Not Even God Can Stop Teens from Having Sex

Jezebel / By Erin Gloria Ryan

 58 COMMENTS

Do Evangelicals Finally Realize This?

Evangelical teens are having all kinds of secret sex with each other, and some adults are advocating for reality-based sex education rather than denial-based shamemongering.

July 16, 2012  |  

 

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If premarital sex made the baby Jesus cry, he'd be a pretty hoarse, colic-y baby. Because evangelical teens, despite the fact that they're told day in and day out that bumping uglies before God says it's okay is wrong (like going to hell wrong) are having all kinds of secret sex with each other. And because of their good Christian abstinence only educations, they don't know how to protect themselves, end up pregnant, and — gasp — have abortions. Finally, some adults in the community are saying enough is enough and advocating for reality-based sex education rather than denial-based shamemongering.

The pesky evangelical belief that the only way that kids will get the idea to have sex is if adults tell them about it was, to put it lightly, not working out so well, asThe Daily Beast's David Sessions points out. States with high concentrations of evangelicals have correspondingly high concentrations of telltale side effects of evangelical beliefs on public health — unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and STD's. That's because very few young evangelicals actually practice what they preach; 80% of them will have premarital sex, and of those who have premarital sex, many will get pregnant since birth control pills aren't something you learn about in Don't Touch Yourself Or Each Other Or You'll Go To Hell Class. And what happens to those evangelical pregnancies? 30% of them result in abortions. Whether or not you believe that abortion is a moral or immoral act, it's fairly safe to say that most women who have abortions would probably have preferred to never have been pregnant in the first place. This is bad. Unrealistic expectations of morality coupled with rampant culture-wide hypocrisy are messing with people's health.

Thankfully, some evangelical leaders are waking up and smelling the spermicidal lubricant. Sessions reports rumblings within Christian nonprofit organizations, religious conferences, and in conservative religious magazines urging church leaders to accept the fact that unless they stop blocking young flock members from medically accurate information about birth control, they're essentially leading their followers down a path that ends in abortion. And, in the evangelical mind, premarital sex is bad, but abortion is worse — to them, premarital sex results in besotting the body, the temple of God. But abortion, in the minds these people, is literally murder. Pee on some hymnals versus kill a baby.

So, gosh oh golly gee whiz, how can evangelicals prevent sex outside of marriage and unplanned pregnancy? Some branches of the movement are advocating people get married very, very young, before they've had enough time to drive themselves crazy with insane sex thoughts. But that's not a very practical idea, either (although it does explain why everyone pictured in cutesy DIY wedding blogs looks like they're 12). In other cases, leaders encourage young unmarrieds to learn about birth control "just in case" and "as a backup plan."

Does this mean the beginning of the end of the US government pouring millions of dollars into programs that teach children that if they have sex before they're married, they're like a glass of water filled with chewed up food? I hope so. There has to be literally dozens of stupider things we could be doing with our money.

Sexism In Major Religions Of The World

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex; or conditions or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex.

While all people consciously and unconsciously defend themselves against internal tension, traditionally held polarities of thinking have long-held women as inferior, a falsehood which permeates all facets of our daily lives and for which all people suffer. All the evidence I have encountered makes it hard to believe that there is any major essential psychological difference between the sexes. As Rebecca Chalker says, “biology is not destiny so much as the social construction of biology is destiny.” We are all in secret cahoots we didn’t even know we were in to denigrate the so-called “feminine.” The idea that people can separate good from evil and “reason” from “intuition” is the same line of thinking that leads to the belief that some people are intelligent and worthy and other people are expendable. This dualistic belief in poles and absolutes has been reproduced throughout the world and has devastating and dehumanizing consequences for all the blind dictators in charge who are divorced from themselves and, much worse, for the scapegoated masses below who bear the brunt of the dictators’ insecurities. essay will now tackle the sexism in major religions namely: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. (Source)

This essay will now tackle the sexism in major religions namely: Islam, Christianity,

The major male dominated monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam have had a profound effect on women’s lives up to and including the present day.

The religions themselves practice overt discrimination against women within their own institutions. They are run by men for men. Christianity has its female icon, Mary, in the lower ranks where their services are needed women are tolerated within a supposedly celibate environment, to help the male hierarchy and in the past Convents provided ‘accommodation’ for upper class women away from the hubbub of secular life. It also needs them to perform primary indoctrination for young children and run services that bind people to the church at local level. (Source)

Still people are submitting themselves to the religion. religion, is nothing but the fruit of man’s innocence about equality of women. surely, this world has changed & women today have equal rights but this is not because of religion. Religion, is nothing but something that humans use to control others. as one quote says ” Religion is regarded as true by the common people, false by the wise, & useful by the powerful”. Tell me exactly how come that God allows inequality among his creations? if he loves everything that he created, how come that he himself discriminates women? This God is nothing but the main cause of separation among humans. religion also make false thinking on how men are above any creations here on earth. i do believe that nothing in this world are higher than the other. Religion is nothing but an ideology that promotes sexism. surely, I advocate Buddhistic approach in life but he Buddha himself is a sexist man, no wonder why early Buddhist women were treated as a thing, as a baby-making machine, so does other religions.

The New Totalitarianism: How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union

AlterNet / By Sara Robinson

 160 COMMENTS

Free-market capitalism was supposed to save us from the tyranny of faceless apparatchiks. But that's not what happened.

 

July 15, 2012  |  

Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com

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The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources. In America, it's taken for granted that Soviet communism lost (though China's more capitalist variant seems to be doing well), and the superiority of neo-liberal economics -- as epitomized by the great multinational corporations -- was thus affirmed for all time and eternity.

There's a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says: choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which they've taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of the Soviet system -- too often leaving their employees, customers, and other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back in the day.

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine

 
This Is A Must Watch Video
A brief and crucial history of the United States

Please send this video to your contact list and tweet often, so that we send it viral. Let us remember "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people" - John Adams - Second President - 1797 - 1801

Now is the first day of a new beginning.

Each one - Reach One- Each One - Teach One

Posted February 23, 2012 - Class War Films

 

Transcript

Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.

Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.

For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.

America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.

With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.

In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.

Why Tolerance is Condenscending [Video]

More ideas from Jillette

Transcript

Question: Is religion responsible for a lot of the world’s problems?
Penn Jillette: What you've said, "a lot," sure. If you want to go to "most" or "all," then no but there is certainly people...  there's a great quote by the physicist... What's his name? Weinberg. Steve Weinberg. The quote of with or without religion good people do good things and bad people do bad things but for good people to do bad things that takes religion. I'm not sure that's word-for-word, almost certain it isn't, but it's important. I think it's not religion. It's much deeper than that. My beef is not with religion per se; my difference of opinion is with objective and subjective reality.

Einstein said the big question is when you turn away is the tree still there? And I talk to Richard Feynman about this and Murray Goodman, there's a feeling that in particle physics the "experimenter effect," a lot of that stuff is distorted. I believe very strongly that there is a physical reality that my perception does not change. Now you can make the argument that we're all just brains in jars, the Matrix, and all of this is an illusion and that is an airtight argument. You can't refute it but let's just say it's not that. I think there's a real reality out there and the people who say "I believe in God because I feel that there's some higher power in the universe"—the problem I have with that is that once you've said you believe something that you can't prove to someone else you have completely walled yourself off from the world.

And you've essentially said no one can talk to you and you can talk to no one. You've also given license to everybody else who feels that. If you say to me "I can't prove it Penn, but I have a feeling in my heart that there is a power over everything that connects us," why can't Charlie Manson say "I can't prove it but I can have a feeling that the Beatles are telling us to kill Sharon Tate and that the race riots are coming?" Why can't Al Qaeda say "I have a feeling in my heart that we need to kill these particular infidels?" Why can't the men who tortured and disfigured Ayaan Hirsi Ali—why isn't what they feel in their heart valid?

The problem is if you have a sense of fairness simply by saying you believe in a higher power because you believe in it, you've automatically given license to anyone else that wants to say that. So I would rather be busted on everything I say and I am, you know, when you've put yourself out on television and on radio as someone who really does believe in objective truth there is not a sentence that I will say in this interview that won't get three or four tweets of somebody with information busting me on it. And they're right, you know, very rarely am I busted on something where I'm right. If someone is taking the trouble to let me know I've said something wrong, chances are I'm wrong.

But that's the world I live in. I want to live in a world of a marketplace of ideas where everybody is busted on their bullshit all the time because I think that's the way we get to truth. That is also what respect is. What we call tolerance nowadays, maybe always—I'm always skeptical about the "nowadays" thing. I don't think things get that much different. What we call "tolerance" is often just condescending. It's often just saying, "Okay, you believe what you want to believe that's fine with me." I think true respect... it's one of the reasons I get along so much better with fundamentalist Christians than I do with liberal Christians because fundamentalist Christians I can look them in the eye and say, "You are wrong." They also know that I will always fight for their right to say that.

And I will celebrate their right to say that but I will look them in the eye and say, "You're wrong." And fundamentalists will look me in the eye and say, "You're wrong." And that to me is respect. The more liberal religious people who go "There are many paths to truth you just go on and maybe you'll find your way"... is the way you talk to a child. And I bristle at that, so I do very well with proselytizing hardcore fundamentalists and in a very deep level I respect them and at a very deep level i think I share a big part of their heart. I think in a certain sense I'm a preacher. My heart is there.

Recorded on June 8, 2010
Interviewed by Paul Hoffman

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50 Liberal Quotes Which Americans Should Remember

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Many Americans today tend to take the past for granted, and with that, we also tend to take the words of past leaders for granted. We forget what they told us, and as a result we lose our identity, we lose the values that make us who we are. Below is a list of quotes spoken by American leaders, heroes, journalists, and others. You’ll find common themes throughout this list. These are the messages from the American past that we should all remember if we hope to solve our own problems and bring America forward to a better future. The future that these people envisioned.

1.) “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
~John F. Kennedy

2.) “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” ~Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

3.) “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
~John F. Kennedy


4.) “The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

5.) “I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”
~Robert Kennedy

6.) “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

7.) “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.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

8.) “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

9.) “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
~Abraham Lincoln

10.) “Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
~Robert Kennedy

11.) “It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
~Hubert H. Humphrey

12.) “I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

13.) “To impose taxes when the public exigencies require them is an obligation of the most sacred character, especially with a free people.”
~James Monroe

14.) “The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for … the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

15.) “The laboring classes constitute the main part of our population. They should be protected in their efforts peaceably to assert their rights when endangered by aggregated capital, and all statutes on this subject should recognize the care of the State for honest toil, and be framed with a view of improving the condition of the workingman.”
~Grover Cleveland

16.) “It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

17.) “Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t even know what the word means. They think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.”
~Barry Goldwater

18.) “The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”
~Thomas Jefferson

19.) “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

20.) “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.”
~John F. Kennedy

21.) “America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal – to discover and maintain liberty among men.”
~Woodrow Wilson

22.) “If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright

23.) “I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”
~Thomas Jefferson

24.) “While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.”
~Barry Goldwater

25.) “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”
~Hubert Humphrey

26.) “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

27.) “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”
~George Washington

28.) “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

29.) “Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”
~Ronald Reagan

30.) “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.) “We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate.”
~Ronald Reagan

32.) “Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

33.) “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
~Dwight Eisenhower

34.) “The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

35.) “Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens–to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one–and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.”
~John F. Kennedy

36.) “But let us begin. Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”- a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
~John F. Kennedy

37.) “We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion suffer by all such interference.”
~Rutherford B. Hayes

38.) “The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.”
~James A. Garfield

39.) “You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.”
~Harry S. Truman

40.) “I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncomitted to a cause but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen.”
~Walter Cronkite

41.) “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level – I mean the wages of decent living.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

42.) “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
~John F. Kennedy

43.) “For all my years in public life, I have believed that America must sail toward the shores of liberty and justice for all. There is no end to that journey, only the next great voyage. We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make.”
~Edward Kennedy

44.) “We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

45.) “Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

46.) “The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”
~Noam Chomsky

47.) “The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
~Helen Keller

48.) “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

49.) “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
~Barry Goldwater

50.) “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

You’ll notice that the quotes by American politicians were not solely from one end of the spectrum. Quotes from Democrats and Republicans were included. There are even quotes from our Founding Fathers. Certainly there are more quotes that could be added as is the case with lists of this kind. But the fact remains that we must remember the words of our past and keep them with us as America carves out its future.

Tags: addicting info, addictinginfo.org, American history, civil rights, corporations, economy,FDR, George Washington, human rights, John F. Kennedy, labor, leadership, Presidential quotes, quotes, Social Security

Low-Wage Nation

 

Poverty and Inequality are Threatening our Democracy
By Peter Edelman 
With its catchy "We are the 99 Percent" slogan, the Occupy movement focused millions of Americans on our nation's chronic inequality. As that movement regains momentum, it must pay more attention to the whole 99 percent.

We certainly should worry about how the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans isn't paying its fair share of the cost of running the country. But we should be just as worried about how people at the other end are doing.

It's not just about the continuing wave of foreclosures. Millions of people are stuck in low-wage jobs that don't pay enough to make ends meet. And millions more live on incomes so low that it's hard to imagine how they survive.

Low-wage work is a pandemic. A third of our population ekes by on less than $36,000 for a family of three. That's 103 million people living on less than twice the poverty line, but most of them technically aren't poor or don't consider themselves poor. Yet they struggle every month to make ends meet and are one medical emergency or protracted illness away from bankruptcy.

Why so much low-wage work? Because over the past 40 years, well-paying industrial jobs disappeared, unions lost much of their clout, the minimum wage stagnated, and the field of competition in many areas became globalized.

The result: half of U.S. jobs now pay $34,000 or less a year. A quarter of U.S. jobs pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four. And the wages for those jobs have been stuck for four decades. Today, they pay only 7 percent more than they did in 1973.

No Religion? 7 Types of Non-Believers

AlterNet
By Valerie Tarico

Religious labels help shore up identity. So what are some of the things non-believers can call themselves?

 

 

 

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Catholic, Born-Again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist . . . .  Religions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward “infidels” is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are.  They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human.  They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves. 

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important.  It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm.  Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though.  For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world.  Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three.  What does it mean?  What emotions does it evoke?  Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community?  The differences may be subtle but they are important. 

If, one way or another, you’ve left religion behind, and if you’ve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these:

1. Atheist.  The term atheist can be defined literally as lacking a humanoid god concept, but historically it means one of two things.  Positive atheism asserts that a personal supreme being does not exist.  Negative atheism simply asserts a lack of belief in such a deity.  It is possible be a positive atheist about the Christian God, for example, while maintaining a stance of negative atheism or even uncertainty on the question of a more abstract deity like a “prime mover.”  In the United States, it is important to know that atheist may be the most reviled label for a godless person.  Devout believers use it as a slur and many assume an atheist has no moral core.  Until recently calling oneself an atheist was an act of defiance.  That appears to be changing.  With the rise of the “New Atheists” and the recent atheist visibility movement, the term is losing its edge.  

2. Anti-theist.  When atheist consistently evoked images of Madeline Murray O’Hare, hostility toward religion was assumed.  Now that it may evoke a white-haired grandmother at the Unitarian church or the gay kid on Glee, some people want a term that more clearly conveys their opposition to the whole religious enterprise.  The term anti-theist says, “I think religion is harmful.”  It also implies some form of activism that goes beyond merely advocating church-state separation or science education.  Anti-theism challenges the legitimacy of faith as a moral authority or way of knowing.  Anti-theists often work to expose harms caused in the name of God like stonings, gay bating, religious child maltreatment, genital mutilation, unwanted childbearing or black-collar crime.  The New Atheist writers including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might better be described as anti-theists. 

3. Agnostic.  Some atheists think of agnostic as a weenie term, because it gets used by people who lack a god-concept but don’t want to offend family members or colleagues.  Agnostic doesn’t convey the same sense of confrontation or defiance that atheist can, and so it gets used as a bridge. But in reality, the term agnostic represents a range of intellectual positions that have important substance in their own right and can be independent of atheism.  Strong agnosticism views God’s existence as unknowable, permanently and to all people.  Weak agnosticism can mean simply “I don’t know if there is a God,” or “We collectively don’t know if there is a God but we might find out in the future.” Alternately, the term agnosticism can be used to describe an approach to knowledge, somewhat like skepticism (which comes next in this list). Philosopher Thomas Huxley illustrates this position:  

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed as ‘in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’ 

These three definitions of agnosticism, though different, all focus on what we do or can know, rather than on whether God exists.  This means it is possible to be both atheist and agnostic.  Author Phillip Pullman has described himself as both. 

The question of what term to use is a difficult one, in strict terms I suppose I'm an agnostic because of course the circle of the things I do know is vastly smaller than the things I don't know about out there in the darkness somewhere maybe there is a God. But among all the things I do know in this world I see no evidence of a God whatsoever and everybody who claims to know there is a God seems to use that as an excuse for exercising power over other people, and historically as we know from looking at the history in Europe alone that's involved persecution, massacre, slaughter on an industrial scale, it's a shocking prospect. 

4. Skeptic.  Traditionally, skeptic has been used to describe a person who doubts received religious dogmas.  However, while agnostic focuses on God questions in particular, the term skeptic expresses a broader life approach.  Someone who calls him- or herself a skeptic has put critical thinking at the heart of the matter.  Well known skeptics, like Michael Shermer, Penn and Teller, or James Randi devote a majority of their effort to debunking pseudoscience, alternative medicine, astrology and so forth.  They broadly challenge the human tendency to believe things on insufficient evidence.  British comic Tim Minchen is an outspoken atheist who earns a living in part by poking fun at religion.  But his most beloved and hilarious beat poem, Storm, smacks down homeopathy and hippy woo.

5. Freethinker.  Free-thinker is a term that dates to the end of the 17^th Century, when it was first used in England to describe those who opposed the Church and literal belief in the Bible.  Freethought is an intellectual stance that says that opinions should be based on logic and evidence rather than authorities and traditions.  Well known philosophers including John Lock and Voltaire were called freethinkers in their own time, and a magazine, The Freethinker, has been published in Britain continuously from 1881 to the present.  The term has gotten popular recently in part because it is affirmative.  Unlike atheism, which defines itself in contrast to religion, freethought identifies with a proactive process for deciding what is real and important.

6. Humanist.  While terms like atheist or anti-theist focus on a lack of god-belief and agnostic, skeptic and freethinker all focus on ways of knowing—humanist centers in on a set of ethical values.  Humanism  seeks to promote broad wellbeing by advancing compassion, equality, self-determination, and other values that allow individuals to flourish and to live in community with each other.  These values drive not from revelation, but from human experience.  As can be seen in two manifestos published in 1933 and 1973 respectively, humanist leaders don’t shy away from concepts like joy and inner peace that have spiritual connotations. In fact, some think that religion itself should be reclaimed by those who have moved beyond supernaturalism but recognize the benefits of spiritual community and ritual.  Harvard Chaplain Greg Epstein dreams of incubating a thriving network of secular congregations.  

7. Pantheist.  As self-described humanists seek to reclaim the ethical and communitarian aspects of religion, pantheistscenter in on the spiritual heart of faith--the experience of humility, wonder, and transcendence.  They see human beings as one small part of a vast natural order, with the Cosmos itself made conscious in us.  Pantheists reject the idea of a person- god, but believe that the holy is made manifest in all that exists.  Consequently, they often have a strong commitment to protecting the sacred web of life in which and from which we have our existence.  The writings of Carl Sagan reflect this sentiment and often are quoted by pantheists, for example in a “Symphony of Science” video series which mixes evocative natural world images, atonal music, and the voices of leading scientists, and has received 30 million views. 

If none of these fit . . . .  Keep looking.  Many of the American founding fathers were deists who didn’t believe in miracles or special revelation through sacred texts but thought that the natural world itself revealed a designer who could be discovered through reason and inquiry.  Naturalists assume a philosophical position that the laws operating within the natural realm are the only laws governing the universe and no supernatural realm lies beyond.  Secularists argue that moral standards and laws should be based on whether they do good or harm in this world and that religion should be kept out of government.  Pastafarians playfully claim to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and their religion is a good-humored spoof on Abrahamic beliefs and rituals. 

Recently there has been steep uptick in people who identify as godless and a parallel uptick in atheist and humanist visibility efforts.  Many godless people are newly out of religion (or newly out of the closet).  Despite the best efforts of, say, the Humanist Community Project or Foundation Beyond Belief, stable communities organized around shared secular values and spiritual practices have yet to emerge.  That means our labels are largely individual and sometimes experimental.  We may try one on for size, live with it for a while, then try on something else.

As a movement, sexual and gender minorities have faced a similar challenge.  LGB started replacing the term “gay community” in the 1980s. It then became LGBT, and then LGBTQ (to acknowledge those who were questioning) or LGBTI (to include intersex people).  In India, an H got added to the end for the Hijra subculture.  For urban teens, the catch-all termqueer has now replaced the cumbersome acronym.  Queer embraces the idea that sexual and gender identity is biologically and psychologically multifaceted.  It includes everyone who doesn’t think of themselves as straight.  Secular rights activists may eventually evolve a similar catch all, but in the meantime, organizations that want to be inclusive end up with long lists on their ‘About’ pages:  atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker, pantheist, skeptic and more.  So, join the experiment that picking one that fits and wearing it for a while.  Or make up your own.  I often call myself a “spiritual nontheist.”  It’s a mouthful, but it forces people to ask, what is that?  and then, rather than having them make assumptions I get to tell them where I’m at:  I don’t have any kind of humanoid god concept, and I think that issues of morality and meaning are at the very heart of what it means to be human.  Maybe next year I’ll find something that fits even better.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

8 Ways the Religious Right Wins Converts – To Atheism

Posted on May 28, 2012 

If the Catholic Bishops, their Evangelical Protestant allies, and other Right-wing fundamentalists had the sole objective of decimating religious belief, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it. 

Testimonials at sites like ExChristian.net show that people leave religion for a number of reasons, many of which religious leaders have very little control over.  Sometimes, for example, people take one too many science classes.  Sometimes they find their faith shattered by the suffering in the world – either because of a devastating injury or loss in their own lives or because they experience the realities of another person’s pain in a new way.  Sometimes a believer gets intrigued by archaeology or symbology or the study of religion itself.  Sometimes a believer simply picks up a copy of the Bible or Koran and discovers faith-shaking contradictions or immoralities there.  

But if you read ExChristian testimonials you will notice that quite often church leaders or members do things that either trigger the deconversion process or help it along. They may turn a doubter into a skeptic or a quiet skeptic into an outspoken anti-theist, or as one former Christian calls himself, a de-vangelist.  

Here are some top ways Christians push people out the Church door or shove secret skeptics out of the closet.  Looking at the list, you can’t help but wonder if the Catholic Bishops, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman and their fundamentalist allies are working for the devil.

Gay Baiting. Because of sheer demographics, most gay people are born into religious families, and in this country almost half are born into Bible-believing families who see homosexuality as an abomination.  The condemnation (and self-condemnation) can beexcruciating, as we all know from the suicide rate.  Some emotionally battered gays spend their lives fighting or denying who they are, but many eventually find their way to open and affirming congregations or non-religious communities. 

Ignorant and mean-spirited attitudes about homosexuality don’t drive just gays out of the Church, they are a huge deconversion issue for straight friends and family members.  When Christians indulge in slurs, devout moms and dads who also love their gay kids find themselves less comfortable in their church home.  Young people, many of whom think of the gay rights issue as a no-brainer, put anti-gay churches in the “archaic” category.  Since most people Gen X and younger recognize equal rights for gays as a matter of common humanity, gay baiting is a wedge issue that wedges young people right out of the church.  That makes Fred Phelps a far better evangelist for atheism than for his own gay-hating Westborough Baptist Church.   

Prooftexting.   People who think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God love to quote excerpts to argue their points.  They often start with a verse in 1 Timothy:  All scripture is given by inspiration of God. (As if this circular argument would convince anyone but a true believer.)  They then proceed to quote whatever authoritarian, anti-gay, or anti-woman verse makes their point, like, Whoever spares the rod hates their children . . . Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being.  or Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.   In doing so, they call into question biblical authority, because the Bible writers so obviously got these issues wrong.  Literalists who prooftext are a tremendous asset to those who would like to see Bible worship fade away – because prooftexting on one side of an argument invites the same in return, and it is easy to find quotes from the Bible that are either scientifically absurd or morally repugnant.

Many liberal or modernist Christians see the Bible as a human document, an attempt by our spiritual ancestors to articulate their best understanding of God through the lens of imperfect human cultures and minds. Suppose such a Christian gets confronted with a verse that says, for example, Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man (Numbers 31:17-18), or No man who has any defect may come near [to God in the temple]: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed;  no man with a crippled foot or hand,  or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, . . . (Leviticus 21:17-23).  He or she can simply shrug and say, “Yeah, that’s ugly.”  A couple of years ago a group of liberal Christians even kicked off an internet competition to vote on the worst verse in the Bible.  Their faith doesn’t stand or fall with the perfection of the Bible.  Biblical literalists, on the other hand give someone like me an excuse to talk about sexual slavery or bias against handicapped people in the Bible – in front of an audience who have been taught that the good book is uniformly good.  For a wavering believer, the dissonance can be too much. 

Misogyny. For psychological and social reasons females are more inclined toward religious belief than males.  They are more likely to attend church services and to insist on raising their children in a faith community.    They also appear more indifferent than males to rational critique of religion, like debates about theology or evolutionary biology.  I was interested to notice recently that my YouTube channel, Life After Christianity, which focuses on the psychology of religion gets about eighty percent male viewers.   Women are the Church’s base constituency, but fortunately for atheists, this fact hasn’t caused conservative Christians to back off of sexism that is justified by – you got it – prooftexting from the Old and New Testaments. 

Evangelical minister, Jim Henderson, recently published a book, The Resignation of Eve, in which he urges his fellow Christians to take a hard look at the consequences of sexism in the church.  According to Henderson, old school sexism has driven some women out of Christianity permanently, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  For those who stay, it means that many are less enthusiastic and engaged than they would be.  Churches rely on women to volunteer in roles that range from secretary to director of Children’s programs to missionaries.  That takes a high level of confidence in Church doctrines and also a strong sense of belonging.  Biblical sexism cultivates neither.  Between 1991 and 2011 the percent of women attending church in a typical week dropped by eleven points, from 55 to 44 percent.

Hypocrisy.  Christians are taught – and many believe—that thanks to the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit they are a moral beacon for society.  The writer of Matthew told his audience, “You are the light of the world.”   That’s a high bar, and yet decent believers (along with many other decent people) try earnestly to meet it.   But the added pressure on those who call themselves “the righteous” means that believers also are prone to hiding, pretending, posing, and turning a blind eye to their own very human, very normal faults and flaws.    People who desperately want to be sanctified and righteous, “cleansed by the blood of the lamb” – who need to believe that they now merit heaven but that other people’s smallest transgressions merit eternal torture—have a lot of motivation to engage in self-deception and hypocrisy.  High profile hypocrites like Ted Haggard or Rush Limbaugh may be loved by their acolytes, but for people who are teetering, they help to build a gut aversion to whatever they espouse.   But often as not, the hypocrisies that pose a threat to faith are small and internal to a single Bible-study or youth group.   Backbiting and social shunning are part of the church-lady stereotype for a reason.   They also leave a bitter taste that makes some church members stop drinking the Kool-aid. 

Disgusting and Immoral Behavior.   The priest abuse scandal did more for the New Atheist movement than outspoken anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith) or Bill Maher (Religulous) ever could. To make matters worse—or better, depending on your point of view– Bill Donohue of the Catholic League seems to be doing everything possible to fan those flames:  On top of the abuse itself, followed by cover-ups, he is now insisting that the best defense of Church property is a good offense against the victims, and has vowed to fight them “one by one.”  The Freedom from Religion Foundation publishes a bi-monthly newspaper that includes a regular feature:  The Black Collar Crime Blotter.  It features fraud, drug abuse, sex crimes and more by Protestant as well as Catholic clergy.  The obvious purpose is to move readers from Religion isn’t true to Religion isn’t benign toReligion is abhorrent and needs fighting.  Moral outrage is a powerful emotion.  

Science denial.  One of my former youth group friends had his faith done in by a conversation with a Bible study leader who explained that dinosaur skeletons actually are the bones of the giants described in early books of the Bible. Uh huh.  Christians have come up with dozens of squishier, less falsifiable ways to explain the geological record: The ‘days’ in Genesis 1 were really ‘ages.’  Or God created the world with the fossils already in place to test our faith.  Or the biblical creation story is really sacred metaphor.   But young earth creationists who believe the world appeared in its present form 6- 10,000 years ago are stuck.  And since almost half of the American public believes some version of this young earth story, there are ample opportunities for inquiring minds to trip across proto-scientific nonsense. 

Like other factors I’ve mentioned, science denial doesn’t just move believers to nonbelief.  It also rallies opposition ranging from cantankerous bloggers to legal advocates.   It provides fodder for comedians and critics: “If the world was created 6000 years ago, what’s fueling your car?” It may produce some of the most far reaching opposition to religious belief, because science advocates argue that faith, even socially benign faith, is a fundamentally flawed way of knowing.  The Catholic Church, perhaps still licking wounds about Galileo (they apologized finally in the 20^th Century), has managed to avoid embarrassing and easily disproven positions on evolutionary biology.  But one could argue that their atheism-fostering positions on conception and contraception similarly rely on ignorance about or denial of biological science –in this case embryology and the basic fact that most embryos never become persons.   

Political meddling.  If you look at religion-bashing quote-quip-photo-clip-links that circulate Facebook and Twitter, most of them are prompted by church incursions into the political sphere.  A spat between two atheists erupted on my home page yesterday.  “Why can’t ex-Christians just shut up about religion and get on with building a better world?” asked one.  “Why can’t we shut up?!” screeched the other.  “Because of shit like this!”  He posted a link about Kansas giving doctors permission to deny contraception and accurate medical information to patients.  

I myself give George W. Bush credit for transforming me from a politically indifferent, digging-in-the-garden agnostic into a culture warrior.  He casually implied that, when going to war, he didn’t need to consult with his own father because he had consulted the big guy in the sky, and my evangelical relatives backed him up on that, and I thought, oh my God, the beliefs I was raised on are killing people.   The Religious Right, and now the Catholic Bishops, have brought religion into politics in the ugliest possible way short of holy war, and people who care about the greater good have taken notice.  Lists of ugly Bible verses, articles about the psychology of religion, investigative exposes about Christian machinations in D.C. or rampant proselytizing in the military and public schools –all of these are popular among political progressives because it is impossible to drive progressive change without confronting religious fundamentalism. 

Intrusion.  Australian comedian and atheist John Safran,  flew to Salt Lake City for a round of door-to-door devangelism after Mormons rang his doorbell one too many times on Saturday morning.   More serious intrusions, in deeply personal beginning- and end-of-life decisions, for example, generate reactive anti-theism in people who mostly just want to live and let live. 

Catholic and Evangelical conservatives have made a high stakes gamble that they can regain authoritarian control over their flocks and hold onto the next generation of believers (and tithers) by asserting orthodox dogmas, making Christian belief an all or nothing proposition.  Their goal is a level of theological purity that will produce another Great Awakening based largely on the same dogmas as the last one.  They hope to cleanse their membership of theological diversity, and assert top down control of conscience questions, replenishing their membership with anti-feminist, pro-natalist policies and proselytizing in the Southern hemisphere.   But the more they resort to strict authoritarianism, insularity and strict interpretation of Iron Age texts, the more people are wounded in the name of God and the more people are outraged.  By making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition – they force at least some would-be believers to choose “nothing.”  Anti-theists are all too glad to help.

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About Valerie Tarico

Seattle psychologist and writer. Author - Trusting Doubt and Deas and Other Imaginings. Founder - www.WisdomCommons.org.

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