The Forced Observance Of Religion

In the news last week was a Cleveland woman named Sakeema Majeed.  Ms. Majeed was in jail (not prison) for something that really happened, and there was nothing untoward about her conviction or incarceration.  She made the news because in the Cleveland jail she was required to attend Christian church services.  Ms. Majeed happens to be a Muslim.  A law suit has been filed.

This is as close to the state establishing a religion as I have seen in my lifetime.

Oh, I’ve seen similar things, but nothing so blatant.  For example, I have written here about the policy of the United States Navy at their Great Lakes Recruit Training facility, back in the 1960’s.  They would not take my heartfelt “no preference” as an answer to the question about religion.  No, we were all to have a religion at boot camp.  With considerable snark, I said okay, I’m a Buddhist.  That was not one of the choices, which were Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish.  I was put down as a Protestant without further adieu, because, as the petty officer said, “I was protesting something.”  As indeed I was.  For ten weeks I attended non-specific Protestant services every Sunday morning.  In 1967, I was, of course, no more a Buddhist than I was a Jew or a Hindu.  But back then I wouldn’t even admit to being a Christian of any kind.  I had been raised Catholic, and had attended Catholic schools for both grammar and high school.  That experience had put me off religion in a comprehensive manner.  I’d say that I was no more of a Protestant than a Jew or a Hindu either, but there I was.

This was not like the establishment of a religion though.  All that was required was that each of the recruits practice some form of religion, within narrow parameters.  The Cleveland jail system is requiring all of its charges to practice Christianity, probably without even the Catholic option.   This might be something new.

“The government shall make no establishment of religion . . .” (I paraphrase.)   This is the Establishment Clause of our constitution.  But where are we going with this thing at this point in our history? 

In our brave new Twenty-First Century world, any politician who wants to get elected in the United States must at least pay lip-service to the Christian God.  “God bless America!”  Except maybe in Vermont, or Brooklyn.  There are one or two professed atheists in our government, and a sprinkling of Jews, Muslims and Hindus, but the Protestants are clearly ascendant.   And they are a busy bunch too, with an active religious agenda. 

Not just the Sarah Palins of the world.  The entire structure of American government is well to the right of center now, including almost the entirety of both houses of congress and maybe even the president as well.  Not to mention the Supreme Court and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most state and local governments too.   The entire Right Wing Establishment feels somewhat beholding to the religious fanatics among us.   I don’t think that it’s even all about the votes anymore.  They’ve decided that religion is of great assistance to them in matters of crowd control and fear mongering. 

There’s the talk of America being a Christian country, which is always dramatically overstated, and the feeling that America must get back to God.  The Ten Commandments have more adherents these days than there are people who can actually recite them.  Abortion and gay rights issues are deliberately used as clubs to drive people apart.  Religious considerations, so-called Christian religious values, are being inserted into a broader range of our laws with each passing year.  Many are specifically Christian, or specifically anti-Muslim.  (Sharia Law!)  The anti-abortion struggle is morphing into an anti-contraception crusade.   Religion, the non-specific “evangelical” form of the Christian religion in particular, is waging a war against our American democracy.  They are cleverly masking it behind a claimed war on religion, a claimed war on the Christian religion. 

They want us to believe that there is a war on Christmas!  That saying “Happy Holidays!” is actually some kind of code for Christians ‘raus!  The paranoia is running so deep that many overly credulous Christians feel like there are deep conspiracies against them, and that some kind of socialist or United Nations takeover is imminent in which they will be rounded up and put in camps.  Run by FEMA!  All of this against the backdrop of an American government that is obviously on a march to establish Christianity as the National Religion of the United States.  Maybe, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, they’ll  call it the United States of Gilead. 

The laws that are being promulgated are intended to force all of us to live by the laws of their religion, as interpreted by them.  To shove, as it were, their religion down our throats.  The worst of it is that they are, in the process, ignoring all that is good and noble in Christianity.  The brotherhood, the charity, the social justice.  We may end up wishing that we were only being dictated to by Episcopalians.  

Maybe you’re thinking, Oh, Fred, you’re so oversensitive.  You’re the one who’s being paranoid.   I hope that I am.  But that whole pendulum swinging back and forth thing doesn’t work as well as it used to.  I’m afraid that these days momentum rules and pendulums are found only in antique clocks.  The momentum is clearly with the right wing so-called conservatives, and they’ve got so much wind in their sails that it might be hard to reverse all of the mischief that they’ve been up to for almost forty years now. 

As usual, I wish us luck and move on.   I’m halfway through an interesting article about the mess in the Ukraine.   Things like that calm me down.  The history of the Ukraine, present and recent, is such a catalog of horror that any problems that America has quickly pale into insignificance.  

Am I An Atheist?

It’s starting to look a little bit dangerous to be identified as an atheist these days.  The circle of demonization has been extending itself since the infamous Nine/Eleven.  That event put Muslims on the shit list.  Homosexuals have been thoroughly demonized by now.  Liberals need not apply in some quarters.  People are angry, and as the world gets weirder and the changes in society come along faster, people are looking for someone or some group or groups to blame it on, to blame whatever the voices in their heads are telling them is happening on. 

Not only Muslims now, but, depending on whom you ask, also Hindus, Sikhs, animists (!!!) and atheists are coming up for the treatment.  Somehow anyone in any of those groups, maybe particularly the homosexuals, is individually and collectively responsible for all of the evils of our society, as delineated by the haters, the demonizers. 

Make your own list of the demons, it’s fun.  Hamas sympathizers!  Washington insiders!  Global Warming patsies!  Dissidents!  Contraceptive mongers!  Democrats!  Leftists!  Congressmen!  Federal agents!  FEMA!  The UN!  The possibilities are endless. 

This is all dangerous, especially if you find yourself in one of the demon categories.  Eliminationist language is frequently employed, often by semi-famous people on Facebook or the radio, and daily by anonymous paranoids in the comment threads of the Internet.  Often they do now shy away from mentioning their preference for Final Solutions. 

So I am moved to wonder:  do my views on religion make me eligible for death? 

What Am I?

I have never made a secret of my views on religion.  I don’t approve of it.  I generally claim that I respect religion, all religions, as other people’s business, it’s up to them.  But that’s not entirely true, the respecting part.  Really I think it’s all poppycock. 

Perhaps luckily for me and my fellow travelers, that may not be enough to make one an atheist.  Let’s hold this thing up to the light.

“Atheism/atheist:  a disbelief in the existence of a god or gods.”  (Not capitalized in the source.)  From the Greek, “a theos,” without God.  (All definitions from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, 2006.)

This might save me on a technicality, because disbelief, like belief, is an affirmative act.  You can argue with atheists, they have taken a position.  It seems to me that atheism is a faith, as much as any religion is a faith.  Atheism is a belief, based not on evidence, that there is no God.  It is based, if anything, on the lack of evidence for the existence of God.  In my Weltanschauung, either the belief in God or the belief that God does not exist are equally foolish. 

There is another category, a kind of “atheism lite,” a kind of wishy-washy almost atheism. 

“Agnostic:  a person who believes that nothing is known, or can be known, of the existence or nature of God."  (Capitalized in the source.)  From the Greek, “a gnostic,” without knowledge. 

Well, that’s a lot more like it.  “Agnostic” seems to sum up my feelings on the matter quite nicely.  As little as we now understand even about ordinary reality, which can be observed and quantified, it seems ridiculous to me to begin pretending that we understand the nature of God.  I am quite satisfied to continue to capitalize the word, “God,” while I remain unpersuaded on the subject of God’s existence of lack thereof.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened than God. 

Agnostic still has a belief component though, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t believe in anything at all on the subject.  Besides, claiming the status of an agnostic when they come for the atheists would be a lot like hiding from the Big Bad Wolf in a house made of straw.  I’m pretty sure that such a narrow distinction would not be honored by hunters.  

Faithless

So I’m going with faithless to describe my own condition.  I’ve written about my failure in this area before.   I’ve never in my life had any faith in anything religious.  It’s not something that I lost at some point, it never took root in me in the first place.  From the earliest attempts by teachers, or my parents, or the church, to inculcate some kind of religious belief in me, I have universally found those efforts to be dubious at best, frequently ridiculous, and certainly nothing that remotely lined up with the world that was staring me in the face. 

Could I be demonized for faithlessness?  It wouldn’t be easy, but those who might seek to do so paint with big brushes, so I guess anything is possible.  My defense would be that faithlessness is not a moral or intellectual position, it is a straightforward confession of fact.   Some may disapprove of it, but you cannot argue with it.  Faithlessness is blameless.