2011-03-14T00:27:31Z Susan Jacoby writes about atheism in America and its impact on the news, politics and culture. tag:onfaith.washingtonpost.com,2011:/onfaith/spirited_atheist//661 Copyright (c) 2011, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive 2011-03-14T00:27:31Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-03-13:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/the_rss_feed_for_this_blog_has_moved.html

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Erica Pytlovany 2011-03-09T22:01:41Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-03-09:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/notes_from_a_free-speech_junkie.html

Once again, people who believe in "free speech for me but not for thee," are outraged by a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the right of Americans to spew venom that offends anyone with a sense of decency. In this case, by an 8-1 majority--a rare example of agreement between the conservative and liberal blocs on the high court--the justices upheld the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket near funerals of soldiers killed...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-03-03T17:25:14Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-02-28:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/eye_of_newt_gingrich_focuses_on_faith_as_presidential_wannabee.html

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich speaks to a cheering crowd during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Thursday February 10, 2011. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post) In a shameful lapse of attention, I missed Newt Gingrich's 2009 conversion to Roman Catholicism--a departure from his previous status as a somewhat lukewarm (by right-wing evangelical standards) Southern Baptist. But there is nothing lukewarm now about his use of his conservative brand of Catholicism...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-02-24T16:52:27Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-02-24:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/how_rare_are_godless_right-wingers_4.html

The world, it seems, is waking up to the existence of politically right-wing atheists, who prove that you don't have to believe in God to believe in the innate superiority of white and Asian brains; the ruinous impact of immigration on American society (unless the immigrants have white or Asian brains); the infallibility and supremacy of that deity of conservatism, the market; and the idea that the poor are poor only because they are lazy...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-02-16T18:47:54Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-02-12:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/revolutions_are_what_they_do_for_or_to_women.html

Like all Americans--unless they live on Planet Crackpot Caliphate--I hope that the joy on the faces of men, women and children in Cairo is only the precursor to the emergence of a more democratic society that fulfills their hopes. Also like many Americans--including some liberals who won't say so publicly--I am worried that the inevitable uncertainties of a political transition from dictatorship will provide a new opening, under cover of democracy, for Islamic radicals to...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-02-09T17:35:26Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-02-09:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/several_steps_back_for_secular_government.html

The Spirited Atheist, like a great many secularists at this political juncture, is feeling somewhat dispirited. President Obama's "how-I-came-to-know-Jesus" speech at that sanctimonious annual ritual known as the National Prayer Breakfast might as well have been titled, "How I plan to be a two-term president by convincing loonies I am not a Muslim or atheist." We're not hearing much about Obama's respect for people of no faith these days and the president's very public embrace...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-02-02T14:57:50Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-01-31:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/who_decides_when_medicine_prolongs_dying_not_living.html

Doctors at Gundersen Lutheran, long a pioneer in ensuring that the care provided to patients in their final months complies with their wishes, ask a terminally ill patient how staff members can help her be comfortable. (Sher Stoneman) The Spirited Atheist is back, after a break for obligations associated with impending book publication. One of the most irrational news developments I missed last month (there were so many) was President Obama's abandonment of a...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2011-01-05T03:02:41Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2011-01-03:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/islamist_violence_strikes_another_blow_against_secularism_and_religious_freedom.html

To end the old year and begin the new, there is more entirely predictable bad news from the world of radical Islam. On New Year's Eve in Pakistan, Islamist political parties brought business and government to a standstill with massive protests against any potential changes in a blasphemy law that carries a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of "insulting Islam." On New Year's Day in Alexandria, Egypt, a suicide bomb attack in a Coptic...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-28T02:13:35Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-25:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_secular_best_and_the_worst_of_2010.html

I've always tried to avoid engaging in the hoary journalistic practice of filling space at the end of December by summing up the best and worse news events of the preceding year. But it seems to me that this year, in the United States, two ongoing stories truly did embody the continuing struggle between rigid religious values, rooted in a literal intepretation of supposedly sacred texts, and a secular world view based, to the extent...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-22T01:10:38Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-18:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/henry_kissinger_and_soviet_jews.html

When the latest batch of Richard M. Nixon's Oval Office tapes was released earlier this month, no one was really surprised to hear more of his anti-Semitic and anti-black slurs, coupled with a few new anti-Italian and anti-Irish bon mots. Nixon's private views about Jews were already well-known ("The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality [sic]"). What really has the Jewish establishment in an uproar is the dismissal, by former...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-17T16:50:25Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-16:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/dispatches_from_the_christmas_front_republicans_see_sacrilege_in_working_over_holidays.html

When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suggested that Congress might have to return to Washington to complete its work during the week between Christmas and New Year's, Republican senators responded by calling the proposal an attack on people of Christian faith. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint even described it as "sacrilegious" for the Senate to remain in session over Christmas to vote on an arms control treaty. That's strange. I've always thought that Christians considered...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-14T16:07:53Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-12:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/conviction_of_elizabeth_smarts_rapist_a_victory_for_secular_feminism.html

The conviction last week by a Utah jury of the man who kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002, forced her into a "celestial marriage" and raped her over a period of nine months has been depicted as a victory for one courageous young woman and for the federal justice system. It is both of those things, but it is also a victory for 40 years of secular feminism, which singlehandedly brought about a vast change...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-10T15:55:05Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-08:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_religious_right_back_in_business_with_censorship_at_the_smithsonian.html

Since the November election, there has been a lot of foolish talk from pundits convinced that the new, Tea Party-infused Republican-controlled House of Representatives will concentrate on its pet economic issues and leave the culture wars on the back burner. Think again. This week, it took exactly one threat from House speaker-in-waiting John Boehner to persuade the man in charge of the Smithsonian Institution to remove an item from an art exhibit that had offended...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-07T17:20:50Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-05:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/time_to_ditch_the_label_politically_correct_2.html

As an early new year's resolution, I am vowing to retire the term "politically correct" from my writing. We all know what it means: it's shorthand for a complex of views that the right wing attributes to everyone on the political left. People on the left are, let's see, thought to: oppose discrimination of every kind except against white men; hate the military; disdain all religion and religious believers; uphold the rights of terrorists over...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby 2010-12-03T17:05:07Z tag:washingtonpost.com,2010-12-01:/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/charter_schools_pose_major_threat_to_church-state_separation.html

More than 1.5 million American children now attend charter schools, thanks to a movement asserting that whatever is wrong with American public education can be fixed by what amounts to a semiprivate--publicly funded but privately managed--school enclave within the larger system. Many representatives of both the cultural right and left have signed on to this Charter of Wishful Thinking, which continues to be seen as a panacea for the ills of public schools even though...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.

Susan Jacoby