A Half-Hearted Apology and Secular Thoughts

I really should apologize sometimes, because I can get overboard with my generalizations. For a man who preaches about how there is no black and white in life, I frequently find myself drawing up battle lines out of anger. In my last post, I was quite angry with theists for perhaps the wrong reason, for in their minds it is not outrageous to uphold the words written in the books they hold canon. This is not something to be laughed at, derided, or as my last post did, completely shit on. My own beliefs should not attack your beliefs and it is not a goal of mine to have anyone trumpeting my views. I am not an idealist who seeks converts; I am an idealist who gives people opportunity to see the world through my [sometimes jaded] eyes and I seek nothing more.

If you grew up in my family, first and foremost you would acknowledge the individuality of religion. We don't discuss it, we don't demean it, and we don't drown ourselves in it. It has led to a variety of conclusions. My sister, as you can read here, is a highly intelligent, well-read theist. For the sake of this post, it makes no difference that she belongs to the Church of Latter Day Saints, but she, as anyone who joins a faith should be, is completely devoted to the faith. If you read her blog, you'll find that she doesn't always have the easiest time teaching it, but the earnestness in her beliefs will never be mistaken. The same can be said for my brother Rick, who for the majority of my life has attended church. He is the family member who coughs when you take that first bite at family meals, and he is the one who makes the long prayers that make you wish he knew you view time as precious. As for the rest of us, I'm going to make assumptions. I haven't seen my brother Bryan in so long that I couldn't tell you much, but he was married in a church and worked for churches so he can't be completely against them. It also wouldn't shock me if he were an atheist, but I honestly don't know. My brother James is an out-and-out atheist from either something he said to me or just my feelings, but perhaps he is just like my parents and agnostic to the point that there isn't a difference.



My brother Ryan has spastic cerebral palsy. Disease or disability have the ability to give completely opposite reactions. Curable diseases (or perhaps better worded, the diseases which you can live with) tend to elicit a reaction of extreme theism, or the idea "God gave me another chance for which to live in his name." Diseases without cure or alleviation like Cerebral Palsy, especially in those as intelligent as my brother, tend to engender the exact opposite response. Almost every church sermon includes either an example of faith healing or the invocation of God's plan. Can you imagine what goes through the mind of my brother when he knows a)that you are lying to him about God's ability to heal him or b)that God took from him some of the most beautiful things in life in the name of his plan? Some people would argue that he is blessed to have a family like ours and to be alive, that a healthy black man born into the foster care program in the inner city would have fell down the same path as many others. That view both rules out the individuality of my brother and is completely racist, not to mention completely misunderstands the hardships of living both with Cerebral Palsy and my parents despite their good intentions. This in part contributes a great deal to my non-belief, as I'm not a big proponent of "the larger picture".

As for me, I like many people have taken a diverse path. I have been to a church service somewhere around twenty times in my life. For the sake of the argument, I will also say I have watched the LDS General Conference three times, which in essence is going to church. I first and only regularly attended church as I was graduating high school in 2003. My parents were becoming members of the Church of the Nazarene and perhaps both out of solidarity and a slight push from them I tagged along. For my brother, it resulted in both happiness from the social aspect of church that he so dearly misses and the awkward problems that sermons presented to his condition. I was bored. Although it was not entirely our pastor's fault, the sermons regularly had a conservative slant to it that I abhorred so I sat in the back and read the Bible. The Bible is an entertaining book, and if you read into it, can really allow you to skew any question in your favor. As a man fascinated by words and now more honestly what I now know to be deceit, it was a powerful tool for many years.

For this reason, I was suddenly no longer an agnostic but closer to what you would consider a deist. I didn't believe in a interventionist God, and never had. At some point this evolved into a strong belief in fate, if not predestination. I believed that we had free will and control still but that we were specifically meant for something. For a young man consistently without a place in the world, it felt better to establish a place for myself. This led to among other things me calmly explaining to a very religious young woman, that I believed God wanted me to be unhappy and I was perfectly okay with that. No, this did not result in the woman fancying me, in case you wondered if declaring yourself a martyr as did Jesus Christ turns on Christians.

However, a year ago when I took a class in Religious history I identified myself as agnostic while acknowledging my deistic tendencies. In all reality, this was just an attempt to give the room a pivot. The reality of history students is that they are mostly atheists. History is sullen by the acts of almost every religion, and after a while cynicism is not a surprising outcome. However, there are always some students who are devout who find themselves on the exact opposite end of the spectrum; I find myself as a moderate. In honesty, I was an atheist.

The next post I will write will be a deeper analysis of the problems with atheism that Christians have and why they are irrelevant, but I will say this for my own defense. I will never purposely belittle someone's personal belief in God, and I will never try to convince you God does not exist. If you wish to be convinced, read Dawkins or Hitchens as they are more than willing to preach about nothing. One will feed you science and the other rhetoric until you wish there were a God to end it all. In my case, I could care less what you believe with the exception if you break my cardinal rule.


Religion (or a lack thereof) has no place in Science, Government, or Health Policy

If you didn't read my last post, to summarize I went on a rant about the Susan G. Komen foundation cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. They said it was because Planned Parenthood was under investigation, in reality pressure had been placed on them because of Planned Parenthood's very open providing of Abortions and birth control to women. As a result of this ridiculous decision, Planned Parenthood received more donations than the amount the receive from Susan G Komen, ironically meaning that the pressure exerted by anti-abortion lobbyists resulted in more funding that could be used for abortions. Susan G Komen reversed their policy about companies under investigation, but had not yet decided to restore funding to Planned Parenthood.

The United States is a wonderful place in that is allows us to freely practice religion as we please. It also allows us the ability to gather together and protest in the name of said religion in the guise of free speech. In the last century, politicians have come to forget that religion is not part of our founding father's intentions and most definitely have forgotten that it provides nothing to the general welfare of mankind. Religion is great for a person, it is cancer for a functional nation or society as a whole.

In exploring this, simple well known recent events will suffice for now. People in Texas didn't want their children to know who Thomas Jefferson was, simply because he was an atheist (and he was a misogynist, but I'm sure racism wasn't a part of it.) People in Kansas don't want their kids to be taught evolution, perhaps because it is more dangerous than atheism in that it specifically lays out ways that God hasn't intervened in the Earth's lifespan. A judge in Alabama want to keep the commandments in front of the state's courthouse, because simply God's law is the highest in the land. Hopefully, the same people would not agree with people being stoned to death for adultery. Our government has blatantly been adding God to our government and creeds for the entirety of our Republic. Some of these are manufactured by misinterpretations (the Pledge of Allegiance) and others are deliberately in violation of separation of Church and State (In God We Trust). I would shout more about these but like having a state religion in England they have actually taken some of the power out of God's name through ubiquity. (For those of you that are theists, more importantly they sully God's name by attaching it to something as unholy as a modern government, but I digress.)

If you wish to participate in a religious discussion or for your kids to, go to a church. Admirably, lots of people get up at early hours to go study scripture before their day begins, and more go to services to do the same. The problem is too often the people who regard themselves as people of God mistake themselves for God. No one man or woman has earned the title of moral arbiter for mankind. If you believe so strongly in the punishment of the after-life for sinners, by what means does it worry you that they are not being punished in real life? If you find homosexuality wrong, you are free to say so. You are not at liberty to deny them the right to adopt, get married, and live as any heterosexual would. If you think abortions are wrong, you share something in common with me, but I think that it is not my place to tell a woman what she can do with her body.

In the grand scope, this will never die. People and governments will always believe they can legislate morality. They can't. I don't kill people, because it is fundamentally wrong not because I could be put to death for it. I don't take opiates because I could die or get addicted not because it is illegal. I don't preach atheism as a fix-all remedy, because I don't believe one size fits all. I'm not going to run out and marry a man if I could, because I'm not gay and it's not a team you join. I'm not going to tell a woman to have an abortion because I'm not ready to be a father and I'm not going to have premarital sex based solely on a school giving me a condom. Legislation does not change the world's morality and especially does not change a person. It only has the power to subjugate people based on their beliefs or the idiotic hatred espoused to things that simply have no effect on the rest of society.

Later today, I will write more about the place of religion in modern politics, its effect on the current and recent past races, and talk more about the criticism of atheism in the same regard.