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?

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.

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.