Only weeks after mounting a stupendously uncreative display denouncing all religion in the Washington state capitol building, Freedom From Religion has joined other activist atheists and humanists in a lawsuit against the use of “so help me God” in the oath of office for President.
Meanwhile thousands of Christian, Jewish and Muslim charity organizations are providing food, shelter and clothing for needy individuals and families struck by economic and environmental disasters. Granted, these same religions foment violence, intolerance, and abuse.
But wouldn’t it be great if there were recognizably atheist organizations that performed similar acts of charity and humanitarian service to the people suffering misfortune? What if in July of this year we had a huge push for giving and soup kitchens and all those other displays of generosity we so often see during the winter holidays? After all, it’s not like the homeless and the poor go hungry only between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
For me this is not merely a rhetorical concern – that is, what messages such stupid lawsuits send about the values of atheists and secular humanists. What about where laytheists like yerz truly can donate his dough? Or get more seriously involved? Our society promotes selfish values of materialism and consumption that induce just enough guilt for religionists to purge at the holiday season without seriously addressing the fundamental inequalities of our economy and democracy that make poverty so difficult to escape. There are religious people working all year long to right such wrongs, but where are the atheist and humanist organizations with similar missions? We need to get beyond these petty activities that just piss off taxpayers, regardless of their religious affiliations. Surely I am not the only atheist who saw this article and thought “frivolous lawsuit.”
5 responses so far ↓
1 Rojo // Jan 3, 2009 at 7:12 am
Food Not Bombs, Anarchist Black Cross, etc. do exactly as you suggest.
Granted, they’re not explicitly atheist, but as anarchists, I’d assume that most are.
Also granted, they’re tiny drops in a large sea, but nevertheless.
I have to admit, that as an anarchist and atheist, my hostility towards the state in itself means that I wind up less concerned about the word God in pledges and X-mas creches on “public” property (see if a homeless person is welcomed onto “public” property and you’ll see how truly public it is) than on the moralistic criminalizing and war-making policies of even the most secular state, usually marshaled in support of class and race war. The “War on Drugs,” for example, has been far more harmful than Christian attempts to place the Ten Commandments in city halls. And the cynical hitching of secular feminism to imperialist war-making in the Middle East is truly disgusting.
These atheist organizations that you speak of never bother to situate the role of religion in supporting and maintaining other ongoing systems of oppression, because they don’t want to talk about those other systems of oppression. At best, they’ll discuss this in the distant past, referring, for example, to the brutal persecution of Jews and Muslims by the Spanish Inquisition and the like.
Also, met some Catholic Workers once, was impressed. Further, one of my erstwhile Wobbly buddies (we’re both erstwhile Wobblies, still buddies, to clarify) has a significant other who essentially runs the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church over on Oak St. and I find her fairly impressive on the basic level of human compassion and concern for justice for all humans. Indeed, even though I’ve been an atheist since age ten (my racist white Southern Baptist grandma helped me along the way with her views! My Hindu grandparents were far less offensive in their views, but failed to convince me), I’ve come to realize that religion has often served as the last refuge for the resistance to oppression, even as it has served as justification for oppression in other manifestations. Would the Civil Rights Movement been half as effective without the Black Church? Along those lines, Western secularists worried about the rise of political Islam in the Middle East need to realize that the West and its Arab and Israeli allies have systematically attacked, destroyed, and/or coopted all secular resistance to Western imperialism in that region. In the 1950s, the biggest mass party in Iraq was the atheist Iraqi Communist Party. We paid Saddam Hussein handsomely to put stop to that situation. We similarly cheered on the genocidal right-nationalist, but secular, Turkish war on their own secular left. And, of course, Israel funded Hamas in its early years as a counterbalance to the left-secular PLO, only to witness them become the incubator of anti-occupation resistance after the cooptation of Arafat and, even more cravenly, Abbas.
Anyway, that was somewhat rambling, but I guess my point is that even though I consider myself a militant atheist, I think my interest in combating what I do indeed see as the pernicious effects of religion as a general phenomenon needs to balanced against understanding its interconnections with other often more pernicious social systems.
2 Rojo // Jan 3, 2009 at 7:33 am
Adding, to continue the ramble a bit, that the Christian/religious left, such as it is, would do well to study a bit more some of the concrete reasons for the hostility to religion on the part of much of the radical left. I’ve often heard criticism of the Spanish anarchists for their executions of Catholic priests during the Spanish Civil War. Now, without endorsing those executions (I wasn’t there and can’t really judge what my position would have been, given the exigencies of the situation), I do have to note that the Spanish Catholic Church was an intimate ally of the fascists and, as an institution, was probably the most exploitative landholder vis-a-vis the Spanish peasantry, so those executions didn’t arise just out of irrational anarchist hatred for God.
Another thing that gets my goat is the treatment the Dalai Lama gets among American hippy liberals. I certainly don’t endorse the Chinese domination of the Tibetans, but at the same time, Tibetan society was prior to the Chinese occupation dominated by a feudal priest class that lived in riches on the backs of the vast majority of the Tibetan peasantry. To suggest that the very feudal priest class that used to oppress their fellow countrymen is the proper agent for Tibetans’ liberation from Chinese rule just strikes me as naive in the extreme.
3 Rojo // Jan 3, 2009 at 7:53 am
Ok, correction: I meant Iran (under the Shah) when talking about the genocidal war on the left above, not Turkey. Brain fart.
4 Kevin Moore // Jan 3, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Hee, hee – once again, you offer more thoughts than I can address properly. But they are all good.
Yes, I had thought of Food Not Bombs, but I didn’t know if they were still active. I hadn’t seen them around in some time. They were an unintended, but delightful part of the scene at my wedding many years ago. They were feeding the homeless across the street from the 24 Hour Church of Elvis where Jenn and I got hitched.
And, yes, I am more interested in freedom of conscience. Why police people’s personal statements of faith? The only reason Bush’s expressions bothered me had to do with the creepy feeling that Jesus Was the Reason we were bombing the shit out of people. And that he thought he talked to God directly. I suspect Obama has no such delusions.
Wasn’t Tolstoy a Christian anarchist?
5 Rojo // Jan 3, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Tolstoy was indeed a Christian anarchist. And I’ve heard Ann Hutchinson cited as an early, not-labeled-as-such, anarchist. And, of course, the Catholic Workers I mentioned above are very anarchistic
Leave a Comment