Possibly my very last Freshwater post, maybe

Last Friday the referee in the John Freshwater termination hearing released his recommendation that Freshwater should be fired (here) and last night the Mount Vernon School Board voted 4 to 1 to terminate his contract (here).  The one dissenting vote was from Steve Thompson, a vocal supporter and fund raiser for John Freshwater, who didn't recuse himself but did complain about Paula Barone not recusing herself.  The hearing cost the school district about $900,000.

Now the excitement is all over unless Freshwater decides to appeal the decision, or, maybe I should say; if the grandstanders and theocracy advocates don't push him into another appeal.  It seems to me that John Freshwater has, from the beginning, been pushed in directions that were not in his best interest by people who used him to fulfill their own agendas.  I don't mean to absolve Freshwater of responsibility.  The fact that he tried to conceal his actions is clear evidence that he knew he was breaking the rules, but with media-whore, bully, Dave Daubenmire and ignorant clown of a lawyer R. Kelly Hamilton in his corner, not to mention all the fundies who always want to try evolution in the court of public opinion, he was doomed from the start.

This fiasco was predicated on the fundy belief that their religious opinions should supersede legal and moral codes.  From the very beginning supporters were incorporating creationist, Christian nation rhetoric that made it clear that they intended the hearing to be a referendum on the incorporation of religious dogma  in public education instead of a simple determination of guilt or innocence.  If their goal was to siphon off $900,000 of taxpayers' money that should have been spent on kids' education;  if their goal was to bankrupt the teacher they professed to be supporting;  if their goal was to prove that the court of public opinion is always trumped by real courts, they were very successful.  However, if their goal was to prove that their fundy beliefs were true, they failed, and they did a hell of a lot of damage in the process.

Spiritual But Not Religious? Danger, Will Robinson!

I just read an article on CNN’s website; “Are there dangers in being 'spiritual but not religious'?” Apparently, it is “trendy” to say that one is spiritual but not religious, which as I understand it, is an assertion that the SBNR person feels free to pick and chose from various religious traditions those things that best reflect their own beliefs, without being tied down to the dogma of a single religion. It seems to me that this is a step in the right direction, if it steers the individual away from blind religious fundamentalism and closer to rejecting religion all together, but it still sounds like most of them are inclined to imbue philosophical writing with mystical, magical powers that don’t really exist.


The article asks (but doesn’t really answer) the question “Are there dangers in this?” As a slightly outspoken atheist (and observer of more outspoken ones), I can answer; yes. That is, narrow-minded religion bullies may try to get you fired from your job, driven out of your community, or even get you killed. However, none of the above was mentioned in the article.

Not surprisingly, Jesuit Priest, James Martin, who arguably has zero experience outside of organized religion, doesn’t like it and thinks it’s driven by egotism. "Being spiritual but not religious can lead to complacency and self-centeredness," says Martin. "If it's just you and God in your room, and a religious community makes no demands on you, why help the poor?" Gee, I don’t know, Father. Maybe you should get out of your church and ask some of the many, many non-religious people who are out helping the poor. Or, alternately, maybe you could talk to all the conservative Xian tea-baggers who prefer to spend their spare time advocating for the elimination of all government help for the poor. And do I have to point out all the complacency and self-centeredness that has had the Catholic church in the headlines recently?

The bottom line is that the dangers in being spiritual but not religious are that those people aren’t under the thumbs of purveyors of organized religion and could ultimately realize that the rigid, dogmatic demands of said religions are pure hogwash. Then they may point out to other people, maybe via, oh, I don’t know, a blog, that Catholic priests want to control everyone else’s bedroom although they can’t control their own, and fundy protestants want to quote-mine the Bible to legitimize the advocacy of bigotry and intolerance, and Islamic fundies just want to kill everyone who disagrees with them. Or maybe the danger is that the SBNR folks will miss out on all the fun of spending eternity with the aforementioned religious groups.

Pray or Shut Up

Here's a little followup to the last post about a xian prayer gathering to support the police and firefighters. I also expressed my opinion on the Columbus Dispatch website that the event should have been more inclusive. Although I didn't indicate my beliefs other than to say I was a non-xian, a response to my comment included this little gem: "Keep your godless garbage out of this forum, you have other vents for your thoughts, go find one."

It's funny how often I get responses like this when I suggest that people other than conservatives and/or xians have a right to exist . Maybe it's my writing style that some people find irritating. Actually, as I think about it, although I've frequently been disagreed with in forums (no, really), conservative xians are the only ones who have actually told me to shut up and get off the forum.

I just now recalled when someone sent me an email that advocated supporting George W. Bush and fundy religion. I think I responded, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I'd rather eat vulture crap with broken glass." He responded by saying "That's just your opinion and it's not welcome here." I guess he should have sent a selection of acceptable responses with the email.

I think I may have mentioned before that I've noticed some people seem to feel that only people that agree with their beliefs and opinions should have a right to exist. They're not all necessarily conservative xians but they're all fundamentalists in the sense that there are things they believe wholeheartedly in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary and their first response to any suggestion they might be wrong is rage. I kinda like getting them to tell me to shut up, but I almost never do.

Needling Your Kids?

The good news is; the boy is recovering from surgery and will be all right as long as he avoids magnets. The bad news is that he's a two-year old whose step-father shoved between 30 and 50 "blessed" sewing needles into his body and only the 4 most life-threatening needles have been removed so far.

A news article from AP tells of a Brazilian man who shoved needles into the body of his stepson during a month-long series of rituals wherein the man's lover would enter a trance and then direct the insertion of the needles. The lover had supposedly had the needles blessed by a woman connected with the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomble and told the step-father that these rituals would allow them to be together.

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I can't imagine agreeing to any of this, no matter how good a lover this lover was. I mean, if my girlfriend came over, went into a trance and started giving me instructions, even if it was something like making pickle-loaf sandwiches, I'm pretty sure that would be the minute that she became an ex-girlfriend. She'd never get the chance to explain why she had a shopping bag full of needles.

Then, who could listen to a person, with or without an altered state of consciousness, give instructions to stick needles in a toddler, and it doesn't have to be a step-son, even if you found a stray 2 year old by the side of the road and brought him home, wouldn't you get a weird feeling that somehow that plan was flawed. Seriously, I'd have trouble sticking a needle in a toad from the back yard; visualizing a sharp needle in close proximity to a helpless little child sends my stomach into gymnastics.

The bumper sticker says something like; People who believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities. Or as apostates of fundamentalism have said; when they believe their religious leaders, they follow orders without question, they don't have to analyze the instructions or feel any personal responsibility. They're just a tool of the religion. Those horrible Brazilians just took it to the next level.

A girlfriend in a trance isn't responsible for what she says. She's just a conduit for a (higher?) power. The step-father isn't responsible because he's just following orders and he's using "blessed" needles that have magical properties. The baby is the only rational one of the bunch. It just goes to show how much it can suck to be in the care of believers in absurdities, but on the other hand, it shows there are worse things than threatening children with an imaginary hell.

Fundamentalism Causes Babies

A new article on LiveScience.com talks about higher teen birth rates among teens in communities that are "highly religious". Highly religious is their term, but what they are referring to, is areas with a high concentration of fundamentalist Xians. The article speculates about possible causes for the religious-preggers-ratio, but I have personal experience that strongly suggests that the main problem is ignorance.

In the distant past (1970), when I was a high school sophomore, my family moved from Danbury, Connecticut, which had one of the highest rated and most progressive public school systems at that time, to Avon, Indiana, that didn't. Danbury benefited from the sophistication spillover from New York City and as a result its High School health classes spent a great deal of time on human reproduction and contraception. Avon was a largely rural community that was just starting to become a bedroom community for Indianapolis and evangelical Xians who lived on farms were what the faculty still perceived as the student population. I don't remember health class in Avon, but I remember that many of the councilors and teachers seemed uncomfortable acknowledging that students had two sexes. The attitude of the educators was that ignorance was the best and only condoned contraceptive.

It was easy to see the effect of the different educational approaches: the "highly religious" community had a lot more teen pregnancies. Ignorance is one of the main objectives of fundamentalists. Since they insist that their members must believe the fundamentals of their group, the survival of the group is dependent on their ability to suppress or disavow any contradictory evidence. In addition to that, sex is icky and dirty and embarrassing to talk about so it's best to conceal the facts and hope the kids don't try to figure out what genitalia are for until after they're married.

Unfortunately, in spite of all the parents' prayers, or, according to fundies, because prayer is not allowed in school, hormones beat out ignorance when adolescents feel the need to insure the fitness of the human species. The result is a bunch of undereducated, emotionally unprepared children trying to raise younger children whose existence is frequently resented by the parents. The expectation would be a higher rate of sexually transmitted disease, more abandoned and abused children and more botched abortions. It seems like an awfully high price to pay for religious dogma.

The Aftermath of the Scary Speech

Obama's speech to the students of the US has come and gone and there are no reported fatalities. Of course, this could just the lull before the storm. When our guard is down, Nancy Pelosi might broadcast the trigger word that was implanted during the speech, then all the children will become ultra-liberal zombies who ravage the country with taxing, spending and creating social programs. Oh! The horror!

Now, Karl Rove has tipped us all off to what really happened; Pres. Obama was going to deliver a speech that would indoctrinate America's children into becoming communist-fascist, Islamic-atheist, terrorist-sissies. Thank goodness the outrage by the Real Americans forced the Antichrist administration to change their evil plan at the last minute, and, thank goodness we have the honesty and integrity of Karl Rove to thank for making that clear. Next, we need to demand to see the real speech as well as the real birth certificate.

Seriously, people like Karl Rove know that the most conservative, most fundamental Xians are very afraid of change and very easily swayed by religious talk, and are therefore easy to manipulate. That is, after all, what Rove did for a living when he worked for George W. Bush. He and other conservative pundits are intentionally tapping into this vulnerability to create a fictitious environment of fear that they know will scare the bejeesus out of a bunch of folks that don't have the rational tools to deal with it objectively.

There are people who were literally afraid to expose their children to a back to school speech. In an interview I read over the weekend, a woman said she didn't want her kids exposed to the President's speech, saying she was an American, the kids are Americans and she is very frightened right now. Does that seem rational to you?

The implication, of course, is that the President of the United States is not an American, that his plans do not consider the best interests of the US's people, and that something really, really, bad is this administration's real goal. They want to avoid their kids' exposure to our President in the same knee-jerk way that they would "protect them" from atheism, evolution and homosexuals. They're scared of the President in a similar way to how I'm scared of knee-jerk reactionaries who are armed with firearms but not with fully functional brains.

A Few of my Favorite Things

I just found this article at Bloomberg by way of a reference to it in Pharyngula. The article is about an investment con where honest investors lost their life savings to 3 guys who promised great profits on their investments, but delivered nothing. The scam was what the article calls "affinity fraud",that targets a group of like-minded people who are especially vulnerable due to the mutual trust among the members. Here's my I-told-you-so moment. The targeted group was evangelical Xians and Mormons.

As I have ragged about a couple of times, some Xians make themselves easy marks for unscrupulous individuals because of their bias toward, and greater trust of, those that identify themselves as Xians. The members of the group lower their inhibitions because they perceive themselves as in a safe environment. The conference call meetings of investors included praying (as well as preying) and talk of using the profits for good causes. No matter how absurd the reasons that were given for needing more money or how many warnings they got from friends and relatives, the investors did what ever they could to come up with more money, even getting second morgages.

This brings me to another subject I've blogged about; avoiding cognitive dissonance. Fundies may be the all time champs at refusing to acknowledge the contradictions between their beliefs and facts that would cause the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Just like the text books say, the people with the greatest emotional investment in the investment are are most likely to deny being ripped off. Some of the folks who lost everything, even though the con-men are all in prison, insist that they lost their money because the FBI stopped the process before the highly profitable deal could be completed.

I feel very sorry for these people who lost everything just because they trusted their fellow man, but as I have suggested before (and as G. W. Bush's political team said), fundies are very easy to manipulate. It's just a pity they don't read my blog, or they would have been armed and ready for the scammers.

Instruct those MV Instructors

Here's a bit of good news; according to the Mount Vernon (OH) News, all Mount Vernon School District staff will be instructed in what is legally acceptable concerning religion in school. If you've read my blog, or even better, The Panda's Thumb, then you know about the ongoing hearing related to the firing of fundamentalist Xian science teacher, John Freshwater who is accused (among other things)of teaching creationism to his 8th grade science students. Witness testimony in the hearing indicates that several teachers have engaged in evangelizing in the classroom and said they thought it was a good idea. This is probably partly a result of so many of the teachers in the school district having graduated from Mount Vernon Nazarene Univ. which seems to advocate evangelizing in the public schools.

Unlike Freshwater who was reportedly ordered to stop teaching creationism but instead just got more sneaky about it, most other teachers have said they were never told that they couldn't preach fundy dogma in their classes. This new instruction should prevent the all-week-long-Sunday-school-teachers from using ignorance of the rules as a defense. I'm not naive enough to believe this will completely stop teachers from trying to save all those captive heathens, but after going through a hugely expensive, drawn out, circus of a hearing, I doubt the School Board will be very forgiving of transgressions.

The Facts Are Just an Opinion

I was drawn to the Pew Research Center's website because of their recent survey on public perception of science, but I stuck around to look at some of their other data and, as readers of science and freethinker blogs already know, conservative xians and political conservatives are, on average, less educated, less knowledgeable about science and less trusting of science data. Although I don't have hard data to back this up, it's been my observation that conservatives are also much more inclined toward information bias.

I base this last observation on the proliferation and avid following of right wing TV and radio programs and the greater inclination of conservatives to censor and suppress opposing views in comparison to liberals. This combination of ignorance and information bias makes them the ideal targets for propagandists who want to obscure the facts.

If Rush Limbo says that global warming is a liberal conspiracy to destroy America, then decades of observation and testing become irrelevant and if the pastor says the world is 6000 years old, well you know. What I'd like to know is why is this legal?

We have libel and slander laws to protect individuals from having lies told about them, but if corporations and "think" tanks spend millions of dollars to spread lies that injure scientists, teachers, learning institutions and museums, that's just a difference of opinion and it's protected by our free speech rights.

I suspect that ignorant, fundy politicians and politicians worried about losing fundy votes have a lot to do with this difference in legal protection, but I can't help wondering what would happen if university presidents and museum directors started bringing lawsuits against groups like the Despicable Institute claiming that the plaintiffs' reputation and business were damaged by anti-science propaganda. In a perfect world it would bankrupt the lying scum.

The Family at C Street Horror Show

I just blundered onto the scariest things I’ve ever read concerning our government and religious fundamentalists. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and Gov. Mark Sanford of SC have both been linked to the C Street House run by a secretive, conservative religious group called the Family that seems to have strong political connections all over the world. All of the inside information on the group and the house seem to come from a single source; Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who stayed in the C Street House for a month and then wrote the book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” Here’s a link to an interview with Sharlet in the “Las Vegas Sun” and a video of part of the investigation being done by “The Rachel Maddow Show.” See what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dox4jdW4UyQ