Atheists Raise $180,000 for Charity
It is said that this is the season of giving, and you don’t have to be religious to do good by giving. It was reported the other day that atheists have used crowdsourcing to raise $180,000 for Doctors Without Borders. I bring this up because there is this prevalent belief that atheists are amoral, hedonistic, and only concerned with their own self interests. I want to show that this belief is false.
I’m not going to try to pretend that atheists are more giving than their religious brethren, I just want people to realize that we, as a group in general, put a very high value on doing what is morally and ethically right. Our understanding that this in the only life we have leads us to cherish it and, since we don’t believe in any finally judgement where the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, we are greatly appalled at the suffering of others in the here and now. We see the huge injustice that millions are living lives of desperation, with no hope of relief, unless we, as fellow human beings do something about it, today. Nothing is more terrible than the thought that so many innocent people suffer and that a painful death is all that many of them have to look forward to. The waste of human life, of human potential is overwhelming. When you know that this time on earth is all that each of us has, this kind horrible waste and suffering is unconscionable.
The fact that this suffering of millions is often brushed aside because people delude themselves into believing that those who suffer will find peace some other future existence is what makes us so angry. We aren’t angry with god, or with believers in general. We are angry that human suffering is often minimized by reference to some insubstantial afterlife, or worse, justified by the whim of some invisible deity.
We give what we can to help those who suffer, not because we are told to by a holy book, or a church, but because we are moved by a shared sense of humanity to do what is right simply because it is the right thing to do.
There are plenty of charities that you can give to, if you are, like me, uncomfortable with the idea of giving to a religious charity, such as the Salvation Army, which espouses homophobic and bigoted beliefs, or a church where most of the money stays in the church rather than going to where it is really needed. My personal choice is Doctors Without Borders, which I believe is a great charity since they provide needed medical care anywhere in the world that it is needed, with no religious, ideological, or political agenda or strings attached.
Where ever you decide to give to, don’t do it because you expect some ineffable reward in a nebulous, unlikely afterlife, or to please your pastor. Do it because it is the right thing to do.
Its All About (warped) Proirites
PZ Myers had a blog post about a terrible Mississippi proposed law that would declare a fertilized human egg a person. The consequences are dire for mother’s and babies. I am not going to try to speak to this since PZ does it much better than I can. Please go read it. Comment there and/or here.
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a name? you might ask. Well, in India, quite a bit, if you are a girl named ”Nakusa” or “Nakushi,” which mean “unwanted” in Hindi. In a heartwarming CBSNEWS World article, 285 girls changed their names to reflect a new beginning in their lives.
It is hard to imagine, in our society, that parents could choose such a cruel name for their child. This reflects, I think, the sad social insistence in many countries on having male children.
It is known that in many cultures in the past, baby girls were buried in the sand, thrown into rivers, lakes, and seas, or left out in the wilderness to die of exposure and starvation, or be eaten by wild animals. Where this horrible concept that a female child is worthless came from is hard to understand. Ok, I get the idea that many cultures desired male children for the purposes of inheritance, protection, wage earning, and so on. Also, many of those same cultures required that the parents of a daughter pay a dowery when she married, which can be seen as a financial burden. Still, why was no thought given to the fact that females are needed for reproduction, or that a marriage of a daughter to a man from a good family could be a benefit? Then there is the most important reason of all to value daughters: that hey are humans begins just as worthy of love and caring as any male.
These misogynistic ideas have their roots in a major change in human social development.
In their book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá trace the origins of misogyny to the advent of agriculture, which “…changed everything about human society, from sexuality to politics to economics to health to diet to exercise patterns to work-versus-rest patterns. It introduced the notion of property into sexuality.” (Ryan and Jethá, 2010)
What we see here is the result of the male desire to secure a claim to property for himself and his offspring. In order for this to work, the woman becomes property as well. These attitudes have prevailed for close to 10,000 years even though there is really no longer any reason to treat woman as property.
We have made great strides toward sexual equality in the past 100 years or so, at least in the West. I hope that the cross pollination of cultures we have seen in the past couple of decades will have a positive influence on less enlightens cultures around the world. Until then, more girls will be shamefully labeled “unwanted”, both in practice as well as in name.
References:
Ryan, Christopher and Jethá, Cacilda, 2010, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Harpers Collins
Sexism Among Atheists and Skeptics
There is a great blog post from PZ Myers that discusses sexism in atheism. I just want to add that this problem is also found within the skeptical community as well, perhaps not quite to the same extent, but close.
This is just a microcosmic example of what we find in society at large. I would say that the problem of sexism in the atheist and skeptical communities isn’t nearly as entrenched or as vicious as in, say, the gamer, science, or other similar communities, which is a good thing. If we can make the efforts that PZ describes, we can be leaders in including women as equals.
As atheists, skeptics, and secular humanists, we already have a greater sense of, and support for, social justice than the population at large. We need to keep working to include all segments of society in our communities and show the often bigoted, sexist, and racist religious believers what real brotherly, and sisterly, love means.
The Tea Party and Fairness (or lack thereof)
Tea Party Republican Congressman John Fleming, speaking about President Obama’s plan to raise taxed on the very rich made a statement in an MSNBC interview. “…by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 leftover.” Granted, he was talking about only having $400,000 to reinvest in his businesses, but still, his overall attitude during the interview was one of being completely out of touch with what the average American has to deal with. I also would say that the interviewer was obviously biased against the Congressman and the statements and conclusions the interviewer drew were soaked in hyperbole.
Despite this, Congressman Fleming’s comments show just how out of touch with average Americans the Tea Party types are.
Of Animal Cruelty and Immorality
There was a very sad, disturbing article in the Omaha World Herald about 64 chihuahuas that were rescued from a home in Falls City, NE. While this is an upsetting story in itself, it isn’t the neglect of these dogs that I want to talk about. I want to talk about a comment that was posted about that article.
Posted by: Tea Party Tom on 08/18/11 @ 12:30 pm:
Here we go agian, more government on our back telling people how to live our lifes. I guess the govenment is never satisfied, now there tellign dogs how they have to life.
When another commenter said that, while they felt it was wrong to mistreat animals, the government should focus on taking care of people. Tea Party Tom responded:
Posted by: Tea Party Tom on 08/18/11 @ 10:03 pm:
To Concerned: why should government take care of people??? Let people take care of people and if they cant do it, to bad thats the way the cookie crumples. I never had the gorverment take care of me and I’m doing just find!
There are so many things wrong with Mr. Tea Party’s responses that I am not quite sure where to start. I suppose I’ll start with his comment that the government shouldn’t be telling dogs how they have to live.
The authorities are considering charges against the owner. The laws that may have been broken have nothing to do with telling animals how to live their lives, but with ensuring that animal owners treat the animals in their care humanely. If anyone is being told how to behave it is the owner, not the dogs.
As for Tea Party Tom’s contention that this is an example of more government on our backs, the fact is that the Humane Society (not a government agency, by the way) was called in because the owner called authorities to tell them that he could no longer take care of the dogs. So the authorities didn’t come out and raid the home or anything. They came in response to a call for help. They weren’t poking their noses into the owner’s private business, but responding to a legitimate call for assistance.
The most egregious comment of Tom’s, though, is his belief that if people can’t take care of themselves that it is their own fault. Basically, fuck the poor, they deserve it. Considering that the Tea Party is, by their own admission, openly Christian, his statement is completely contrary to the teachings of Christianity, which call for compassion and aid for the poor.
Finally Mr. Tea Party states that the government never took care of him. While I can’t say that’s not true for sure, given his atrocious grammar and spelling I can only assume that he attended a public school, a government funded institution that provide him with 12 years of free education.
This ill informed, bigoted screed is just another example of the moral bankruptcy of the Tea Party and its followers.
It has been shown that sociopathic killers often start their careers by torturing and killing animals when they are young. The same, I believe, holds true for a person’s attitude toward animal welfare. This is clearly illustrated by his comments. Tea Party Tom, and his cronies, show not just their indifference to human suffering, but their outright hostility and disgust of those less well off then them. To call themselves the party of family values and morality is more than disingenuous, but is grossly immoral and abhorrent.
The War Against Woman Has Real Consequences
When will people realize that denying a woman an abortion has real life and death consequences? PZ Myers has a very sad and scary example on his blog.
It isn’t just that abortions are harder to get, but also that many health care professionals have been scared off by the terroristic activities of the anti-abortion crowd. This means that even where abortion is legal, when a woman needs a life-saving abortion, often there isn’t anyone available to perform one.
How long will we allow the elite, white, male, christian dominated right wing to dictate what a woman can and can’t do with her body? That a woman, any woman, should risk losing her life just because some religious zealots want to make everyone else live their lives according to their interpretation of an archaic, iron age text, is unconscionable.
Miracle Mineral Solution – How Bleach Can Cure the World!
I listened to the Righteous Indignation podcast today where they interviewed Jim Humble, the creator and promoter of Miracle Mineral Solution. The interview was very interesting and revealing. It was interesting in the sense that it was fascinating to hear Mr. Humble commit just about every logical fallacy that I’ve ever heard of. It was revealing in that it became obvious that Jimbo is either completely deluded or an evil genius.
From listening to his halting, folksy way of speaking, the first impression is that he is simply deluded, but later we found out that he created a church to promote the healing properties of his Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS. When he was asked why he decided to use a church instead of a traditional non-profit organization to promote MMS, he rambled on about how Jesus told his disciples to go out and heal.
When asked about an article in which he used the Catholic Church’s tax exempt status and the separation of church and state as examples of how this gives his organization more power than a non-profit, he fumbled around for a bit before admitting that it was a bad example to use given the abuses of the Catholic Church.
What strikes me about this, though, is that he obviously gave a lot of thought to how organizing as a church would allow him to skirt many of the laws and restrictions that a non-profit would be held to in providing health care using a product that can only claim testimonials and anecdotal evidence for its efficacy. This shows him to be, in my book, a true charlatan. Evil genius it is!
The claims he makes for MMS are myriad and track perfectly with typical pseudoscientific claims. It can cure cancer, HIV, malaria. It can treat serious burns by lowering the PH of the burn area, which he claims is highly acidic, even though he has no medical research whatsoever to back up this claim. In fact, he has no medical research at all to back up any of his claims. When called on this, he spouts the usual clap-trap about modern science not wanting to believe the truth about his claims, invokes the evils of modern medicine, and goes on the seal the deal with anti-vaccination rhetoric.
To quote his website:
“The answer to AIDS, hepatitis A,B and C, malaria, herpes, TB, most cancer and many more of mankind’s worse diseases has been found. Many diseases are now easily controlled. More that 75,000 disease victims have been included in the field tests in Africa. Scientific clinical trials have been conducted in a prison in the country of Malawi, East Africa.”
Strangely, he doesn’t not include links to these “scientific clinical trials”. I wonder why?
This guy is treating people around the world with what is essentially bleach. That’s right, bleach. He advocates putting bleach on burns, open wounds, and drinking it to cure any number of maladies.
Jim Humble should be locked up for peddling a dangerous product to innocent people, as well as practicing medicine without a license, but since he operations mainly in Africa, he is probably immune from prosecution here in the U.S.
Homophobia Rears it’s Ugly Head, Again.
Montana has wide open spaces, big sky, and homophobic bigots running their state legislature. Commenting on the failure of a bill that would repeal a law that criminalizes homosexuality, Rep. Ken Peterson, R-Billings, says that the law, ruled unconstitutional by the Montana Court in 1997, thinks that the law may still apply in some situations.
According to an article published in the Missoula Independent:
According Peterson, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, there are at least two prosecutable offenses—felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. One is the “recruitment” of non-gays. “Homosexuals can’t go out into the heterosexual community and try to recruit people, or try to enlist them in homosexual acts,” Peterson says. He provides an example: “‘Here, young man, your hormones are raging. Let’s go in this bedroom, and we’ll engage in some homosexual acts. You’ll find you like it.’” Peterson hasn’t actually seen this happen, he says, because “I don’t associate with that group of people at all… I’ve associated with mainstream people all my life.”
The other offense, in Peterson’s legal opinion, is the public display of homosexuality, since he believes the Supreme Court’s decision only applies to private acts behind closed doors. Being gay in public, he says, is a wholly different matter:
“In my mind, if they were engaging in acts in public that could be construed as homosexual, it would violate that statute. It has to be more than affection. It has to be overt homosexual acts of some kind or another… If kissing goes to that extent, yes. If it’s more than that, yes.”
Peterson says that he never intended to offend the LGBT community with his comments. That’s like calling the Tuskegee Airmen, “A fine bunch of patriotic nig#$@s”, and being surprised that you caused them offense.
Other lawmakers were even more brazenly open with their homophobia; one opposing witness of the bill went so far as to say all pedophiles are either gay or bisexual.
What really gets me is the supreme arrogance of these people. For a political group that claims it is fighting for less government interference in people’s lives, the Tea Party crowd sure likes to tell other people how to live their lives. I guess it is one thing to have the government try to control the sale of guns, but completely another to have it tell you who you can love and who you can’t. The hypocrisy is so blatantly obviously that I can only conclude that these people are either diabolical liars or so clueless that they have to wear hats to keep their brains from falling out. It is like some Saturday Night Live sketch come to life and gone horribly wrong. It would be funny except for the fact that these people are electing either liars or idiots to office. Either way, it is us, the people, who lose.
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