[div class=”excerpt”]A healthy respect for Charles Darwin isn’t exclusive to atheists, for example. A number of Christian churches – including the Roman Catholic, United Methodist and the Church of England – have shown a great deal of amenability to the theory of evolution, and are never the institutions to object to its teaching. As for the role of scientific inquiry in the “betterment of humanity,” it’s absurd and insulting to imagine only non-religious people to be interested in the improvement of human life through scientific progress.
Who the fuck claimed “a healthy respect for Charles Darwin” is exclusive to atheists? Anyone? No, I didn’t think so.
Despite the author’s misgivings, the Darwin Day bill is an appropriate metric to measure secularity. The bill itself is benign; a mere official recognition of Darwin’s impact on modern science. It wasn’t proposed to make it a national fucking holiday; kids weren’t going to get the day off school, and Macy’s sure as shit wasn’t about to throw a Darwin-day parade. It would have been Arbor Day for Charles Darwin. Not costing anyone anything but political capital, there is virtually no reason to oppose the bill unless one 1) doesn’t “believe” in evolution (in which case one is allowing their own religious beliefs to cloud their objectivity), or 2) doesn’t want to alienate voters in their state or district (in which case one is allowing the religious beliefs of the majority to cloud their objectivity).
[div class=”excerpt”]It’s even more bizarre to try to work out exactly what that would have to do with the separation of church and state, unless it would be necessary for the SCA that a legislator vote in favor of literally everything that did not compromise the separation of church and state in order to score a 100 percent, rather than simply refusing to vote for things that would compromise that separation. Under a metric that silly, a legislator could refuse to sponsor “National Everyone Is Now a Christian Day” and also refuse to sponsor “National Bert and Ernie Day” and still fail to score an A merely because Bert and Ernie don’t compromise the separation of church and state and thus, like Charles Darwin, necessarily belong in the orbit of legislation by some strange metric.
It is awfully funny that the Secular Coalition of America would be measuring secularity. What on earth are they thinking?
Talk about insulting. This clown is essentially suggesting non-believers would look at the SCA’s report cards and vote accordingly, without consideration given to the candidates’ positions on issues other than secularism.
The UFCW doesn’t rate politicians based on gun policy. The NAACP doesn’t rate politicians based on their positions on net neutrality. The NEA doesn’t rate politicians based on their stances on renewable energy. Special interest groups rate politicians in relation to their particular special interest. Funny how that works.
[div class=”excerpt”]The same story applies to the bill that would protect rights of conscience. First, a person can conscientiously object to a practice without any involvement in religion whatsoever. Second, the act would signal the government’s refusal to act upon individuals who, for reasons of conscience, did not want to perform a particular service. In that sense it’s a clear-cut push for neutrality: Abortion and other objectionable procedures will remain legal, it’s just that people who disagree with them will be able to abjure without consequence. This is a retreat of religion from the public sphere into the private, not an example of the state confirming a particular set of necessarily religious beliefs by enacting the beliefs themselves.
This is an issue of medical ethics; simply put, whether or not a physician should be allowed to cause a patient harm because of his or her religious beliefs. Few would argue a Jehova’s Witness would be justified in denying a patient access to a blood transfusion based on his or her asinine reading of religious scripture, and if such a thing were to happen, the doctor in question would likely find himself or herself promptly stripped of the privilege of practicing medicine in his or her respective state.
Ah, yes, and there’s the rub: medical professionals are licensed by the state, and are bound to certain ethical precepts as defined by the state. If they act in a manner contrary to these ethical precepts, then they are no longer allowed to practice medicine.
Why is this so difficult to understand?
[div class=”excerpt”]It may well be the reality that the SCA and organizations of a similar aim object purely to the idea of the supernatural (in which case they would have to expel the agnostics in their ranks who permit the possibility of such a thing) and intend to nudge religion out of the public sphere for that reason alone. But based on the issues that appear meaningful to the SCA and the side they fall out on, it seems there’s rather a political agenda tied up in their secularism, and it’s a decidedly leftist one.
While it may be appealing to push back hard against the religious right in order to make de facto political gains in a leftist agenda, doing so ham-fistedly deprives the religious left and the secular left of a well-deserved coalition through which to achieve, of all things, the betterment of humanity. It may be quite a task for organizations like the SCA to warm up to the idea of the religious left, but it also may be a wise strategy toward furthering left goals.
Yes, that’s right. The left’s inability to enact major change over the past thirty years or so is because those damned secularists won’t reach out and ally themselves the poor, oft-neglected religious liberals.
Religious liberals like 99% of federally-elected Democrats.
Most atheists are Democrats. From statistical analysis of voting patterns alone, that means atheist Democrats are – and have been – routinely voting for religious liberals. It sounds to me like the author’s idea of an “alliance” is one in which religious liberals continue to do what they’ve been doing for the past three decades while the non-believers keep their fucking traps shut.
What the author doesn’t understand – and what many religious liberals don’t seem to understand – is that the method by which one arrives at a conclusion is just as important as the conclusion itself. Yes, there are a few positions with which I find myself in line with the Roman Catholic Church (income equality, abolition of the death penalty, etc.), but they can’t reasonably justify these positions to the wider public. “Because Jesus wants us to” isn’t a good reason to enact policy, regardless of whether or not I agree with it.
And, if you oppose the theocratic inklings of the religious right, doing so makes you a goddamned hypocrite. Why should you have the right to invoke your religion to justify legislation, and not the homophobic holy roller representing Oklahoma?
It seems to me the sane thing to do is to keep religion out of the political discourse.
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