If sex did not exist, religion would have to invent it so it could prohibit the religious from engaging in it outside of marriage for any reason, within marriage for any reason other than procreation, and with anyone who happens to have the same genitals as they.

Very early in my life, while I was being raised and educated in the Seventh-day Adventist cult, it became clear to me that my genitals and what I did with them were very important to my pastor, my teachers, and everyone who ran the cult, including its long-dead founder and “prophet,” the alcoholic plagiarist Ellen G. White.

Ellen was a Victorian-era religious fanatic who claimed to receive “visions” from god.  One of Ellen’s favorite topics was masturbation, which she called “self-abuse,” “self-indulgence,” or “solitary vice.”  On page 63 of her 1870 book A Solemn Appeal, she wrote:

“Children who practice self-indulgence previous to puberty, or the period of merging into manhood or womanhood, must pay the penalty of nature’s violated laws at that critical period.  Many sink into an early grave, while others have sufficient force of constitution to pass this ordeal.  If the practice is continued from the age of fifteen and upward, nature will protest against the abuse she has suffered, and continues to suffer, and will make them pay the penalty for the transgression of her laws, especially from the ages of thirty to forty-five, by numerous pains in the system, and various diseases, such as affection of the liver and lungs, neuralgia, rheumatism, affection of the spine, diseased kidneys, and cancerous humors.  Some of nature’s fine machinery gives way, leaving a heavier task for the remaining to perform, which disorders nature’s fine arrangement, and there is often a sudden breaking down of the constitution; and death is the result.”

All of this, she claimed, was shown her by god.  Of course, we now know that masturbation is natural, healthy and beneficial.  According to a 2003 Australian study, ejaculating more than five times a week makes men a third less likely to develop prostate cancer.  In women, it helps prevent cervical cancer , clears up urinary tract infections and decreases the risk of heart disease and type-2 diabetes.

Was god simply unaware of these facts about the human body that he is supposed to have created when he warned Ellen G. White of the deadly dangers of wanking?  I’m more inclined to conclude that she was a fanatic exploiting the ignorance of her day to draw people into a cult over which she could have power.  Ellen, however, was not alone in these beliefs about masturbation, and those myths persist today, not only in the Seventh-day Adventist cult (which continues to see Ellen’s writings as the infallible final word in doctrine and scriptural interpretation) but throughout Christianity.

Why is religion so intensely interested in the sex lives of its believers – and even in the sex lives of people who have no interest in religion?  It’s very tempting to conclude that religion simply doesn’t want people to enjoy themselves.  But that’s too simple.  The real reasons are a little more complex, and far more devious.

In his brilliant and highly recommended book, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture, Dr. Darrel W. Ray likens religion to a virus that will do anything necessary to survive and spread.  One of the things it does to achieve these goals, he writes, is create a “guilt cycle” that binds the believer tightly to the virus — or, rather, the religion.  It works like this:

“The guiltier you feel, the more you seek to assuage your guilt with the very thing that induced it in the first place.  This creates a perfect feedback loop from which you cannot escape without outside help.  Much like a computer that gets into a loop and freezes, your brain gets caught in a guilt loop that only gets worse.”

According to Ray’s illustration, you engage in BEHAVIOR (let’s stick to masturbation as an example) that makes you feel GUILTY, which then creates TENSION, which you then assuage by engaging, once again, in the BEHAVIOR (masturbation).

“As you are bearing this emotional burden of guilt, along comes the priest, rabbi or minister with the promise of help.  He or she accomplishes this by breaking the loop and running it through the religion and back to you.  It goes like this:  ‘You can’t conquer this by yourself.  Give yourself to god and he will help you conquer it.  You will overcome your weakness and get forgiven for your sins.  You will no longer have to live with this burden of guilt.’  The effect is some relief but at a high cost.  Each guilt-forgiveness cycle imbeds the virus [religion] deeper and deeper, making it harder and harder to get relief.”

Every time that guilt returns, it becomes necessary to turn to the religion again for the needed forgiveness.  This makes religion necessary to the person feeling guilty.  An ingenious way of strengthening this need is to attach guilt to something that everyone has in common, a need shared by all.  Sex.

Religion did that a looong time ago.

“And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” – Leviticus 20:10

“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” – Leviticus 20:13

“And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.” – Leviticus 20:18

That last one not only condemns the act of sex but manages to attach shame to another natural biological function, a woman’s menstrual cycle.  It kills two birds with one stone!

I think the best reaction to religion’s need to demonize our sexuality comes from country singer Butch Hancock:

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things.  One is that god loves you and you’re going to burn in hell.  The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

Religion without sex is like The Wizard of Oz without the songs — it just doesn’t work.  Sex is the one thing religion can use to control every single believer.  Of course, this requires a contradictory double-message:

God in his infinite wisdom created your body, which is a temple.

Your body has wicked urges that must be denied.

Your body is a temple, but it’s got some evil nastiness in the basement!  You must deny your natural bodily functions or you will fall out of favor with the god who created them!  If religion can convince you of this, then it has you.  Once it has convinced you that there is sin in the very functions of your body, it has claimed you for its own and any escape will require more than will and effort — it will require virtual reprogramming.  Convincing people that their own biological functions are wicked might sound like a difficult task, but it’s really not.  The work started thousands of years ago.

The book of Leviticus was written sometime around 1440 BCE, and since that time, it has been laying the groundwork for what we have today — a sex-negative environment in the United States that has been driven solely by Christianity.  Leviticus — one of the most evil and bloodthirsty books of the bible — was directed at the Jews, of course, but Christians have no problem using it when it suits their purposes (which is most of the time).  When they’re criticized for their Old Testament views, they’re quick to point out that they are a New Testament religion, but this is just a ruse, another way they wiggle out of reasonable discourse.  Christians have been enforcing Old Testament sex rules from their beginnings and continue to do so today in the United States of 2010.

Christianity has attached guilt to sex, then prohibited sex outside of marriage and sex with anyone other than one’s spouse.  But that sex — the sex that’s allowed — is intended only for reproduction.  These days, most Christian sects will not say this directly, but when you look at their sex rules, that’s what it comes down to:  Sex for procreation only.

When she wasn’t warning people of the dangers of playing with themselves, Ellen G. White was warning them about “marital excess.”

“Sexual excess will effectually destroy a love for devotional exercises, will take from the brain the substance needed to nourish the system, and will most effectively exhaust the vitality. No woman should aid her husband in this work of self-destruction. She will not do it if she is enlightened and has true love for him. The more the animal passions are indulged, the stronger do they become, and the more violent will be their clamors for indulgence. Let God-fearing men and women awake to their duty. Many professed Christians are suffering with paralysis of nerve and brain because of their intemperance in this direction.”
– Adventist Home, Ellen G. White

While it’s true that Ellen wrote that in the 1800s, this attitude still exists in Christianity today, although it is cloaked in more modern terms.  Within Christianity, sex for pleasure exists for only one purpose — to create guilt that will strengthen the bond between the guilty and the religion.

Religion in general and Christianity in particular cannot survive in a sex-positive environment.  The acceptance of sex as natural and healthy and pleasurable removes the oxygen Christianity needs to survive.  Like any religion, Christianity must fully control its flock, and it cannot do that unless it controls the genitals of its flock.  Where sex is treated realistically, as a natural and healthy part of being human, things like birth control are made accessible and comprehensive sex education is appropriately taught to young people.  It is absolutely essential for the survival of Christianity that sex remain attached to guilt and sin.

But Christianity does not limit its rules to Christians.  Here in the United States, it works hard to enforce its laws on a federal level and has had great success so far.  This is a back door tactic aimed at the goal of transforming the United States into a Christian theocracy.  The genitals of Christians alone are not enough to feed Christianity’s appetite for power – it must seize control of the genitals of all Americans.

Christians continue to repeat the lie that America is a Christian nation, when in fact it is a secular nation that provides freedom to all religions, or no religion.  But to Christians, it seems that “freedom of religion” means that, as a religion, they have the freedom to do whatever the hell they please.  If they can transform America’s laws and government into reflections of Christian dogma — which they have been doing at an alarming pace right under our noses — then their lie will become true.

30 years ago, Jerry Falwell created the “Moral Majority” (which, by the way, was neither).  He gathered together a coalition of Christian sects — even pulling in the Mormon faith, which, until that time, was vehemently rejected by Christianity as a non-Christian cult, but, hey, there’s strength in numbers, right? — and began to talk politics on a national level.  Using intimidation and strong-arm tactics, Falwell and his minions blustered and browbeat politicians into bringing religion into the national conversation, forcing them to declare their religious beliefs (which violates the Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for the nation’s leaders), and bullying them into enforcing Christian rules as much as possible by being anti-sex, anti-choice, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and fighting a “war on drugs” that has failed miserably.

Aided by groups like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, the coalition made the Republican party the political arm of the Christian religion and made “conservative” a code word for “Christian.”  They developed stealth tactics to get Christians into local, state and federal elected offices.  For the most part, these candidates kept their religious zealotry quiet until they got into office, then began working tirelessly to promote a Christian agenda.  Now, 30 years later, they have become entrenched in the American political system and are eating away at the Constitution like termites in a wood pile.  Nowhere have their efforts been more obvious than in the area of contraception, abortion and sex education.

Conservatives — remember, that’s code for Christian — claim that comprehensive sex education and accessible methods of birth control like condoms and the pill encourage teenagers to engage in sexual relations earlier than they would otherwise and before they are ready.  They prefer abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education, which rejects birth control, demonizes abortion, and eliminates a broad discussion of sexuality in favor of a very familiar teaching that can be summed up in one line:

NO SEX UNTIL YOU’RE MARRIED!

All of this, of course, is absurd.

Let’s take the idea that comprehensive sex education and/or the accessibility of birth control encourage teenagers to have sex.  This suggests that teenagers need encouragement to have sex.  As we all know, those teens are just sitting around with long faces, dying of boredom, because the thought of having sex has never occurred to them.  The idea of rubbing their bodies together and involving the use of their hands and tongues has not crossed their minds for a moment.  Sex?  What’s that?  I mean, it’s not like teenagers have any natural urge to engage in sexual activity.  It’s not like they’re the hormonal equivalent of Chernobyl, or anything, right?  They’re just hanging around playing video games, talking on the phone, and wondering what’s for dinner.

Along comes comprehensive sex education and accessible methods of birth control and excited teenagers exclaim, “Hey!  Why didn’t somebody suggest this sooner, dammit?  We could’ve been fucking our brains out all this time!”  Suddenly, teenagers are focusing all their attention on newly engorged parts of their bodies they didn’t even know they had before somebody filled them in!  Now everywhere you look, girls are getting pregnant, boys are comparing notes, sexually transmitted diseases are rampant, and the moral fabric of America is destroyed!

Damn you, you immoral secular humanist liberal perverts!

Yeah, right.

Abstinence-only-until-marriage is not sex education.  It is anti-sex and abandons factual information in favor of outright lies that instill guilt and fear.  It teaches young people nothing about sex — nothing truthful, anyway, although it gives them information that is blatantly untrue – it simply tells them not to do it until they get married.  And it’s not new.

In an effort to prevent comprehensive sex education from tipping teenagers off to the existence of their otherwise unknown, dormant sex drives, the United States government has been using taxpayer dollars to support abstinence-only-until-marriage programs ever since the whole thing sounded like a good idea to Ronald Reagan in 1981.  There was absolutely no existing research on the effectiveness of these programs back then, but Reagan was convinced by his conservative Christian cronies — like those in Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” — that it was the right thing to do.

According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS), there are three funding streams for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.  The first is the Adolescent Family Life Act:

“The Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) was quietly signed into law in 1981 as Title XX of the Public Health Service Act without hearings or floor votes in the U.S. Congress.  In addition to providing support for pregnant and parenting teens, AFLA was established to promote ‘chastity’ and ‘self-discipline.’”

We’re talking about federally funded chastity, here, folks!  The second is what is commonly referred to as the Welfare Reform Act:

“The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF), better known as ‘welfare reform,’ was signed into law in 1996.  The welfare reform law added Title V, Section 510(b) of the Social Security Act which established a new funding stream to provide grants to states for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Similar to AFLA, this program was enacted quietly, without public or legislative debate. … With the passage of the Title V abstinence-only program came an eight-point federal definition of ‘abstinence education.’  All programs that receive abstinence-only-until-marriage funds must adhere to this definition which specifies, in part, that ‘a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of all human sexual activity’ and that ‘sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.’”

The third funding stream is Community-Based Abstinence Education:

“In October 2000, the federal government created yet another funding stream to support abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Under this third funding stream, originally known as Special Projects of Regional and National Significance – Community-Based Abstinence Education (SPRANS–CBAE), the federal government awards grants directly to state and local organizations. Until Fiscal Year 2005, SPRANS – CBAE was administered within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Beginning in Fiscal Year 2005, however, this funding stream was moved to HHS’ more conservative Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and is now referred to simply as Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE).”

Title V abstinence-before-marriage-only allowed the states to decide which programs would be awarded funding.  But CBAE eliminates that step and allows HHS to give this money directly to these community programs.  They’ve cut out the middleman and now allow the federal government to decide where this money goes.  CBAE funding will only be given to programs that teach the eight-point government definition of “abstinence education.”  This has given conservative lawmakers much more control over the money available to these programs.  In some cases, this control has gone to their heads.  Some of these lawmakers have tried to block money from going to educational media programs and after-school programs because, according to SEICA, “such programs dilute the abstinence message, do not sufficiently focus on marriage, and violate the intent of Title V’s eight-point ‘abstinence education’ definition.”  But it gets worse:

“In fact, in early 2006, ACF released a new funding announcement for CBAE programs.  With this call for new proposals, ACF promulgated a series of assaults on logic, science, and individual dignity, and CBAE programs have become that much more ideologically driven.  The new funding announcement views sexual abstinence prior to marriage as the magic elixir to a more perfect life.  Sexual abstinence before marriage is credited with leading to a happier life, including having a healthier marriage, having more money, having healthier future children, being more ‘responsible’ parents, being honorable and having integrity, attaining a better education, having fewer psychological disorders, avoiding drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, committing fewer crimes and staying out of prison, and having a longer life span.  The problem with ACF’s proclamations, however, is that they have no basis in sound evidence and very little grasp on the reality endured by the vast majority of America’s youth.”

By now, you might be wondering exactly what this “eight-point abstinence education definition” is.  Here are the things these federally-funded programs must teach:

Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, P.L. 104–193

For the purposes of this section, the term “abstinence education” means an educational or motivational program which:

A.  has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;

B.  teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children;

C.  teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;

D.  teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity;

E.  teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects;

F.  teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society;

G.  teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increase vulnerability to sexual advances, and

H.  teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

For the record, I personally have no problem with the last two points on this list.  The other six?  Preposterous twaddlecock.  Not only is there no reliably conducted research to back up any of these points, but there is plenty of existing research that refutes them.  But let’s not let that get in the way of using taxpayers’ dollars to teach our young people what Jesus expects of them.

Oh, sure, there’s no mention here of Christianity or god or Jesus or the bible — but you can be sure that this list of eight “definitions” does not come from experts in human sexuality.  It comes straight out of the Christian rulebook, and what’s behind it is not fact-based scientific research in human sexuality or behavior.  What’s behind it is the message that Christianity has been pounding into the heads of human beings for thousands of years:

SEX IS BAD!  SEX IS WRONG!  SEX IS DIRTY!  SEX IS A SIN!

If you’re a parent who doesn’t like the idea of this message being taught to your children, then you know what?  That’s just too fucking bad.  Because this isn’t being taught by pastors or Sunday school teachers or in private schools — this is being funded by your government with money that comes out of your pocket, and they don’t care what you think about it.  Why do you think this was done quietly without any public or legislative debate?  They didn’t ask for your opinion or anyone else’s.  And your money is being used to fund these programs in spite of overwhelming evidence that what they’re teaching our young people is not only wrong but doesn’t work.

On behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. did a study on the effectiveness of abstinence-only-until-marriage education.  The results were released in a 2007.  From a SEICA report about the study:

“(The study) found no evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs increased rates of sexual abstinence.  In addition, students in the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs had a similar number of sexual partners as their peers not in the programs, as well as a similar age of first sex.”

But it’s even worse than that.  While there was no evidence of increased rates of abstinence, the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs misinformed young people about things like methods of contraception.  From the report:

“Program group youth, however, were less likely than control group youth to perceive condoms as effective at preventing STDs.  Compared with control group youth, program group youth were less likely to report that condoms are usually effective at preventing HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea, and herpes and HPV.  Furthermore, program group youth were more likely than control group youth to report that condoms are never effective at preventing these STDs.”

Is it possible that these programs could be deliberately misinforming teenagers about the efficacy of contraceptives?  Let’s take a look at some excerpts from published materials that are used in these abstinence-only-until-marriage programs (provided by SEICUS):

“There are always risks associated with it [premarital sex], even dangerous, life-threatening risks such as HIV/AIDS.  Using contraceptives does not change this for teenagers.”
– FACTS  Middle School, Student Handbook, p. 50

This is a bald-faced lie.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

“Couples who use condoms for birth control experience a first-year failure rate of about 15% in preventing pregnancies.  This means that over a period of five years, there could be a 50% chance or higher of getting pregnant with condoms used as the birth control method.”
– Choosing the Best PATH, Leader Guide, p. 18

“At the least, the chances of getting pregnant with a condom are 1 out of 6.”
– Me, My World, My Future, Revised HIV material, p. 257

More bald-faced lies.  According to the June 1999 issue of Consumer Reports (page 46), Studies in Family Planning, January/February 1990, volume 21, number 1 (page 52), Contraceptive Technology, 17th revised edition (New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1998, pages 328-329), and many other sources, when used properly and consistently, condoms are 98% effective in preventing pregnancy.

“AIDS can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact.”
– Reasonable Reasons to Wait, Teacher’s Guide, Unit 5, p. 19

Another bald-faced lie.  According to the CDC, “Only specific fluids (blood, semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk) from an HIV-infected person can transmit HIV.”

“Game Plan does not promote the use of contraceptives for teens. No contraceptive device is guaranteed to prevent pregnancy. Additionally, students who do not choose to exercise self-control to remain abstinent are not likely to exercise self-control in the use of a contraceptive device.”
– Game Plan, Coach’s Clipboard, p. 27

How can you even respond to such a nonsensical statement?  The claim that “students who do not choose to exercise self-control to remain abstinent are not likely to exercise self-control in the use of a contraceptive device” barely qualifies as an opinion let alone a fact.  There is absolutely nothing to support such a claim.  As Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Telling human beings — especially young people who are curious and bubbling with hormones — to abstain from sex is to tell them to ignore their own biology.  Anyone who actually expects them to abstain from sex is either mentally disabled, has forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager, or has some other agenda to enforce — and all signs point to the third option.  More on that in a moment.  Telling them to abstain is bad enough, but to deliberately lie to them about contraceptives in this day and age is to endanger their lives.  But that’s what these abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are doing — deliberately lying to teenagers.

The above excerpts from abstinence-only-until-marriage “educational” literature are just the tip of the iceberg.  Here are a few more.

“Girls need to be aware they may be able to tell when a kiss is leading to something else.  The girl may need to put the brakes on first in order to help the boy.”
– Reasonable Reasons to Wait, Student Workbook, p. 96

“A guy who wants to respect girls is distracted by sexy clothes and remembers her for one thing.  Is it fair that guys are turned on by their senses and women by their hearts??”
– Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 94

That’s right, girls – it’s all up to you.  Keeping that wily penis under control is your responsiblity because you’re the one who woke it up in the first place.  And if something goes wrong – if you end up getting pregnant or raped – then it’s your own damned fault!

“One thing that sex education and the media fail to communicate is the power of sex. Spies, who are trained not to give away government secrets, even lose their sensibilities and give in to the power of sex, often because of what a woman is wearing.”
– WAIT Training, Workshop Manual, p. 86

Excuse me?  Did you say ‘spies?’  No, seriously … spies?  Is this a joke?  Is this based on research?  Did someone do a study to see what makes spies “lose their sensibilities?”  What about superheroes?  Do they lose their super powers when they see a woman in hot clothes?  How about space aliens?  Or Bigfoot?  Hey, I can play this wackjob game, too, you know!

“Abortion is not the best choice because it unfairly penalizes the baby for the bad decision the baby’s parents made.”
– Sex Respect, Teacher Manual, p. 7

“Teacher’s Question:  What are the possible consequences of choosing to have an abortion?
Suggested Answers:  Feelings of regret, shame, sadness, guilt; physical complications for girl; continued feelings of shame, sadness, regret; death of fetus.”
– Choosing the Best LIFE, Leader Guide, p. 31

“The unborn infant is a unique never to be repeated human”
– Reasonable Reasons to Wait, Teacher’s-Guide, Unit 9, p. 35

Hmm.  Shame, guilt, regret … this is starting to sound awfully familiar, isn’t it?

“Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots … a woman is stimulated more by touch and romantic words. She is far more attracted by a man’s personality while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.”
– WAIT Training, Workshop Manual, p. 37

“A young man’s natural desire for sex is already strong due to testosterone … females are becoming culturally conditioned to fantasize about sex as well.”
– Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11

That’s right, girls – those aren’t real sexual fantasies you’re having, you’re just being conditioned to pretend you’re having sexual fantasies.  Because as we all know, women don’t have sex drives.

Whenever you have absolutely no research or factual information to back up what you’re saying, it’s always a good idea to keep a bunch of stereotypes on hand.  In the two examples above, we have some tried and true gender stereotypes that are always helpful in clouding a discussion when there are no supporting facts available.

“These are simply natural consequences.  For example, if you eat spoiled food, you will get sick.  If you jump from a tall building, you will be hurt or killed.  If you spend more money than you make, your enslavement to debt affects you and those whom you love. If you have sex outside of marriage, there are consequences for you, your partner and society.”
– Sex Respect, Student Workbook, p. 11

“The only safe sex is in a marriage relationship where a man and a woman are faithful to each other for life.”
– Game Plan, Student Workbook, p. 38

“Teenagers who are sexually active in high school will find that their schoolwork suffers.”
– Reasonable Reasons to Wait, Student Workbook, p. 41

Question: What are the risks of being sexually active?
Answer: Teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, low self-esteem, loss of reputation, feelings of being used.
– Choosing the Best PATH, Teacher’s Guide, p. 6

“Each time a sexually active person gives that most personal part of himself or herself away, that person can lose a sense of personal value and worth. It all comes down to self-respect.”
– Choosing the Best PATH, Teacher’s Guide, p. 7

What about gay teenagers?  There seems to be nothing here for them.  Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not even acknowledge the existence of gay teenagers.  And even if it did, they would be up shit creek without a paddle, because they aren’t allowed to get married!  They have been ostracized from this discussion and left to fend for themselves.  In a lot of ways, they’re probably better off.

Are you starting to get a feel for what’s being conveyed here?  These aren’t facts.  None of this is meant to inform teenagers about their sexual options.  The only options being given here are shame, guilt, disease, low self-esteem … or abstinence.  Add all of this stuff up.  Do the math.  What do you come up with?

This is stealth Christianity.  Everything being taught by these abstinence-only-until-marriage programs is straight out of the Christian sex rulebook.  They don’t mention Jesus or god or the bible or salvation, but abstinence-only-until-marriage is made up entirely of Christian guilt.  Attach guilt to sex and everybody feels guilty, and as soon as that guilt sets in, Christianity steps up and says, Hey, we can help you with that. And then it’s got you.

Even better for the Christian religion, this guilt is being aimed at young people.  Before their minds are fully developed, before they’re able to think critically, these young people are being taught that sex is bad, their bodies have wicked urges, and they must be ashamed of and resist them.  If you can instill this in them early, it will follow them for the rest of their lives.

Best of all for the Christian religion, it doesn’t even have to do this in a religious way.  Religion turns a lot of people off; as soon as they know someone is trying to foist religion onto them, they become immediately unreachable.  This isn’t being offered as religious teaching — in fact, it isn’t even being offered.  This is Christian guilt and shame that has been federally mandated, Christian dogma that is being funded by your tax dollars and shoved into the minds of children in public schools.

It started with Ronald Reagan and has been continued by every president since then.  You might think a Democrat like Bill Clinton would put a stop to it, but that’s what you get for buying into the illusion of the two party system.  You might think Barack Obama — the first president to acknowledge nonbelievers in his inaugural address while pointing out that America is a nation of many religions and no religion — would do something about this very unconstitutional state of affairs, but you would be way off in thinking that.

Earlier this year, during the battle that raged over health care legislation, everyone was so busy analyzing it and arguing and speculating about it that nobody noticed the $250 million extension for abstinence-only-until-marriage education that was slipped into it like a ruffie being slipped into a supermodel’s appletini.  From a March 31, 2010 Huffington Post article by Advocates for Youth President James Wagoner:

“Lost in the shuffle of analysis of the new health care reform legislation, is the fact that Democrats included over $250 million for failed Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.  The funds had been inserted in the health care reform legislation by Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) during Senate Finance Committee consideration of the bill.

“Never mind that these programs place the health and lives of young people at risk by denying them medically accurate information about condoms and birth control.  Never mind that an exhaustive eight-year evaluation by Mathematica published in April, 2007 showed that these programs have ‘no impact on teen behavior.’  Never mind that 22 states had rejected TitleV funding in the past because they did not want to spend precious matching funds on programs that don’t work.  Never mind that Speaker Pelosi condemned these programs at the Netroots conference in 2008.  Bottom line is they are back, and Democrats seem none too eager to own up to who threw young people under the bus!”

How does this throw young people under the bus?  By giving them inaccurate information about condoms and sexually transmitted diseases, by keeping them ignorant about their own sexuality.  Sex education classes that lie to students about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases and tell students that having sex outside marriage will destroy their lives — and even society! — is like a home economics class that tells its students the kitchen is dangerous and will kill them, so they should stay out of it no matter how hungry they become.  It also makes about as much sense.  This kind of “sex education” results in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.  Why would our government enforce taxpayer-funded programs that result in the exact opposite of what proponents of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs claim?

Because underneath all the moralizing and guilt-tripping, underneath all the unsupported claims made by the people who support these programs, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies are the GOAL of abstinence-only-before-marriage programs!

Before you roll your eyes, let me explain.

Telling teenagers not to have sex until they get married and then expecting them to obey is not only unreasonable, it is completely untethered from reality.  From a December 19, 2006 article on the website of the Guttmacher Institute:

“The vast majority of Americans have sex before marriage, including those who abstained from sex during their teenage years, according to ‘Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,’ by Lawrence B. Finer, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports.  Further, contrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage. …

“‘This is reality-check research.  Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,’ says study author Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute.  ‘The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12–29-year-olds.  It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.’”

If premarital sex is the norm, then it’s not true that it causes people to have low self-esteem, emotional problems, and difficulty remaining faithful to one person later, all of which are taught to students by abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.  Take a step back and place a religious template over this, and suddenly everything falls into place.

Christianity claims that sex outside of marriage is immoral.  Christianity claims that abortion is not only immoral but the murder of precious unborn lives.  In the Christian religion, whenever the subject of sex comes up, you are faced with two conflicting orders — 1.) Don’t have sex, and 2.) Have that baby no matter what.

What do abstinence-only-until-marriage programs teach?  1.) Don’t have sex, and 2.) Have that baby no matter what.

The diseases and pregnancies that result give Christianity what it needs to survive in an increasingly secular United States of America:  Guilt and children.

Premarital sex — especially if it results in a sexually transmitted disease or an unwanted pregnancy — creates guilt that your local Christian church will offer to rid you of if you’ll just come to church and be a part of the Christian family.  Unwanted pregnancies result in children, which Christianity desperately needs to propagate itself.

According to studies by Nazarene Church Growth Research and the International Bible Society, 83% to 85% of all Christians “make their commitment to Jesus between the ages of 4 and 14, that is, when they are children or early youth.”  After the age of 14, the chances that someone will convert to Christianity decline rapidly as a person ages.  That means only a very small percentage of Christians are converted as adults rather than being raised in the religion.  The great majority of Christians are born into their religion and indoctrinated from infancy onward or, at the very least, are convinced to “make their commitment to Jesus” at a very young, vulnerable age, before they can think critically and analyze Christianity reasonably.

From an Advocates for Youth article titled “Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.—Why the Difference?”:

“Regularly since 1998, Advocates for Youth has sponsored study tours to France, Germany, and the Netherlands to explore why adolescent sexual health outcomes are more positive in these European countries than in the United States.

“Rights.  Respect.  Responsibility.®  The study tour participants – policy makers, researchers, youth serving professionals, foundation officers, and youth – have found that this trilogy of values underpins a social philosophy regarding adolescent sexual health in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.  Each of the three nations has an unwritten social contract with youth:  ‘We’ll respect your right to act responsibly and give you the tools you need to avoid unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.’”

According to Advocacy for Youth, this method has worked out very well.  Teen pregnancy in the United States is more than six times that of the Netherlands, nearly four times that of Germany, and triple the rate of teen pregnancy in France.  The teenage birth rate in the U.S. is nine times higher than the Netherlands’, almost six times higher than France’s and more than four times higher than Germany’s.  In every category — the rates of teenage abortion, HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, and the use of condoms and birth control pills by teenagers — the United States compares abysmally to these European countries.

Why?  Because in those countries, sex is treated like a natural function of the human body, a biological and emotional need that is not a source of shame or guilt, something that is not a sin.  Instead, it is incorporated into the everyday lives of the citizens in a way that allows them to engage in it responsibly and as safely as possible.

But not in the United States, where Christianity has infiltrated the government and used it to pervert sex.

While Dr. Darrel W. Ray’s idea of looking at religion as a virus is an excellent one, religion — any religion — also can be seen as a parasite.  It attaches itself to the host and takes and takes and takes.  It needs money, it needs people, it needs acceptance, reverence and respect, and to propagate itself it needs children and it needs to instill guilt and shame in everyone around it.  More than anything, it needs power.  It takes credit for things it does not do and holds itself up as something necessary and authoritative, something to be revered — as something it is not.  In return, it gives … nothing.  Well, it gives nothing positive.  It provides plenty of guilt and shame and fear and condemnation and division and bigotry.  In nurtures ignorance while it suppresses facts.  It hinders progress while it condemns real knowledge.  It vilifies the natural and glorifies the unnatural.  It kills the soul with the self-loathing it instills.  It marginalizes and demonizes anyone who meets with its disapproval.  It craves war while it tells the lie that it comes in peace.

If you ignore what Christianity says about itself and the things it does and look only at the results of its actions, you quickly see that a large gap separates the two.  Whenever it talks about itself — what it stands for, what it does, what its motivations are — Christianity is lying.  To see this, all you have to do is hold Christianity to a verse from the very book on which it claims to be based:

“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:16

The fruits of Christianity bear no resemblance whatsoever to the claims of Christianity.

“What have been Christianity’s fruits?  More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
– James Madison (Fourth U.S. President)

Ignore Christianity’s words and look at its fruits.  Everything it does — absolutely everything — is done to protect and propagate itself and to gain power and money.  Look closely at the things it does as charity.  The charity comes with conditions.  Ever been to a Christian homeless shelter or soup kitchen?  If you want the shelter and food, you have to take the religious guilt, condemnation and indoctrination, too.  When Christian missionaries go to a third world country, do they educate the children with real-world knowledge and work toward making the country self-sufficient and productive?  No.  They immediately indoctrinate the people in the religion.  Any food and medicine provided is conditional on acceptance of the religion.  No third world country has ever been brought out of poverty and ignorance by Christianity.  Ever.  If anything, conditions worsen as Christianity makes the populace dependent upon it and its teachings.

It’s the same here in the United States.  Christians say that sex is immoral and they are concerned for the salvation of America’s young people.  Not true.  They are attaching guilt to something that is natural and healthy in order to make people dependent on their religion.  They say they want teenagers to abstain from sex to avoid diseases and unwanted pregnancies.  Not true.  They want those diseases and unwanted pregnancies because they produce the guilt Christianity needs to retain power over people and the pregnancies produce the children it needs to survive.  They say abortion is immoral and they care about the unborn humans it kills.  Not true.  They see those unborn babies as the future of their religion.  They represent young, defenseless minds that can be captured and indoctrinated before they are developed enough to rationally examine Christianity and make an informed choice about it.  These are the things Christianity needs in the United States.  It wants the government to provide them and you to pay for them.

All of this is true of any religion/parasite.  But in the United States, the parasite is Christianity.  It has attached itself to the government and it is now sucking from it money and power.  If it is not stopped very soon, then it won’t be long before it consumes our public school system and replaces facts with myths, enlightenment with fear, and textbooks with bibles.

Next time you hear a conservative complaining about government programs he identifies as “socialism,” ask him how he feels about socialism for Christianity.  Because that is exactly what abstinence-only-before-marriage programs are — socialism for Christianity.  And there are plenty of other forms of socialism for Christianity currently in effect, as well.  Christians say they oppose socialism.  Not true.  They’re all for it — as long as it is socialism that gives their religion power and money.

Christianity’s latest socialist victory?  $250 million of your money have been picked from your pocket so the parasite can thrive.  And there is only one person can do something about it.

You.

Sarah Palin is using the “mama grizzly” theme in her new ad, big female protector of her children, however where are her cubs? Why are her children never around her except for when she wants to prop them up for a photo shoot? I’m not against working moms at all, but I am against someone being hypocritical and using her offspring for her own gain and pretending to be something she is not. Someone else is raising her kids while she is on the road and her husband is working, and she has money to pay nannies, sitters, whoever to care for her little darlings. All she really cares about is her own political gain.

And of course there is the question of what a quitter she is. She walked away from her term as governor and did not fulfill her elected promises and obligations. Why would anyone believe she will make a loyal and strong president? Because she loves Jeebus and has conservative imaginary friend beliefs?

While many would not consider Palin a serious threat in the 2012 Presidential election, I don’t think we can take the stupidity of the conservative fundamentalists for granted. They elected Dubya…twice! And don’t underestimate their desire and ability to elect someone even dumber.

Palin touts ‘mama grizzlies’ in new ad

The video of the ad

If she did by some bad luck get elected, that would really suck. We cannot allow that to happen.

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” – Thomas Paine

Well, it’s true: America has some serious reforms. We need more jobs, we need something vaguely resembling universal healthcare, we still need to eliminate poverty and needless suffering, and provide better education. The laundry list goes on, at length, seemingly ad infinitum. But complain as we so often do, it’s an easy thing to forget just how lucky we atheists  are.

For one such item, if I were to post my anti-religious declamations (as I do here and at my own blog) and I were living in a Sharia state, I could very well be punished with anything ranging from a fine to beheading. Whereas here in the US, we can actually argue what constitutes ‘blasphemy’ in court, and whether it’s allowed. And we have a pretty good clue that the ‘free exchange of ideas’ motto doesn’t fly in some communist states.

I’ll not debate the fact that America has in some abstract way let us down that varies according to interpretation, but we should celebrate the right to interpret. Because after all, freedom of religion is impossible without freedom from religion.

And let’s face it: we have the higher standard of living, ergo a higher standard of education, thanks to our glut of resources, that we can actually afford to be atheists. In other countries, it’s difficult (and likely impossible in some) to actually break free of the powerful superstitions that have become entrenched in societies.

Knowledge is power, after all.

Celebrate your freedom. Celebrate the Fourth, and safely. Allow me to top this off with a quote from one of my heroes, Thomas Paine:

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.
Thomas Paine

Till the next post, then.

What no vacation bible school? Sarwy. Happy 4th everyone

Ok so I know there are a few of you in Australia, the UK and other European countries. I know you don’t celebrate our Independence day but do you have someone like Neil Young? And yes I do know he’s from Canada. Feel free to add what you like, inform us.

Freedom as they say isn’t free. I have always respected the way Canadians treat their fallen.
Unlike the US, Canada does not hide the uncomfortable truth about war. Thank you.
Open forum, say what you like, add something of interest, ETC.

Pakistan. The country that was specifically created for the Muslims.  A country pockmarked by religious controversy and riots.

It is no surprise to any of us, that these sort of headlines are commonplace:

Pakistan to monitor Google and Yahoo for ‘blasphemy’

Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google and Yahoo, for content it deems offensive to Muslims.

YouTube, Amazon, MSN, Hotmail and Bing will also come under scrutiny, while 17 less well-known sites will be blocked.

Officials will monitor the sites and block links deemed inappropriate.

In May, Pakistan banned access to Facebook after the social network hosted a "blasphemous" competition to draw the prophet Muhammad.

The new action will see Pakistani authorities monitor content published on the seven sites, blocking individual pages if content is judged to be offensive.

Telecoms official Khurram Mehran said links would be blocked without disturbing the main website.

As no doubt you are all aware, Pakistan has the strictest anti-blasphemy laws – you literally cannot  badmouth religion in that country. On pain of death.

And of course, the UN concurs. Because when you grant rights to an idea over the rights of a human being, you are (indirectly) giving free rein to terrorist bullshit. And let’s face it folks: you take young men, tell them they can’t masturbate or can’t have sex until marriage, well, all that energy has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? I know that I would be extremely irritable if that were so, but luckily I live in a country that isn’t as stringent as some of these ass-backwards Sharia countries.

And this garbage isn’t happening in Pakistan alone – Indonesia is also in the grips of this stone-age anachronistic horse manure:

One of Indonesia’s top celebrities has been charged under an anti-pornography law for his alleged role in sex videos which have appeared on the internet.

Pop star Nazril "Ariel" Irham and two other celebrities, TV presenter Luna Maya and soapstar Cut Tari, have denied involvement in the sex tapes.

The scandal has angered many in Muslim-dominated Indonesia.

Some conservative Islamic groups have called for the celebrities to be punished.

Zainuri Lubis, deputy spokesman of the National Police, told the BBC that Ariel had been charged with the making and distribution of the sex tapes under the controversial anti-pornography law.

He is the first high-profile person to be charged under the law, which came into effect in 2008 despite strong opposition from the public and members of government.

The law has been criticised for being too vague and for its harsh penalties.

Ariel’s charge carries with it a maximum sentence of 12 years and a fine of more than $600,000 (£403,000).

The Abrahamic religions sure seems to be obsessed with sexuality. Human sexuality is a driving force – it could well be said that civilization owes a large debt to it, as much of civilization was an effort to impress the opposite sex (to paraphrase Orson Welles and Futurama). It may not be a force to be feared, but it is to be reckoned with. But when a society is in the thrall of an iron age set of rules better left centuries ago, fear is all those people will know.

Islam (AKA Asslam): it’s gotta go.

Till the next post, then.

The tune “Don’t Give Up “Click from Herbie Hancock”s recent release ‘The Imagine Project” Click on Don’t Give Up under Preview Songs. Original link ended. Also I think this is originally by Peter Gabriel.

Many of us are waiting for the good days to return. What happens if they don’t? How do we take personal responsibility in advancing our lives to make the best of what is?
I’m proud to be an atheist and have available knowledge and resources unheard of before. Never before in any country have so many good things been available to so many. And I don’t mean just material goods. I am refering to all the resources of mind and imagination. From Stem Cell research to nano-tech to space exploration. We are no longer constrained by religious belief or superstition. We have no need to grovel on our knees in obeisence to some phantom. We do not ask permission from a priest or minister. We are finally becoming truly free.

Freedom and reason terrify the religious leaders. So much so that they have for millenia invented and made up their lies and conjectures which they use to terrorize their sheeple. They are superb terrorists. Think of it this way. A small group of mostly men endevour to control a bigger group of people. The very fastest way is to kill some and get the rest to go along with the plan. And if not outright killing then through threats of punishment and also finally the threat of eternal punishment after you have died. All the Abrahamic religions started that way.

I have no faith in your gods. Jew, Christian, Islam. So please, I ask you, keep it to yourself.

Also let me me add this quote by Jim Rohn, a business philosopher, Who said: “Here is what we must teach our children in the 90’s. The skill of selective listening. Don.t spend your time on the voices that don’t count. Voices that are going to add too little worth to your future. Don’t waste your time on the shallow and the silly.Tune those voices out and tune IN those that are going to add somethng to your life.’
Jimmer

The music.
Herbie Hancock “The Imagine Project’
Herbie Hancock
John legend
Pink
Jeff Beck

Whenever I write about religion, I’m often asked, “What makes you an expert?”

I’ve got news for you.  We’re all experts on religion to one degree or another, every last one of us.  Religion is not like, say, heart surgery or entomology or aviation.  Sure, there are people who spend years in school studying theology and the bible, years in seminaries becoming clergymen.  But there are also people who wake up one morning and decide to start their very own religion, and then do it.  You, if you so desired, could go online and, for a small fee (small compared to the tuition that would be required to get a degree in anything), become an ordained minister, start a church and – presto-chango! – become a tax-free religion (yes, it really is that easy).

In any field of endeavor in which you are free to make it up as you go along, the word “expert” has little or no meaning.

We’re all experts on religion by virtue of our experience with it.  No matter who you are, no matter what your religion or denomination, whether you’re agnostic, atheist, Satanist, Rotarian, Pisces, a Nobel Prize winner or someone who lives in a refrigerator box in an alley with nothing to your name but a grocery cart full of unmatched old shoes, you have had a great deal of experience with religion.  If you live in the United States, you’ve had more than most.

The United States of America is the most religious nation in the industrialized world.  According to a 2009 survey of 21,000 people in 21 countries conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Religion Monitor, 89% of Americans identify themselves as religious, 62% highly religious.  In the United States — an ostensibly secular nation whose Constitution makes no mention of god, Jesus Christ, the bible, or the ten commandments and mentions religion only to prohibit from government its promotion or hindrance — 76% of Protestants and 65% of Catholics say that religion influences their political views in ways ranging from moderate to substantial.

If you live in the United States, religion is a part of your everyday life, and that religion is Christianity.  Whether you’re religious or not, believer or atheist, Jew or Muslim, Democrat or Republican, outraged by it or indifferent to it, it’s everywhere you go, everywhere you look.  You can’t even sneeze without someone invoking a deity.  Literally!  The only way to avoid it is to stay home and never leave your house.  But even that doesn’t work, because then they will bring it to your door.

We are all experts on religion, whether we like it or not, and that qualifies us to speak out about it.  The only problem is … that’s not really allowed.

Religion has always been an untouchable subject.  We are not allowed to comment on someone’s religious beliefs in any way that does not involve abject praise unless we’re willing to be pilloried by nearly everyone within earshot.  Why?  That is a very good question.

We can argue about politics, sports, movies, history, literature, art, science and any other topic you can imagine to our hearts’ content.  We can disagree about them and with them, criticize them, ridicule them, denounce them, and no one cares.  But when it comes to religion, we are expected — by some unwritten law, some unspoken universal agreement — to respect the beliefs of others and remain silent about them.  No.  Matter.  What.

If a man says he cannot leave the house without flipping every light switch in it on and off 40 times so the earth won’t burst into flames, we might tell him that he has a treatable problem and urge him to get help, and that’s acceptable.  If a man says he can fly and intends to jump off a cliff to prove it, we do everything we can to stop him because we know he is delusional and will kill himself, and that’s acceptable.  If someone says he doesn’t like us because of the color of our skin, or our weight, or our political affiliation, we can tell him to go piss up a rope and that’s acceptable.  But if parents refuse to get medical treatment for a sick child because that goes against their religious beliefs and they are certain that god will intervene and heal the child, we are expected to zip our lips and respect that because it is a religious belief and it is somehow unacceptable to say or do anything that might offend the believer.  Even the state is reluctant to step into such situations, although it sometimes happens — and then many become outraged and complain that religious rights are being violated.  If someone comes to your door on an otherwise peaceful Saturday morning to inform you that your soul is in danger of eternal damnation if you do not embrace their religion and live your life the way they say you should — which, as far as I’m concerned, is the height of arrogance and obnoxiousness because this person has actually come to your home to do it — you are expected to gently, politely decline, thank that person for stopping by and send him on his way with a smile, because it would be unacceptable and offensive to the believer to cut him off mid-sentence and tell him and his bible to get the hell off your porch before you get the garden hose.

Every human being on the face of the earth deserves respect.  But somehow, we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that those human beings who choose to believe in invisible, unprovable, and nonexistent things — and, in turn, to believe that we must believe in those things, too, or we are bad people who will be eternally lost — entitles them to some greater degree of respect, and we must be tolerant and silently endure their presumption, arrogance and simply rude behavior because they believe and have faith — and aren’t those wonderful things?

Well, I disagree with the whole arrangement.  I have nothing whatsoever against people practicing their religion, but when it intrudes on my privacy and disrupts my life, when it is rudely pushed at me, or when it abuses others or is used to break the law, I must object.  I’ve discovered that I am far from alone in objecting, but even most of those who feel as I do are afraid to voice their feelings because of the inevitable response, which is always swift and angry and sometimes even threatening and violent.  And that is unacceptable.

I don’t expect religion to go away.  That won’t happen anytime soon, and certainly not in my lifetime.  Although I must admit that this would be a better world without it.  It would be a freer, more peaceful world and we would have advanced farther and faster than we have with it.  By now, without religion, we’d probably have those damned flying cars we were promised by the year 2000.  At the very least, Salman Rushdie’s security bill would be a lot more manageable.

I am a sincere and enthusiastic supporter of the freedom of religion provided by the United States Constitution.  Hell, I’m a cheerleader for it.  I agree that everyone should be able to worship as they please, believe whatever they want, and apply those beliefs to their lives.  Spirituality is an intensely personal and individual thing for those who embrace or need it, and no one should ever be made to feel that their spirituality must conform to anyone else’s.  Our founding fathers recognized that individuality and wanted to protect it, which is why the Constitution declares that no one religion will be recognized by the United States government, which remains secular and divorced from religion.  That is left up to the individual.  And that is a significant part of what makes that document one of the greatest ever written.

But not everyone embraces or needs religion (or, if you prefer, spirituality) or is even interested in it.  Those of us who fit that description should not have to keep swatting religion away like swarming flies as we go about our business.  We shouldn’t have to deal with pamphlet-bearing Christians who come to our door and claim to have something we cannot live without.  We should not have to listen to politicians, who are annoying enough as it is, talk about god or Jesus or prayer or about how this is a Christian nation when it most certainly is not; it is a secular nation that is populated mostly by Christians — there’s a big difference.

It is not my intention to offend anyone, but in the case of religion, it is virtually impossible not to.  One does not need to attack or insult a religious person to cause offense — one need only to disagree with, question, or in any way criticize that person’s religion.  I have found religious people to be among the most thin-skinned on the planet.  They demand that everyone respect their religion by complimenting or praising it or saying nothing at all — and yet they seem incapable of showing respect as they routinely and casually criticize and condemn others who do not share their beliefs for living lives of which their religion does not approve.  They spout and spew their dogmatic nonsense freely and without pause.  But when others openly disagree or criticize, their response is, “Just shut up!”

The Constitution guarantees us the freedom to believe –- or not believe — as we see fit, but nowhere in that document is there a guarantee that others will agree with our beliefs.  Nowhere is there a guarantee that others who do not share our beliefs will take seriously our gods and rituals.  And there certainly isn’t anything about others being required to show reverence or deference to a god or a belief system that they do not worship or share.  There’s not even any requirement that they take them seriously.

While they may be the majority in the United States, the right guaranteed by the Constitution is not guaranteed to Christians alone.  It is guaranteed to each and every single individual in this country so that individuals can decide for themselves what they believe according to their own conscience.  It guarantees these individuals the right to gather with others who share their beliefs and engage in rituals that uphold those beliefs.

And that’s about it, folks.

But somehow, any response to religion other than respectful silence has become a social crime in our culture!

In an April 23, 1803, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Nothing but free argument, raillery and even ridicule will preserve the purity of religion.”  Jefferson didn’t think it was a crime — he thought it was a necessity.  Of course, Jefferson didn’t think too highly of the clergy.  He saw them as corrupt tyrants who controlled the masses with confusion, spiritual threats and mystical intimidation, and who craved ever more power.  Here are two excerpts from letters that serve as perfect examples of Jefferson’s attitude toward men of the cloth:

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”
– To Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.  He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.  It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes.”
– To Horatio G Spafford, March 17, 1814

Jefferson did not trust the clergy.  He saw their greed for power and control as a threat to liberty, and it seems that he thought ridicule was one way of preventing that threat from being realized.  It’s pretty hard for something to become a threat to liberty as long as people are allowed to openly criticize it, expose its weaknesses and faults, and even joke about it.

Jefferson thought the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was utter nonsense and had no qualms about saying so.  He believed it was the kind of nonsense only a priest could decode and explain to his flock, using that concocted understanding as a tool to make himself necessary to them and further control their minds and lives.  In a July 30, 1816, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, he wrote:

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.  Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity.  It is the mere abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”

Can you imagine the outrage and uproar such a remark would cause today?  An infuriated and harrumphing Rush Limbaugh would vilify Jefferson for hours and hours on national radio, five days a week.  A sobbing Glenn Beck would denounce Jefferson as anti-American and declare him to be a supporter of concentration camps for Christian patriots.  Ann Coulter would call into question the size of Jefferson’s penis and his ability to use it.  And Fox News would go on red alert and probably hire extra on-air talent to handle the amount of incensed coverage the story would get.  All of that would happen because Jefferson’s fear has become a reality — speaking in any negative way about religion has become such a taboo that religion has been allowed to gain power and control it does not deserve.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a look at some of the things this unwritten law, this unspoken agreement has intimidated us into respecting with our silence.

Since 1949, Billy Graham has been the biggest Christian star since Jesus Christ himself.  He has been beloved by Christians around the world, and his “crusades” have always attracted massive throngs that would have made Cecil B. DeMille envious.  He’s the one evangelist people have taken the most seriously and have seen as the most sincere — so much so that he has been the pastor to the presidents.  But all of that should have been called into question when, on Thursday, February 28, 2002, the National Archives released an audio recording of an Oval Office meeting between Graham and then President Richard Nixon.  In reference to the influence the minister thought Jews had on the United States, Graham said, “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.”

“You believe that?” Nixon said.

“Yes, sir.”

Nixon said, “Oh, boy.  So do I.  I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time,” Graham said, “then we might be able to do something.”

Do something?  Wow.  Sounds like Billy was ready to fire up the ovens again.  I can see the two of them, Nixon and Billy, standing together in a crowded back yard, each wearing an apron — Nixon’s reads, “I am not a cook!” and Billy’s reads, “Eat this in remembrance of me” — and Billy, holding a spatula, shouts, “Okay, everybody, how do you like your Jews cooked?”

Later in that same conversation, Graham told Nixon that he had Jewish friends in the media who “swarm around me and are friendly to me. … They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”

So, when Billy was preaching Jesus’s love and forgiveness all those years, apparently it did not extend to Jews … even though Jesus, according to the bible, was a Jew.  Another Jew — hmmm.  Tell you what, Billy, while you’re heating up those ovens, why don’t you grab a hammer and some big nails so just in case Jesus does decide to come back, you’ll be ready for him.

Jerry Falwell was a fundamentalist Baptist minister and televangelist who helmed a megachurch (a church that has 2,000 or more members) in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded Liberty Christian Academy and Liberty University, and cofounded the Moral Majority.  He was one of the most prominent and respected Christian leaders in the United States for decades.  During that time, he said some things that were, well … interesting.

In 1999, Falwell saw what he believed to be homosexual indoctrination in the UK TV show for preschoolers called The Teletubbies.  He identified one of the Teletubbies — a character named Tinky Winky — as gay in a “Parents Alert” in his National Liberty Journal.  Falwell wrote, “He is purple — the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle — the gay-pride symbol.”  In a statement issued later, he said, “As a Christian I feel that role modelling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children.”

Some Christians see Satan around every corner, but Falwell saw gays, too.  Judging by some of the other things he said about gay people, one might conclude that Falwell thought Satan himself was gay.  In a March 11, 1984 broadcast of The Old Time Gospel Hour, in reference to the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church, Falwell said the following:

“But these things speak evil of those things, verse 10 (in the book of Jude) which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.  Look at the Metropolitan Community Church today, the gay church, almost accepted into the World Council of Churches.  Almost, the vote was against them.  But they will try again and again until they get in, and the tragedy is that they would get one vote.  Because they are spoken of here in Jude as being brute beasts, that is going to the baser lust of the flesh to live immorally, and so Jude describes this as apostasy.  But thank God this vile and satanic system will one day be utterly annihilated and there’ll be a celebration in heaven.”

Here are a few other choice quotes attributed to the good reverend:

“The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews.”

“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”

“There is no separation of church and state.  Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.  The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.  What a happy day that will be!”

“Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.”

“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

And my personal favorite:

“AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.  To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh’s charioteers … AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

On September 13, 2001, Falwell appeared on fellow evangelist Pat Robertson’s TV show and said the following about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 only two days earlier:

“I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

The next day, when confronted with this remark on CNN, Falwell backpedaled:  “I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize.”  But in May of 2007, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked him again about his remark.  Falwell said, “If we decide to change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as he has in the past.”  When Amanpour asked if he stood by his September 13, 2001, comment, he said, “I stand right by it.”  A week later, in a gesture of uncharacteristic consideration for others, Falwell had the good taste to die.

While he was certainly a master of the hateful, batshit-crazy statement, Falwell hardly cornered that market.  He had stiff competition from his good buddy Pat Robertson, who had the advantage of living on after Falwell’s death, thus having plenty of time to outdo Falwell’s sterling record of being a douchenozzle.

Although an ordained Southern Baptist minister, Robertson functions mostly as a political spokesman for conservative Christians in the United States.  Over the years, he has founded a university, a broadcasting network — all kinds of lucrative entities.  And he tried to run for president in the 1988 primaries.  He is, at this moment, probably the most prominent, influential and powerful — not to mention richest — Christian leader in this country.  He is the host of The 700 Club, a Christian TV show that airs throughout the United States.  Robertson has something to say about … well, everything.  It’s usually something jaw-droppingly stupid, obnoxious and hateful, and he usually says it on his TV show.  Here, in no particular order, is a selection of Pat Robertson quotes taken from The 700 Club’s page on the Internet Movie Database:

“The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people.  But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.  And that’s what’s been happening.”

“The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement. We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in.  In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.”

(On homosexuals)  “It’s one thing to say, ‘We have rights to jobs, we have rights to be left alone in our little corner of the world to do our thing.’  It’s an entirely different thing to say, well, ‘We’re not only going to go into the schools and we’re going to take your children and your grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals.’  Now that’s wrong.”

“Why are so many marriages falling apart?  Why is the divorce rate so high?  Why is there such a tragedy in marriage?  Now the basic answer to the basic problem of marriages today is a question of leadership.  The wife actually makes the husband the head of the household and she looks to him and she says, ‘Now you pray, and I’m going to pray for you that the Lord will speak to you.’”

“If the widespread practice of homosexuality will bring about the destruction of your nation, if it will bring about terrorist bombs, if it’ll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn’t necessarily something we ought to open our arms to.”

(On Apartheid in South Africa) “I think ‘one man, one vote,’ just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights.”

“Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals.  The two things seem to go together.”

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution.  It is a lie of the left and we are not going to take it anymore.”

“I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their tendencies.  Such people are sinning against God and will lead to the ultimate destruction of the family and our nation.  I am unalterably opposed to such things, and will do everything I can to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their contagious infection to the youth of our nation.”

“The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There’s never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I’ll buy some of the feminism.”

(On Planned Parenthood)  “It is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns.”

“I am absolutely persuaded one of the reasons so many lesbians are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement is because being a mother is the unique characteristic of womanhood, and these lesbians will never be mothers naturally, so they don’t want anybody else to have that privilege either.”

(A nifty-keen science lesson from Professor Roberts)  “I think the sky is blue because it’s a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there’s a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that’s bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets. I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it’s the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that’s one of the effects of the shifting of colors.”

“NOW (the National Organization for Women) is saying that in order to be a woman, you’ve got to be a lesbian.”

Opposing the equal rights initiative in Iowa, Robertson wrote in a 1992 fundraising letter:

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.  It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

On page 218 of his book The New World Order, Robertson wrote:

“When I said during my presidential bid that I would only bring Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a firestorm.  ‘What do you mean?’ the media challenged me.  ‘You’re not going to bring atheists into the government?  How dare you maintain that those who believe in the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?’  My simple answer is, ‘Yes, they are.’”

The day after the January 12, 2010 7.0 earthquake in Haiti that killed as many as 200,000 people, Pat Robertson went on TV and said the Haitians had brought the earthquake on themselves:

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

Of course, the above quotes are the words of only three of the most prominent Christian leaders, but there are many others whose statements are no less horrifying.

This is what we’re supposed to respect?  This is what we’re supposed to tolerate with our reverent silence?  This is what we’re not allowed to criticize?  How did this happen?  How have we been made into people who will sit still for this kind of — and I use this word loosely — thinking?

When we read of the horrific slaughter of certain races or religions throughout history, we often ask, How could this have been allowed to happen?  How could people stand by and do nothing while this was going on? The answer is simple.

We’re living in it!  This is how it happens — what we’re discussing right now, this unwritten law of silence and so called “respect” when it comes to religion in America.  We have been intimidated into silence, into saying and doing nothing while hateful lies spread like a cancer that has metastasized throughout the population, resulting in discrimination, persecution, and even murder.  We have been respectfully silent for a long time now.  And look where it’s gotten us.  Of course, where it’s gotten us is nothing compared to where it will take us if we remain silent.

Now, you might be saying, Isn’t it unfair to base a characterization of all Christians on the ugly remarks of a few TV hucksters?  To you they might be TV hucksters, but to Christians, these guys are (or, in the case of Falwell, were) leaders.  These men represent Christianity in the United States — throughout the world!  How do you think they got so rich and powerful?  Off of bake sales?  Kino winnings?  No.  They got rich off the loving, supportive and generous — not to mention tax-free — donations of their followers.

If these men do not represent the thoughts and feelings of Christians everywhere, then when they make these appallingly hateful and lunatic statements, where is the outrage of Christians who don’t want to be represented by them?  Why haven’t throngs of Christians denounced them?  Why hasn’t the money stopped flooding in?  Why haven’t their television ratings plummeted?

That hasn’t happened because these men and others like them do represent the thoughts and feelings of Christians everywhere.  And we are supposed to say nothing about it.  We have been convinced that it is somehow wrong to criticize this because faith and belief are such sacred things.  And if we do criticize it, then the Christians cry persecution.

Try having a conversation with a Christian about the words of Falwell or Robertson or any of the other tyrannical, homophobic, mysoginistic, hatemongering greedbeasts who represent them.  The Christian will always inject his BUT into the conversation.  Christians have a lot of very big BUTS and they use them as dividing lines.  Before the BUT, you will be told what the Christian thinks you want to hear in an effort to soften you up and get comfy with you, to make you think you’re sympatico.  Then after the BUT, the Christian will tell you exactly what he thinks.  The latter always completely contradicts the former.  It goes something like this:

“I certainly don’t agree with Pat Robertson about the earthquake in Haiti and I think it was wrong of him to say that.  BUT.  He has every right to say it because the Constitution guarantees it, and after all, Robertson has sent a lot of food and money to Haiti to help those poor people.  What have you done for them?  And when you think about it, he’s not too far off the mark.  I mean, historically, he’s right, isn’t he?  Where does voodoo come from?  Haiti!  And that’s Satanic!  I think you just have a problem with religion, that’s all.  I don’t know what’s made you so bitter, but you shouldn’t try to impose your angry personal feelings about religion on others.  Christian-bashing is prejudicial, but these days, Christians are the only people it’s okay to hate in America, and I think it’s terrible.  A person’s religious beliefs are personal and deeply felt and you should show them respect.  Why don’t you focus on all the good things Pat Robertson has done instead of just pointing out his mistakes?”

Good things?  How many good things can possibly be done by someone who says the things Pat Robertson says?  And on the outside chance that he is doing something good while hating women and homosexuals and everybody who isn’t a Christian and drawing on his formidable resources to limit or even abolish the rights of those people, does it really matter?

And there’s that word “respect” again.  We are told, over and over, that we owe our respect to the religious.  But how respectful are they?  Do you see any respect for fellow human beings in the quotes from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson?  Was Robertson being respectful of others when, on January 14, 1991, he said on his TV show:

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing.  Nonsense.  I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.  I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don’t have to be nice to them.”

Was Jerry Falwell being respectful when he wrote in his book Listen, America!:

“The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief.  They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.”

Are these people who have respect for others?  If the word “respect” can be defined as “bigotry and hatred shown to all who do not conform to your beliefs,” then yes, they are abundantly respectful!  But what dictionary gives that as the definition of the word?  In the above quotes, both Robertson and Falwell were talking about other religions!  If they don’t show cowering respect for the religious beliefs of others, then why the hell should anyone else?

Respect is a two-way street and it needs to be earned in both directions.  I don’t know about you, but I refuse to show respect for people who speak, write, support or believe the words spoken by these men, or any other words like them.

Christians are quite convinced that they are being persecuted at every turn.  Here’s Pat Robertson again, being interviewed by Molly Ivins in 1993:

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians.  It’s no different.  It is the same thing.  It is happening all over again.  It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians.  Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today.  More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

Now, you know as well as I do that Christians in America are not being rounded up and ushered into concentration camps.  No one is giving them blankets infected with smallpox.  They are not being tortured and slaughtered.  They are not even being abused or discriminated against.  In fact, every right they have ever had in the United States remains untouched and fully intact — they just want to have more rights while others have fewer.  If anyone is persecuting anyone, I think the above quotes from Robertson make it quite clear as to who is being victimized by whom.  He says women are to be subjugated and they are to like it; he says feminists and lesbians are child killing witches; he says homosexuals are Satanists and child predators and if we treat them like human beings, horrible natural disasters will result; he says the Constitution is for Christians only, that only Christians are capable of properly running the country, and everyone else is anti-American.  And yet he claims that he and his fellow Christians are the ones being persecuted?

Come on, people — did we just fall off the idiot truck yesterday?

Robertson’s claim that Christians are being persecuted in America is, quite frankly, a bald-faced lie.  But it’s a lie told often, and it’s catching on.  And it’s not the only lie — there’s also the lie that America’s founders were all devout Christians, that America is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, for Christians.  These lies, too — despite all the proof available to refute them — continue to be repeated, and they, too, are catching on with an increasingly distracted public that is sadly ignorant of its nation’s history.

Joseph Goebbels, who knew a thing or two about influencing the masses, said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Pat Robertson?  Meet Joseph Goebbels.  Oh, I’m sorry — you’ve already met?  Great!  Then I’ll leave you two alone so you can catch up.

Now, you might be saying, Sure, they’re nuts, but they have every right to believe whatever they want to believe.  They’re harmless.  Just ignore them.

Harmless?  Just ignore them?  Really?

While interviewing syndicated columnist Joel Mowbray, author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Endangers National Security, Robertson said:

“I read your book.  When you (the reader) get through, you say, ‘If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that’s the answer.’  I mean, you get through this, and you say, ‘We’ve got to blow that thing up.’”

Foggy Bottom is a Washington, D.C. neighborhood where the United States Department of State is located.  The term “Foggy Bottom” is frequently used to refer to the State Department.  So let me make sure this is clear –- in the above statement, Pat Robertson, on national television, advocated the destruction of the United States Department of State with a “nuclear device.”  If you or I did that, we would, at the very least, be on a watch list so fast that all the Dramamine in the world wouldn’t keep us from puking.  But Pat Robertson is a man of god, right?  He represents the biggest religion in the United States, so to criticize this remark would disrespect his religious beliefs and offend Christians throughout the country.  And we just can’t do that.  Right?

On his TV show, Robertson once said the following about Islam:

“I want to say it again and again and again:  Islam is not a religion, it’s a political system meant on — bent on world domination, not a religion.  It masquerades as a religion, but the religion covers a worldwide attempt to exercise power and to subjugate the world into their way of thinking.”

Now read the following Pat Robertson quotes and tell me — doesn’t his description of Islam above apply just as accurately to his description of Christianity in America?

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say this very clearly.  If the people of the United States — all across America, in their churches and in their civic groups and in their legislatures — decide that they’re not going to allow the Supreme Court to dominate their lives in the fashion that it has been in this nation, the Supreme Court does not have the power to change that.  They are not going to be able to overturn the will of a hundred million American people.  And I think the time has come that we throw off the shackles of this dictatorship that’s been imposed upon us.  We had a war in 1776 that set us free from the shackles of the arbitrary rule of the British crown … And I think the time has come that we do that.”
– The 700 Club, quoted in Conrad Goeringer’s article “A Not-So-Modest Proposal – Post the Commandments, Spare Not the Rod”

“We have enough votes to run the country.  And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.”
– in a speech given to the April, 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally

“We at the Christian Coalition are raising an army who cares.  We are training people to be effective — to be elected to school boards, to city councils, to state legislatures, and to key positions in political parties. … By the end of this decade, if we work and give and organize and train, the Christian Coalition will be the most powerful political organization in America.”
– a July 4, 1991, fundraising letter

These are not the words of a man who wants to spread the love of Jesus Christ.  These are the words of a man whose religion is nothing more than a disguise for a political system bent on dominating and subjugating others.  These are the words of a revolutionary who wants to overthrow a free and secular nation, abolish its Constitution, and establish a theocracy.  These are words of sedition.

But we can’t criticize these words because they wear the sacred cloaks of religion?  We aren’t allowed to stand up and say, This is wrong!  This is anti-American! because it might offend the faithful believer in the exercise of his constitutional freedom of religion?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I call bullshit on that.

The same Constitution that gives these people the right to say these horrible, hateful things also gives everyone the right to denounce and condemn those things.

But there’s that unwritten law, that unspoken agreement that we won’t say anything negative — anything at all — about the sacred, constitutionally protected religious beliefs of others.  We are to respect it!

You don’t want to offend anyone?  You don’t want to make waves?  You don’t want to exercise your constitutional right of free speech?  Fine.  Then don’t complain when, someday in the not too distant future, the government tithes you as well as taxes you.  Don’t come whining to me when prayer in schools becomes mandatory and your kids come home from school to watch reruns of The Flintstones because their science teacher says it’s a documentary and it’s part of a homework assignment.  You’ll have no room to gripe when your favorite sex act becomes illegal because it offends god.

Because that is what these people want.

Silence may be golden, but in this case it’s deadly.  Remember what Jefferson said about the priest being “hostile to liberty” and always being “in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”  And remember what he said about ridicule being “the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions” and the only way to preserve “the purity of religion.”  If Jefferson were somehow able to rise from the grave and see how “free argument, raillery and even ridicule” regarding religion have been smothered into silence, and see how severely religion has been allowed to encroach on the freedoms of this secular nation, he would simply drop dead and have to be buried again.

The silence is being broken finally, thanks to the work and encouragement of great writers and thinkers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others.  But it’s happening too slowly.  America is experiencing trying times right now — economically, socially and politically.  Times like these make any country vulnerable to drastic change — often not for the better.  Times like these are often irresistible to those who want to dominate and subjugate, especially when the people being dominated have been convinced that it’s wrong to speak out and resist the very tools those dominators use to achieve their goals.  We can’t afford to be silent right now.

Speak up.  It’s your Constitution, too.

I guess you’ve heard about the Bermuda triangle
There’s something going on
Nobody seems to know just what it is
And the air force won’t let on
It might be hole down in the ocean
Yeah or a fog that won’t let go
It might be some crazy people talking
Or somebody that we ought to know
Down in Bermuda, the pale blue sea
Way down in the triangle, it’s easy to believe – Fleetwood Mac, Bermuda Triangle

Few things capture the public’s imagination like disappearances. We see the occasional child on the back of a milk carton, sometimes a billboard where someone has simply vanished and the frantic efforts of the family to find the vanishee, we hear anecdotal tales where somebody simply wasn’t there suddenly, and of course tales abound of mysterious freighters whose crews seemed to have blinked out of existence. But of all the wild tales, the famous Bermuda Triangle has spawned a series of books and movies, and anyone American instantly recognizes the phrase and its implications.

As I am fond of repeating, everything on earth has a rational, logical explanation. Everything. Five minutes on Wikipedia usually tends to thrash the wild rumors:

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared mysteriously. Popular culture has attributed these disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings. Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were inaccurately reported or embellished by later authors, and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is similar to that in any other area of ocean.

Naturally, the true ‘believers’ will concoct some conspiracy theory or whatnot. Or say you need to ‘read between the lines’, or start rattling off ‘facts and figures’  that are demographic to that specific area without comparing to any similar areas or statistics.

The boundaries of the triangle cover the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean island area and the Atlantic east to the Azores. The more familiar triangular boundary in most written works has as its points somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Miami, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, with most of the accidents concentrated along the southern boundary around the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

The area is one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, with ships crossing through it daily for ports in the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean Islands. Cruise ships are also plentiful, and pleasure craft regularly go back and forth between Florida and the islands. It is also a heavily flown route for commercial and private aircraft heading towards Florida, the Caribbean, and South America from points north.

With that density of transport going on, of course there’s going to be ‘disappearances’, or lost ships/planes. It’s just numbers.

The earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 16, 1950 Associated Press article by E.V.W. Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery At Our Back Door", a short article by George X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand’s article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered in the April 1962 issue of American Legion Magazine. It was claimed that the flight leader had been heard saying "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white." It was also claimed that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars." Sand’s article was the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. In the February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis’s article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" argued that Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region. The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book, Invisible Horizons.

Ah, excuse me: Fate? The handbook of the delusional? And Argosy is a boy’s adventure pulp magazine, specializing in fiction.

Others would follow with their own works, elaborating on Gaddis’s ideas: John Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969, repr. 1973); Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda Triangle, 1974); Richard Winer (The Devil’s Triangle, 1974), and many others, all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined by Eckert.

All of which are out of print.

Luckily, there was someone about who actually had a critical eye:

Lawrence David Kusche, a research librarian from Arizona State University and author of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved (1975) argued that many claims of Gaddis and subsequent writers were often exaggerated, dubious or unverifiable. Kusche’s research revealed a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies between Berlitz’s accounts and statements from eyewitnesses, participants, and others involved in the initial incidents. Kusche noted cases where pertinent information went unreported, such as the disappearance of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, which Berlitz had presented as a mystery, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Another example was the ore-carrier recounted by Berlitz as lost without trace three days out of an Atlantic port when it had been lost three days out of a port with the same name in the Pacific Ocean. Kusche also argued that a large percentage of the incidents that sparked allegations of the Triangle’s mysterious influence actually occurred well outside it. Often his research was simple: he would review period newspapers of the dates of reported incidents and find reports on possibly relevant events like unusual weather, that were never mentioned in the disappearance stories.

Kusche concluded that:

• The number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean.
• In an area frequented by tropical storms, the number of disappearances that did occur were, for the most part, neither disproportionate, unlikely, nor mysterious; furthermore, Berlitz and other writers would often fail to mention such storms.
• The numbers themselves had been exaggerated by sloppy research. A boat’s disappearance, for example, would be reported, but its eventual (if belated) return to port may not have been.
• Some disappearances had, in fact, never happened. One plane crash was said to have taken place in 1937 off Daytona Beach, Florida, in front of hundreds of witnesses; a check of the local papers revealed nothing.
• The legend of the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery, perpetuated by writers who either purposely or unknowingly made use of misconceptions, faulty reasoning, and sensationalism.

And further:

When the UK Channel 4 television program "The Bermuda Triangle" (c. 1992) was being produced by John Simmons of Geofilms for the Equinox series, the marine insurer Lloyd’s of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd’s of London determined that large numbers of ships had not sunk there.

Yeah…none of the ‘true believers’ thought to ask a major insurer? What a surprise.

United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the number of supposed disappearances is relatively insignificant considering the number of ships and aircraft that pass through on a regular basis.

Do I need to repeat it? Numbers.

The Coast Guard is also officially skeptical of the Triangle, noting that they collect and publish, through their inquiries, much documentation contradicting many of the incidents written about by the Triangle authors. In one such incident involving the 1972 explosion and sinking of the tanker SS V. A. Fogg in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard photographed the wreck and recovered several bodies, in contrast with one Triangle author’s claim that all the bodies had vanished, with the exception of the captain, who was found sitting in his cabin at his desk, clutching a coffee cup.

That one sounds vaguely familiar, probably from the days I read Fort.

The NOVA/Horizon episode The Case of the Bermuda Triangle, aired on June 27, 1976, was highly critical, stating that "When we’ve gone back to the original sources or the people involved, the mystery evaporates. Science does not have to answer questions about the Triangle because those questions are not valid in the first place… Ships and planes behave in the Triangle the same way they behave everywhere else in the world."

I’m stealing that line about ‘science doesn’t have to answer questions’, because it fits so well for so many debunkings. The following paragraph will no doubt sound familiar:

David Kusche pointed out a common problem with many of the Bermuda Triangle stories and theories: "Say I claim that a parrot has been kidnapped to teach aliens human language and I challenge you to prove that is not true. You can even use Einstein’s Theory of Relativity if you like. There is simply no way to prove such a claim untrue. The burden of proof should be on the people who make these statements, to show where they got their information from, to see if their conclusions and interpretations are valid, and if they have left anything out."

And the following is Sad But True, #2:

Skeptical researchers, such as Ernest Taves and Barry Singer, have noted how mysteries and the paranormal are very popular and profitable. This has led to the production of vast amounts of material on topics such as the Bermuda Triangle. They were able to show that some of the pro-paranormal material is often misleading or inaccurate, but its producers continue to market it. Accordingly, they have claimed that the market is biased in favor of books, TV specials, and other media that support the Triangle mystery, and against well-researched material if it espouses a skeptical viewpoint.

No surprise there. SIGH.

Finally, if the Triangle is assumed to cross land, such as parts of Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, or Bermuda itself, there is no evidence for the disappearance of any land-based vehicles or persons. The city of Freeport, located inside the Triangle, operates a major shipyard and an airport that handles 50,000 flights annually and is visited by over a million tourists a year.

Wow. Has any of these pro-Triangle folk interviewed any inhabitants of Freeport, and checked for weird stories? I’d bet the rent on NO.

One of my all time favorites about this ‘mysterious patch of ocean’, is the famous ‘compass gone crazy’ crap:

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, such anomalies have not been shown to exist. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are only exactly the same for a small number of places – for example, as of 2000 in the United States only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.

As was mentioned earlier, this is one of the heaviest travelled shipping lanes in the world. If compasses didn’t work there, logic would dictate it would be one of the least travelled shipping lanes, not vice versa.

So, in conclusion: if you’re planning a trip to Bermuda, it’s perfectly safe, no matter what fish story you may have heard.