http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/ 15 Susan Jacoby writes about atheism in America and its impact on the news, politics and culture. en Copyright 2011 Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:27:02 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=4.2-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/the_rss_feed_for_this_blog_has_moved.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/the_rss_feed_for_this_blog_has_moved.html Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:27:02 -0500 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 in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Westboro hatemongers (most of whom seem to belong to one obsessive extended family) think that the deaths of American soldiers represent God's punishment on the nation for tolerating homosexuality. http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/notes_from_a_free-speech_junkie.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/03/notes_from_a_free-speech_junkie.html Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:25:09 -0500 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 to promote his presidential ambitions. He and his third wife, Callista Bisek, have produced a film about the role of Pope John Paul II in the fall of Communism in Poland. Speaking before Ohio Right to Life, Gingrich recently asserted, "To a suprising degree, we are in a situation similar to Poland's in 1979. In America, religious belief is being challenged by a cultural elite trying to create a secularized America, in which God is http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/eye_of_newt_gingrich_focuses_on_faith_as_presidential_wannabee.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/eye_of_newt_gingrich_focuses_on_faith_as_presidential_wannabee.html Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:34:34 -0500 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 and stupid. It wounds me that members of the national media find the existence of right-wing atheists a surprising phenomenon, because it means they haven't been reading the comments on this blog, where angry, godless right-wing men regularly take me to task for being a sentimental woman who won't accept the junk science, directly descended from 19th-century social Darwinism and Ayn Rand's "objectivism", which maintains that the wretched of the earth deserve their wretchedness and http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/how_rare_are_godless_right-wingers_4.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/how_rare_are_godless_right-wingers_4.html Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:50:43 -0500 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 push their repressive agenda. I hope that this fear will prove unjustified but--reflexive multiculturalists to the contrary--it is not unreasonable to be concerned. I am certain of one thing: we outsiders will be able to judge how well or how badly things are going by what happens to women in Egypt in the coming months and years. We'll know that the Egyptian revolution has taken a bad turn--that is, a bad Islamist turn--if we hear http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/revolutions_are_what_they_do_for_or_to_women.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/revolutions_are_what_they_do_for_or_to_women.html Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:36:31 -0500 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 of his faith is only one byproduct of the larger resurgence, in the nation's capital and many states, of those who want religious belief to determine public policy. http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/several_steps_back_for_secular_government.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/02/several_steps_back_for_secular_government.html Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:30:55 -0500 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 modest, commonsensical proposal to allow Medicare to pay for voluntary consultations between patients and their doctors about end-of-life care. This was a cave-in to the extreme religious right, which takes the absurd position that merely talking with your doctor about this subject constitutes a "death panel." http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/who_decides_when_medicine_prolongs_dying_not_living.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/who_decides_when_medicine_prolongs_dying_not_living.html Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:48:42 -0500 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 Christian church wounded at least 96 and killed 21 people. In Iraq, attacks on Christians that began in October continued, causing the flight of additional refugees toward the more tolerant Kurdish territory to the north. The governments--our putative allies in the Muslim world (and in Iraq, a government that would never have come into being without American military force)--seemed unable or unwilling to display any backbone on behalf of secular principles of governance. The target http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/islamist_violence_strikes_another_blow_against_secularism_and_religious_freedom.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2011/01/islamist_violence_strikes_another_blow_against_secularism_and_religious_freedom.html Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:03:23 -0500 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 that human beings are capable of transcending their fearful and superstitious past, on reason. Without question, the most important victory for secular values this year, or any other year in recent memory, is the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_secular_best_and_the_worst_of_2010.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_secular_best_and_the_worst_of_2010.html Sat, 25 Dec 2010 06:12:59 -0500 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 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--himself a refugee from Nazi Germany--of the era's Soviet Jewish emigration movement as a legitimate U.S. foreign policy concern. "And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union," Kissinger told his boss, "it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern." That "maybe," captured on pre-digital technology, is just priceless. http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/henry_kissinger_and_soviet_jews.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/henry_kissinger_and_soviet_jews.html Sat, 18 Dec 2010 06:30:03 -0500 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 Jesus the prince of peace. Senator Christmas apparently worships a Jesus who wants everyone to be sipping mint juleps on ye olde plantation, skiing in Aspen, or, at the very least, buying new digital toys in a big-box store during the holy days before and after Christmas. As is well-known, every working American gets to take off the week between Christmas and the holy hangover brought on by New Year's Eve. Here in New York http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/dispatches_from_the_christmas_front_republicans_see_sacrilege_in_working_over_holidays.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/dispatches_from_the_christmas_front_republicans_see_sacrilege_in_working_over_holidays.html Thu, 16 Dec 2010 07:08:37 -0500 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 in public and legal attitudes toward rape in the second half of the twentieth century. Four decades ago, it is highly unlikely that this case would ever have come to trial. Had Smart been found, and returned alive to her devout Mormon family, it is unlikely that she would ever have been heard from again in public. She would have been shrouded by the shame and silence that were the lot of nearly all rape http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/conviction_of_elizabeth_smarts_rapist_a_victory_for_secular_feminism.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/conviction_of_elizabeth_smarts_rapist_a_victory_for_secular_feminism.html Sun, 12 Dec 2010 09:51:29 -0500 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 the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which is dedicated to censoring speech and art it deems offensive to Christians in general and Catholics in particular. Boehner had warned the Smithsonian to "be prepared to face tough scrutiny" under the new Republican majority. Just like that, Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough caved and removed a video with an 11-second image of ants crawling on a crucifix, in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_religious_right_back_in_business_with_censorship_at_the_smithsonian.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/the_religious_right_back_in_business_with_censorship_at_the_smithsonian.html Wed, 08 Dec 2010 11:28:36 -0500 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 the rights of American citizens (unless the citizens are terrorists); favor bigger government and higher taxation; embody a kind of multiculturalism that denies basic universal human rights; accept the scientific consensus on global warming and embrace a host of other obviously whacko ideas. In practice, political correctness is nothing more than a meaningless, overarching indictment of any idea that contradicts one's own opinion. I'm shocked to realize that I've used it in my own writing, http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/time_to_ditch_the_label_politically_correct_2.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/time_to_ditch_the_label_politically_correct_2.html Sun, 05 Dec 2010 07:28:22 -0500 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 the most comprehensive evaluation of charter schools, by Stanford University's Center for Education Outcomes, reveals "in unmistakeable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well" in terms of academic performance as students in comparable public schools. Even worse, and equally unmistakable, is the fact that charter school promoters with specific religious and cultural agendas around the country are using every possible means to skirt the First Amendment and obtain public support http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/charter_schools_pose_major_threat_to_church-state_separation.html?wprss=onfaithspirited_atheist http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/12/charter_schools_pose_major_threat_to_church-state_separation.html Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:10:10 -0500