Readers with nothing better to do may have stumbled upon this in my Musings:

Or this:

Not that I don’t understand wobbly public knees. You cannot take a stand for without taking a stand against, and vice-versa. Which means taking a stand can place your popularity at risk. 

I understand, but I don’t sympathize. I experience disappointment when, only to avoid a slight heat increase, people readily betray that to which or those to whom they privately express support.

To be fair, there are times when keeping one’s yap shut is reasonable. If invited to speak at a religious funeral, you can bet I won’t use the pulpit to take on the religion’s tenets. Wrong time, wrong place, counterproductive, and bad manners. Such situations demand seeking common ground from which to speak and leaving hot topics out of it.

I also make allowance for times when the outcome is sure to be “nothing gained,” no matter what I say or don’t say. If “nothing gained” is the guaranteed endpoint, I prefer expending the least possible effort getting there. This can include not chiming in, and not bothering to respond to barbs. Call me wimpy if you like. If you believe there is more integrity in losing the hard way, more power to you.

But more often, I avail myself of opportunities to speak up and risk unpopularity. A few times as a result I have lost what I thought were dear friends. When that happens, I don’t toss out a cavalier, “Easy come, easy go.” Those moments make me sad. And they stick with me.

On the compensatory side, stand-taking has brought me quite a few wonderful new friends, not to mention helped me better appreciate rock-solid friendships that transcend differences. 

Meanwhile, I try not to mistake being stubborn and offensive for standing for what matters. It is an ongoing challenge. In the heat of the moment, they are not always easy to tell apart.

The Value of Dissent

A friend opined to me that a certain politician “trampled the Constitution.” Interested to know what I’d missed, I asked for examples. After a moment’s pause, he replied, “Good one. You got me there.”

It wasn’t my goal to “get” him, whether “there” or anywhere else. Had it been, I would never have imagined I could do so only by asking for an example or two. 

All I wanted was to hear his reasoning. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any. Not that he let that stop him from believing and spreading a serious allegation. 

How he got to that point is instructive. He associates almost exclusively with people who say “yep” to any unsavory comment about that politician. Accuse the politician of, oh, I dunno, improper sexual relations with fruit flies, and the group will nod assent. Accusing, not substantiating, is all it takes to belong.

When you limit your circle to like-minded people, you risk thinking you’re right by not having to think.

I cherish well-informed opposing views. (Clearly, my friend’s view failed the “well-informed” test.) They are my opportunity to better inform my own views in order to reinforce, modify or even discard them. Think of the growth I’d miss out on by associating only with people who only reflected the world back to me exactly the way I already see it.

Why stamping a belief “sacred” 
must not protect it from scrutiny

Three memes* regarding religion hold strong in America: that religious faith is a virtue; that religious beliefs are to be treated with respect; and that people who don’t see faith as a virtue or treat belief with respect are intolerant.**

The memes even infected my atheist father and grandmother. Whenever they heard a tale of individual sacrifice for faith, they struck a starry-eyed pose and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that someone has such faith.” Yes, they said wonderful with verbal italics. But they didn’t mean it. They thought such people were morons. What they were really saying was, “See what how tolerant and generous I am?”

Other kinds of beliefs enjoy no such memetic protection. If I said that all house cats are bipedal, no one would fault you for rebutting me with evidence, or for calling me nuts if I smugly retorted, “I don’t care about all that; I have faith that I’m right.”

Yet if I said that Noah loaded a ship with two of every species, that Joshua halted the earth’s rotation, or that with a sentence Jesus killed a fig tree, many people would shame you for rebutting me with evidence and cheer me for saying, “I don’t care about all that; I have faith that I’m right.”

Thus religion enjoys protected status thanks to a meme that bullies people out of publicly challenging it. It’s a shame. Suppressing dialog of any sort, religious or other, is no way to move society forward.

Intolerance is not expressed by challenging religious beliefs, but by suppressing free expression. Ironically, it is those who seek to quell challenges to faith and belief who manifest intolerance at its worst.

* Meme refers to an idea that ends up being replicated throughout a culture as a gene does, metaphorically speaking, in organisms.
** Roughly akin is the equally silly meme that you should admire people for saying what they feel and sticking to their guns, even if their ideas are insane.

Dear Friend:

I have made mistakes. I make them now. I acknowledge the likelihood I will make more.

Thank goodness you will not be satisfied with my owning up to them, repairing what damage I can, and trying move on with my life. In case the punishment I heap upon myself doesn’t suffice, it’s comforting to know I can count on you to ostracize and damn me not in a spirit of intolerance but of righteous zeal.

I am all for “in God we trust” on your letterhead, on the masthead of your magazine, on a bumper sticker on your car, even painted in big letters across the front of your house. Promote creationism and challenge evolution all you want on your TV or radio station. Put a huge nativity scene on your front lawn. Say the Pledge including “one nation under God” all you want. Display the Ten Commandments prominently in your yard. Bear your personal witness to the world.

Do all of the above with my blessing.

I am not being wholly unselfish. It doesn’t take much thought for me to realize that by protecting your right to practice religion and to talk about it publicly, I protect my own right not to. 

It works the other way, too. By protecting my right not to practice religion and to talk about that publicly, you protect your own right to do the opposite.

All I ask is that you not use government to promote or endorse any religious belief.

If you are part of this country’s Christian majority, I understand why you would think that it is virtuous or at least harmless to have students say “one nation under God.” 

But since Wicca is growing in popularity, imagine if someday you found yourself a Christian holdout in a Wiccan majority. And suppose that the Wiccan majority thought it was virtuous or at least harmless to have students say “In the Triple Goddess we find peace.”

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I suspect that most God-fearing Christians would raise a stink. 

I suspect that many would tell the Wiccans to do as they wish at home, but not to enlist the aid of the government and our public schools in promoting their particular brand of theistic belief — because it constitutes an infringement on religious freedom.

Should the Wiccans accuse you of warring against religious belief or of limiting religious freedom, you would most likely say, “Nonsense. Practice your religion. Just don’t use my taxes to promote it.”

There you have one, admittedly lightweight example of how the Jeffersonian concept of a “wall of separation between church and state” protects everyone’s freedom, believers and non. Imagine what a look at some heavyweight examples might reveal.

Asking government not to promote religion on currency, in the Pledge, in laws and on public lands in no way constitutes a war on religious freedom. Quite the opposite, it fosters public policy that lets the religious and non-religious believe and proclaim as they choose. And it protects us all from having to pay to promote someone else’s beliefs, rather than simply protect their right to have them.

Would-be crusaders for kids love to publicly rue that Utah spends less per student than any other state.

If that truly defines the problem, two possible solutions come to mind. Either:

1. Get Utah to spend more, or
   
2. Get the other 49 states to spend less.

Yet somehow I doubt that where our spending ranks vis-a-vis other states truly defines the problem. What does? Ah. It seems no one has bothered to come up much beyond “not to be ranked last.”

So here’s an idea. Let’s set relevant, measurable objectives for our school system. Then evaluate it accordingly. Never mind how much other states do or do not spend.

On “Attacking” Religion

I deal frankly with religion in this blog. I post warnings lest the sensitive stumble in unawares. Still, some venture in, only to emerge accusing me of having “attacked” their beliefs.

The accusation never fails to take me by surprise. Attacking is not on my agenda. 

Still, one person’s “report” or “examine” may be another’s “attack.” When a religious claim or stance fares poorly under my scrutiny, I can certainly understand how the faithful might see me as on the attack.

So, fine. For the sake of discussion, let’s go with “attack.” 

In fact, I will go one better. Let’s call what I do a “counterattack.” 

In this blog I have written about molester Catholic priests, Mormon cultishness, religious sexism and racism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses blood transfusion ban, unreliability of the biblical canon, religious opposition to scientific fact, and the Bible’s endorsement of slavery — to name a few. 

I suppose you could say that by raising those points, I am on the attack. Could.

Except, well, I didn’t raise those points. 

Religions did. 

I didn’t don a frock and molest kids, build a cultish organization, establish sexist and racist policies, ban transfusions, canonize a book of questionable provenance, oppose scientific fact, or write biblical passages endorsing slavery.

Back to that word attack. Each of the above is precisely that. An attack. An attack on facts, individual rights, reason, human decency, or a combination of the above.

When I raise an opposing online voice, I am speaking out against those attacks. I am, in a word, counterattacking.

The next time you are tempted to scold me for taking on a religious stand, first look at the stand. Then ask yourself who truly is on the attack, and against whom and against what, as opposed to who is merely sticking up for facts, individual rights, reason, and human decency.

A religion that doesn’t attack facts, individual rights, reason or human decency need have no fear of a counterattack.