synthaetic synapse

…”goat”, of course, being a euphemism for “anything that pisses me off.”

regular readers of this blog (all 3.1 of you per month*, on average, i believe) will likely recall that i’m usually nicer over here. sorry for the bursting of certain bubbles and all that, but today i have a rant. i haven’t exactly read everything that’s available though the Blogswarm Against Theocracy, but i’ve read a lot of it. and a lot of it pisses me off. of course, a lot of other things piss me off, too, and the read can decide whether or not that’s the product of a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, or having children, or this upcoming move, or what. regardless, i’m about to rant. Happy Easter.

WHAT REALLY GETS MY GOAT.

1. Atheists who position their arguments seemingly from the stance that Atheism is a religion. yeah, that’s right, i started with “us” first. why? because when we talk like we deserve the same recognition as organized religion, non-profit churches, and government-sanctioned endeavors to help those in need, we simply obviate how much we fail to understand about society and government. Atheism is not a religion. it’s bad enough that the fundamentalists keep trying to fit us in that box. let us not do so as well.
2. Christian fundamentalists who promote methods by which their special brand of intolerance can be inflicted on the general public. and by that i mean everything from anti-abortion legislation to protesting funerals of Iraq war veterans.
3. School systems which require, as a portion of the graded curriculum, the attendance of middle-school (junior high) children in abstinence-only education. this is, in fact, one of the most subtly nefarious blurring of that already-compromised line between Church and State.
4. Agnostics who spend 3/4 of whatever it is that they say or write in the communication of obtuse caveats in the vain hope that whatever eventually becomes the point of their message will not offend anyone. seriously, we understand that the point of agnosticism is largely to leave all options open so that with your last dying breath you can suddenly become Christian or Jewish or Muslim or whatever and thus be “saved”, no matter what. we don’t need to be told that you find every religious teaching to be beneficial and worthwhile and respectable and “neat” every time you open your mouth. jump into whatever pool it is you chose with both feet and get yourself wet. because right now all you’re doing is wandering aimlessly with a lukewarm drink in your hand and getting sunburned.
5. Intelligent Designers who fail to understand the inherent irony in that title, considering the fact that its ideals are largely spouted by some of the most willfully ignorant people in the world, for whom “intelligence” is but a dim, fading light at the end of a tunnel that they don’t even realize they’re standing in, and yet forcibly desire to inflict their petulant myopia on the world at large.
6. School systems and governments who cave in to the Intelligent Designers.
7. Fundamentalists who seek to destroy everything they cannot understand, including Art and people who “shockingly” have different perspectives and beliefs.
8. “News” people who have compromised any sense of common decency, let alone journalistic integrity, to “report” the “news” that they are fed from the Bush Administration and its Congressional sycophants.
9. The people of this community who now look at me askance and pretend as if i’m suddenly not trustworthy just because i’ve admitted, within their hearing, that i do not hold any particular belief in their god. there’s surprisingly fewer of them than i thought there would be, but seriously, your lips, my sphincter. enjoy.

what does all that have to do with the separation of Church and State? well, some of that is inherently obvious. the rest of it exists in our society as a by-product of the intolerance which naturally springs from a semi-religious governmental status quo. as i noted in this post (also here), the public’s view on politics is largely that politicians should show some form of allegiance to some form of religion. which, in light of the fact that what people want is the confidence that their leaders have a spiritual side, is quite ironic, because religion often has incredibly little to do with spirituality. but before i digress too much, let me point out that this is the same thing the public generally wants of itself as well. a person’s spiritual shortcomings, moral turpitude, lack of common decency—all can and will be overlooked provided they attend church regularly and at least pretend to drink the religious Kool-Aid.

which, of course, merely underscores the lack of common sense that exists on quite a large scale.

and it’s having to deal with that lack of common sense on a perpetual basis that really gets my goat.

* this number, by the way, is completely made up and full of shit, in case you were wondering. since it’s my blog, i steadfastly refuse to apologize for making up certain metrics relating to the blog itself, or to the numbers of individuals, in part or in whole, who give a flying shit about anything i write.

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I believe it is relatively clear that our European allies, especially Great Britain, live in more secular societies than we do here in America. Especially where Great Britain is concerned, there’s a significant amount of irony involved in such progressivism: our founding families fled such places because of religious oppression at great personal risk, and a couple of hundred years later elements of our own government desire a steadfast adherence to religious edicts, and already have systems in place by which non-Christian business and organizations are disallowed participation in certain government-sanctioned areas of business. It’s ironic, and of course from my perspective, it’s considerably depressing. I believe the story of the American Revolution—pretty much all the stories of the American Revolution, in fact—is a grand tale of personal commitment, courage in the face of imminent threat, and indeed, the fundamental precepts of honor, perseverance, and integrity.

Of those, it is integrity which bothers me in this seemingly continual struggle for religious domination of our government. For the desire for religious domination is promoted as Americanism when it is, in fact, one of the most extreme of un-American acts that can be perpetrated on the populace outside of mass murder. The lack of self-integrity that it constitutes is also troubling for me, because the individuals who promote the redefinition of America as a “Christian Nation” are those who set themselves as examples of good behavior to the rest of us. Setting aside the fact that dogmatic belief in biblical stories is a nefarious form of delusion (and self-delusion, to boot), they cherry-pick their own religious doctrine in the attempt to make their desires real.

I once considered running for a local political office. After two days of discussions with local Party officials, I was finally contacted by the State Democratic Party and told in no uncertain terms that they would not support me as long as I refused to attend church. In other words, unless I was willing to violate my sense of self-integrity, I wasn’t a solid enough candidate in their minds to support. I lacked the personal funds (and the time, to be honest), to aggressively compete against the individual who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation that was so controversial on the national circuit (South Dakota’s Proposition 6), and even though the state party abhorred both the policy and the man, they simply weren’t willing to fight him from the opposite religious extreme. And as an already-established dynamic member of my community, heaven forbid that I would have brought some logic, critical thinking, and personal insight to the matter (the personal insight being that I was adopted and had a child placed for adoption and was in contact with my daughter from a previous relationship, whom i didn’t get to raise).

While I found this personally offensive, the concept wasn’t hard to understand. Even a cursory view of politics today shows how intrinsically it is tied to religion. Political candidates take great pride, it seems, in opportunities to speak at churches, and are generally careful to show themselves as supposedly-honorable members of their religious communities. Beyond that, in many locations, voting is done at the local church, although I don’t protest this too much, for in many small communities, the local church also serves as the community center, and hosting elections there is a more than just a matter of convenience or even preference. And yet, as a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist (I don’t view atheism as a religion, in other words, nor do “practice” atheism dogmatically), one of the things that I wish candidates wouldn’t do is pander to this presumed need. There are, after all, over 30,000 separate Christian denominations in the world. Pandering to one offends another, and I think, shows a that a supposed leader is incapable to effectively lead, resorting instead to the appearance of conformance to a relative minority of the voting public.

If candidates approached this issue logically, I don’t think they’d stoop to the church-hosted photo-ops. To the critical-thinking crowd (many of whom, in certain terms, actually exist in the religious crowd, too), the demonstration of a limited world-view, a relatively intolerant mindset, and a dependency on rote superstition should be quite unattractive. As well, the explicit deference to a minority (and active, participating Christians ARE a minority in this country) should be no more acceptable to the logical mind than the undue influence by any other political lobby. And the critical-thinking crowd shouldn’t be afraid to ask pointed questions to their candidates. Why should we allow such candidates to lead us? Why must we invest our own forms of faith in the good behavior and ethical conduct of those who show, time and time again, the willingness to defer to delusional thinking? Should we ever have to define the “best” candidate in terms of the admirable qualities that they lack? In many ways, those are unfortunately rhetorical questions. The status quo, after all, is a difficult thing to circumvent, let alone redefine. But I fear that if we do not manage to do some day, that even under progressive or liberal control, we will find ourselves living in a Christian State, rife with intolerance and dedicated on converting the world. And when that day comes, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

And to bring this back to the title, the real problem with this is basically just visual. On the left side of the political aisle, you know these aren’t the types of people hell-bent on changing the Constitution to make this a Christian Nation, or even personally dedicated to “saving” all the people of the world. But as such, the very appearance of their deference to these ideals, the very appearance that they take the teachings of their religions seriously, creates a logical disconnect from which it is almost impossible for the likes of me to step aside. I respect and even admire their personal faith, but the mere appearance of a need to even make religion an issue in today’s world is simply silly to me. Even when I was a steadfast, devout conservative Christian (yes, I was, once upon a time), I still had many questions and problems voting for candidates whom I didn’t think I could trust to uphold our rights and protect our freedoms simply on the basis of our citizenship, which is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

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cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors under my other pseudonym, “commander other”. coming up next: Easter celebrations in the otherwhirled!