The Gaytheist Agenda

Last summer Americans United for the Separation of Church and State called for the IRS to investigate First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif. for a possible violation of federal tax law barring electioneering by non-profit groups. This came after pastor Dr. Wiley S. Drake issued a press release endorsing presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Flash forward to this month and Americans United was pleased to announce that the IRS was indeed investigating the church. Their joy was short lived however. For two days afterward they discovered that they were the targets of a “Death Prayer” campaign instigated by pastor Wiley Drake.

Controversial Southern Baptist Pastor Wiley Drake has again urged his followers to pray for the deaths of staff members at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Last August, Americans United filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service about Drake’s use of church letterhead and a church-based radio program to endorse presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Federal tax law forbids tax-exempt groups from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office.

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In response, Drake issued a Feb. 14 e-mail appeal to followers to engage in “imprecatory prayers” (curses) against Americans United and three of its staff members.

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“We have asked the IRS to investigate what we believe to be Drake’s violation of federal tax law,” Lynn continued. “If Drake thinks he is innocent, he has more than adequate legal representation, and there is ample opportunity to make his case.

“Trying to turn God into some sort of heavenly hit man is repugnant,” Lynn concluded. “There is more than a whiff of the Taliban in this action”

Wrote Drake, “In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer. Especially against Americans United for Separation of Church and State…. Specifically target Joe Conn or Jeremy Learing [sic] and their leader Rev. Barry Lynn. They are those who lead the attack.”…

This is the type of person who would claim atheists are immoral and hateful, yet he’s praying for the death of an entire group of innocent people. Why? Because those individuals had the audacity to alert authorities to his illegal acts.

Now that’s truly immoral. It’s just a good thing his plan won’t amount to anything.

 

The RW Christians are engaging in yet another round of outrage against atheists with a new billboard campaign. It seems they didn’t like the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s billboards that read, simply, Imagine No Religion, a reference to Imagine by John Lennon. In response, InGodWeTrustUSA.org asks: Why Do Atheists Hate America?

The nation’s largest atheist group wants you to imagine a world without the Pledge of Allegiance, without faith, without patriotism, and without America as we know it.

Right off they hit us with the big lies that atheists are not and cannot be patriots, and that without faith/Christianity patriotism would not exist. Also without faith and Christianity “America as we know it” would cease to exist. Of course to an extent that second part is true. Just imagine how much bigotry and oppression we could dispense with by eradicating Christianity alone.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation has begun posting their “Imagine No Religion” billboards all across the country. So, In God We Trust has created our own billboard campaign asking “Why Do Atheists Hate America?”

Hmmmm, I wonder what would happen if we were to erect billboards asking Why do Christians Hate America? . I imagine the furor would set the country on fire from coast to coast. But it’s still acceptable for Christians to put up inflammatory billboards like Why do Atheists Hate America? . Maybe we should be discussing why that is rather than this phony “Christian persecution”.

Why does this particular atheist group seem to want to banish people of faith? Our sign doesn’t say, ‘Imagine No Atheists.’ All we want is a public debate. We want the atheists to defend some of the Anti-American statements they’ve made.

I’m not a member of the group myself and cannot, therefore, speak for them. However speaking as an independent atheist, I don’t want to banish people of faith and I know most atheists don’t. We just disapprove of the stranglehold faith/religion has on our nation and the way it is crammed down our throats constantly. We dislike the notion many people of faith have that they have the inherent right to impose their religion on everybody, whether those people like it or not. We want people of faith to use faith to guide their own lives, not use it as a weapon against others. We’re also quite willing to defend our statements so feel free to ask us, in a rational manner, about them.

Not only that, but we would like to know how ‘Imagine No Religion’ is different than ‘Imagine No Christians’ or ‘Imagine No Jews’?

Religion is a belief system, an ideology. It is not a person, animal or other living being. Therefore if it ceased to exist no harm would have been done to anybody. Saying Imagine no Religion is not the same as saying Imagine no Christians or Imagine no Jews because the latter two statements involve living beings who could come to harm.

Think about what these atheists are really saying. ‘Imagine No Mother Theresa?’ ‘Imagine No Martin Luther King, Jr.?’ I guess that’s the kind of world in which these atheists think we would all be better off living.

Christians are very fond of citing MLK and Mother Theresa as evidence of the good religion can bring to the world. However people such as Hitler, Jack Hyles, Earl Paulk, Angel Maturino Resendiz, and countless others commit heinous acts in the name of religion/God. Religion also causes a great deal of divisiveness, bigotry, war and even genocide. Accordingly it’s easy to claim that religion is a force of evil as well as good.

They then continue with a page titled The Atheists’ Opinion of America. It includes various quotes from FFRF, no doubt cherry-picked to get the best reactions from their RRRW audience.

Finally, Christianity is harmful. More people have been killed in the name of a god than for any other reason. The Church has a shameful, bloody history of Crusades, Inquisitions, witch-burnings, heresy trials, American colonial intolerance, disrespect of indigenous traditions (such as American Indians), support of slavery, and oppression of women.
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 217

In any event, the Colonists of the 1630s did not establish our country. The United States of America was founded a century and a half later. If we are going back one hundred and fifty years before our founding, why stop there? Native Americans were on this continent at least twelve thousand years before the American Revolution. These were the true discoverers of our land, and if we must return to the tradition of our founders, then all “true Americans” should adopt the pantheistic, polytheistic, natural system of Native American religions. The “Christian nation” argument is racist. (So is Columbus Day, for that matter.)
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 307

The Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with religious freedom . . .
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 307

All of those statements are true. They are not in any way hateful towards religion, Christians or America. Why should atheists or the FFRF apologize for stating the truth, even if it hurts the feelings of those who might find it uncomfortable?

The current climate in the United States, which is in the throes of a theo-patriotic kneejerk response to 9/11, has had a very depressing and muzzling effect on the campaign for human rights. Progressive organizations have actually all grown a bit in membership, but the economic toll is going to be bad in the long run.
– Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President - Keynote speech to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, meeting at Conway Hall in London, England, Fall 2003

Bush’s proclamation of Friday, September 14, as a “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance” shows the pitfalls of the “God is on our side” mentality, and the dangers of religious patriotism. While it may be natural for religious persons to turn to religion or prayer for solace, it is not the role of the President of the United States, or his spokespersons, to urge citizens to pray, to go to church, to turn to faith, or to observe a National Day of Prayer with worship. Prayer had its chance on September 11, and it failed. Imagine the unanswered prayers of hundreds or thousands of the victims of these terrorists. Official prayer will not solve any problems. The “God is on our side” mentality was responsible for these tragic acts of terrorism. We must not compound the dangers by a “One Nation Under God” response.
– Freedom From Religion Foundation Press Release 9/13/07

Therein lies more of the “If you’re not with us you’re against us–and that’s bad” mentality that the RRRW harbors. Conformity at all costs, diversity is to be drummed out, naysayers are hunted down and denounced. What is wrong with somebody having a different opinion? Why does everybody have to believe exactly what you do? Why is your belief the only acceptable one? There are three colors on the American flag, not one. So why do you demand that every American fit into your narrow mold?

How does coercing my sixth-grader to endorse concepts that run counter to our family’s values promote unity? Whether my child remains seated for the Pledge or feels compelled to stand with the believers (the real Americans), a precious integrity has been sacrificed…
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Freethought Today November 2001

How would Christians feel if their children were compelled to state every day that God did not exist? How would they feel if their children were forced to say the Pledge every day, but instead of “under God” the phrase was “under Allah” or “under Thor”? It seems Christians never have a problem forcing others to comply with their beliefs, but have a very real issue when they’re forced to comply with others beliefs (or lack thereof).

Although I feel that churches should be directly taxed, the climate might not yet be ripe for such reform…Since only a tiny portion of church donations truly goes to charity, we should allow only a percentage of religious contributions to be deductible from personal income.
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 259

Religion also poses a danger to mental health, damaging self-respect, personal responsibility, and clarity of thought.
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 217

Christians have an unhealthy view of human nature, and they seem hell-bent on proving it. If they had a more natural view of self and sex, and if they were allowed to grow to a level of self confidence, they could become mature adults able to handle their own sexuality in a responsible and positive manner.
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 285

Once again, these are all true statements. Anybody who wishes to do so is free to dispute them but the fact that they make people experience cognitive dissonance doesn’t make atheists haters of America.

If Christianity were simply untrue I would not be too concerned. Santa is untrue, but it is a harmless myth which people outgrow. But Christianity, besides being false, is also abhorrent.
– Dan Barker, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President in Losing Faith in Faith Page 215

The vote by the House of Representatives on Dec. 11, 2007, to approve H. Res. 847, “Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,” was both a meaningless exercise in pandering, and a meaningful gauge of how quickly politicians still roll over and play dead when confronted with a religious “gotcha” issue.
– Freedom From Religion Foundation Press Release 12/14/07

In our religion-drenched society, it is just assumed that if it’s religious, it’s good. We question whether basing decisions on faith, which basically means with no evidence, rather than on reality, can ever be good for people or for society. Since there is no proof for various religious claims, it creates divisiveness.
– Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President press release 12/5/07

See my comments above.

Maybe the question we should be asking is not Why do Atheists Hate America but Why do RRRW Christians Hate America and Everybody in it? Why do they feel compelled to shove their narrow minded views down the throats of everybody regardless of what anybody else wants or feels? Why do they think they are the moral authority of the nation and feel they have the right to speak for everybody? Why do they have the right to selectively interpret the Bible and use it as a weapon against others? I could go on and on but I’m sure I’ve made my point.

Atheists do not hate America. Atheists just want to be free to enjoy it along with everybody else, free from the iron fist of busybodies who think they have the right to impose their beliefs on others. Nothing more.

Addendum. A comment has been received (and I anticipate more as this post is on the Carnival of the Godless #86). Mike H. says:

Very well done, I am glad I found this post through the Carnival of the Godless.

Thank you, Mike. I’ve been a fan of COTG for a long while, and am thrilled to now be featured on it from time to time. I’m glad you enjoyed my post.

But it’s actually half-funny, half annoying. Is it possible to laugh and roll your eyes at the same time?

Rather a low-budget Fred Phelps who targets atheists instead of gays is my impression. I wonder whose “funeral” they’ll stage next.

Yeah, he’s definitely got that “Hey little girl–you want a piece of candy?” look about him.

Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the White Nationalist (as well as homophobic) group National Vanguard pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in federal court recently.

Kevin Alfred Strom was originally scheduled for a trial this week on several child porn charges. Instead, the 51-year-old pleaded guilty to a single count and prosecutors dropped the remaining charges against him.

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Strom was once part of the leadership of the National Alliance, a West Virginia-based organization Potok said was a white supremacist group.

Strom edited some of the organization’s publications and produced and sometimes hosted its shortwave radio and Internet broadcast.

“Jews are so dominant and influential in debasing and deceiving white women and girls on such a massive scale that, to any decent white person, no forgiveness is possible,” Strom said at the beginning of one August 2003 radio show.

Jews debase and deceive women and girls? That’s the pot calling the kettle black, or perhaps good old-fashioned projection.

Elisha Strom, who is estranged but not divorced from her husband, said they moved to Greene County in 2000, when Kevin Strom was working for National Alliance.

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Things started to break down for the couple in 2006, after Elisha said she returned home one day and found her husband sitting naked in front of the computer looking at child pornography.

Afterward, in an apparent attempt to patch things up, the two signed a notarized contract in which Kevin Strom agreed to seek treatment for pedophilia. But the couple’s relationship continued to disintegrate.

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In August 2006, investigators seized Strom’s computer during a raid of his home. He was arrested in January 2007 after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of witness intimidation and possession of child pornography.

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In April, Kevin Strom was indicted on an additional charge of attempting to sexually entice a minor. Authorities said he’d been fixated on a 10-year-old classmate of his stepdaughter’s.

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However, judge Norman K. Moon threw out the charges. Though he said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Strom was sexually attracted to the girl, Moon ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with attempting to sexually coerce her.

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The trial for the remaining pornography charges was postponed until Monday. In a summary of what the case would have been had it gone to court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Gould wrote that Strom later acknowledged to authorities that he’d downloaded child pornography.

Strom will remain at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail until his sentencing. He could face up to a decade in prison at his April sentencing in U.S. District Court, though federal guidelines could call for a much lighter sentence.

It would be interesting to do a psychological study to determine if there is a correlation between openly espoused hatred of one or more groups and criminal sexual perversions. Given the number of such cases I’ve seen I imagine there would be.

In the meantime I’ll recommend Strom for Conservative Babylon. He’ll fit right in there.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation based in Madison is after another Nativity scene, this time in Arkansas.

Their Web page has this statement, “The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution wanted citizens to be free to support the church of their choice or no religion at all.” They claim to educate the public concerning the separation of the church and state.
To educate means to provide unbiased information. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nowhere does it state or insinuate, “or no religion at all.”

On the contrary. People who don’t practice any religion are just as protected under the First Amendment as are those who practice religion. (Those who practice minority and “unpopular” are also protected.) The intolerance of religious bigots doesn’t change that.

The reason that the Congress added “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” was because of organizations and zealots who would eliminate our freedom to worship were there no laws to stop them.

It was also added because of zealots who would try to impose their religion on others who do not worship the dominant religion or do not worship at all. Sadly revisionists keep trying to misconstrue it as something it’s not. It doesn’t mean that RRRW Christians can run roughshod over America and rule it with an iron Bible.

The First Amendment is there to protect religion from the government, not to protect the government from religion. I quote from their Web page, “Our Constitution was very purposely written to be a godless document.” They never reference the Declaration of Independence, which says that we “are endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

And by the way, the “godless” Constitution refers to the “Godly” Declaration of Independence in Article VII.

David Haile,

Wausau

The “Creator” loosely referenced in the DoE is not the meddle-in-everything God of the Christian Bible, particularly the RRW Dominionist style Christianity. It was the Deist God, and many of the Founding Fathers were in fact Deists rather than Christians.

The deist outlook also gained a foothold in the American colonies, where it became popular among the rich and well-born about the time of the Revolution. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the theological leanings of some twenty have been identified. Three have been characterized as deists: Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Two others, John Adams of Massachusetts and George Wythe of Virginia, are described as liberal Christians strongly influenced by deism. Four, including Jefferson’s friend Benjamin Rush, were liberals not inclined toward deism. About eleven were definitely orthodox believers. Samuel Huntington, Philip Livingston, and John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, were prominent in this last group.

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None of the Founding Fathers meditated more assiduously on religion than Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). He was brought up in the rituals and traditions of the Anglican Church, as it existed in Virginia at the time. In his college years at William and Mary he came to admire Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as three great paragons of wisdom. Under the influence of several professors he converted to the deist philosophy. He made a careful study of the philosophical writings of Viscount Henry Bolingbroke, a strict deist whose God was remote and unconcerned with human affairs.

In his public pronouncements as a statesman and legislator, Jefferson expressed what he considered to belong to the common and public core of religion. He kept his more personal opinions to himself, refraining from putting them in any writing that might find its way into print, but he occasionally penned confidential memoranda for himself and a few friends.

Jefferson’s public religion appears in the Declaration of Independence, which refers to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to “inalienable” rights conferred upon all human beings by their Creator, and to “the protection of divine Providence.” In his first inaugural address, in 1801, Jefferson spoke of how the American people were “enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence.” In his second inaugural, four years later, he emphasized the nation’s need for the favor and enlightenment of Providence and asked his hearers to unite with him in supplication to “that Being in whose hands we are.”

Indeed. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a Deist. The “creator” he referred to in that document was the Deist God, a rational God. There were numerous differences between Deists and Christians, the most striking being that Deists rejected these particular core doctrine of Orthodox Christianity:

•The doctrine of the Trinity is false because there is no Scriptural evidence for it.
•Jesus was human, though an exceptional human, not God in any manner.
•Jesus’ death was not an atonement for our sins nor did God demand that someone suffer for our sins.
•The following doctrines are false: original sin, predestination of the elect, the inherent depravity of human beings, and eternal damnation.
•The “faith alone” doctrine of Protestants.

Again, the Founding Fathers were not all Christians as the revisionists would like us to believe they were. America is not and never has been “A Christian Nation”.

One of Jefferson’s firmest principles, as we know, was that of religious freedom. In 1777, as a legislator, he composed what later became the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which embodies his personal conviction that the government should exercise no coercion in religious matters. In his famous letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association he referred to the “wall of separation between Church and State”—a term that had previously been used by the Baptist Roger Williams.

The principles of religious freedom established through the efforts of Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were not for the sole benefit of Christians . They were for everybody.

Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, noted above, established the Wall of Separation between Church and State that is so crucial in our nation. Many of Mr. Haile’s ilk are wont to point out that the Wall of Separation is not mentioned in the Constitution, and it is not. However that doesn’t mean that it is nonexistent or not important–for the state, for the religious and for the non-religious alike.

Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 to answer a letter from them written in October 1801. A copy of the Danbury letter is available here. The Danbury Baptists were a religious minority in Connecticut, and they complained that in their state, the religious liberties they enjoyed were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the legislature - as “favors granted.” Jefferson’s reply did not address their concerns about problems with state establishment of religion - only of establishment on the national level. The letter contains the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” which led to the short-hand for the Establishment Clause that we use today: “Separation of church and state.”

The letter was the subject of intense scrutiny by Jefferson, and he consulted a couple of New England politicians to assure that his words would not offend while still conveying his message: it was not the place of the Congress or the Executive to do anything that might be misconstrued as the establishment of religion.

It is important to remember that Christianity was not the only religion practiced in the colonies. In fact a number of the founding fathers expressed some rather strong opinions about it.

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” James Madison

 

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” Thomas Jefferson

 

“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!” John Adams

 

America was never a “Christian Nation”. We have never been what the RRRW fundamentalists claim. The notion that the Founding Fathers were Bible-thumping RW Fundamentalists a-la Pat Robertson is a revisionist fantasy of theirs.

And while we’re at it let’s refer to the Treaty of Tripoli, which states: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

The treaty was written during the Washington administration, and sent to the Senate during the Adams administration. It was read aloud to the Senate, and each Senator received a printed copy. This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required by the Senate, but only the third time a vote was unanimous (the next time was to honor George Washington). There is no record of any debate or dissension on the treaty. It was reprinted in full in three newspapers - two in Philadelphia, one in New York City. There is no record of public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.

So anybody who tries to claim that the United States is a Christian Nation, and that its government is based on Christian principles or the Christian religion, is either mistaken or lying.

Mr. Haile claimed that “To educate means to provide unbiased information” but he failed to do that. The information he provided in his LTTE was not only very biased but bigoted. It’s possible he’s just ignorant of American history, particularly with regard to the Founding Fathers, which is very common. I’m always glad to provide the truth, however.