Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
Once again my pet peeve scab has been plucked. A Humanist leader is profiled on the CNN website talking about forming warmed over religious services he calls ‘congregations’. This is my pet peeve because I don’t care for using religious terms with new definitions. It is being abstruse in the least and at most dishonest. A church or congregation without god is not something I need and I wish we would get media coverage that shows how Humanism is totally different than theism.
In his dissent in United States v. Windsor, Justice Antonin Scalia once again showed he lacks any judicial values beyond his selfish ends. His reasoning for dissenting basically came down to his view that the court lacked the power to invalidate a law democratically adopted. Yet he found no such concern in invalidating the Voting Rights Act yesterday. It is obvious that his personal view of the law determines if he thinks the court has the power to give a ruling. In my world that is known as being a hypocritical asshat.
Some Christians and right wingers cry and whine about their freedom of religion being suppressed when their Christian privilege is called out or shut down. But time and again, when the roles are reversed, those same Christians see no problem in suppressing points of view that contradict their beliefs. Orange County School Board in Florida allowed a Christian group to distribute literature, including the Holy Bible, in their high schools. When an atheist group wanted to do the same the school district and the schools did everything they could to sabotage the effort. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is suing the school district in Federal court.
Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist has the details:
As much as I get frustrated about the unnecessary backlash against atheist feminists, it makes me even more upset to see some well meaning opponents of feminism in the movement who fail to learn from history. Tom Flynn, the editor of Free Inquiry and the executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, points out the work of women on the front lines in the struggle of freethought in the last 40 years of the 20th century. Women have led the major atheist groups from the 1960’s to the present.
It has been almost 20 years since I officially chucked religion once and for all and identified as an Atheist and Humanist. Getting rid of the irrational belief system called religion was the most liberating thing that had happened to me in my life to that point and I wanted everyone to know it. I became an evangelist for rational thought and if you didn’t agree with me you were a moron. Now 20 years and many battles later I don’t feel the fire in my belly as much. I’m still a non-believer but I am more selective about what gets me cranked up. Is it my age? Have I gained some kind of wisdom as I got older that mellowed me out. Maybe it is some kind of secular menopause.
*Editor’s note* Since this post was originally published and after some good feedback in the comments below I have rewritten a couple of paragraphs to clarify my thoughts. I didn’t intend to offend any reader young or old. This post was mainly an expression of my thoughts on the subject and how I need to do better. I expressed the thoughts I know are not productive as means of illustrating that it was not productive. If you read the entire post you should see that my point as set in the title is that all of us seculars, young and old, need to work together. We all have different things we can bring to the movement. Thanks again for the feedback and reading this post.
