God Wants You to Force People to Pray

The New York Times [unfortunately not a permalink] has a nice article about the Dobrich family and goes into some more detail about what they have endured. Of course their lives have been threatened.

A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”

Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls.

God wants that, you know. He wants you to threaten women and children. Especially Jews. It’s in the Bible. You have a right to force people to be Christians. Doesn’t it say that? I don’t remember it in any of my copies of the Bible, but surely it’s in there.

The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.

And you know they knew it was illegal. Mrs. Dobrich suggested they use generic prayers rather than specifically Christian ones. She would have been satisfied with that. That would have been illegal also, but it would have been less mean and arrogant. No dice. Mean and arrogant or nothing.

A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”

Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”

Mean arrogant and cruel. It has become the face of Christianity in this country. It’s not the Christianity I am familiar with. It is Christianism. It is no different at all from Islamism. In fact, it is worse because so many Islamic countries are totalitarian dictatorships and the citizens have no choice. This is America where the constitution guarantees freedom of religion. If you have a free religion, why do you need cruelty, arrogance and bigotry?

Why do they need to use the power of government to force their religion on innocent children? Their churches are inviolate. The government can’t go there, can’t regulate or tell them what to believe or what prayers to pray. Why do they need to force people to conform to their religious views? What is the point? I don’t understand it, but I am bitterly opposed to it. As you can see by the threats and the horrendous behavior of the Christianists, this need to force religious conformity has corrupted the Christian message into something Jesus of Nazareth would find horrifying.

via Pharyngula

Thou Shalt Not Piss Off Your Insurance Company

Previously I reported about a school district that used its governmental power to prosletize Christianity to school children. When a family of Jews objected they were harrassed, intimidated and eventually forced to leave the district. They sued. The board agreed to a settlement.

And then the board changed their collective minds. Or lost them.

The board’s insurance company is refusing to pay any more legal defense for them. The insurance company wants to be reimbursed for all the legal defense they’ve paid so far. They know the board cannot win at court and this is all money down a rat hole. Insurance companies are not too exited about pouring money down rat holes. It’s against their nature.

Christianists LOVE to pour money down rat holes–especially tax dollars. Their arrogance gets them every the time. They just know this time, somehow the 1st Amendment will mean they can use government force to make people pray. After all, God is on their side. All they have to do is pray and they can violate the constitution. God wants them to violate the constitution and therefore they not only can, they are required to do it. God always agrees with everything they want to do.

But not the insurance company.

If it’s Good for Marriage, It’s Good for Marriage

For more than 40 years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family.” – Dr. James Dobson of Focus on The Family, in a July 2004 letter to supporters

James Dobson never gets it right.

Bruce Wilson over on talk2action has a nice analysis of marriage in Massechusetts, the only state in the Union where gay marriage is legal.

Divorce rates are commonly used as a key measure of marital and family health. US states, including Massachusetts, submit monthly summaries of vital statistics on births, deaths, marriages, and divorces to the US Center For Disease Control’s National Center For Health Statistics ( NCHS ). The NCHS then compiles publicly available monthly and yearly reports of this data. The following statistics are based on that NCHS material.

Divorce rates in the US have been declining steadily since the the early 1980’s. Massachusetts has shared in the trend and traditionally has had a divorce rate considerably lower than the national average. In fact. for several years now the Commonwealth has had the lowest divorce rate of any state in the union.

You want to know who has the HIGHEST divorce rate? You guessed it, the states that are the most strongly opposed to gay marriage.

Among those US states that have no laws on the books specifically prohibiting same sex marriage or civil unions — WY, NM, NY, MA, RI, CT, NJ, MD, VT — the average divorce rate drop ( unadjusted for population changes ) was -8.74%. No states in this group had divorce rate increases in 2004 and 2005.

Among those US states that are most opposed to same sex marriage which have also provided divorce data for the time period — ( alaska ? ) AR, KS, KY, MI, MS, MO, NE, NV, ND, OH, OK, OR, UT, TX — the average divorce rate ( unadjusted for population changes ) for 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005 increased 1.75%. This group contains 4 of the 5 states with the highest divorce rate increases in the US during 2004 and the first 11 months of 2005.

So marriage is good for marriage. What a surprise! (Not really) Marriage is good for everybody. I am in a very happy marriage. Naturally I want the same happiness for everyone else. Who would not? Who would be so cruel to deny this kind of happiness to their fellow man? Christianists.

Christianism in the Courtroom

The Washington Post has an article called Bringing the church to the courtroom that details the work of Alliance Defense Fund, a Christianist organization that characterizes itself as a sort of “anti-ACLU.” From the sound of their agenda they are hoping they can destroy civil liberties by using the court system.

The group has been battling embryonic stem cell research in Missouri and won a Supreme Court stay preventing the removal of California’s 29-foot Mount Soledad cross. In Florida, where saving the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo became a crusade, the group supported efforts to nourish her.

“What we are really trying to protect are the things this country was founded on,” said D. James Kennedy, leader of Florida’s Coral Ridge Ministries and one of the prominent Christian conservatives who fashioned the alliance in 1993 as a sharp stick in the national culture debate.

That is not how opponents see the organization. While crediting the ADF with training troops for battles once fought by a haphazard assortment of government lawyers and often ill-prepared volunteers, critics question the alliance’s commitment to tolerance and the Constitution.

D. James Kennedy is an open reconstructionist. That is, he is hostile to democracy and individual liberty. He will destroy the Constitution if he can. His endorsement of the ADA exposes their agenda rather nicely.

Rottweiler Nation

This is from The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Blog, filed under “Religion of Pus, Useless Swine.” It’s an Interesting take on the Supreme Court’s decision that maybe we can’t torch the Geneva Convention after all. The Iraqi insurgents are the most inhumane, subhuman enemy we’ve ever faced and this guy is pissed that we aren’t just like them.

So keep that in mind. Should we ever make the mistake of capturing any of the perpetrators of the war crime against PFCs Menchaca and Tucker alive, we can forget about interrogating them in order to catch the rest, according to the Supreme Whores. Well, unless they’re willing to give up information if we ask “pretty please?”, since anything other than that has been deemed illegal by those blackrobed tyrants. Are we exaggerating? Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

Until then, here’s the message to our troops overseas: Shoot to kill, don’t bother taking prisoners. The Supreme Court has decided that they’re actively on the other side, so the only thing we’re likely to get from NOT shooting the koranimal swine is a bill for hosting their stay in Gitmo. Until the Supreme Whores decide that that’s against some penumbra of an emanation of Miss Cleo’s crystal ball as well, that is, at which point they’ll probably decide that we owe the hadjis a few million bucks in compensation as well.

Let me make a few things clear here:

We’re at war. We’re at war with the most inhumane, subhuman enemy we’ve ever faced.

We have two sets of enemies.

We have the ones without, the koranimal butchers that will not hesitate to do to each and every one of us, ourselves, our wives, our husbands, our children, and every single one of our friends what they did to PFCs Menchaca and Tucker and, on top of that, celebrate and ululate about it.

Now, go here and look at the shields in the banner at the top of the blog. This creep almost certainly imagines himself to be Christian.

This guy says “We’re at war with the most inhumane, subhuman enemy we’ve ever faced.” That is, of course, what was said about the Kaiser, Hitler, and the North Vietnamese along with every other country we have been at war with.

Bad Religion

Mark Isaak has written an interesting essay over at the Panda’s Thumb called “The Larger Issue of Bad Religion.”

What is “bad religion”? Everyone has different ideas about what is good in a religion, so it might seem that defining bad religion would be impossibly contentious. But there is one simple criterion which gets to the heart of most religion-related problems and which must be embraced by anyone who accepts the Golden Rule: A person is practicing bad religion if he or she, uninvited, attempts to impose any of their religious beliefs on another. A bad religion is any religion which condones such behavior. Other bad practices and beliefs can appear in religion, but by sticking to that one criterion, we can keep this simple and hopefully less controversial.

On this board, we see bad religion mainly in the form of attempts to ban the teaching of evolution and/or to force the teaching of miraculous creation (aka “intelligent design”). But, as anyone who pays any attention to the news in the United States knows, the battle is far more wide-ranging, covering issues such as putting graven images of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, prohibiting certain love-based marriage, and allowing pharmacists to impose their religious practices on their patients. In other parts of the world, bad religion imposes strictures on every aspect of life and kills people for noncompliance. The problem of bad religion is already widespread, and it appears to be spreading. It must be fought.

Say Hallelujah!

A lot of Christianists who have been kind enough to give feed back to the Sword of Freedom have characterized this blog as anti-Christian or anti-religion. After all, I occasionally quote atheists! The truth is, I have no problem with people who practice their own spiritual path but do not try to make other people do it. The idea of MAKING someone be spiritual is incomprehensible. It’s as incomprehensible as making someone pray. If a prayer does not come from the heart, it can’t be anything but empty words.

Isaak points out that Christianists (he doesn’t call them that) think their religious opinions are the laws of the universe. A little humility would fix that, but I know that’s a lot to ask for.

Benjamin Franklin, A Smart Man

“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”–Benjamin Franklin

Amen.

Life under Christianist Dominion III

The (mostly) science blog Pharyngula has been following the Hardesty, Oklahoma case and posted this piece which was written by the defendant. It’s long, but well worth the read. Here’s a snippet:

Well, that was then but now the court was about to hear the verdict. There was a feeding frenzy about to begin with the dirty little atheist and his family put in their place with him in jail and the family run out of town. Like the teacher told my daughter “This is a Christian country and if you don’t like it get out!”

I could hear my heart beat in my ears and I dreaded the cheers from the righteous mob that were about to begin. The pain of having my family being in the front row to witness this swirling cesspool of hatred come to its inevitable end with my head on a pike, sucked the air right out of my lungs.

Life under Christianst Domionion II

This is someone who posted a comment in a blog called “I’m From Missouri” about HR 2679.

DaveScot said…

I hope someone keeps track of the 11 parents and their children. Everyone in Dover knows damn well that no children were forced to listen to the 60 second announcement regarding evolution and intelligent design. So what you have is 11 parents whose religious hostility extended to such a trivial matter they were willing to make the tiny school district pay a million dollars.

I grew up in a small town and when a few people pull crap like that that hurts everyone there will be payback. I won’t be at all surprised if the children of these parents are so badly ostracized and abused by other students that they’re forced to find another school and the parents will be snubbed and insulted and their cars keyed and their coworkers and supervisors making their lives miserable that they’ll all end up moving away.

I hope that’s all tracked so that the next group of parents that gets their panties in a bunch and volunteers to the be the designated shitheads know what it’s going to cost them.

Sound familiar? It’s life under Christianist dominion. Obviously DaveScot is just dreaming of the day.

Life under Christianist Dominion

I have had several of these stories forwarded to me lately and I think it’s important to report them. I think it’s important to never purchase a pig in a poke. If American wants the Christianists to run the country instead of a secular government, it’s good to see what life would be like after the change-over.

This case involves the Smalkowski family who live in Hardesty, Oklahoma

The Smalkowski case attracted national attention after Nicole Smalkowski was kicked off of the girls’ basketball team after refusing to stand in a circle with her teammates on the gymnasium floor of the Hardesty public High School and recite the “Lord’s Prayer.” After school officials learned that she and her family were Atheists, lies were created about her as grounds to take her off of the team.

When her father Chuck discovered conclusively that public school and law enforcement officials had lied to him about his 15 year old daughter, he and Nicole and her mother Nadia went to the home of principal Lloyd Buckley to attempt to discuss the matter with him. Outside of his front fence, the principal struck Chuck, who blocked the blow. Both men fell to the ground and Buckley sustained minor injuries, the provable origins of which were strikingly contrary to his under oath trial testimony. Buckley then took out misdemeanor criminal assault charges against Chuck. After Smalkowski rejected the offer to drop the charges if he and his Atheist family left the state, the charges were raised to a felony. Chuck called American Atheists for help.

On June 22, 2006, after only a little over two and a half hours of deliberation, a span of time that included dinner, the jury found Chuck “Not Guilty” of the felony charge of assault and of two lesser included misdemeanor assault charges.

One of the main problems with any totliatarian state is the need for radical conformity. Any difference is not tolerated. In fact any difference from the main group can get you killed, jailed, persecuted. It is perceived as a threat to the power of the state.

The “good” folks of Hardesty knew they vastly outnumbered the Smalkowskis. They knew they were not in any physical danger from them. They knew their churches, homes and religion were under no threat from these atheists. The threat was to their power. The power to make you pray their prayers to their God at a time and place of their choosing.

If you are a Christian, Jew, Atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, Baha’i, or any kind of American you must stand with the Smalkowskis. You must stand with them if you would like to make those prayer decisions yourself and not have them imposed on you.

There’s no particular reason to believe that God wants to hear the prayers of people who were forced to pray. It is the powerful Christianists who are pleased by those prayers, not God.