Bully Pulpit

Sometimes teenagers commit suicide. It’s not always possible to figure out why, but we know that quite often when kids kill themselves it’s because they’re gay or transgendered and are unable to see how to get through another day while feeling those feelings.

We also know that quite often, kids who are perceived as different are bullied. One of the main reasons kids are perceived as different (though not, of course, the only one) is because they’re seen — correctly or incorrectly — as having a divergent sexual orientation or gender identity.

Ideally, the teachers and administrators in middle schools and high schools would be vigilant about suppressing bullying. Ideally, teachers and administrators would actively support the perception that different is not wrong or bad — it’s just different. Ideally, they would put a little extra energy into helping students who are different feel good about themselves. Feel pride, even.

Here’s where it gets sticky: There are thousands or millions of active, passionate adults in this country who are committed to preventing teachers and administrators from providing support and encouragement to gay and transgendered students. They pressure school boards across the country to forbid teachers to present homosexuality as something that is normal or acceptable. This leaves the school personnel with two difficult options: They can stand idly by while the bullying goes on, or they can risk being fired.

The sick, hate-filled people who are leaning on school boards to block any sort of open, accepting environment for gay and transgendered students consider themselves Christians. They feel sure that in allowing the bullying to go on unchecked, in creating an environment in which more unhappy teenagers will commit suicide, they’re doing God’s work.

I’m not a Christian, so I’m not well equipped to parse the theological niceties. If these disgusting people call themselves good Christians, I really have no choice but to take them at their word.

I’m aware, of course, that there are also millions of other Christians who take a much more tolerant view, who are happy to respect differences in gender identity and sexual orientation. Should I paint them with the same broad brush? Should I insist that Christianity is, in and of itself, an evil, corroding force?

Yes, I should. The problem is, the good Christians routinely give a free pass to the evil Christians. They could stand up forthrightly and saying, “No, that’s not Christianity. You people are not Christians at all.” But they don’t say that. Instead, they remain tactfully silent, or murmur quietly about differences of opinion. When it comes to “differences of opinion,” suddenly Christianity is a “big tent” where everybody (no matter what kind of slime they’re preaching) gets equal respect.

Where are the clergy who could stand up at meetings of the National Council of Churches and state forthrightly that conservative evangelical churches are not churches at all, that they’re terrorist organizations and should be summarily kicked out of the National Council of Churches and their leaders prosecuted for hate crimes? Where are those voices of reason?

If you can’t clean up your side of the street, folks, you really have no beef when I point out that you’re standing hip-deep in fresh steaming dogshit. As far as I’m concerned, “fresh steaming dogshit” and “Christianity” are synonyms. If you feel differently — if you feel sure I’m wrong about that — then you’d better break out the big shovel and start shoveling out the dogshit, because right now you’re wallowing in it.

Baby, Look at You Now…

I’ve tended to ignore the ongoing assaults on women’s reproductive rights. As abhorrent as these efforts are, they haven’t moved me to take action. (But then, very little does.)

Today’s bulletin about how the breast cancer people (“Susan G. Komen for the Cure”) are going to stop funding the breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood got to me, though. I got into a sort of mud-slinging match with an anti-abortion idiot on Facebook, and my blood is still boiling.

What bugs me most, I think, is the fact that this “debate” (and I use the quotation marks advisedly) isn’t really about saving the lives of unborn children. That’s a smoke screen. It’s a lie. The real, unadmitted agenda of the anti-abortion knuckle-draggers is that they want men to have control over women’s bodies. Women exist, in these morons’ view, strictly as incubators and infant-feeders whose lives are to be governed by men. The fact that the anti-abortion forces are drawn overwhelmingly from conservative religious denominations makes this pretty obvious.

And no, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here’s why: Russian orphanages. In Russia and other parts of the former Soviet bloc, there are thousands of unwanted babies languishing in orphanages. These children suffer horrendous

Complicity Through Silence

Sometimes I make statements critical of religion. Not infrequently, someone (usually it’s someone who apparently espouses a religious faith) responds by pointing out the good things that religion brings into the world.

It would be silly to deny that religious people sometimes do good things. Quite often, the good things are suggested by their pastors, or by their peers within the congregation. The question that has to be asked is, does that fact let religion off the hook? Should we respect religion as an institution because it sometimes leads people to undertake good and praiseworthy actions?

The default presumption — and this may be especially true in the United States, because it was founded by people who firmly believed in tolerance toward all religions — is that religion is entitled to respect. Today I’m going to suggest that the default presumption has it exactly backward. By default, religion is entitled to contempt.

If you feel that all religions, or some religion in particular, should be respected, the burden is on you to demonstrate why. Of course, this will require that you

Remaining Tolerant

Among today’s headlines, an Indiana state legislator has introduced a bill that, if enacted into law, would allow local school boards to force teachers to teach Creationism in science classes.

The legal niceties of this don’t interest me. I’ve read that such a law would clearly be unconstitutional, based on an existing Supreme Court decision — but on the other hand, I don’t trust the current Court not to overturn that decision. I regard the legal situation as essentially fluid. If the law were passed, and if a school board chose to act on it, the lives of teachers and children would be disrupted for years, whatever the Court’s eventual determination.

What I am concerned about is whether it’s possible, or desirable, to remain tolerant of religion, given the fact that a person who is so manifestly a dangerous lunatic (a) has a passionate commitment to a religious faith and (b) has, in the 21st century, been elected to high public office.

I try to be tolerant; honestly, I do. I have friends and professional colleagues who are deeply religious, and I almost never discuss religion with them. Such a discussion would only lead to

Superstition

I’m not a big fan of religion. I like Stevie Wonder’s lyric: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” Religion, it seems to me, is precisely the act of believing in things that you don’t understand. And all too often, it’s not only the believers who suffer. They enthusiastically inflict suffering on those around them.

I have a friend who is quite insistent that my disinclination to show respect for religion is a form of dogmatic belief. If I understand her correctly (it’s hard to be sure), she feels that I’m insisting that I’m right, insisting that the rest of the world ought to believe what I believe.

I’m pretty sure she’s way off base. Really, the only thing I believe is that concrete evidence provides a useful corrective for unbridled fantasy. In the absence of concrete evidence, fantasy is all too likely to lead to confusion, hurt feelings, suffering, and outright cruelty.

I remember Richard Dawkins explaining the distinction this way (and I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the exact quote handy): “I’m a scientist. When someone shows me evidence of the existence of a God, I will change my mind. The difference between a scientist and a religious believer is that religious believers will tell you quite explicitly

Rick Santorum and the Naughty Bits

According to an article in today’s Huffington Post, “Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently pledged to ‘die on that hill’ fighting against same-sex marriage, and made a similar vow to repeal all federal funding for contraception because it is ‘a license to do things in a sexual realm.’ Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, made the claims during an interview with CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart, according to Think Progress.”

This is so bizarre that it requires comment. Let’s see if I understand where Rick is coming from.

If teenagers are using birth control and therefore don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or catching a loathsome disease, they’ll be more likely to have sex. So, in order to try to force them to have less sex, Rick wants to make it more likely that, if they do it anyway, they’ll cause more unwanted pregnancies and catch more potentially life-threatening diseases.

Why? The only reasonable conclusion is, Rick Santorum hates sex! He hates it so darn much that he would rather see teenagers die of AIDS and/or have to drop out of school because they get pregnant, in order to (maybe) get a few other teenagers not to fool around in one another’s pants.

For him, that’s a net gain. More deaths, more unwed pregnancies, but less sex.

Rick, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your mother had to have had sex at least once. Possibly with your father, but that remains unproven. Possibly with the local dog catcher. Or with a local dog, we can’t entirely rule that out. You’re exhibiting about the same level of intelligence as a border collie, and rather less compassion.

The Power of Positive Thinking

From time to time I get into a little wrangle on Facebook with a friend who has posted a message that’s intended to be positive, uplifting, and inspirational. This has led to bad feelings in the past … and today I did it again.

I have a naughty tendency to check in with reality. I engage my brain and actually analyze the things that people say. This gets me in trouble — primarily, it seems, with people who are eager feel a certain way and disinclined to engage in thought processes that might cause them to reconsider their feelings.

Today my friend said, “You know the Universe loves you and wants you to be happy. Your thoughts create your world.” She said, “I believe that if you’re not happy with the way something is that you can change it.” She said, “You get what you expect to get. There are plenty of people who have made a better life for themselves despite their circumstance. I believe in hope.”

Here’s what I believe. I believe that it’s both useful and important to encourage people to take action to improve their circumstances. I believe that there are often things people can do along those lines that they have not considered, or have rejected too quickly. I believe that having hope is quite generally useful. Hope will give you a morale boost that will get you into action, and hope can help your actions be more focused and effective.

But this is all quite different from saying, “You get what you expect to get.” To start with an extreme case, I think it is morally irresponsible in the highest degree to imply

Logic and Faith

Ultimately, religious faith is irrational. Faith is the belief in things that cannot be (or in any case haven’t been) proven.

Beyond that, we all float in a vast sea of things that we “take on faith” — things that we’re told have been proven and believe have been proven, even though we haven’t gone through the steps of the proof ourselves. I take it on faith, for instance, that there are such things as electrons. People whom I trust tell me that the existence and properties of the electron are well established by scientific methods, so I believe in electrons without ever having seen one.

One of the key problems that arises, when the talk turns to religion, is that religious people are quite often convinced that the articles of their faith are in the second category rather than the first. That is, they themselves have not

The Hazards of Sea Travel

Strip away the veneer of civilized society, and as you near the human heart you find something much darker. William Golding explored that theme most famously in Lord of the Flies, which most of us read in high school. I don’t remember when or where I acquired a copy of Golding’s Rites of Passage, but the fact that “.50″ is penciled inside the front cover suggests it was at a used book sale. I don’t think I had ever read it, but this month I’m taking a random walk through my temporarily disorganized book collection. Feeling a bit weary of science fiction, I thought I’d try something more literary.

Golding’s microcosm in Rites of Passage is a sailing ship bound from England for “the Antipodes,” either Australia or New Zealand. The year seems to be about 1820; Golding is coy about the exact date, but we learn in passing that Coleridge is still alive. Conditions on the ship are about what you’d expect — the stench from the bilge, the tyrannical captain, the tiny cabins, seasickness, all juxtaposed against the stiff British etiquette of the upper-class passengers.

The book is in the form of a journal of a young man, a Mr. Talbot, who is one of the passengers. His affection of literary conceits is rather distracting, and the archaic word usage may cause the less literate reader to stumble now and again. Talbot is no more honorable than he needs to be: Before too long he has seduced, or perhaps raped, one of the female passengers. From the description in his journal, we can’t quite tell

Clubbed

A tiny controversy is brewing this month in Livermore over the presence of a Good News Club as an after-school activity at a local elementary school. This week’s Mailbox column in the Livermore Independent was entirely devoted to statements, pro and con, over this activity. One of the letters was my own.

It seems to me that a detailed and, insofar as possible, dispassionate analysis of the situation might be useful. Because such an analysis will likely take more space than the Independent can easily provide, I thought I’d use my blog for the purpose.

You may legitimately assume that I have a horse in this race. I have, that is, an opinion about the activities of the Good News Club. That opinion will become quite apparent as we proceed. But first, a little background may be in order, for those who are wondering what the heck this is all about.

The Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a national and quite likely international organization. I’m not going to provide their URL; they’re easy to find using your favorite search engine.

The CEF home page characterized the Club in this way: “Good News Club is a ministry of Child Evangelism Fellowship in which trained teachers meet with groups of children in schools, homes, community centers, churches, apartment complexes, just about anywhere the children can easily and safely meet. Each week the teacher presents an exciting Bible lesson using colorful materials from CEF Press. This action-packed time also includes songs, Scripture memory, a missions story and review games or other