Monthly Archives: July 2014

Christian Predators

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I know they are trying hard to ‘save’ me. But all they manage is to creep me out.

‘Without god, everything is permissible,’ they say. ‘Without a God, what would stop you from raping or killing?’

It takes a lot of self-control not to run away screaming. These people don’t get it. And the fact that they don’t gives me the willies. Here’s the thing: each day I already rape and murder as much as I want. Which is not at all. Which is normal for most social beings. At least for each and every atheist I know.

And that is why believer’s incessant talk about rape and murder makes me nervous. From where I stand, they are obsessed with it; they seem to find it natural that everyone wants to rape, murder, kill. More disconcertingly, though, the only thing that prevents them from giving in to these urges is an even more vicious being – one that they completely made up: God.

Worst: What horrors can we expect from deeply religious people when they find out that this God doesn’t exist?

Faithful Atheist

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Sometimes, a believer will assert that

it requires faith to be an atheist.

The first few times I heard it I thought that this was a tongue-in-cheek, somewhat tacit admission that they knew that their faith was somewhat tenuously grounded, something not to be examined too closely – like a mother’s claim that her baby was the most beautiful baby in the world and also unusually intelligent. It’s just something we say.

Now I know better. Believers really do think that it requires faith to not believe. Like an addict who needs a certain substance, believers have been made dependent on faith and need it to face the real world.

With the addict, the contradiction in the assertion is startlingly obvious: you don’t need drugs to stay clean. So perhaps we should build a bridge for believers that they can walk across to understand this point:

You don’t need drugs to not become high.
You don’t need a razor to not shave.
You don’t need a pen to not write a letter.
You don’t need a car to not park somewhere.

And you certainly don’t need faith to not believe something.

Christian Rights

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A few days ago, I stupidly wrote in Militant Stupidity that

Most importantly, though, there are no longer religious rights – i.e. special rights attained only through adherence to a particular religion – in the UK.

And boy, was I wrong. Not in that it shouldn’t be that way, but wrong because I failed to see that obviously, in the UK, as in most other european countries, this unfortunately is not true.

In the UK there actually are some religious rights. For the sake of clarity, with religious rights I mean special rights that you can only claim when you say that you have a certain religious belief. In addition to the fact that it breaks the ‘one law for all’ principle, religious laws have another peculiar property: There is no actual way to prove that you are a believer – you can fake belief as easily as a religion can fake their god. There is no way to prove a negative. This alone should be grounds to immediately deep-six those paragraphs, but I digress.

Anyway, there are two important religious laws in the UK that apply only to self-proclaimed religious people, and they are:

  • you must be a Christian (rather: Church of England-brand Christian) or you cannot become King/Queen of England. Since you must also have a direct blood line to the throne, few people will ever come in conflict with this silly law.
  • Members of the Roman Catholic Christian Belief, and more to point, their Organization, are exempt from a lot of important laws: The non-discrimination acts against women, gays, and people of certain marital status.

Therefore, being a Christian in the UK does indeed engender special privileges; some privileges even allow you to act in ways that would immediately land you in hot water if you weren’t religious – without adding any new responsibilities. How nice is that!

So yes, the UK does have religious rights. How silly of me to have gotten this wrong. Seeing how the US have just screwed their women over the same issue, my oversight is doubly embarrassing.

For the record, I should have said:

Most importantly, though, there should never be religious rights – special rights that apply only to people who claim to adhere to a particular religion – in the UK.

Sorry about that.

SCOTUS schmotus

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The issue is simple, they solution obvious. Then religion enters the playing field, and old men make a silly choice. As a result women are placed at a disadvantage.

That about sums up what just happened at SCOTUS – the Supreme Court of the United States.

The issue: should a privately held company be forced to comply with the law, even if it conflicts with the religious beliefs of their owners?

Obviously, this is a non-issue: When your religious beliefs conflict with the law, you better abide by law, or place yourself in harm’s way. In the civilized world, Law trumps Religion, right?

Well, not so fast. SCOTUS has actually managed to shoot itself in the foot on a very, very simple, clear-cut case.

The Affordable Care Act in the US states that companies must provide contraception coverage in their insurance packages. As it should be common knowledge, ‘contraceptives’ prevent pregnancies from happening, they do not terminate them. Contraceptives include IUD (‘Coil’ or ‘Spiral’) and ECP (‘morning after pill’).

An evangelical Christian-owned company in the US now refuses to cover for IUD and ECP. On the grounds that their religious beliefs prohibits this kind of contraception, they sued the US administration. Today SCOTUS ruled in favor of the company.

There are a number of remarkable items here:

  • A company is a juridical person and, along with some other traits like skin color or sex, can’t have a religion. So even if the owners all adhere to the same religion, this is not true for their company. SCOTUS, it seems, has now ruled against a very simple principle – a ruling that leads to head-scratching and raised eyebrows around the world. How can you screw up something that simple?
  • The complaint against the administration falsely claims that using IUD and ECP are abortions. This is factually untrue. That supreme judges can’t get something right that most female European teen-agers know may have something to do with the composition of the panel; it is definitely not a testament to their knowledge or level of preparedness to rule on such an important issue

SOTUS’ ruling is disquieting because it opens the door to religious discrimination against employees. Here it allows the company’s owners to withhold rights to their employees based on religious beliefs. That is a bad precedent. Even worse, the US uses case law – which is based on precedents. This ruling thus has far greater reach than a boneheaded decision like this would have in a country built on code law.

So women in the US again get to be told by religious people what they may, or may not do.

God bless America – her judges surely don’t.