion, the topic chosen to galvanize the movement. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, set up the Moral Majority and enlisted Evangelist Jerry Falwell to run it, once Falwell agreed to oppose abortion. 

Why this adamant opposition to contraception and abortion? Read about the Commission on Population and Birth, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1966 to determine if the Church could change its opposition to birth control. Though the Commission voted overwhelmingly that the policy should be changed, Paul VI adopted the minority view that insisted that making this change would destroy the fundamental principle of infallibility and with it, the Church itself. He then issued his encyclical, Humanae Vitae (1968), reaffirming the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church regarding contraception and abortion. The Church hierarchy does not permit abortion even in case of rape or as a direct way of saving the life of a pregnant woman.  

While defunding contraceptives and abortions fulfills the longtime goal of the Catholic Church, there may be an additional, more devious, purpose at work here.  

Throughout history, countries have prohibited abortion whenever it suited their needs, such as increasing the size of their armies. Capitalism presents a new opportunity. Non-availability of subsidized birth control increases birthrates among families who are least able to afford children, forcing them to work for low wages. This cheap labor creates greater profits for the employer.  

Now, with many Tea Party candidates funded by corporations, with the past election won by donations from corporations—thanks to the Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums anonymously in political campaigns—with Speaker of the House John Boehner’s close ties with corporate interests, our country is effectively controlled by corporate power. If this legislation becomes law, that corporate power will have far greater control over its workers, increasing over time.  

That may be the real objective.

The Real Objective - by Janet Brazil

Appeared March 20-26, 2011 with the quotation below.  

I am convinced that some political and social activities and practices of the Catholic organizations [I mention here only the fight against birth control] are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere.  

Albert Einstein, 1954

The Religious Roots of Terrorism - by Jan Brazill: Freethought Views July 2011

The Religious Roots of Terrorism - by Jan Brazill

If only…

Nowhere are these words of regret more distressing than in our current concern with terrorism. The dreadful event of 9/11, the bombings worldwide with increased security at home, even the airport searches that make air travel uncomfortable—all these could have been avoided, if only…

The tragedy of 9/11 in 2001 might never have happened had we heeded the warning of the United States Security Council in 1979 when they determined that world population growth seriously threatened the security of all nations, including our own. And had we pursued the recommendations of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), to help developing nations around the world control their numbers. 

By the mid-1960s America had become increasingly aware of the world population problem. The invention of the contraceptive pill in 1960 stimulated broad public debate on birth control, as did the book, The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, and Garret Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

Even mainstream religious denominations recognized the problem. In 1965, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church urged “the government of the United States to be ready to assist countries who request help in the development of programs of voluntary planned parenthood as a practical and humane means of controlling fertility and population growth.” By 1971, it recognized that “the assumption that couples have the freedom to have as many children as they can support should be challenged. We can no longer justify bringing into existence as many children as we desire. Our corporate responsibility to each other prohibits this.” They wisely stated, “We who are motivated by the urgency of overpopulation . . . would preserve the species by responding in faith: Do not multiply – the earth is filled!”

President Richard Nixon had recognized this connection, and created the Rockefeller Commission which made over seventy recommendations, including birth control, to address the problem. When Rockefeller was asked later why no concrete program resulted, he responded: “The greatest difficulty has been the very active opposition by the Roman Catholic Church through its various agencies in the United States.”

After his reelection in 1974, President Nixon tried again, ordering a study by various government agencies on the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” Sadly, the results were stamped “classified” and buried. When population scientist Stephen D. Mumford acquired these documents in 1991, he saw that NSSM 200 had accurately predicted the effects of world population growth on the environment, living standards, and U.S. security interests. It had urged that measures to reduce fertility be started in the 1970s.

Had we done so, we would have a very different world today. Instead, President Nixon disavowed this report after the U.S. Catholic Bishops threatened him politically. Later, Catholic leaders successfully pressed President-elect Carter to de-emphasize federal support for family planning. They have grown even more powerful in the years since then and their opposition to contraception has successfully derailed most attempts to curb overpopulation. 

Now we live in a world where nearly half the world’s population — some 3 billion people — are entering their childbearing years. Overpopulation creates conditions of social unrest and instability in places already overburdened by poverty, disease, and natural resource depletion. Support for terrorism is rooted in such conditions.

Thus did one religion change the course of the world.

Published July 21, 2011 with the quotation below. 

Short of nuclear war itself, overpopulation is the gravest issue the world faces.  If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.      

Robert Strange McNamara, former World Bank President

The Sanctity of Religion in Politics - by Richard Baker: May 2008

Recently, in one of the few resolutions of its kind actually released to the public, our El Paso County Board of Commissioners resolved to name the week of Jan. 20-27 “Sanctity of Human Life Week in El Paso County.”

Apart from the time and taxpayer money expended in the development, writing and production of this resolution, if it had anything to do with respecting life at all, it might have been an admirable thought.

Of course the resolution has very little to do with respecting life. It is, in fact, a mission statement by the Dominion Christian movement to re-establish its control of a woman’s reproductive system by cleverly issuing it through a government organ to give it more validity. The fact that this violates the very constitution our stalwart Commissioners have taken an oath to defend seems not to be an issue to them.

The resolution is just one more anti-choice device to repress a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion guaranteed by the US Constitution and confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade.

The text of the resolution contains the statement: “all children should be welcomed in life.” And assuming the “children” are actually that – fully formed, intended fetuses with proper pre-natal care – let the welcome begin.

But if we are talking about a few cells, a disposable egg, a shot of sperm and a Christian operative peering in your bedroom window, then, no matter how you may dress it up in dogma, it’s not a child.

Yet in the warm glow of their self-righteousness, our Commissioners, beaming with the opportunity to demonstrate their abject obedience to religion, presented this resolution ceremoniously to local Catholic Bishop Michael. J. Sheridan.

Sheridan, if you recall, issued a pastoral letter recently saying that American Catholics should not receive communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teachings.

This bit of managing the flock by threat is just another in a long line of Christian doctrines that are routinely foisted on the public. Opus Dei will be proud.

And our elected County officials? They are prepared to abrogate their elective oaths in solemn dedication and servitude to Christian Dominionism. In league with the purveyors of patriarchal dogma, they reinforce the archaic and arcane provisions of a male-dominated society in which morality has become distorted to condemn a woman to slavery and bondage to the male. In this distorted morality, the woman carries and bears children at the pleasure of the male and is beholden to his whim.

Perhaps one day instead of requiring the woman to “submit” to her male counterpart, as is demanded of her in scripture, we might see a “County Vasectomy Day!” in which all males wishing to help lower the abortion rate get snipped. Maybe our esteemed Commissioners could sponsor an El Paso County “Birth Control Day” or “County Emergency Contraception Week.”

But I wouldn’t count on it, for it is not abortion our good leaders wish to curb. It is the right of American women to remain inviolable.

The Commissioner’s time would be better spent resolving to round up wayward fathers and getting them to pay for women’s thankless nine months of bond servitude and the eighteen or so years of raising the children following delivery.

The Sanctity of Religion in Politics - by Richard Baker: May 2008

The Savior Template by Phil Stahl

A condescending aspect of current evangelical Christianity is its prescription for personal salvation: that one must be "born again in the Lord Jesus Christ" and "accept him as personal Savior." Of course, in spouting this codswallop, Christians thoughtlessly consign billions to the Christians' eternal microwave - Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Buddhists and others - whose only "crime" is they either refused to follow, or weren't privy to, the magic salvation formula.

In fact, the evidence shows that the Christian myth of the unique God-Man/Savior is not original, but probably plagiarized from earlier pagan sources - such as the Book of Mithras. This was the main source for the ancient religion of Mithraism, which predated Christianity by hundreds of years.

Exactly like Jesus, Mithras was "born of a virgin" (Anahita) in humble surroundings and later worked miracles, including walking on water and raising the dead. He was also crucified, died and was buried, to ascend three days later. Coincidence? Hardly! It is more likely the basis of a common myth (also present with the God-Man Horus, and Orpheus) present throughout antiquity. Thus, it would have made eminent sense for the early New Testament authors to copy these stories where they could. Why reinvent the proverbial Savior "wheel"?

In his excellent exposé article "How Jesus Got A Life" (The American Atheist, June 1992, p. 46), author Frank Zindler notes even more comparisons, such as the fact that Mithras was born on Dec. 25 (the Winter Solstice, according to then crude computations), he was also worshipped on SUN-days (being also a solar deity), and the leader was called "papa" (pope) and ruled from the "mithraeum" on the Vatican Hill in Rome.

Mithraic priests wore "miters" (from which current Catholic Bishops' head gear is derived), and they consumed a sacred meal "Myazda" which "was completely analogous to the Catholic Eucharist service." (ibid)

Why the need to copy wholesale earlier God-man stories? The Catholic historian, the Rev. Thomas Bokenkotter is clear on this:

"The Gospels were not meant to be a historical or biographical account of Jesus. They were written to convert unbelievers to faith in Jesus as the Messiah, or God."

In other words, the earlier pagan tracts and myths were copied to try to fulfill a Church agenda, not to disclose any historical or biographical truth. Later Protestant sects, formed after the Reformation, would simply alter the theme to making "salvation" contingent not only on the belief in the overall God-Man mythology - but BELIEF in the MYTHICAL MAN as GOD and SAVIOR. In other words, what evangelicals are effectively doing is threatening unbelievers with eternal perdition unless they embrace a God-Man account likely plagiarized by their Catholic forbears from ancient pagan works.

The whole thing would actually be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. One can imagine the ancient founders of Mithraism laughing hilariously from their graves at the gullibility and profound ignorance of modern day Christians who buy this hogswill and are really putting their trust in a unique "savior" and "god."

Did a real historical Jesus exist? According to Geza Vermes: "Jesus was an ordinary man, crucified because he clashed with Jewish and Roman leaders and was regarded as a potential threat to law and order."

The Ten Commandments are Moral Fossils by Dr. Charlie Webb

Nobody really believes in the Ten Commandments of Moses. Most of us can't even remember them, let alone name the punishments for breaking them. If we did know, we would all turn away in disgust and look for a more civilized guide for morality.

For example, if your loved one comes to the hospital on a "Sabbath" day, all the nurses and doctors who work to save a life are breaking the fourth commandment. What is their punishment as prescribed by the Old Testament God? Death. (Exod. 31:15 or Num.16:32-36). And since Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are all derived from ancient Mosaic law, the Sabbaths now include Friday, Saturday, and Sunday!

If you go to church and pray to an image of Jesus or to a cross, your reward for breaking rule #2 is death. If Dad is frustrated and takes the Lord's name in vain (whatever that means), his punishment for breaking rule #3 is death. If a teenager is stubborn and rebellious or if she curses her parents, her punishment for breaking rule #5 is death. ( Exod. 20:9 or Exod 21:17). In the words of philosopher Michael Earl, "How's that for family values?"

So why do we cling to such fossilized traditions as the Bible and its Ten Commandments? I think it's because of our need for symbols. We spend the first decade or two of our lives just learning our cultural symbols (words, numbers, and pictures). We are really the symbol species, Homo symbolicus. This is our great strength and our great weakness. We have the capacity to communicate countless ideas, yet we confuse symbols with reality. We think we understand something simply because we can name it.

We are most easily fooled by symbols that fill our emotional needs. We all have a need for symbols that proclaim our goodness, but in our laziness we often forego integrity for the convenience of tradition. Hence the common but superficial belief in a symbolic "good book" and in the" Ten Commandments." Most of us have been taught that the Bible is both loving and good before we are old enough even to read or examine it for ourselves. But the Bible is not really loving or good: commandment #1 demands that anyone worshipping any religion different from that of Moses must be killed. Have any words in the history of mankind done as much damage as this?

Most of us would agree with the last five commandments of Moses (do not kill, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet your neighbor's home and wife). Yet who remembers the greatest criminal of all in the Old Testament, the one who boasts in Numbers 31 of killing 32,000 innocent men, women, and children, of stealing the booty of an entire city, and of coveting and raping every female virgin? Of course it was Moses, the lawgiver himself...Some things never change.

We do not need to proclaim our goodness by professing faith in the Bible any more than we need to wear suits and yellow ties to show that we mean to do business. We can find more wisdom in William Shakespeare and Robert Ingersoll and more love in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King than in any books of religion.

The War on Christmas - by Charles Wallace: December 2008

The War on Christmas

by Charles Wallace

Have you heard the news? There is a war on Christmas in America. At least that is what conservative pundit Bill O' Reilly and others want you to believe. Though many secularists oppose government endorsement of religious holidays because it violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, calling this a "War on Christmas" is an exaggeration. In this country everyone is free to worship any god they wish. Christians are free to decorate their trees, put wreaths on their doors, hang greenery, light up their homes, have parties and exchange gifts. There were wars against these activities, Mr. O' Reilly. It was not the atheists who waged them. It was Christians.

Neither the date nor the festivities of Christmas are originally Christian. No one knows when Jesus was born. Early Christians did not care. Origen, a biblical scholar in the third century, argued that only sinners celebrated the date of their births. There is no record during this time that Christians celebrated the birth of Christ. December 25 was an important date - - for Romans. In the Julian calendar it was the date of the winter solstice. Mid-winter was a time honor gods like Saturnus, Mithra and Sol. There were great festivities during this time; especially, Saturnalia and New Year's Day. During Saturnalia Romans visited friends, exchanged presents, sang, and held banquets. Romans decorated their doorways with garlands and lit candles. And Christian theologians condemned it all. Tertullian, the first theologian to proclaim god as “Trinity,” was furious at Christians who participated in Mid-winter and New Year's Day indulgences. He argued that the only people who should hang laurel-wreaths on their homes were those who were doomed to the fires of hell. Yet the war on what would become Christmas was being lost even as he preached.

Over time Christmas acquired new elements. Mistletoe was borrowed from the Druids, and Christmas trees began appearing in Germany in the sixteenth century. Folk tales about Father Christmas started in the seventeenth century – the same century a real war on Christmas took place. In 1640 the Puritan Parliament in England banned Christmas for being too pagan and Roman Catholic. Yet their ban lasted less than two decades. Christmas was a tradition that the English people refused to give up.

The only Christian part of Christmas is the nativity, the story of Jesus' birth. It is derived from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Their accounts of the birth of Jesus are irreconcilable, and many historians believe both are fictitious. Maybe U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott was correct when she ruled that Christmas is now a secular holiday. The war on Christmas is over. There is almost nothing Christian in Christmas, and time has proven that its celebration is here to stay.

The War on Christmas - by Charles Wallace: December 2008

Theocracy: are we there yet? by Groff Schroeder

Theocracy: are we there yet?

By Groff Schroeder

     Since at least 1974, a secretive religious group calling themselves “The Family,” “The Fellowship” and “The Christian Mafia” (the neighbors call them “pod people”[1]) quietly provided free room and board in a registered church[2] on C Street in Washington DC to countless Members of the United States Congress, apparently violating local laws, housing covenants and perhaps the US Constitution.  Allegedly, the only requirement for those holding positions of extreme public responsibility in return for their keep in The Fellowship’s church “home” is cult-like secrecy and – well, uh…it is a secret.

     No matter whom the alleged “spirit” leading, feeding and bedding our “representatives,” it appears to have low ethical standards, at least with respect to conflict of interest in an allegedly democratic society – and with whom it does business in less than democratic societies. “The Fellowship's “God-led men” have included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators.”[4] In 1974, Time listed Charles Colson, then recently convicted of obstruction of justice, Jeb Stuart Magruder and Gerald R. Ford (the new 38^th President of the United States) as being associated with “The Fellowship.”

    The Fellowship appears intent on advancing theocratic ideals, organizes the Presidential Prayer Breakfast and provides numerous benefits to American public servants under apparent conflicts of interest. The Fellowship seems to think those with money or political power have been “chosen by God,” and that they therefore need not follow the rules (i.e. laws) everyone else follows (except the secret “Fellowship” rules of course).

     Repeated sex scandals involving The Fellowship recently forced press reports upon “C Street.” Breathlessly reporting on extramarital affairs, most American reporters appeared to studiously ignore an apparent mountain of evidence suggesting a well-organized and funded strategic plan to (at least) infiltrate (and perhaps) compromise the United States government.  Apparently, ensuring that Members of Congress maintain a wholesome sex life is more critical to the maintenance of democracy and freedom than exposing widespread membership in a bizarre cult-like theocratic secret society. Nothing distracts the People like sex, and this distraction appeared just in time to wash the stunning news that former Vice President Richard B. Cheney apparently operated his own private CIA assassination squad from the American “news cycle.”

     Perhaps thousands of Representatives of the People of the United States and government big shots are members of The Fellowship. Imagine the public indignation that might follow reports of American unions operating a secret “home,” providing US Representatives with room, board and “organizing.”  In contrast, it appears few people seem concerned with the theocratic goals of the “The Christian Mafia” or their apparently thorough infiltration into US and other governments. Many Americans even appear to look forward to theocracy in the United States, perhaps basing their anticipation upon how well theocracy has worked out in other nations – like Afghanistan and Iran.

[1] Madsen, Wayne,  EXPOSÉ: THE “CHRISTIAN” MAFIA - Where Those Who Now Run the U.S. Government Came From and Where They Are Taking Us, February 3, 2005, http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htm, retrieved July 18, 2009. 

[2] Tapley, Lance, Does John Baldacci belong to a secretive, powerful, conservative Christian group?, http://www.portlandphoenix.com/features/top/ts_multi/documents/02877355.asp, retrieved July 18, 2009. 

[3] Usher, Tom, March 28, 2008, The Family, Doug Coe, Hillary Clinton et.al., http://www.realliberalchristianchurch.org/wordpress/2008/03/28/the-fellowship-the-family-doug-coe-hillary-clinton-et-al.html accessed July 18, 2009.

[4] Usher, Tom, March 28, 2008, The Family, Doug Coe, Hillary Clinton et.al., http://www.realliberalchristianchurch.org/wordpress/2008/03/28/the-fellowship-the-family-doug-coe-hillary-clinton-et-al.html accessed July 18, 2009.

Time to Regulate and Tax Marijuana Sales? - by Bob Wiley

How much longer can we afford to criminalize the use of marijuana, a product that is much less harmful than America’s most dangerous drugs, alcohol and tobacco?  According to an economic study “Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws”, Harvard Professor Jeffry Miron estimated that Colorado spends $64 million every year in futile efforts to enforce marijuana prohibition and forgoes another $17 million in tax revenue that could have been collected if the product were taxed similarly to alcohol and tobacco.  The study was conducted in 2004 and was endorsed by 500 prominent economists including the late Milton Friedman.  In our current financial crisis, can we afford to continue our draconian prohibition policy that is costing us over $81 million year after year after year?

If marijuana prohibition actually worked, perhaps one could make the argument that the cost was worth the fiscal drain of $81 million annually.  Prohibition efforts have wasted valuable law enforcement and court resources that could have been used to make us safer.  Instead, we keep throwing money at a program that is no more effective than the Dutch boy who put his finger into a leaking dike. Can anyone argue that criminal sanctions to control marijuana's production, sale and use have been effective?  If not, why do we pursue this costly debacle?

Consider this: Marijuana prohibition supports organized crime.  If this innocuous weed were not illegal, it would be nearly worthless to street gangs.  If we had the political courage to regulate, control and tax marijuana we would strike a financial tsunami at the livelihood of street gangs, drug dealers and cartels.  Imagine taking marijuana out of the inventory of illegal drugs sold by our street gangs.  According to the Department of Justice, 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, street level distribution of marijuana is a major source of income for nearly every major gang.  After thirteen years of alcohol prohibition, we ended most of the violence and crime associated with selling illegal alcohol not by making alcohol go away, but by removing its illegal status.

What about the violence in Mexico associated with the illegal production and distribution of marijuana?  Have we considered OUR own contribution to the deaths of over 6000 Mexican citizens last year who were killed in drug prohibition violence?  Be aware, the killings were not caused by the drugs, but instead by the illegal status of the drugs.  Let’s legalize marijuana and eliminate the violence associated with its prohibition.

What could Colorado do with another $81 million in its annual budget?  Perhaps we could fully fund drug treatment and prevention programs with the money we now spend trying to make marijuana go away.  We need to begin a public discussion on this issue.

For more background on Drug Policy Reform, please visit Drug Policy Alliance at http://www.drugpolicy.org.

Tombs and Miracles by Janet Brazill

It's almost enough to make one believe in miracles! The series of events is uncanny. Consider all the facts that had to be discovered to make the case claimed in "The Jesus Family Tomb," by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino. This book, just published, could represent, as the authors claim, "The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History," by proving that the burial place of Jesus of Nazareth and his family has actually been located. Only those with closed minds with no cracks for the light of reason to shine through can ignore such carefully gathered evidence!

The first miracle, as I see it, was that ossuaries (stone boxes containing bones of the deceased) were used ONLY in the first century. So there is no doubt about the period being investigated.

The second miracle is that this particular rock tomb was ever discovered. This happened while they were building suburbs in the Jerusalem area in 1980. As required by Israeli law, construction ceased while the Antiquities Authority carefully mapped the area, then removed the ten ossuaries found there, and resealed the tomb.

The next miracle was that one ossuary was stolen on its way to the holding area, and diverted to the antiquities black market. It was later featured in a documentary because its inscription read "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

Another miracle was that Simcha Jacobovici, after making that documentary, crossed paths with one of the archaeologists who had discovered this tomb, who told him the names on the six ossuaries that had inscriptions: Maria; Joseph; Mariamne; Matthew; Jesus, son of Joseph; and Judah, son of Jesus. Most were common names of that era so no great significance had been noted.

The recent discovery of a complete copy of the apocryphal book, "The Acts of Philip," constitutes the next miracle in our story, because it identifies Philip's sister Mariamne as Mary Magdalene, which now puts a different light on the names in the tomb. Statistics show the chance grouping of those particular names in the small population at that time were extremely low.

When the Antiquities Department collects ossuaries, it allows Rabbis to rebury the bones and the ossuaries are then cleaned for display. Luckily, (another miracle) there was enough residue remaining on the Mariamne and Jesus ossuaries to do some DNA analysis. Only the mitochondrial DNA could be recovered, but that was enough to prove that Marianmne and Jesus were not related. Since tombs normally contain either blood relations or spouses, it is likely that the two were married, and that Judah was their son.

Now the final miracle: the ossuary of "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," was proven to have come from that same tomb, making the statistical chance that this was the family tomb of the Biblical Jesus absolutely compelling!

Each of these "miracles" was, of course, a natural event, resulting in a convergence of facts that suggest a completely different story of the life of Jesus and his fabled Resurrection from that preached by most Christian churches.

The REAL miracle will be if believers are open-minded enough to read this book (which provides much additional material) and then create a new, rational concept of Christianity focusing on what Jesus taught, not who they thought he was.

Toolbox of Tyranny - by Groff Schroeder: October 2008

Toolbox of Tyranny

by Groff Schroeder

By the time you read this, the United State's 2008 Election will probably be over. Thanks to President George W. Bush (rejected by popular vote in 2000 and prevailing in 2004 in Ohio under rather dubious circumstances), the office of President of the United States is radically different than it was on January 20, 2001.

Like kings predating the Magna Carta (or dictators since) America's president is no longer bound by habeas corpus rights, is essentially above the law and inherits virtually complete and unchecked power over all civil and human rights – including human life. However, unlike recent history's dictators and even the god kings and imperial emperors of antiquity, the unchecked power of the US President extends to virtually every point on the surface of the earth.

Because information plays such a key role in politics, intelligence and history, the next president will be able to spy on any of us at any time for almost any reason, free of the relatively minor restrictions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The president may arrest and imprison anyone, anywhere for any reason (including no reason). Presidential restrictions upon assassinations have been eliminated, and the idea of trials to establish innocence or guilt appears to have been abandoned, especially in cases of “terrorism,” which is now quite broadly defined. Furthermore, thanks to the Presidential Records Act Executive Order of November 1, 2001, the People of the United States will probably have access to precious few documents relating to the actions George W. Bush (or any president thereafter).

Countless other human rights, civil liberties and privacy, public health and environmental laws We the People fought (and sometimes died) for during the 20^th have been unenforced, selectively enforced or quietly revoked during the last eight years. Often apparently criminal corporate manipulation of the United States government (made possible by “campaign donations” and “omnibus” bills) appear to have led to the systematic looting of the US Treasury, the revocation of important laws and the nullification of the strong separation of powers and checks and balances of the US Constitution. Perhaps only one check and balance to this power remains – the power of the American People to vote for presidential candidates.

The United States 2008 Election Ballot contained the paired names of sixteen presidential candidates, each meeting identical requirements for inclusion on the ballot. What do you call an election in which most voters have little or no information about most of the candidates running for office? How come just two candidates received almost 24x7 speculative “news” coverage and the exclusive benefit of nationally televised “debates?” Why must We the People employ personal research to educate ourselves about any legal candidate for the most powerful office on earth – let alone almost 90% of them?

No matter who is elected, it will be months before America's next president takes office, which leaves plenty of time for shreddin... uh... cleaning out those incriminat... uh... useless documents sitting around in filing cabinets and safes in the White House and vice president's residence. After all, although our representatives are no longer impeachable for violating the Constitution after leaving office they are still subject to prosecution for violations of the law and there appears to be plenty of evidence of that – at least for now.

Toolbox of Tyranny - by Groff Schroeder: November 2008

Triumph of Reason Forensics - by Groff Schroeder: September 2008

Triumph of Reason Forensics

by Groff Schroeder

The Greek philosopher Archimedes first employed the methods of science in the investigation of an alleged crime. While the modern mythology of the invention of forensic science involves a gold crown, a possibly dishonest goldsmith, a bathtub and exclamations of “Eureka” as Archimedes supposedly ran naked through the street, the true story is probably a bit more complicated.¹

Some 2200 years later, incredibly detailed, highly public scientific investigations including systematic preservation of the crime scene, thorough photographic documentation, careful (even microscopic) evidence collection, the maintenance of an evidentiary chain of custody and painstaking scientific analysis have become de rigueur in the investigation of almost every crime. Forensics can help to identify the sources of engineering failures (preventing future problems), can identify clever perpetrators evading responsibility and has helped the American People to become very familiar with Due Process of Law. Fatal celebrity misadventures, petty criminal acts, heinous murders, hijackings, airliner crashes and building collapses fueled countless sensationalized news reports, TV documentaries and advanced textbooks - until September 11, 2001, when intensely public, highly detailed scientific forensic investigation suddenly stopped.

Instead of careful and systematic evidence protection and gathering at the crime scene (what the surviving firefighters called “the site”), “clean up” of “ground zero” (formerly meaning the center of a nuclear blast) began immediately - despite what we now know (and the government knew then) were incredibly dangerous air quality conditions. Although no steel frame building ever collapsed before (or since) due to fire, World Trade Center steel, (whose thorough analysis should have contributed to numerous textbooks and scientific reports - especially the super-sized steel of WTC 7) was quickly removed from its evidentiary context and melted down. The National Transportation Safety Board failed to investigate even one of the plane crashes, violating Federal Law. President George W. Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit congressional investigations² of the mass murder of almost 3000 American Citizens. There are apparently no airport security videos of the alleged hijackers boarding the participating aircraft. It remains difficult to access useful information about the crime scene. The list goes on.

A Congressional investigation, performed in secret by the same alphabet soup of agencies that failed the People of the United States on 9/11 was apparently not operational in May 2002 and much of their December 2002 report remains “redacted” (secret) even today. On November 27, 2002, enduring public demands finally forced the initiation of a public investigation. After Henry Kissinger resigned the directorship to avoid “conflict of interest,”³ Philip Zelikow (Condoleeza Rice’s “intellectual soul mate”⁴) became the director. It was not until April 2004 that President Bush “answered every question [the independent commission] posed to him” about the attacks – and then not under oath, with Vice President Cheney by his side and without a stenographer or recording equipment⁵ - not exactly standard operating procedure.

Almost no forensic investigation of the “new Pearl Harbor” in New York City on September 11, 2001 took place. If standard forensic procedure and Due Process of Law founded the investigation, many of the events of September 11, 2001 would not be mysterious anomalies inducing questions and speculation, but a matter of public record providing useful architecture, aviation, criminal, engineering, legal, metallurgical and structural information for the future.

Two Spirits - by Gary King: November 2011

TWO SPIRITS interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at a time when the world wasn't simply divided into male and female and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.

Fred Martinez was a nadleehi, a male-bodied person with a feminine nature, a special gift according to his ancient Navajo culture.  The place where two discriminations meet is a dangerous place to live, and Fred became one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at sixteen.  Between tradition and controversy, sex and spirit, and freedom and fear, lies the truth - the bravest choice you can make is to be yourself.

The variations of Human Sexuality are great, many cultural and spiritual beliefs, such as multiple genders, are understood by science and honored in many regions of the world.

Gary King was the Bicultural Arts Program Coordinator and an instructor at Soaring Eagle Native American Survival School in Northern Wisconsin.  In 1972, the American Indian Movement became involved with schools, taught by Traditional factions of many tribes to enable their survival.  Indian children had for many years been stolen from their families and placed in schools run by Christian churches with the expressed purpose of ending their language and beliefs.  Ending their culture.  Most of those children suffered abuse.  Their language is Important to the understanding of their culture, values are changed when they are translated using “Christian English.”  Years of struggle have led to Tribal Education Systems (1979) and the beginning in 1994 of the Onieda Turtle School.  By 2000 the Onieda Nation was able to evict the Norbertine Priests and close St. Francis.

American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That henceforth / On and after August 11, 1978, /

it shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.

The highest suicide rates are amongst Native American and Gay Youth.  These two groups have been tormented and told to change who they are.  These children are not loved when told they are sinners, that they are not good enough, that they would be better off dead.   Gary has been a teacher, an advocate in programs on Domestic Violence, a facilitator for LBGT youth and is Director of the Colorado Springs chapter of FFRF. 

The Freedom From Religion Foundation stands for the Constitutional Freedom of Religion, Creed or Belief as well as the Freedom not to believe, endowed to each individual as Our First in the Bill of Rights.  The Foundation believes that Freedom is not possible without the basic Freedom from religion being imposed by another.  When the beliefs of one persons cultural and spiritual identity is made to comply, by law, with the religions of the majority, this is a transgress, a disregard, and tramples on the Constitutional rights of that person.

War Precludes Security - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views January 2010

War makes it legal to kill people on the industrial scale. Success is uncertain, and killing both “combatants” (formerly soldiers) and “non-combatants” (formerly civilians) is acceptable - under certain circumstances. International law(1) and ethical ideals forbid "pre-emptive" war against people who might attack in the future – but allows people under attack to defend themselves with defensive and aggressive deadly force. Therefore, pre-emptive war appears to facilitate, if not guarantee, the outcome it supposedly prevents.

Even if your cause is just and your contribution small, the violent death or maiming of each child, mother, father, brother, sister or friend increases the probability that one or more survivors will develop the lifelong desire to kill or maim you, your child, mother, father, brother, sister or friend – perhaps even “all of the above.” The victimization of children and the obliteration of families appear especially likely to create the desire for vengeance at any cost. It appears that war fuels a positive feedback loop of violence by fostering hatred, misunderstanding, murder, terror, vengeance and a need for retribution. Those who profit from war rarely appear to participate in its more violent aspects – other than supplying the implements.

War is cruel, expensive, irrational and unfair, often creating significant morbidity and mortality among combatants and civilians alike. Abstract concepts such as borders, honor, nationalism, and loyalty coupled with attempts to “ensure that no one has died in vain” often guarantee that wars continue to kill long after the outcome is inevitable. Ironically, although war requires that participants surrender prohibitions against killing, taking by force and other moral ideals, religious beliefs often play crucial roles in the cause, furtherance, justification and rationalization of war. While “just” wars winning human freedom are not unprecedented, criminal war (to obtain strategic resources) and profligate war (such as the Korean War), appear more common.

Although advocates cite technological advancements as positive outcomes, war usually prompts the development and use of the most destructive, horrendous and terrifying technologies imaginable, and the development of environmentally sound or socially beneficial technologies usually appear only incidentally. Armed conflict usually creates anarchistic “war zones,” devoid of neutral law enforcement and conducive to most any immoral or unethical act imaginable. Furthermore, the urgency and secrecy of war conceals not only tactics and strategy, but also potential corruption, incompetence, profiteering and duplicity. Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized war’s unique contribution to society, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”(2)

War seeks to provide security through the desperate, intentional and wholesale demolition of human beings, environments and infrastructure, even though history suggests that only assistance, cooperation, friendship, mutual respect and trust can win peace and security. In the process, war destroys not only people and their security, but also due process of law, civil rights, human freedom and social infrastructure.

Pre-emptive war is a failed military strategy previously employed by some of the most infamous criminal regimes in world history. Until We the People forbid it, we will continue to suffer from its negative effects on human beings and experience severe threats to civil liberties, human rights and economic, personal and national security.

1. Statemaster-Encyclopedia, "Crime Against Humanity,"

, accessed May 11, 2009.

2. Eisenhower, Dwight D., Chance for Peace Address, Washington, DC, April 16, 1953.

We can know - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views May 2011

We can know

Throughout history, countless prophets from countless religions have issued countless prophecies predicting the end of the world. Radio personality Harold Camping and the website www.wecanknow.com, predict the “rapture of believers” will occur on May 21, 2011 (this weekend), with destruction of the earth and universe to follow on October 21. In 1992, Camping previously predicted these events would occur in September 1994.

While some take such predictions seriously, liquidating their assets etc., others believe the prophecies of Michael Nostradamus have already predicted the future. Between 1550 and 1567, Nostradamus published more than 6000 self-described prophecies, many in vague “quatrains” like those in The Prophecies (1555). Through recognizing the prophecy after the event has occurred (“post diction”), perhaps up to 60 of his prophecies have been interpreted as correct. Despite his reputation as history's most successful prophet, Nostradamus' success rate is apparently only about 1 percent.

Today, devotees of prophecy need look no further than their own lives. Thanks to engineering, mathematics, and science, everyone makes correct prophecy – a very large number of times every day. When we set an alarm clock, turn an auto ignition key, cross a bridge, take a prescription medication, or do virtually anything involving technology, we correctly predict the future. We can know that unless something is wrong, the alarm will go off, the car will start, the bridge will hold, the medication will work, – and so on. While problems do occur, your prophecy success rate dwarfs Nostradamus' at well over 99 percent.

The power to predict the future is the gold standard of science, a self correcting method of observation, experiment, publication, and competition that evolves mathematical relationships correctly modeling nature. Engineers employ these mathematical relationships to design, construct, and test the technologies we trust.

Isaac Newton's kinematic equations, published in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), model the behavior of objects in gravitational fields with great accuracy and precision. Given the mass of a projectile, the energy consumed, and the angle at which the projectile is released, Newton's equations predict the velocity of the projectile, its path, its greatest altitude, and where and when it will land. Similarly, engineers use James Clerk Maxwell's equations (and many others) to make your auto go. Equations of statics, dynamics, and harmonic motion predict bridge, building, and highway behavior. Statistical equations help physicians and pharmacists correctly predict how people – and pathologies - react to medications.

Thanks to the hard work of a myriad of unappreciated scientists and engineers, every one of us successfully predicts the future much more correctly and often than Nostradamus. Furthermore, there is no need to interpret our predictions - they are obviously correct, first time and every time. You can bet your life on it.

Although science and engineering are not perfect, their mathematical models predict the future behavior of machines, materials, organisms, structures, and many other things – correctly, quantitatively, and repeatedly. Science and engineering does not require faith, we trust our lives to technology daily because we know it works.

What will happen on May 21, 2011? No one can be sure. However, thanks to the equations of statistics and recorded data, we can know it is likely that our bridges will hold, our medications will work, and our cars will start - and that the “rapture of believers” will not.

Published May 19, 2011 with the quotation below.  

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.   Isaac Newton

What Do You Think?

What follows is a synopsis of Newdow v. Roberts, a federal lawsuit (http://www.ffrf.org/legal/warrenComplaint.pdf) filed by physician and lawyer Michael Newdow against the Honorable John Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court et. al., claiming violations of the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America during the January 20, 2009 Inauguration of the President of the United States of America. 

Causes of Action

Newdow v Roberts Count 1: "THE ALTERATION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL OATH OF OFFICE SPECIFIED IN ARTICLE II OF THE CONSTITUTION, TO BE PERPETRATED BY DEFENDANT ROBERTS WITH NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER, VIOLATES THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE."

Newdow v Roberts Count 2: "GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED INVOCATIONS TO GOD AND BENEDICTIONS IN THE NAME OF GOD, PROVIDED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE PRESIDENT BY GOVERNMENT-INVITED CLERGY, VIOLATE THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE"

Newdow v Roberts Count 3: "THE ALTERATION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL OATH OF OFFICE, TO BE PERPETRATED BY DEFENDANT ROBERTS, AND THE GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED, CLERGY-LED INVOCATION AND BENEDICTION, TO BE PERPETRATED BY THE REMAINING DEFENDANTS, VIOLATE THE FREE EXERCISE CLAUSE"

Newdow v Roberts Count 4: "THE ALTERATION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL OATH OF OFFICE, TO BE PERPETRATED BY DEFENDANT ROBERTS, AND THE GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED, CLERGY-LED INVOCATION AND BENEDICTION, TO BE PERPETRATED BY THE REMAINING DEFENDANTS, VIOLATE RFRA"

*RFRA is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act

Newdow v Roberts Count 5: "THE ALTERATION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL OATH OF OFFICE, TO BE PERPETRATED BY DEFENDANT ROBERTS, AND THE GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED, CLERGY-LED INVOCATION AND BENEDICTION, TO BE PERPETRATED BY THE REMAINING DEFENDANTS, VIOLATE THE DUE PROCESS CLAUSE OF THE FIFTH AMENDMENT"

Newdow v Roberts Count 6: "THE ALTERATION OF THE PRESIDENTIAL OATH OF OFFICE, TO BE PERPETRATED BY DEFENDANT ROBERTS, AND THE GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED, CLERGY-LED INVOCATION AND BENEDICTION, TO BE PERPETRATED BY THE REMAINING DEFENDANTS, ARE VOID AS AGAINST PUBLIC POLICY"

Prayer [sic] for Relief  

"I. To declare that unauthorized addition of “so help me God” to the constitutionally prescribed presidential oath of office by the individual administering that oath to the President violates the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, as well as 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb et seq. (Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA));"

"II. To declare that the government-sponsored use of any clergy (much less an openly Christian clergy) at a presidential inauguration violates the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, as well as 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb et seq. (Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA));"

"III. To enjoin Defendant Roberts, in his official capacity and in his individual capacity, from

altering the constitutionally-prescribed text of the presidential oath of office while administering that oath to the President-elect at the January 20, 2009 inauguration, as well as at any future presidential inauguration;"

"IV. To enjoin the remaining Defendants – and/or similarly situated government officials – from utilizing any clergy to engage in any religious acts at the January 20, 2009 inauguration, as well as at any future presidential inauguration;"

"V. In the alternative, to enjoin these Defendants – and/or similarly situated government officials – from utilizing clergy to engage in overtly Christian religious acts at the January 20, 2009 inauguration, as well as at any future presidential inauguration;"

"VI. To allow Plaintiffs to recover costs, expert witness fees, attorney fees, etc. as may be allowed by law; and"

"VII. To provide such other and further relief as the Court may deem proper."

To join the Reverend Dr. Newdow as a plaintiff in this case as an individual or organization please visit http://1000plaintiffsfornewdowvroberts.blogspot.com/ before February 22, 2009.  Thank you. 

What Happened to US? - by Groff Schroeder: November 2008

What Happened to US?

by Groff Schroeder

More than two hundred years ago, We the People created a democratic republic, the United States of America (US), founded upon the Enlightenment ideas of democracy, secularism, separation of powers and human freedom. Thousands of Americans fought, suffered and died in the Revolutionary War – and many wars thereafter – establishing and protecting the US Constitution and the civil, human and political freedoms its Amendments define.

Sixty years ago, we were anything but divided. We had just helped to win the Second World War (in which many millions died) and were just starting a new “cold” war that would threaten earth with mutually assured destruction (MAD) for more than forty years. We were proud Americans – happy to endure any sacrifice (including paying taxes) supporting our democratic republic, our armed forces, our fellow citizens and our way of life.

We thought of ourselves as “one nation, indivisible,” until 1954. In the 70's, many of us were still “proud US taxpayers” – even as Nixon’s “PACs” opened doors to political “donations.” By 1980, we wanted government “off our back,” (apparently unaware it would move into our pants).

Rather than an integral part of America’s “E Pluribus Unum” (from many one), today’s Americans often label themselves as “left” or “right” – and dare not converse with each other about issues critically important to our freedoms. The friendly debates about political or religious issues that once forged common ground and mutual respect have become ideological, rigid, uncomfortable and unproductive.

The American People appear to have become so thoroughly and extensively divided that when a single person with a gun entered sequential classrooms on the Virginia Tech Campus, systematically killing people one by one there appears to be no evidence that the victims even tried to work together. Did they all think of themselves as individuals so much (or as members of their label groups) that it never occurred to them they could work together to save at least some of their lives by overpowering the shooter as a group?

How can We the People be so easily turned against our fellow citizens – and why do so many appear to have applied the (often highly effective) strategies of “divide and conquer” against their own nation? How can a person paid by the National Rifle Association become the Washington lobbyist for the States United to Prevent Gun Violence? If there are paid “moles” inside citizen’s lobbying groups, how can we be sure similar shills (secretly paid to work against the goals of a group from within) do not receive salaries from America’s media giants - or the United States Congress?

When did the We the People of the United States of America stop seeing our fellow citizens as “us,” and when did we stop asking what we could do for our country and start asking what can the country do for me (or my special interest group)? How much longer can American’s expect the United States of America to cater to narrow interpretations of rigid political ideologies at the expense of the common good?

Until American citizens again become “We the People” - dedicated to our Constitution, government, nation and fellow citizens, the United States will remain unable to implement proven solutions to imminent economic, health care and military crises; corruption, debt, overpopulation, pollution and prisons will continue to expand; and our children’s future’s will be much less free, healthy and rich than our own.

What Happened to US? - by Groff Schroeder: November 2008

What I Want for Christmas - by John Patrick Michael Murphy: December 2008

What I Want for Christmas

by John Patrick Michael Murphy

One hundred years ago, Robert Ingersoll, America's greatest orator and best-known agnostic, penned the following wish list for Christmas:

"If I had the power to produce exactly what I want for next Christmas, I would have all the kings and emperors resign and allow the people to govern themselves.

What I Want for Christmas - by John Patrick Michael Murphy

"I would have all the nobility crop their titles and give their lands back to the people. I would have the Pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God -- is not infallible -- but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their "flocks" to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

"I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.

"I would like to see all the politicians changed to statesmen -- to men who long to make their country great and free -- to men who care more for public good than private gain -- men who long to be of use.

"I would like to see all the editors of papers and magazines agree to print the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid all slander and misrepresentation, and to let the private affairs of the people alone.

"I would like to see drunkenness and prohibition both abolished.

"I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison. Cruelty hardens and degrades, kindness reforms and ennobles.

"I would like to see the millionaires unite and form a trust for the public good.

"I would like to see a fair division of profits between capital and labor, so that the toiler could save enough to mingle a little June with the December of his life.

"I would like to see an international court established in which to settle disputes between nations, so that armies could be disbanded and the great navies allowed to rust and rot in perfect peace.

"I would like to see the whole world free -- free from injustice -- free from superstition.

"This will do for next Christmas. The following Christmas, I may want more."

Posterity is the eternity of the philosopher. For over a century Ingersoll's writings have been published. Time and time again the clergy had him investigated and could only find a manlier man than themselves, who proclaimed the religion of humanity for this world and proposed that we let the gods run the heavens.

What I Want for Christmas - by John Patrick Michael Murphy: December 2008

This article originally appeared in the Colorado Springs Independent in December 2001 and Robert G. Ingersoll first published “What I Want for Christmas” in The Arena, Boston, Massachusetts in December 1897.

What Is A Freethinker? by Dan Barker

What Is A Freethinker?
free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority or established belief… No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.

How do freethinkers know what is true?

Clarence Darrow once noted, "I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose." Freethinkers are naturalistic. Truth is the degree to which a statement corresponds with reality. Reality is limited to that which is directly perceivable through our natural senses or indirectly ascertained through the proper use of reason. Reason is a tool of critical thought that limits the truth of a statement according to the strict tests of the scientific method…

Do freethinkers have a basis for morality?

There is no great mystery to morality. Most freethinkers employ the simple yardsticks of reason and kindness. As author Barbara Walker notes: "What is moral is simply what does not hurt others. Kindness . . . sums up everything." Most freethinkers are humanists, basing morality on human needs, not imagined "cosmic absolutes." This also embraces a respect for our planet, including the other animals, and feminist principles of equality. Moral dilemmas involve a conflict of values, requiring a careful use of reason to weigh the outcomes. Freethinkers argue that religion promotes a dangerous and inadequate "morality" based on blind obedience, unexamined ultimatums, and "pie-in-the-sky" rewards of heaven or gruesome threats of hell. Freethinkers try to base actions on their consequences to real, living human beings.

Do freethinkers have meaning in life?

Freethinkers know that meaning must originate in a mind. Since the universe is mindless and the cosmos does not care, you must care, if you wish to have purpose. Individuals are free to choose, within the limits of humanistic morality…

Doesn't the complexity of life require a designer?

The complexity of life requires an explanation. Darwin's theory of evolution, with cumulative nonrandom natural selection "designing" for billions of years, has provided the explanation. A "Divine Designer" is no answer because the complexity of such a creature would be subject to the same scrutiny itself. Even a child knows to ask: "If God made everything, then who made God?" Freethinkers recognize that there is much chaos, ugliness and pain in the universe for which any explanation of origins must also account.

Why are freethinkers opposed to religion?

Freethinkers are convinced that religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition. Most freethinkers consider religion to be not only untrue, but harmful. It has been used to justify war, slavery, sexism, racism, homophobia, mutilations, intolerance, and oppression of minorities. The totalitarianism of religious absolutes chokes progress…

Do freethinkers have a particular political persuasion?

No, freethought is a philosophical, not a political, position. Freethought today embraces adherents of virtually all political persuasions, including capitalists, libertarians, socialists, communists, Republicans, Democrats, liberals and conservatives. There is no philosophical connection, for example, between atheism and communism. Some freethinkers, such as Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, were staunch capitalists; and there have been communistic groups which were deeply religious, such as the early Christian church. North American freethinkers agree in their support of state/church separation.

Is atheism/humanism a religion?

No. Atheism is not a belief. It is the "lack of belief" in god(s). Lack of faith requires no faith. Atheism is indeed based on a commitment to rationality, but that hardly qualifies it as a religion. Freethinkers apply the term religion to belief systems which include a supernatural realm, deity, faith in "holy" writings and conformity to an absolute creed. Secular humanism has no god, bible or savior. It is based on natural rational principles. It is flexible and relativistic - it is not a religion… Freethought is reasonable. Freethought allows you to do your own thinking. A plurality of individuals thinking, free from restraints of orthodoxy, allows ideas to be tested, discarded or adopted. Freethinkers see no pride in the blind maintenance of ancient superstitions or self-effacing prostration before divine tyrants known only through primitive "revelations." … Freethought is truly free.

Who are the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs? by Marsha Abelman

The Freethinkers of Colorado Springs has been sponsoring this ad in The Independent for about 14 years! The FTCS was begun as a support group by people who were shocked by discriminatory legislation passed in 1992 (a little item tacked onto the Colorado constitution called "Amendment 2"). The original members were from varied backgrounds, but they did have a couple of things in common: a fear that Colorado Springs would become an intolerant place to live and a desire to be agents for tolerance and inclusiveness. The group soon morphed into more than just a social bunch, because its members were the kind of people who wanted to be involved in their world.

The Freethinkers of Colorado Springs has monthly meetings at which we have educational lectures. We are always seeking thought-provoking speakers. We also currently have several projects that members work to advance and several sub-groups that serve as support groups and social outlets:

The FTCS was invited last year to become part of the Air Force Academy's SPIRE program. "SPIRE" means Special Program in Religious Education, and various religious groups have for years held weekly meetings on the Academy to support their denominations' cadet members. FTCS is now present on the Academy as a support group for interested cadets, and we thank the Academy for the invitation. Several members work as hosts of the FTCS weekly meetings and occasional barbeques or other functions.

There is a new Parent Group in FTCS. This group consists of several families who want to have fun days and field trips that are nature- or science-based for their kids. The group "supports the values of respect and tolerance and promotes humanist philosophies which will enable the kids to feel free to speak their minds, ask questions without fear, and have a solid sense of belonging." A recent event that the children enjoyed was a "tent city" in a family's back yard. Soon the kids and their parents will be enjoying a field trip to the Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. The kids have "creative control" of their group, and they have suggested to their parents nature walks, movies, digging for fossils, museums, science projects, festivals, and free play days.

If you like hiking, have we got a lively group for you! One of our Board members is a hiking fanatic who hosts frequent area hikes. Some hikes are geared for beginner or intermediate hikers, some are "whoa, Nelly!" mountain excursions. Members of the group often go out on 2- or 3-person hikes, also.

Is writing your talent? If you have 550 words' worth of wisdom about some free thought subjects, we solicit your writing for this weekly space. Followers of this space will remember the earliest columns from some of the original organizers of FTCS, writing about some of the challenges in Colorado Springs at that time. There is always a need to courageously speak up for tolerance, for human rights or for preserving the endangered separation of church and state.

In addition to all the above, some members host book clubs, movie nights or women's dinners. Some members are activists on their own for women's rights or for peace. FTCS also has monthly socials where members eat, drink and discuss. Do you have suggestions for yet another group? What do you want to participate in?

Who can you trust? by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views July 2010

Who can you trust? 

by Groff Schroeder

Injury, illness, limited understanding, and ever-increasing need for access to private information, intimate anatomy, and financial resources have forced patients to trust hospitals for generations.  The vulnerability of patients and the diversity, opportunity and potential rewards of unethical behavior in medicine, especially in the context of desperate family members and literally life and death power of providers, prompted the evolution medical ethics such as Informed Consent over more than 2500 years.  While governments are often assumed to enforce regulations (laws) governing hospitals, private organizations may play a more important role through hospital accreditation. 

Despite these ancient, legal, and societal motivations, patients still appear to routinely endure unethical experiences, especially in America’s religious hospitals.  Although about 13% of America’s hospitals (serving about 5.3 million people) are church run and perceived as religious charities, public funds dominate their financial resources.  One study found that Medicare provides about 27% of public hospital funds, versus 36% for church run hospitals.  The rest of church run hospital funding comes from county appropriations (31%), investments (30%) and not necessarily religious charitable contributions (5%).  Apparently, only about 0.0015% of religious hospital funding comes from the churches that administrate them.  As for charity care, religious hospitals write off as charity care only about 1.9% of their gross patient revenue, versus 0.8% for for-profit hospitals and about 5.1% for secular public hospitals (1). 

In addition paying to fund church run hospitals, We the People might also pay with our lives if we need medical procedures operating churches deny under claims of “freedom of religion.”  Although religious prohibitions vary, virtually all church run hospitals deny reproductive services such as birth control information, procedures and supplies – usually even in cases of rape and incest.  No matter what the patient’s religious beliefs (if any), Catholic run hospitals prohibit all abortions – even when the mother will die and the pregnancy cannot survive. 

While churches can choose whether or not to operate hospitals, patients often seek medical care as a matter of life and death and are often unaware of hospital enforcement of religious law.  Despite ideals such as the “golden rule,” teachings prohibiting dishonesty, and a “patient bill of rights” promising “impartial access to care,” “informed consent,” etc., church run hospitals rarely appear to inform patients that compliance with church law (surrendering their own freedom of religion) is a prerequisite for admission.  Since few patients would knowingly admit themselves into hospitals denying possibly life saving medical information, procedures, and supplies, the absence of information regarding enforcement of church law and concomitant denial of medical procedures in church run hospital admissions contracts appears to successfully mislead patients. 

What is a patient to do?  The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) has offered hospital accreditation since 1953 and accepts complaints related to “quality of care” issues including “patient rights, care of patients, safety, infection control, medications and security” at www.jointcommission.org/GeneralPublic/Complaint.  Sadly, it appears that professional medical groups and government agencies avoid involvement in hospital regulation, making patient requests for investigation and enforcement of possible ethical and contractual violations difficult.  As for appeals to the churches operating the hospitals, it appears they have already demonstrated their preference for the exercise of political and religious power over the equality, lives, reproductive rights, and religious freedoms of their patients.   



1. Uttley, L., Pawelko, R., No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religious Hospitals in the United States, MergerWatch, 2002, http://www.mergerwatch.org/pdfs/bp_no_strings.pdf , accessed July 19, 2010. 

Who Decides Our Death? by Jan Brazill

     To quote Dave Farber, “We all have to die someday, if we live long enough.” So, being Westerners with a tradition of independence, we should insist that we be allowed to die as we wish.

     Alas, certain religions feel they have the right to pre-empt our wishes, telling us we must die a “natural” death to be ready to meet their Lord. When Oregon passed a referendum legalizing physician-assisted suicide in 1994, the Catholic Church worked to overturn it, forcing another vote in 1997, but that vote to repeal was soundly defeated by Oregon voters (60%-40%) and the law was passed. 

     Next, the National Right-to-Life organization tried a lawsuit, subsequently dismissed. Then Catholic U.S. Representative Henry Hyde attempted an override of the Ore­gon people’s will by amending the Controlled Sub­stances Act to re­voke the license of any physician who writes prescriptions for life-ending medication. However, the Justice De­partment ruled (in June, 1998) that this would not apply because prescriptions written under such state law do con­stitute a legitimate medical purpose.

     This opposition to euthanasia is the result of the 1975 Bishop’s Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, which declared war on both abortion and euthana­sia. The Catholic Church is inflexible in promoting this dogma, regardless of circumstances or the suffering it may cause.

     Contrast that with the 1974 statement by prominent Humanists: “We hold that the tolerance, acceptance, or enforcement of the unnecessary suffering of others is immoral. We believe in the value and dignity of the individual person. This requires respectful treatment, which entails the right to reasonable self-determination. No rational morality can categorically forbid the termination of life if it has been blighted by some horrible malady for which all known remedial measures are unavailing.”

     There is a distinction between passive and active euthanasia. Passive euthanasia is the withdrawal of extraordinary life-prolonging techniques, such as intravenous feeding and resuscitation, or not initiating such treatment, when the situation is hopeless. Active euthanasia is the administration of increasing dosages of drugs (such as morphine) to relieve suffering, until the dosage, of necessity, reaches the lethal stage.

     Washington has now become the second state to pass a Death with Dignity Act allowing active euthanasia with important safeguards. Since then, bills that seek to improve end-of-life care have been introduced in nine state legislatures around the country. Seven states have introduced Death with Dignity laws, and two states have proposed laws that require physicians to inform patients of all of their end-of-life options.

     Colorado needs such legislation to insure freedom in deciding end-of-life treatment without religious interference. The preservation of individual rights is one of the foundations of our democracy. What right could be more important than the right to end your life with an easy death?

     Catholics should heed the words of John Paul II, in a speech given at the World Day of Peace, January 1, 1991: “To deny an individual complete freedom of conscience…or to attempt to impose a particular way of seeing the truth, constitutes a violation of that individual’s most personal rights.”

     Actually, this sentiment was given in response to perceived persecution of Catholics. Perhaps it is true that the oppressed make the worst oppressors.

Who do you trust? - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views April 21, 2011

Who do you trust?

By Groff Schroeder

Between 1630 and 1643, “Puritans” seeking religious freedom emigrated to America. Despite experiencing religious repression in Britain, the Puritan's Massachusetts Bay Colony punished citizens like Roger Williams for advocating religious tolerance. Williams founded Rhode Island upon religious freedom and the separation of church and state in 1636, and in 1644, wrote against “...enforced uniformity of religion.” Between 1650 and 1700, the Massachusetts Bay Colony expelled or executed numerous Quakers, Catholics, “witches,” and others for religious violations.

Although religious animus cooled, economic tensions flared in the 1700s. The East India Company was going broke selling tea to Americans who preferred tea smuggled from Holland. When the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773 eliminated taxes on the East India Company but continued the “taxation without representation” Americans abhorred, a boycott – then a Revolutionary War, followed.

July 4, 1776's, Declaration of Independence required the creation of “The Great Seal of the United States” for official correspondence. The Great Seal and its three dicta (mottoes), “E Pluribus Unum“ (out of many, one), “Anuit Coeptis” (a nod to the beginning), and "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (new order for the ages), was approved in 1782. "E Pluribus Unum" has appeared on US currency since 1795.

America's brilliant founders drafted the United States Constitution at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia “...to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The Constitution prohibits “Bribery,” omits “God,” “corporation,” “free market,” etc., and was followed in 1791 by the ratification of the “Bill of Rights,” the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. The first two clauses of the First Amendment state, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Despite this history, in 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed the Coinage Act mandating "In God We Trust" on US currency.  In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower's signature made “In God we trust” the "official" motto of the United States and inserted, “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance.  On March 24, 2011, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives passed resolution HR 2102 H.Con.Res 13 "reaffirming" "In God We Trust" as the official motto of the US. On January 21, 2010, the United States Supreme Court upheld corporate citizenship rights including unlimited paid political advertising (“free” speech).

Legal trickery creating corporate personhood from incorrect head notes on an 1886 railroad decision and legislation “reaffirming” a US motto invoking “God” are egregious attacks on America's most important founding principles. If denying food and health care to minor, disabled, and elderly taxpayers to fund corporate tax breaks and “subsidies” is not taxation without representation, what is? If invoking “God” in government, on currency, and in public schools does not “establish” religion, what would?

Should “In God, we trust,” ignoring conspicuous falsehoods and surrendering our responsibilities to a deity, while America's neediest taxpayers subsidize tax sheltered corporations to “drown” America “in a bathtub?”  Or will We the People step up, trust America's founder's, exercise our political power, proudly contribute, and work to solve our problems together as “Out of many, one?”

Who do you trust?

by Groff Schroeder

April 15, 2011

Appeared April 21-27, 2011 in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs "Freethought Views" column in the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. 

Adolf Hitler

Women Without Superstition by William Edelin

Women Without Superstition...No Gods...No Masters..."is a very moving...educational and inspirational book. Ninety women are portrayed...women who had virtually no status or respect as individuals. And yet, what a tremendous difference they made in the life of our nation as they challenged the Christian church, the clergy and organized orthodox religion."

Two women in the book are such inspiring examples of courage...guts...intelligence and integrity.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON wrote "We need the courage to go to the source and strike the blow at the fountain of all tyranny, religious superstition, priestly power and canon law. I can tell you that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies."

She was the author of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women's right to vote. She was the first to call for women's suffrage in the United States. She fought tirelessly to free women from legal constraints and from the blight of religious superstition.

Stanton wrote and said over and over again..."when women understand that religion is a human invention...and that bibles...prayer books...catechisms...and encyclical letters are all only emanations from the brain of a man...they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of "thus saith the Lord."

She said again and again in every way possible that the bible has been used by men for the purpose of keeping women in a state of subjection.

Throughout her life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton suffered abuses and humiliations, and yet she never faltered in her commitment to truth and the emancipation of women, for humanity's sake.

MARGARET SANGER wrote: "If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for women. Its greatest outrage upon her was to forbid her to control the function of motherhood under any circumstances...thus limiting her life's work to bringing forth and rearing children. Coincidental with this...the churchmen deprived her of her place in and before the courts...in the schools...in art and society...."

In 1914 she wrote "the first right of every child is to be wanted. Over population is the root of the most serious problems in the world." She was the first to use the phrase "birth control" and she campaigned for "the right of every woman to total sovereignty over her own person."

No safe method of birth control was known in America in 1912. Women were not only trapped into economic and social slavery, they were also in biological slavery.

The church hated her and the medical profession denounced her. She was often jailed and once had to flown to England to avoid a potential forty five year sentence.

When the weight of governmental and clerical opinion fell heavily upon her, Ghandi, who in his own country realized the blight of overpopulation, came to her defense. So did Clarence Darrow and H.G. Wells.

One of the greatest tributes paid her or any historical figure came from the pen of H.G. Wells who wrote:

"Alexander the Great changed a few boundaries and killed a few men. Both he and Napoleon were forced into fame by circumstances outside of themselves and by currents of the time, but Margaret Sanger made currents and circumstances. When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine."

As we revere those whose lives stood for truth against popular custom, political power and clerical arrogance and ignorance...we must remember all of those women who stood boldly by their convictions with their written and spoken words.

The power of the written word! The immortality of the written word. Great ideas are a force for change. There is an immortality in that, as the great Roman and Greek thinkers 3000 years ago still remind us. "The spoken word perishes: the written word remains.". Vox audit perit: litera scripta manet.

It is through their written words that Stanton and Sanger...Emerson...Jung...Jefferson and Madison...still today inspire...motivate...encourage...teach...awaken...stimulate...us still...even more so than in their own time.

Women Without Superstition...No Gods...No Masters...still giants of today in our own time...and we stand on their shoulders and carry their courage and their truth...onward.

You get what you pay for - by Groff Schroeder: Freethought Views October 2010

Despite low tax rates for the industrialized world, many American journalists, politicians, and pundits oppose taxation and act as if capitalism and corporate power were enshrined in the US Constitution, perhaps somewhere in the First Amendment.  We are told what a burden it is to support our country and our communities with our tax dollars – and how much better everything will be when corporations profit from services government currently delivers at cost.  Before we privatize public schools or cough up “co-pays” for police and fire services, perhaps we should examine the role corporations play in American elections, government, and taxation. 

Strange legal precedents grant corporations political rights and equate "free speech" with “campaign donations” (even in the context of conflicts of interest), creating elected officials who appear to represent immortal corporate “citizens” rather than the human American Citizens they are handsomely paid to represent.  The raw political power held by the “military industrial complex” and similar corporate groups are legendary, and as corporate political power increased, tax revenue from large corporations apparently decreased. 

Tax breaks, “loopholes,” and even direct subsidies help many large corporations evade taxes and their responsibility to “support the troops” who often defend their interests overseas.  Citizen opposition to taxation has spawned a political movement.   With thousands of American soldiers enduring repeated and often deadly combat deployments, complaints about paying the taxes that fund our nation, our communities, and the armor, ammunition, food, vehicles, water, and weapons needed by our armed forces seem sad, shortsighted, and unfortunate. 

Similarly, most Americans enjoy taxpayer funded bridges, highways, schools, and streets, which directly or indirectly support countless jobs.  Those of us not directly or indirectly employed due to publicly funded infrastructure would surely face painful and expensive problems without it.  Furthermore, just as tax dollars fund the deployment of soldiers, America’s firefighters, police officers, and emergency services personnel are also asked to make personal sacrifices far above and beyond the taxes they pay. 

Here again, corporations often appear strongly opposed to supporting these services through taxation – and very interested privatizing them as a means of increasing their profit and power.  While voters can “throw the bums” if they do not like the way their representatives provide public services, corporate control of public services could threaten democratic principles such as equality and free speech, and could be very difficult to reverse. 

Despite benefits enjoyed by both human and corporate citizens, some see government as a horrible problem that must be taken “off their back.”  In contrast, countless other Americans see their government as a priceless treasure worth supporting and defending – even with their life. 

The recent “Citizens United” Supreme Court Decision grants corporations unlimited, unregulated, and conveniently anonymous “free speech.”  Many large international corporations already enjoy significant tax advantages (even direct subsidies), and can make expenditures greater the pooled resources of all of America’s unions combined.  This financial power, the anonymity granted by the Citizens United decision, and the recent disclosure of the use of funds in the 2010 election cycle apparently solicited from foreign corporations appears to threaten not only America’s source of corporate tax revenue, but also American democracy itself. 

Perhaps our problem is not with taxation or American government, but the corporations who reap America’s benefits without contributing to its support – and whose power over America’s electoral processes continues to expand.

"Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society."      Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Published October 21. 2010