Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
This weekend social media blew up when comedian Bill Maher and actor Ben Affleck debated Maher’s views about Islam on his HBO show. Affleck makes the same mistake most liberals make when religion is involved in a debate, they conflate criticism with ‘racism’. Ideas like that lead us to blasphemy laws.
The heated portion of the debate started after comments from author Sam Harris:
On Monday night, Kansas City Chiefs safety Husain Abdullah intercepted a Tom Brady pass and returned it for a touchdown. He decided to celebrate the big play and knelt to the ground in the endzone to pray. He was penalized according to the rulebook but the next day the NFL said it goofed. Now there is one set of rules for religious players and another set for those who don’t wear their religion on their sleeves. Religious privilege has arrived in the NFL.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted aired his first campaign ad this week. The ad hypes a program that treats members of the military better than average Ohio citizens by bending over backwards so they can vote. The program is one reason Husted keeps loosing in Federal court as he keeps trying to obstruct voting for non-military Ohioans and especially African-Americans.
Yesterday, my Facebook feed included a link to another article by Chris Stedman that attempts to make me feel bad because I don’t love religion. He uses a point made by another writer that actually doesn’t support his conclusion. If he thinks a study proves that some atheists, like Christopher Hitchens, don’t speak for all atheists then he needs to include all the information – that atheists like Chris Stedman also don’t speak for all atheists.
Chris Stedman, an atheist who wrote the book “Faitheist” and is a columnist for Religion News Service, wrote a post on September 24th that was an interview with author Dale McGowan who is Executive Director of Foundation Beyond Belief along with other hats he wears in the freethought community.
I’ve been part of the non-religious community for 20 years and one thing is constant, we have many different groups to support us and it seems new ones show up regularly. Case in point is ‘Openly Secular’, a ‘new’ coalition of several large secular groups. Its mission of drawing attention to discrimination of non-religious people is needed but I’m disappointed in the fact that they named the group ‘Openly Secular’ instead of ‘Openly Non-religious’.