Miscellanea Agnostica

My home state of Connecticut has a history of Puritan parochiality. The original three colonies which eventually became the single Connecticut colony (Connecticut/River Colony, Saybrook Colony, and New Haven), were all established by Puritans (Pilgrims), who disapproved of many practices of their time … gambling, drinking, observing Christmas, and more. To a Puritan, pretty much everything which wasn’t either work or church attendance was an evil vice to be avoided at all costs. And while they retained political power, they prohibited even non-Puritans living within their domains from engaging in any of these vices — hence Connecticut’s infamous Blue Laws, vestiges of which remain on the books even now. Granted, this state is no longer run by Puritans — and hasn’t been since before the U.S. was founded — but Connecticut nevertheless retains a sometimes-furious Puritanical streak that continuously reasserts itself.

An example of this “modern-day religious Puritanicalism” can be seen in this story about the city of New Haven allowing bars to remain open another hour, every night, in order to ease congestion (as reported by WVIT-TV in Hartford):

People who have partied in the bars along Crown Street in New Haven can tell you what closing time is like. …

To cut down on the chaos, Town Green Special Services District Director Rena Eddy recently floated the idea of letting the bars stay open an hour later, until 3 a.m. …

But staying open later won’t mean more time to drink. If the proposal happens, last call would still be at the same time, but bars would have until 3 am. to serve food and soft drinks, before getting people out the door.

Giving people an hour to get out of the bars rather than just a couple of minutes, seems like a reasonable way of dealing with this congestion and havoc. But the churches of New Haven are having none of this:

At a forum on violence in the Elm City, organized by the Christian Community Comission Brotherhood Leadership Summit, reaction was to the proposal was immediate Wednesday night.

“That’s terrible,” said CCC Executive Director Minister Donald Morris.

Morris doesn’t overtly state that his objection to this is religious, but he does cite a reason which — in the end — has nothing to do with the problem:

Morris said the timing is also bad, given the murder of a Hamden man last month at Sinergy, a Crown Street nightclub.

“You had a young man both shot and killed and another stabbed. We don’t need another bar and we certainly don’t need an extension of bar time,” said Minister Morris.

The reason these things happened was not due to the amount of time the bars were opened, it was due to the fact that people drink in bars and some of those people get into fights. If he’s truly interested in reducing violence among the drunks in New Haven’s bars, that might actually be achieved, if the nightly chaos caused by the mass exodus from the bars were alleviated.

But little things like rationality don’t matter much to would-be Puritan religionists, I guess.

Tags: 3am, bars, blue law, blue laws, calvinist, calvinists, christian, christian community commission brotherhood, Christianity, closing time, connecticut, connecticut US, connecticut USA, donald morris, new haven CT, pilgrims, puritanical, puritanism, puritans, vice, vices

The “war on Christmas” folks have decided it’s not enough just to whine, on their own. They feel it necessary to insert words into the mouth of Jesus himself, as reported by WCPO-TV in Cincinnati:

“I miss hearing you say ‘Merry Christmas.’” That’s what Jesus is telling drivers on southbound I-75.

The billboard greets people between the Norwood Lateral and Mitchell Ave, in Saint Bernard. …

This particular billboard was bought by several women who live in Niles, Ohio.

They say that God has been taken out of the season

The problem, of course, is that people have not, in fact, stopped saying “Merry Christmas.” I’ve been hearing it for the last couple of weeks.

Tags: christ, christmas, cincinnati OH, jesus, jesus christ, merry christmas, niles OH, st bernard OH, war on christmas, war on christmas 2009

The election of an atheist, a month ago, to a municipal office in Asheville, North Carolina, has caused a ruckus and may result in a lawsuit, if North Carolinian religionists have any say in the matter. The AP reports, via CBS News (WebCite cached version):

Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government — but he doesn’t believe in God. His political opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they’ve got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.

Bothwell’s detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state’s antiquated requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Constitution.

North Carolina’s state constitution retains a provision preventing atheists from taking any office; Article VI section 8, begins:

The following persons shall be disqualified for office:
First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.

Unfortunately for the Carolinian legions of the Religious Right who are raising hell over this, that provision — while it’s still present in the state Constitution — is unenforcable, in light of U.S. Supreme Court precedents such as Torcaso v. Watkins (1961). No one can prevent Bothwell from taking office. But, armed with this obsolete state-constitutional provision, and a massive case of sanctimonious outrage, the religionists are nevertheless spoiling for a fight:

One foe, H.K. Edgerton, is threatening to file a lawsuit in state court against the city to challenge Bothwell’s appointment.

“My father was a Baptist minister. I’m a Christian man. I have problems with people who don’t believe in God,” said Edgerton, a former local NAACP president and founder of Southern Heritage 411, an organization that promotes the interests of black southerners.

Religionists elsewhere have managed to make the lives of atheist office-holders miserable … even in spite of Torcaso v. Watkins, as the AP went on to explain:

But the federal protections don’t necessarily spare atheist public officials from spending years defending themselves in court. Avowed atheist Herb Silverman won an eight-year court battle in 1997 when South Carolina’s highest court granted him the right to be appointed as a notary despite the state’s law.

I have no doubt that Edgerton and the rest of his Religious Right and Neoconfederate friends have deluded themselves into thinking they can get Torcaso overturned … but that appears unlikely, since it has repeatedly been upheld in the decades since. Unfortunately, delusional people driven by righteous furor are not known for their restraint. I wish Mr Bothwell luck as he faces years of legal challenges to his presence on the Asheville City Council.

Tags: asheville city council, asheville NC, atheism, atheist, atheists, cecil bothwell, confederate, constitution, freedom of religion, hk edgerton, neo-confederate, neoconfederate, no religious test clause, north carolina, north carolina state constitution, religionism, religionist, religious right, torcaso, torcaso v watkins

The Roman Catholic Church’s priestly pedophilia and child-abuse scandals are not, as it turns out, limited only to the U.S. and Ireland. Canada has had its share of scandalous behavior by the Catholic Church within its borders. A settlement in a class-action suit against the Diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia has been approved, as reported by the CBC:

A $15-million class-action settlement involving Roman Catholic priests accused of abusing young boys in Nova Scotia will proceed.

John McKiggan, the lawyer handling the historic settlement, said both sides of the class action — the Diocese of Antigonish and lead plaintiff Ron Martin — agreed to go ahead with the deal now that the deadline for opting out has expired. …

The settlement was the result of a class-action lawsuit spearheaded by Martin, a Cape Breton man who said he was sexually abused by a priest as a boy. Martin said his brother, David Martin, killed himself in 2002 and left a note stating that he, too, had been abused by a priest in the diocese.

This is not, however, the only bad news endured by the Roman Catholic Church in that province. In October, Richard Lahey, bishop of Antigonish — who (ironically or not) had been key to negotiating this very settlement — was arrested by Ottawa police for possession of child pornography, as the Globe and Mail reported:

A Roman Catholic bishop who oversaw an historic settlement with victims of past sexual abuse by priests in Nova Scotia has been charged with possessing and importing child pornography.

Bishop Raymond Lahey of the archdiocese of Antigonish was searched at the Ottawa airport as he re-entered Canada on Sept. 15. Officers found images “of concern” on his laptop, and seized it along with other media devices. He was released pending further investigation. …

In a statement Saturday, Bishop Lahey said that “after much thought and careful consideration” he had submitted his resignation to Pope Benedict “for personal reasons.”

What’s really stunning about this is that Lahey had been caught with child porn, after having issued the following statement about the (then-pending) settlement (as the G&M went on to say):

At the time [the potential settlement was announced], Bishop Lahey, who was bishop of Antigonish for six years and was not implicated in the allegations, apologized to the victims and noted they were entitled to protection from priests.

“Sexual abuse, indeed any abuse, is wrong. It is a crime and it is a serious sin in the eyes of God. I want to assure you that for some time our diocese, like others throughout Canada, have been taking steps to protect children and youth,” Bishop Lahey told a news conference.

Wow. I mean, just wow. The hypocrisy here is so obvious, and so brazen and stark, there doesn’t appear to be anything left to say about it.

At any rate, anyone who thought that Roman Catholic Church clerical scandals were only here in the U.S. or — as revealed this year — in Ireland, is sadly mistaken. Clerical misdeeds within the Catholic Church are much more widespread than most people suspect. What’s worse is, these are not cases of lone, abhorrent priests doing things they shouldn’t and then getting caught. Quite the opposite: Each of these scandals has featured active involvement by the hierarchy above these priests, to hide their misconduct, cover it up after-the-fact, shield them from secular prosecution, with no discernible effort made to prevent it from happening.

Tags: atigonish NS, canada, catholic, child abuse, child pornography, clerical pedophilia, diocese of antigonish, nova scotia, ottawa, ottawa ON, pedophilia, pedophilia scandal, priestly pedophilia, raymond lahey, roman catholic, roman catholic church, ron martin, vatican

The results of a newly-released Pew Forum poll show that the U.S. is fast becoming a vast soup of metaphysical gibberish. CBS News reports on it:

When it comes to religion, many Americans like the mix-and-match, build-your-own approach.

Large numbers attend services of traditions other than their own and blend Christianity with Eastern and New Age beliefs, a survey finds.

The report Wednesday from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life also shows tremendous growth over the past three decades in the number of Americans who say they have had a religious or mystical experience.

This trend is offset by the fact that these same Americans who are having more religious or mystical experiences, are increasingly unable to understand them:

Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country, significant minorities say they hold beliefs of the sort found at Buddhist temples or New Age bookstores. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed overall and 22 percent of Christians say they believe in reincarnation, the idea that people will be reborn in this world again and again.

As for the significant numbers who visit more than one place of worship, it’s not just an occasional visit while on vacation or for special events like weddings and funerals.

One-third of Americans say they regularly or occasionally attend religious services at more than one place. One-quarter say they sometimes attend services of a faith different from their own.

I used to be concerned about fundamentalists and religionists whose ferocity of belief in specific packages of dogma — and who by definition refuse to negotiate on any of it — were the biggest religious problem in the US. Now I’m no longer sure about that. A significant number of Americans are playing “metaphysical draw poker,” exchanging components of belief almost at random, with no attempt at any kind of cohesion. This means one is dealing not only with people who may not really comprehend the beliefs they claim to hold, but they may just change them, making it impossible, at any given moment, to know what it is they believe.

I don’t see this as much of an improvement.

More information on this poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life can be found on their Web site.

Update: Robert T. Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary has even more to say about the results of this poll.

Tags: buddhism, Christianity, eastern religion, Metaphysics, new age, pew forum, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, poll, Religion, survey, united states, US

California is an odd state, compared to the other 49. It has a very large and diverse population; perhaps the greatest variety of terrain and climate of any state; and it has easily the most bizarre political system of all. Among its governmental features is the ease with which initiatives can be circulated and then get on the November ballot. This means lots of initiatives get voted on by the people of California … sometimes very strange ones.

One such initiative campaign is a somewhat-less-than-serious effort to force so-called “protectors of marriage” to actually live up to their declared intention of truly “protecting” marriage. The AP (via Google News) reports on it:

Til death do us part? The vow would really hold true in California if a Sacramento Web designer gets his way.

In a movement that seems ripped from the pages of Comedy Channel writers, John Marcotte wants to put a measure on the ballot next year to ban divorce in California.

The effort is meant to be a satirical statement after California voters outlawed gay marriage in 2008, largely on the argument that a ban is needed to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage. If that’s the case, then Marcotte reasons voters should have no problem banning divorce.

“Since California has decided to protect traditional marriage, I think it would be hypocritical of us not to sacrifice some of our own rights to protect traditional marriage even more,” the 38-year-old married father of two said.

Marcotte passed his first hurdle, having obtained permission to collect petition signatures. But that was the easy part; it gets much harder:

Marcotte needs 694,354 valid signatures by March 22, a high hurdle in a state where the typical petition drive costs millions of dollars.

Even if his initiative never makes it, Marcotte has made his point, and it’s been noticed, as the AP goes on to say:

Not surprisingly, Marcotte’s campaign to make divorce in California illegal has divided those involved in last year’s campaign for and against Proposition 8.

As much as everyone would like to see fewer divorces, making it illegal would be “impractical,” said Ron Prentice, the executive director of the California Family Council who led a coalition of religious and conservative groups to qualify Proposition 8.

This is otherwise known as “excuse-making” or “rationalizing.” As it turns out, Prentice makes his groups intentions crystal-clear:

Prentice said proponents of traditional marriage only seek to strengthen the one man-one woman union.

“That’s where our intention begins and ends,” he said.

In other words, Prentice and his group are concerned with preventing gays — and only gays — from marrying. No other group of people are their targets … just gays. They have no other interest in the “marriage game” — and have admitted it themselves. So when they later claim that “we’re not ‘anti-gay,’ we’re ‘pro-marriage’,” we all know that to be a lie.

Find out more about Marcotte’s California Marriage Protection Act at their Web site.

Tags: ballot, california, california marriage protection act, gay marriage, initiative, john marcotte, marriage, petition, proposition 8, referendum

Bill O’Reilly has ramped up his war to force every American to observe Christmas just as he does … regardless of whether or not they are Christians. This time, he sent his producer Jesse Watters to interview school officials in Chelmsford, Mass. who have set policies about a “winter holiday fair” which they don’t like. While Watters appears impressed with himself for his Mike Wallace-style “ambush interviews” and O’Reilly claims this ambush was somehow “fair and balanced.” However, neither of them appears to understand some salient facts:

1. In case you didn’t know it, Mr Watters, Chelmsford school officials don’t work for you — really! — and they are not answerable to you. They do not have to talk with you. You cannot presume yourself to possess the power to force them to speak with you. Oh — and Mr Watters — I’ve watched Mike Wallace. I’ve watched him all my life. And trust me, you’re no Mike Wallace.

2. Mr Watters, you say you’re trying to “help the children.” Woops. You’re not. You’re just saying what you want to say and presuming to speak for the children of Chelmsford, so that you can rationalize being there and asking questions of people as though you’re their boss, when you and they know you are not. You don’t even live there, so you have absolutely nothing to say about Chelmsford’s children. To assume that authority is astoundingly irrational of you … and it’s a lie. (So welcome, Mr Watters, to my “lying liars for Jesus” club.)

3. The people at the school board meeting — who are residents of Chelmsford and do have a say in the matter — nevertheless appear to have problems with fallacies. That “80%” of Chelmsford is Christian, does not entitle them to force everyone else to behave like Christians. That’s a philosophy known as majoritarianism, and it’s based on the fallacy known as “appeal to the masses.” It doesn’t grant you veracity. What it does is show that you can use numbers to bully others.

4. Also, that schools don’t allow sales of candy canes within their halls, in no way prevents Chelmsford families — and their children — from celebrating Christmas however they wish, in their homes and churches. It just doesn’t.

5. One parent claimed celebrating Christmas inside the school is “education.” Woops. It’s not. It is, instead, indoctrination and also forced religious observance. Both of these are illegal in US public schools; but even if they weren’t, they would still be thoroughly unethical.

Note to Mr O’Reilly and Mr Watters: I honestly hope you both keep up your campaign to force each and every American to celebrate Christmas — which is a Christian holiday — regardless of whether or not they are themselves Christian. It just makes clear your goal: The voluntary or involuntary conversion of everyone in the US to Christianity. By all means, continue living down to all my expectations of ardent and furious religionists. With your every word and your every move, you continuously display your complete lack of character, morals, ethics, and integrity, as well as your contempt for freedom and rationality.

Tags: bill o'reilly, candy canes, chelmsford MA, christian, Christianity, christmas, fox news, jesse watters, liar for jesus, liars for jesus, lying liar for jesus, lying liars for jesus, merry christmas, public schools, war on christmas, war on christmas 2009

The Episcopal Church continues moving into the future. The Los Angeles Times reports an openly-gay cleric has been tapped as the next Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles:

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles today elected the first openly gay bishop since the national church lifted a ban that sought to bar gays and lesbians from the church’s highest ordained ministry.

Clergy and lay leaders, meeting in Riverside for their annual convention, elected the Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool, 55, who has been in a committed relationship with another woman since 1988. Another gay candidate, the Rev. John L. Kirkley of San Francisco, withdrew late Friday.

The Rev Glasspool would be the second gay cleric elevated to Episcopal bishop since V. Gene Robinson was selected in 2003 and became Bishop of New Hampshire in 2004. That had caused a rift in the church:

Robinson’s election threw the Episcopal Church and the global Anglican Communion into an uproar, leading to decisions by some conservative parishes and dioceses to leave the national church and resulting in a de facto ban on the election of additional gay bishops. …

In the U.S. some Episcopal parishes, including four Los Angeles parishes, and several dioceses bolted from the national church and aligned themselves with conservative Anglican bishops in Africa and South America.

After some more seesawing over the issue, this appears to be the next “test” of whether or not the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Union of which it’s a part, can stay together. The consequences of this elevation haven’t gone unnoticed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Union, as the (UK) Telegraph reports:

Dr Rowan Williams warned Episcopal Church leaders that they risk breaking “our bonds of mutual affection” if they ordain the openly gay reverend as an assistant bishop. …

Responding quickly to the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles’s election of the Rev Canon Glasspool, Dr Rowan Williams said it raised “very serious questions” for the divided church.

He reminded Episcopal leaders that they had agreed there should be a “period of gracious respect” over such controversial appointments.

The agreement Williams alluded to had been reached in 2006, but earlier this year, it was lifted. Glasspool’s election — if it comes to pass (and it’s not guaranteed yet that it will) — very well could cause serious problems for the Anglican Union and its member churches. As I blogged already, it’s arguable that an Anglican schism is already underway in the US, and this won’t make reconciliation any easier.

Tags: anglican schism, anglican union, bishop, bishops, episcopal church, episcopal diocese of los angeles, episcopal schism, gay, gay clergy, gays, gene robinson, homosexuality, los angeles CA, mary glasspool, rowan williams