Happy Xmas (War is Over)

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate from here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  As for my household, we're mostly just taking it easy.  Working in a school means the lead-up to Christmas can be kind of chaotic, and I have to say that I'm enjoying being able to sit here drinking a cup of coffee without people yelling my name at me every three seconds.  Plus, we're having a winter storm that's supposed to dump five inches of snow on us today, and comes with forty mile an hour winds (already there's a gale howling out there).  So I doubt seriously if I'll put my nose outside today.

Some of you might wonder why I, an atheist, am wishing a Merry Christmas to people.  The reason is: I am not an asshole.  I am honestly happy for people who enjoy the Christmas season, and that does not mean I'm somehow discriminating against those who don't.  Mostly, I want everyone to be happy and enjoy life, and am of the opinion that my being of the non-religious persuasion doesn't imply that I'm ill-wishing people who are believers.

This, of course, won't convince the perpetually-disgruntled types who think that someone saying "Happy holidays" is the moral equivalent of strafing Whoville.  And in fact these people have now started an ad campaign that has as its main message thanking Donald Trump for allowing us to say "Merry Christmas" again.

What I want to know is, what pretend world are these people living in?  Because, apparently, they honestly believe that President Obama outlawed saying "Merry Christmas."  My guess is that they believe he substituted a mandate that we all say "Allahu akbar" instead.  This is despite the existence of this video montage of Obama saying "Merry Christmas" over and over and over, with apparent enthusiasm and enjoyment.

But as has been demonstrated time and again, facts don't matter with these people.  Or, more to the point, you're allowed to make up the facts as you go.  Trump (and his eternally-angry pals Joe Walsh and Bill O'Reilly) have claimed for years that Obama and his family were not Christian and had general disdain for Christmas, despite the fact that the tradition of the White House Christmas Tree, the annual Christmas message, and Christmas cards went on during the eight years of Obama's presidency just as it did before and after.

And, astonishingly, their followers believe them.  Instead of watching the video of Obama saying "Merry Christmas," and concluding they were wrong, they ignore the evidence that's right before their eyes so they don't have to change their preconceived opinions.  Instead, they accept statements like that made last week by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas about the horrorshow that would have occurred had Hillary Clinton won:

If Hillary were elected and then she replaces [Antonin] Scalia with someone who has contempt for the God we know rules the universe, and our freedom of religion would have been gone.  They consider Christians a hate group, even though it’s the one true religion based on ‘God so loved the world he gave his son.  His son so loved the world he gave his life,’ and they have turned that upside down.  They were going to be coming after Christians with the help of then a 5-4 Supreme Court. 

So on election night I said, ‘But if on the off-chance Hillary wins, sweetheart, you need to be ready.  They’ll probably have me in jail within four years,’ and I wasn’t kidding.  I really believed that if she had won, my freedom was at stake because of my Christian beliefs.

Okay, I know that Gohmert has the IQ of leftover mashed potatoes, but still.  On what basis could he possibly conclude that if Clinton had won, she would have had Christians jailed?  Because -- and it pains me to have to point this out -- Hillary Clinton is also a Christian.  Her membership in the Methodist church is well established.  Why on earth would she try to create a policy of oppressing a group that she herself belongs to?

Of course, we're not talking about logic, here.  But it still amazes me that anyone can listen to Louie Gohmert (or, frankly, Donald Trump) and just sit there nodding and saying, "Yeah, right on, that makes sense."  How do people's bullshitometers not peg?  When the little girl on the commercial says, "Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to say, 'Merry Christmas" again," how do people not say, "What kind of horseshit is this?  The phrase 'Merry Christmas' starts appearing in stores in September.  What makes you think it was ever forbidden?"

But amazingly, they don't.

Anyhow.  Sorry for getting off on a rant, when probably what you want to be doing is opening presents and drinking eggnog and socializing with your family.  Didn't mean to put a damper on things.  And, honestly, I've found that people who continually take things the wrong way and seem to enjoy being outraged are the minority.  So to everyone else I'll say: Enjoy the day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.  Even if you're not religious, "peace on Earth and good will toward everyone" is still a pretty good rule to live by, as is "don't be an asshole."

Making the world safe for hypocrisy

Republicans are currently having a meltdown over the reception that Vice President-elect Mike Pence got when he showed up at a performance of the Broadway musical Hamilton a couple of nights ago.

President-elect Trump, never one to sit by silently when Twitter is waiting, jumped in with the following: "Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.  This should not happen!" and followed it up with "The Theater must always be a safe and special place.  The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence.  Apologize!"

The rumor went around that the cast had booed Pence, and that started up the outrage machine.  "Boycott Hamilton!" trended on Twitter, which is kind of funny in that the musical is sold out months in advance, so any potential boycotters would have a long wait.

But what is appalling about all of this is that as usual, these people are reacting to what they think happened, not to what actually happened.  So let's start by setting the record straight.  The cast did not boo Pence; the audience did, and then the cast told them to stop.  Here's a transcript of what the cast said:

There’s nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen.  There’s nothing to boo here.  We’re all here sharing a story of love.  Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us here at Hamilton: An American Musical...  We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir.  But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.  All of us.

That is the message that President-elect Trump called "harassment" and for which he demanded an apology.

I thought this called for a response.  My initial thought, which ended with "... and the horse you rode in on," on reconsideration struck me as lacking in subtlety and depth of thought.  So here is a more measured, nuanced take on the whole thing.

The group who is screeching that Hamilton should be boycotted is by and large composed of the same people who flipped out when Starbucks changed their cup design, saying Americans should boycott the coffee company because they're "anti-Christmas and anti-Christian."  They are the ones who had conniptions at the protests over Trump's policies that have been staged in cities throughout the United States, and who have even suggested making such demonstrations criminal offenses.  They are the ones who claim that every time anyone demands separation of church and state, it's a direct attack on freedom of religion.

And yet, with no apparent sense of hypocrisy, the loudest "freedom of religion" types are now the ones who are actively supporting a government registry for Muslims, including those who are American citizens.  The ones who are having a meltdown over what the cast of Hamilton said to Mike Pence are the same ones who don't bat an eye at people who call the Obamas every derogatory name you can think of (the most recent being the characterization of the First Lady by a West Virginia mayor as "an ape in heels").  The ones who think that Mike Pence is such a delicate snowflake that the cast of Hamilton should apologize for hurting his feelings are the ones who ridicule liberals as "whiny safe-spacers" who "can't stand it if everyone doesn't get a trophy" when there is a demand that the incoming administration treat all Americans, including LGBT individuals, atheists, and minorities, with respect and equal access to rights.

In other words: "a safe and special place" means that Americans can feel free to ridicule, degrade, and strip the rights from anyone who isn't a white Christian, but if those who are on the receiving end of such treatment respond, it's "harassment."  Freedom of speech and freedom of religion only apply if they're the right speech and the right religion.

I've been trying like hell to stay out of politics, but I think this marks the point where I've given up resisting.  I see our country heading toward a very, very scary place, led by a cadre of people who take umbrage at anything outside of their narrow little worldview, demanding apologies of people who challenge them and (when those are not forthcoming) responding with vitriol, hate speech, and threats.

So, frankly, I've had it.  My previous posts on recent political developments, where I tried to be measured and polite, to ask for reconciliation and compassion, were met with comments such as (these are direct quotes) "Stop your fucking whining, you lost" and "Get over yourself" and "I bet you'd never call out the ultra-left-wingers for all the shit they do."  (The latter, at least, should be obviously wrong to anyone who has read this blog for any length of time; I've always thought of myself as an equal-opportunity critic.)

So fuck being apolitical.  At this point, not to speak up against what is happening in this country would be tantamount to supporting it.  So this may lose me blog followers at best, and friends at worst, but don't expect me to stay silent.  I am hereby vowing to call out hypocrisy wherever I see it (and yes, that includes the liberals), to stand up for the people that the incoming administration has vowed to oppress, to be an advocate even if it puts me right in the bullseye.

In other words: I am choosing to place myself right outside the "safe space."  Deal with it.  You, and the horse you rode in on.

The politics of fear

In M. G. Miller's amazing book Bayou Jesus, we read about four characters on a deadly collision course in early 20th century southern Louisiana -- the young, unwed African American woman Miss Zassy, her saintly son Frank Potter, Miss Zassy's sadistic employer Samson Boudreaux, and his daughter Alice.  Throughout the book there is a sense of tragic inevitability, driven by Miller's elegant prose and his character Samson's pervasive fear of the dark-skinned race who were freed after what he calls "The War of Northern Aggression."

It's the fear that struck me, throughout my reading of this book.  What, exactly, was Samson so afraid of?  He phrases it in self-justifying platitudes: "Give them an inch, they'll take a mile."  "If you don't keep them in their place, they'll take over the whole world."  And despite my knowing that Miller's depiction is sadly accurate, and that there were people in the Deep South who believed this -- after all, Bayou Jesus is set only a stone's throw from where I spent most of the first twenty years of my life -- I couldn't help but think more than once, "how can Samson look around him, and honestly think that the poor, powerless, disadvantaged African Americans in his home town are any kind of threat?"

And yet he, and the real white supremacists who were all too common in the post-Civil-War South, did feel exactly that.  It had nothing to do with logic, facts, or even reality, and yet it drove them to harass, torture, and kill innocent people who weren't trying to do anything other than eke out a meager living in peace.

African Americans during the Civil War [photograph by Mathew Brady, 1864]

Which brings me to conservative columnist John Zmirak's claim that Christians in America are facing imminent genocide.

In an interview with radio talk show host Joe Miller, Zmirak made the following statement, which I quote here in its entirety:

When a dominant group wants to persecute a minority, the first thing they do is vilify them.  You had the dominant secularists in France before the French Revolution spend about twenty years vilifying the Christian clergy; the moment they took power in the French Revolution, they started killing the Christian clergy.  When the Turks decided that the Armenians were a dangerous minority almost 100 years ago to the day, they started out with a propaganda campaign saying that the Armenians were all traitors working for the Russian czar; within a few years, they were butchering in the streets and driving them into the desert to die of thirst.  Same thing happened in, of course, Nazi Germany, they vilified the Jews, preparing people for the Holocaust.  You saw it happen again in Rwanda, where the once-powerful Tutsi minority, they were declared on government radio stations for weeks and weeks, they were called cockroaches, ‘we must exterminate the cockroaches.’  It was repeated over and over and over again and it was followed, of course, by a genocide that in the course of a month or two, killed more than a million people. 

I think this vilification of faithful Christians could lead to violence in America.  I think the churches have been persecuted before, Christians are being persecuted all around the world by Islamists — and the U.S. government is doing nothing, of course — I could imagine Americans standing by while churches are padlocked and pastors are arrested for being hatemongers, while children are being taken away from their parents because they don’t want them to be taught their extremist views. 

It’s happened so many times before, and all the signs are there that the enemies of Christianity are seeing ‘how much can we get away with?  Can we close down a pizza parlor for even theoretically being willing to discriminate?  Can we get teachers from religious schools fired?  They’re going to keep pushing until they hit pushback.  And unless there’s powerful pushback from Christians now — not five years from now, when it will be too late, but now — we’re going to see ourselves reduced to the status of second-class citizens the way Christians are in countries like Egypt and Syria.

There are three takeaways I had from this:

1. 74% is a minority?  Even in the most secular parts of the United States, there are more Christians than any other group.  In some places, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's not a Christian.
2. Saying that Christians (and anyone else, for that matter) can't discriminate is not "vilification."  In fact, it's kind of the opposite.  It's saying you can't use your religion to vilify someone else.
3. In Egypt and Syria, Christians comprise about 10% of the population, and the entire government, virtually all schools and public institutions, and even the legal system, is dominated by non-Christians.  How can you draw an analogy between the Middle East and the United States?  Unless... you know, you were to reverse it, to demonstrate that non-Christians might be a persecuted minority here in the United States?

But none of those facts matter.  Like the fictional Samson Boudreaux, who felt that wealthy, privileged Caucasians were in imminent danger from poor, downtrodden African Americans, John Zmirak thinks that the Christian majority -- whose members control virtually every level of government -- are about to be overthrown and oppressed by secularists.

And all because we're trying to make sure that pizza parlor owners can't refuse to serve people on the basis of their sexual orientation.  (And allow me to point out that the pizza shop owner who is the focal point of all of this is so far from an oppressed "second-class citizen" in the eyes of most Americans that she received over $840,000 in donations from like-minded Christians for her refusal to serve gays.)

It's amazing what fear will do, isn't it?  Because that's what drives the whole thing.  Fear of The Other, fear of losing your way of life, and worst of all -- fear that the people you hate will treat you the way you'd like to treat them.  When, of course, most of the members of the groups Zmirak and his ilk detest want only what everyone wants -- the freedom to live without being ridiculed, harassed, discriminated against, and (to use Zmirak's own word) vilified.

But this isn't about reality, and as has been said many times before, you can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into.  More to the point, I'd like to end with a quote from Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

The oppression of the majority

I wonder what it is about the mere existence of atheists that is so terrifying to some Christians.

Now, right up front, I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about all Christians, here.  I have friends who are devout Christians, and friends who are members of various other faiths, and mostly we all get along pretty well.  But it seems to me that there is a growing number of Christians, mostly of the evangelical stripe, who are threatened by people like me -- atheists/rationalists/secular humanists who won't just shut up and let the dominant majority religion run things, as it has for the last thousand years.

This all comes up because of two news stories from last week.  In one, Anthony Foxx, mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, declared May 2 not only to be a "National Day of Prayer," but a "National Day of Reason," stating that "it is the duty and responsibility of every citizen to promote the development and application of reason."   Seems an innocent enough statement, right?

Nope.  The backlash was immediate and vitriolic.  Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women of America, blasted Foxx's move as anti-religious in general and anti-Christian in particular, ending a screed on Fox News with the quote, "You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism.  And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust."

Then, there was the story that appeared in Breitbart News that claimed that Christians in the military were in danger of being court martialled if they "shared their faith."  The whole thing apparently started with a demand by Mikey Weinstein, of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that commanding officers enforce the long-standing no-proselytizing rule, explained as follows by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen:

Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one's beliefs (proselytization).  If a service member harasses another member on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, age, or disability, then the commander takes action based on the gravity of the occurrence.  Likewise, when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case-by-case basis.

Breitbart, and later Fox News, interpreted this as a "Christian cleansing of the military" by the Obama administration that would lead to the abolition of chaplains, and ultimately to court martial of any Christian in the military.  (Weinstein himself was called an "anti-Christian extremist.")

The story was accompanied by the following photograph, in case the plight of the poor, oppressed Christians didn't yank at your heartstrings enough:

Okay, can we just clarify something, here?  You Christians are still in the majority.  Virtually every position of power in the United States government is held by a self-professed Christian.  You have used your majority status to institute legislation that compels public school students to treat your holy book as if it were science.  You have mandated prayers before governmental meetings, and are determined to try to work prayer back into classrooms.  "In God We Trust" is still on our currency, and "one nation, under God" still in the Pledge of Allegiance.  People are still sworn in with their hand on the bible.

How, again, are you oppressed?

The problem, of course, is that you're unused to being challenged, and you're mistaking having someone push back against your hegemony with being persecuted.  You have been, for centuries, in sole control of everything in the United States and western Europe, with government and religion so deeply entangled that it was often hard to see where one started and the other ended.  But now, what has some Christians spooked is that people like me are becoming more numerous.  A recent poll put the number of atheists and agnostics in the United States at 20% -- a new high -- and put Protestants in the minority for the first time ever, at 48%, although Christians as a whole are still an overwhelming majority, at 76%.  The increase of non-belief, to the point that we're too numerous to subdue into silence, is terrifying to a group that has long held unquestioned dominance in every sphere of American life.  There are more self-professed atheists now than ever before in history, and we're refusing to do what we've always done -- which was to hide.

The ironic thing is how unfounded those fears are.  While atheists, agnostics, rationalists, humanists, secularists, and free-thinkers -- and those who hold to all other gradations of disbelief -- are often vocal in their disavowal of Christian ideas, very few of them have any grudge against Christian people.  The vast majority of the aforementioned nonbelievers think that Christians, and members of other faiths, are free to believe whatever they want, as long as they accord the same right to us.  And that's the critical point, here; we just want the same freedom that you have had for the last thousand years -- to be open about our convictions, without fear of repercussion, and without having to put up with religious folks demanding that we do things their way, or else.

So, to that subset of Christians who desperately want to appear oppressed because you're finally not getting your own way, I'd like to end by saying: no need to be afraid.  We atheists have no intent to do to you what you'd like to do to us.