antikoan

 |::| Monday, November 04, 2002

 |::|   8:44:32 PM 

Beyond Belief. Barry Carter writes: Imagine telling a person from the Agriculture Age that one day their children will no longer be taught at home. Their children will go off to a building where the parents have never visited and be taught and disciplined by people that the parents have never met. They will be grouped with hundreds of other children in one building. The father and mother will no longer work at home with their family. The mother and father will work inside of separate buildings many miles apart. They will have so little control over their work that they will have to request permission for a drink of water or to relieve themselves. Since both parents will work outside the home, the grandparents will be warehoused in a building with dozens of others and taken care of by people who don't know or love them. The parents and children will be away from home all day doing different things in different places and controlled by people who have little stake in their long-term well-being. (11/04/02) [Synergic Earth News]

OK, I'm imagining it...

It sounds like Mesopotamia. Or ancient China. Or the slave-powered latifundia of Rome. Or... well, or like lots of places. So what's the point? That things were better or more "natural" in that mythic "agriculture age"?

There are no good old days to bless or damn the way we live. There are only the choices we make about what we want. That is the single most salient characteristic of the human animal: Within the limitations of our capabilities, we are able to choose how we will live. Anything justification based on appeals to states of nature or blessed bucolic pasts is mere rationalization.

 |::| Wait -- tell me again why we're doing this?  7:46:35 PM 

"Well, one has to be hopeful. Certainly if you're not attentive and not trying to help the situation it's likely it could get worse. If you are attentive and trying to help it it is not necessarily clear that you'll be able to solve it." -- Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense

Translation: "You might be damned if you don't, and you're probably damned if you do, too -- so you might as well do." Now everything's clear.

 |::| Godless and American, but still invisible  11:31:51 AM 

The Godless Americans March on Washington happened on Saturday. I know folks who were there, and spoke in glowing terms. But if you read the papers or watch the news, or even if you watch the news feeds on the web, you wouldn't know it had happened -- not unless you lived in the D.C. area. I've been emailed stories from the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Here are direct links -- as of 2:45pm on Sunday afternoon (the day following the march), neither is on the front page (though that's probably to be expected).

From the Washington Post ["March of the Godless Takes to the Mall; Nonbelievers Fight Religion in Government"]:

Staging their first Godless Americans March on Washington, the demonstrators said they wanted to show that Americans who do not believe in God or who doubt the existence of a supreme deity comprise a significant part of the population that needs to be taken more seriously.

....

[Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists] and other speakers cited the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey done by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York showing that 14 percent of the population identifies with no religion.

This is a larger group, Johnson noted, than many faith denominations, including Jews and Episcopalians. But because "so many of us are in the closet," she added, views of the nonreligious are not respected.

Easily lost, but not insignificant, is the fact that many of the "godless" are not atheists or even agnostics. Many of them are simply a-religious; many others are practitioners of religions which don't conceptualize a "personal god", like Enlightenment-style Deism, or like Taoism and many flavors of Chinese and Japanese Buddism. Still other categories, like La Veyan Satanists and many neo-Pagans, count themselves among the "godless" because they do not accept the canard that "God" in popular usage is an ecumenical term. (And they're right, in my not-so-humble opinion. After all, it's just plain not an ecumenical concept to lots of very large groups of Americans, such as Missouri Synod Lutherans and "KJV Baptists", among others.)

"I want to show people that we are part of the United States and are just like them even though we don't believe in God," said marcher Anne Richardson, 49, a graphic artist from Annandale. [::]

In many states it's illegal for me to hold public office (which has been upheld by the 8th Circuit). I could never be a Boy Scout leader. I'm regarded as inherently amoral by many people as soon as they find out I'm an atheist. So, yes, there are a lot of people -- and a lot of institutions -- who don't understand that I'm "just like them", to borrow Anne's phrase.

Plans for the march provoked criticism from some conservative Christian commentators. In an essay, Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and chief executive of the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation, wrote: "This will be a sad day in my view. And the interest expressed by the 'Godless Americans' in increasing their political activism is something that requires the close attention of social conservatives."

Many in the crowd said they hoped to dismiss [sic] the myth that nonbelievers are unpatriotic. Against the backdrop of a huge sign that read "Atheists Bless America," about 100 military veterans were called to the stage to receive a round of applause. Other atheists currently serving sent their support.

[::]

(Curiously, the Post story appears to have been published in the "Alexandria supplement" section of the Sunday Post -- not in the National section, as you'd normally expect.)

From the Washington Times ["Nonbelievers march on Mall"]:

"This is a class in Activism 101. ... We Godless Americans are everywhere. Nonbelievers comprise 14 percent of the population. ... We are your husbands and friends. ... We work for corporations, and we, too, served in the recovery after 9/11," said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, the Cranford, N.J., group that organized the march.

"We still need to keep marching and protesting," Ms. Johnson told the crowd. "I'm asking you today ... to work with Godless Americans Political Action Committee. Some of you came thousands of miles to be here. You care about the separation of church and state," she said. She encouraged the group to become more politically active.

"We are on the move to becoming a well-oiled machine who knows how to play the game," Ms. Johnson said.

Johnson at least has the rhetoric right -- but American Atheists may be exactly the wrong organization to lead such a fight, considering the history of bad blood with other freethought orgs (the American Humanist Association refused to even mention the GAMOW).

I also checked ABC, NBC (MSNBC.com), CBS, CNN, USA Today, my local Gannett affiliate, LA Times, Time.com, Newsweek.com (same as MSNBC), and the AP, UPI, NYT and Reuters feeds on Yahoo, with nothing found. I threw in the London Times, and the Guardian/Observer for good measure. Nothing.

Finally, I found this at the San Francisco Chronicle -- but it was dated 11/1, the day before the march ["'Godless' forces to rally in capital; Many say, unlike his predecessors, Bush has blurred separation of church an state"]:

....[A]theists concede they just don't know how many people in America, home to a smorgasbord of active religions, endorse their views. "The community of reason is not one that joins organizations," said Ron Barrier, a New Yorker who is national spokesman for American Atheists. "It's not like we're offering eternal life or grace."

I gave up looking after hitting all the Chicago dailies, and checking Plastic.com and FreeRepublic.com to see if anyone had posted something I couldn't find. these three stories are _it_.

In other words, if the point of the march was to increase awareness, it failed. While it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that the press didn't notice because it had other things on its mind (there is an election Tuesday, after all), I know damn well that a lot of the folks who were there in flesh or spirit will see this as a conspiracy -- and be further marginalized because of that. I don't envy Ellen Johnson, and kick myself more than ever over not just blowing the budget and pointing the Volvo south. No, one more body wouldn't have made a difference if nobody was going to notice; but at least I could say that someone had failed to notice me.