tales of an ordinary girl

For my Blog Against Theocracy post I am going to point out six cases of discrimination against non-theists. I'm posting this in advance because I'm going to be out of town next week and I won't have much of a chance to post this weekend.

This post is largely in response to Matthew C. Nisbet's post Atheism is not a Civil Rights Issue. In effect Nisbet is stating that if someone is beaten, dismissed from his job, wrongly accused of a felony, and ordered by the court to attend church, simply because that person is a non-theist that's not a civil rights issue.

I like PZ Myer's response to him in “Polarizing” is a dirty word, so atheists should surrender.

However, far from being the paramount focus of modern atheism, atheists have treated civil rights violations simply on a case-by-case basis. It's there, all right, but we don't have a simple, sweeping case of legal discrimination that has to be dealt with; we aren't denied the right to vote, we aren't told to sit at the back of the bus, there aren't many laws that overtly discriminate against non-believers, and the main legal issue we have to deal with are pervasive attempts (some successful) to get the government to endorse religious belief. We know all this; nobody has complained that atheists are oppressed anywhere near as badly as minorities or women. No one is demanding legal redress in the form of something analogous to the Civil Rights Act or universal suffrage. So really, Nisbet's argument begins with a lie, a false claim that we are making a big deal out of one view of the issue … which greatly simplifies his job of dismissing it.

In reality many people don't see atheists as being discriminated against because they are perceived as a class of educated, white males. It's a fallacy, but it's the perception.

Most of the cases listed below are governmental, but a few are not. Still, it shows that religious bigotry is still a force within America. All of these cases come from the comments section of Nisbet's article.

1. Religion in America: Atheists claim discrimination

The problem arose, says Universist Movement founder Ford Vox, when he met with Anderson to discuss holding a gathering at Cool Beans. After she asked what the group believed in, he claims, Anderson said she was not comfortable with it meeting in her cafe because she is Christian.

2. Discrimination Against Atheists

n 2001, for instance, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld an order giving a mother custody partly because she took the child to church more often than the father did, thus providing a better "future religious example." In 2000, it ordered a father to take the child to church each week, as a Mississippi court ordered in 2000, reasoning that "it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training."

3. Smalkowski Found Not Guilty on All Counts

Outside of his front fence, the principal struck Chuck, who blocked the blow. Both men fell to the ground and Buckley sustained minor injuries, the provable origins of which were strikingly contrary to his under oath trial testimony. Buckley then took out misdemeanor criminal assault charges against Chuck. After Smalkowski rejected the offer to drop the charges if he and his Atheist family left the state, the charges were raised to a felony.

4. Army EO [Equal Opportunity] Reps: “Discrimination Against Atheists OK”

Now the Army National Guard is telling its unit level Equal Opportunity representatives that it is OK to discriminate against atheists. They are using my formal EO complaint as a training scenario in which a Lieutenant files a formal EO complaint against a general officer for claiming that there are no atheists in foxholes. The Sergeant Major who conducted the EO training for Ohio’s unit level EO reps told them that “since atheism is not a religion, atheists are not protected by the regulation and it is acceptable for officers and chaplains to disparage their own soldiers”.

5. Luken v. Brigano

On April 23, 2002, appellant filed a complaint against Brigano and Wilkinson, claiming that the ODRC grooming policy violated his right of conscience as guaranteed by Section 7, Article I of the Ohio Constitution, and requesting that the court enjoin appellees from taking any disciplinary action against him. Appellees moved for summary judgment on October 23, 2002, and the trial court granted the motion on December 17, 2002. In its decision, the trial court stated, "Reasonable minds could certainly conclude that Mr. Lukens' beliefs regarding his hair are sincerely held. There can be no issue, however, that they are not in deference to or the mandate of a higher being."

6. Mirecki Affair

Sen. Kay O'Connor (R-Olathe) was reported by the Daily Kansan as saying whoever beat him should be "prosecuted to the fullest." "If they try to cover themselves under the mantle of being Christian or being Christian people, sorry Charlie," she said. "They're just thugs."

This was a change from her somewhat sinister comments prior to the beating: "I'm surprised that something more severe isn't happening to this teacher who obviously has a hatred for Christians."

Editorial writer Phillip Brownlee from the Wichita Eagle even suggested, prior to the beating, that Dr. Mirecki be physically assaulted:

But KU officials - though not state lawmakers - still need to get tough on Mirecki. A chairman of a religion department shouldn't be hostile to conservative Christianity. How about making Mirecki go through a paddling line at one of KU's fraternities?

For more information about supporting the separation of church and state visit First Freedom First.

I don't know when I finally gave up on believing in anything spiritual. I do know what influenced it. My mother-in-law runs into the craziest people. She believes them when they tell her crazy stories. They "prove" that they can do supernatural things through tricks. One told her that the body can't lie and he showed that her body responded positively to anything she believed was true. That's not proof!

I do remember when I first verbalized being an atheist. I was at a new year's party just a few months ago. I was a little drunk (a homemade martini and a bottle of wine will do that to you) and we were talking about religions and I blurted out, "I'm an atheist." I think I shocked myself. But I realized it was true. I am an atheist. I don't believe in the supernatural.

I still believe there are things that we can't explain or don't understand, but that doesn't mean that I believe in what people tell me it could be. I participated in a religion-induced lie for too long. I have to have something more than "faith" to go on. Give me proof that there's a god and I'll believe. Until then I count the probablity as too small to even consider.

It doesn't bother me like I thought it would. It doesn't make me feel any less special. It doesn't make me sad to know that I'm not going anywhere when I die. My body will be buried or cremated (hopefully cremated, but I don't really care other than the cost to my family) and I won't be alive anymore. That's OK. I have this life, as long as it is, to live. And that's enough for me.

I don't feel bad about not having a "divine" purpose either. I think we all make our own destinies with what we have. That doesn't mean that I can make everything I want happen, but that means I can try to do things with my life and try to be the type of person I want to be.

And I don't feel like I'm any less moral because I don't follow the code of law from an ancient book. I know right from wrong. I know there are gray areas that are hard to judge. I know that I'll make mistakes in my life and I'm accountable for those mistakes, even if they're accidental. And I don't think I'm a bad person because I make these decisions for myself.

Thanks to everyone who's read my history. It's been liberating to be able to share what I believe and how I came to believe the way I do. So many times I've been in conversations with people about personal belief and I haven't felt free to express myself. I don't want the knee-jerk reaction that because I'm an atheist I can't talk to someone who's religious. But I've censored myself because I don't feel it's acceptable. You've shown me that it is acceptable; that we are truly a society of free religion, or non-religion. I hope through this I'll be able to express myself better.

Other posts in this series:
How I became an atheist part II
How I became an atheist part III

Even though I didn't consider myself an evangelical Christian anymore I still believed in God. The thought of being wrong and going to hell was too much for me to handle. But I didn't believe the Bible to be literally true to the exact word. I thought Jesus was misrepresented by later leaders in the church; there were still all of the positive teachings of Christ that were valid.

One of the guys I dated in college called himself an agnostic. He professed that he didn't really believe in a specific god, but that he thought there was the possibility that there was something out there involved in our lives. A friend of ours said that an agnostic was an atheist that was too afraid to admit that he was an atheist. I found their discussions interesting, even amusing, but I didn't participate much with my individual beliefs. I was in flux. I couldn't verbalize those changes going on inside.

I still believed in the spiritual. I thought without the supernatural there was nothing to make humans special. I explained it to myself by saying that there were plenty of things we couldn't comprehend or even theorize about and the supernatural was one of them. I loosely called it "magic."

I believed in the ability of people to influence the world through the mind, manifested in supernatural events. It was sort of like the verse in the Bible about moving mountains with faith. I still believed it was possible, but that my faith didn't have to be in God. I could do it through faith in myself.

It's not unlike what I hear about "The Secret," I'm afraid to admit. I had a group of friends that believed similarly. None of us had a set "religious" belief. We borrowed paradigms from different religions (though never Christianity) and our goal was to prove scientifically that "magic" was real. I played along, again as an enabler, not realizing that this was exactly the same thing I had grown up with dressed up in another package.

We tried little experiments and rituals, meditation, etc. Nothing more than could be explained by coincidence was ever discovered. I remember asking a friend of mine how you could tell the difference between magic and coincidence. He replied that it didn't really matter. It was all how you perceived it. That really threw me for a loop. It bothered me. If the only difference was perception, what did it matter what I believed?

My niece died unexpectedly at the age of 14. It was a huge shock to my family. I remember sitting in the funeral service, angry, thinking that Christianity was a death cult. People didn't want to let go of loved ones after death and so made up an afterlife to explain what happened, to deal with the loss and fear of death. I felt certain my niece did not go on to an afterlife; that she no longer existed except in our memories. I didn't say that to my family, of course. It was difficult enough of a time without me making it worse for my deeply spiritual parents.

Over the years I vacillated between believing in nothing and believing in "something" that I was never really able to define. But the more I looked at spirituality and the more I found out about those that professed to believe in the spiritual, the more I found fakers and con-artists.

Other posts in this series:
How I became an atheist part I
How I became an atheist part III

I was raised in an evangelical Christian household. My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. I went to Christian schools. I wasn't allowed to wear shorts. I went to church 3 times a week at a minimum. When I grew up I wanted to be a missionary.

Christianity was something I fully embraced. I didn't know anything else. I was fascinated by other religions, but mostly as mythological stories. From an early age I was taught to believe I was special because I embraced God so whole-heartedly.

When I was 5 I was "saved" by asking Jesus into my heart. At 7 I was baptized in the Holy Spirit and baptized in water. Our church met at a local Day's Inn and I was baptized in the hotel pool. I spoke in tongues and I fell under the power of the Holy Spirit. I remember thinking that these things were real, but feeling like I had to pretend because I didn't know what else to do. It had to be something wrong with me not to experience it for real.

I remember once falling under the power of the Holy Spirit. I was too afraid to get up. I was terrified that someone would know I was faking it. I was too afraid to get up. One of my parents came in and started speaking to the children's pastor after a while and still I couldn't get up. I took that paralyzing fear as being under the influence of God. Eventually I just stood up, but I was down there a long time. That's the last time I did that. I was too afraid.

I went with our youth group to preach on the streets of our city. I was always polite and I felt weird being pushy, even though I wanted to be a missionary. My idea of being a missionary was like Ingrid Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I would show by example.

But I never became a missionary. Even though I had a full scholarship to a Christian college, my parents didn't like the idea of me leaving home for college at 17. The plan was that I'd attend a local university for a year and then I would transfer. Except that it didn't happen. It was probably my parent's worst nightmare. I fell in love and got engaged to an atheist.

I remember our discussions about religion. I told him he just needed to have faith. He told me he wished he had faith, but he couldn't fake it. He couldn't have faith in something that he couldn't see. My friends all thought he was an evil influence on me. My youth pastor, who I saw at a revival, told me that I should not be seeing an unbeliever. Eventually the pressure mounted and I started to doubt him and us. We parted ways, not very well, but eventually became good friends.

By the beliefs of my church anyone who didn't accept Christ explicitly by asking him to come into their hearts was going to hell. Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and many other denominations of Christians were going to hell because they didn't explicitly give their life to Jesus and profess him the son of God. It always troubled me that people that had never heard of Jesus were condemned to hell, but I was assured that God let them know about Him through nature (with a lower-case 'N', of course).

Despite the break-up and subsequently dating a nice, Christian guy, I had too many doubts to return to my church. The chinks were there: the history of the compilation of the New Testament and the books destroyed in the process; the Sumerian and Babylonian myths that were so close to the early Old Testament myths, yet were written down long before; the fact that I had to be subservient because I was a woman; and many more.

But the fact that I had faked much of my spirituality lay locked up inside me. I didn't think about it until much, much later.

Other posts in this series:
How I became an atheist part II
How I became an atheist part III

This weekend I'm participating in the Blog Against Theocracy blog swarm. To get this straight in the beginning, I am not against religion. I think anyone should have the right to believe however they wish as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. The objective of the swarm is to speak out about the separation of church and state. There should be no state religion, or theocracy, in America. No religion should be given preference over another and as such I believe religion has no place in government.

My goal is not to be offensive to those of you that believe in whatever you believe in. I plan to post some stories about how I came to be an atheist in recognition of my religious freedom. This is a new thing for me. I've never really publicly spoken out about it because it's just not something that most people like to hear.

Have a great weekend and check back at some point.

(Oh, and I have tomorrow off. My company recognizes Good Friday. No, I'm not complaining or going into work in protest.)