Category: News

Mike Huckabee was on the Daily Show again last night. He’s hawking his new book, but naturally he didn’t much talk about his book.
“Why does anybody have to be automatically anything other than what they truly believe?” Huckabee asked Stewart in the first part of the interview (6:14). At that point, he was talking about letting black conservatives be conservative without calling them “pawns,” or worse. A good question, which begs the question put to him in the second segment of the interview: why do Christians who don’t believe what their fundamentalist preachers tell them to believe have to be consigned to the fires of hell?

Yes, the second segment of the interview is what’s really important.

Stewart started the second segment by asking, “When [conservatives] keep demonizing these groups, whether it be single women, black people, illegal immigrants, it makes it impossible to work with them as a collaboration. Why would you collaborate with evil people? And when you convince them that they’re evil, why work with them?”

Unfortunately, this question never got answered. Huckabee denied demonizing these people, and truthfully, he probably has not demonized most of them himself. His network and his party certainly have, though he won’t speak for either of those entities. Now, Huckabee has demonized the natures of gay people, but Stewart did not take him to task for that.

Instead, Stewart segued into an abbreviated version of the despicable two-minute commercial Huckabee narrated for the Christian Right just before the election. You know the one.

In it, Huckabee quotes Psalm 127:1 and says that “unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” He then calls certain things “not negotiable:”

• The right to life from conception to natural death
• Marriage should be reinforced, not be defined
• It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life

Against a backdrop of flames, Rev. Huckabee goes on to say that “Your vote will be recorded for eternity.” He asks, “Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire?”

This commercial is so incredibly offensive on so many levels my stomach still churns with anger to watch it, and the election is over and done with.

Huckabee actually claimed that this commercial did not attempt to send the message that if Christians voted for the Democrats they would go to hell – unless they were biblically illiterate. I really cannot imagine how that wasn’t the message, since I don’t even believe in hell and that’s the clear message I got from it – and I’ve read and studied the Bible extensively. “Oh, no!” exclaims Huckabee. “If they know 1 Corinthians 10, they will know!” Then he claimed that 1 Corinthians 10 was about being tested in the fires of a forge, and coming out stronger or some such.

For the biblically illiterate, let me explain 1 Corinthians 10. There is not one word about forges or fire. It’s all about not worshipping false gods and not participating in idolatry. We all know that since there is only one true god, so there can’t be any other gods, no matter how true their own believers believe them to be, and no matter how false those idolaters believe the one true god to be. Frankly, the arrogance of the “one true god” thing just staggers me, especially when one considers that the adherents of the Abrahamic religions have no better proof of their god than the adherents of any other religion.

But let’s look at 1 Corinthians 10:29, which asks, “Why should my liberty be judged by someone else’s conscience?”

Why, indeed, Reverend Huckabee? Why should my freedom be judged by your conscience? You arrogant twit, I can cherry-pick Bible verses just as well as you can.

I think the Good Reverend Huckabee was actually referring to 1 Corinthians 3:13, which more or less says what Huckabee claimed this commercial meant to say, just without the forge part. Because that’s totally not in there. And the part about judgement day, and therefore hell, definitely is in that particular passage.

Again, this is what pisses me off about Christians. They want to spew their Bible at me, but then I have to correct them – even the supposedly learned ones – because they don’t get it right. If they want to beat me up with their scripture, they should at least know their stupid scripture.

Of course, maybe he really meant 1 Peter 1:7, or 2 Peter 3:7, or some other passage that refers to fire but not hell, even though most of the passages I find pretty much equate testing by fire with the Judgment Day and hell. So Huckabee’s protests that the reference to fire doesn’t also refer to Hell or Judgment hold about as much water as that colander I used to strain my spaghetti last night.

Let’s examine the the three points of that disgusting commercial.

The right to life from conception to natural death

Nowhere in the Bible does any religious authority, real or imagined, claim that life begins at the moment of conception. I’d cite verses where it says so, but there aren’t any.

Let’s face it: The Biblical God is not pro-life. He advocates and permits child murder, infanticide, child abuse, and, yes, abortion.  Fundamentalist Christians rely on such passages as “thou shall not kill” Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17 (one of the commandments), and  “If men strive and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no misfortune follow, he shall be surely punished according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.And if any misfortune follow, then thou shalt give life for life,eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Exodus 21:22-24. Although the Exodus passage seems to be a favorite among the anti-choice crowd, I would point out that the harm mentioned in it is harm to the woman, not to the aborted or miscarried fetus.

God’s favored prophets prayed for abortions. Don’t believe me? Read Hosea 9:11-16. This same favored prophet also advocated ripping the fetuses out of the wombs of pregnant women in Hosea 13:16, something the God-favored King Menahem of the Israelites proudly did in 2 Kings 15:16, too. There’s even a ritual to induce an abortion in a faithless wife in Numbers 5:21 (presumably done instead of stoning her, although when stoning and when abortion is the proper course of action, the Bible doesn’t say).

So God is definitely not pro-life, at least for fetuses. But what about hastening death? Apparently the fundamentalist Christians also don’t like euthanasia, mercy-killing, or assisted suicide, either. They want people to suffer. This is where compassion gets thrown to the wind by these Christians. Suicide is tantamount to murder, in their eyes.

The Bible reports several suicides (Ahithophel; Saul and his armor-bearer; Samson; Zimri, who was king of Israel for only seven days; and Judas Iscariot) and men who want to be stricken dead (Moses, the prophet Elijah, and Jonah – twice) but nowhere in the Bible does it condemn them for that. The Bible also reports mercy killings, without reference to judgment, except in the case of the Amalekite who lied to David about killing Saul. Saul himself was not condemned for asking to die. Abimelech begged his armor-carrying servant to kill him in Judges 9:52-54, because he lost a battle and could not bear the indignity of his inevitable murder at the hands of (gasp!) women. There was no judgment attached to Abimelech’s death.

So, there does not seem to be a problem with euthanasia, either. Huckabee’s first point fails, on both counts.

Marriage should be reinforced, not be defined

This one is so easy it’s almost a no-brainer. I cannot grasp why these wackjob Christians think that the Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Jon Stewart jumped on this pretty fast, pointing out that the biblical definition of marriage is polygamy. Although Huckabee tried to say it isn’t, he cited no biblical authority for his position other than the Adam and Eve story. Lots of biblical marriages came after that one. Furthermore, it’s not real clear that Adam and Eve ever actually tied the knot. They sort of hooked up because of the dearth of others of their same species to choose from, and apparently shacked up, never going that extra step of committing to each other monogamously. They had no other options but bestiality.

So it stands to reason that yes, marriage could stand to be defined. But to say it’s biblical marriage really leaves the door wide open.

Because if you let your servant get married, and he leaves your employment, his wife and children are yours unless the servant agrees to stay and have his ear bored through with an awl. (Exodus 21:6) I’m not clear whether this means the servant’s earlobe gets pierced, or if his eardrum gets pierced. Either way, it’s pretty barbaric. But, that’s one definition of Biblical marriage.

Exodus 21:10 reminds men who take second wives that they can’t neglect the first one. Oops, Mr. Huckabee. Guess there’s a new definition of biblical marriage implied here.

Deuteronomy 22 is a great place to look for definitions of marriage. I like the one where the guy marries the woman and decides he doesn’t like her. If her father can’t then produce bloody sheets proving that she was a virgin at the time of the wedding, well, she gets stoned to death. What a sweet marriage that makes.

One of my favorite definitions of marriage is the rapist and his virgin victim. Yeah, Deuteronomy 22:28-30 is all about that.

Now, Paul is not real keen on marriage at all. Despite the fact that the species will disappear without it, sex is gross, and women are … well, Paul’s misogyny is another issue altogether. Paul thought everyone ought to have a spouse, though, if they really want sex, whether or not he could fathom why they’d want it. My guess is that Paul was so undesirable he never got laid, and therefore had no idea what he was missing.

And that doesn’t count all the various marriages in the Bible that involved multiple wives, concubines, and slaves. Heck, Abraham had a wife (Sarah), his wife’s slave (Hagar), another wife (Keturah), and an unknown number of secondary wives.

Then his grandson Jacob had two sister-wives (Rachel and Leah), and two servants of his wives (Zilpah and Bilhah).

Solomon had 700 wives and 300 secondary wives, in addition to the Queen of Sheba. That’s 1001, for those of you who aren’t good with math.

And the list goes on.

It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life.

Right.  Do I really have to explain this?

Most people in the United States who are lucky enough to have health insurance coverage have it because their employer provides it. If their employer did not provide it, health insurance would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, people are generally forced to accept whatever health insurance is offered through work, unless they are wealthy enough to afford it on their own – which most people are not.

Limiting your employee’s health insurance options based on your own religious beliefs, whether or not your employee shares your religious beliefs, is totally not forcing your religion on them. (/Sarcasm)

Until there is a single-payer system, or until health insurance is decoupled from employment and made affordable, employers are in a position to unfairly force their religious beliefs on their employees.

It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for anyone to limit our access to health care based on religious beliefs we do not hold. If the government permits this, the government is complicit in the establishment of religion.

Therefore…

Stewart nailed him on the thinly disguised guilt trip the Huckster attempted to foist on good believing Christians. The commercial was pro-life and homophobic, and it essentially told Christian voters, with the appropriate imagery of their religion of intimidation and threat, that if they were not also pro-life and homophobic, they would burn for all eternity. Sweet message, that.

Among the most disturbing things about these Christians who want to impose their Bible on the rest of us are:

1. For a number of reasons, foremost among them its bizarre contradictions, we don’t believe their Bible to be reliable, and therefore object to basing our laws on it;
2. Their Bible contravenes proven science;
3. We do not agree that some of the crazy shit they think is good is actually, well, good;
4. As a foundational document, their Bible is inconsistent, violent, bigoted, misogynistic, and homicidal, and none of those things are acceptable in modern society;
5. If they cherry-pick only the “good parts” of the Bible to apply to modern life, we have to question why, if so much of it is dispensable, they consider it to be a legitimate authority;
6. Why they think it is acceptable to force their dogma on people who do not accept their dogma.

Dissenting minorities and minorities representing different demographics will always need protection from the will of the majority. And right now the majority seem to be batshit Christians, who want to impose their will on the rest of us.

It’s election time again, which means that now is the perfect time for atheist activism. I know a way for you to become an effective atheist activist without ever leaving the safety of your keyboard, and I’m going to share it with you.

Come on – let me see a show of hands – how many of you reading WWJTD know of a church or other religious organization in your community that tells its members how to vote on issues? Raise those hands higher. I can’t see you. Okay, now look around. See all the hands waving in the air? There are lots of them.

It’s time to do something about this.

Did you know that most nonprofit organizations – including churches – cannot endorse candidates, tell their members how to vote, publicly support one side of an issue, or lobby? I know. It’s stunning. You’d never know it from the way so many of them behave. But if they lobby, electioneer, or outright tell their congregation how to vote, they’re supposed to lose their coveted tax-exempt status.

Because it’s illegal for them to engage in politics. Not illegal in the criminal sense, but in the sense that they enjoy a favored status in exchange for a promise that they will not engage in politics. So, when they break that promise, they should lose their favored status. The problem is, they tend not to. The IRS just doesn’t have enough proof against most of these churches.

I want to do something about that. I want you to do something about that. And I can tell you how to do it in a legal, above-board, non-confrontational way.

We can make these particular churches pay taxes just like everyone else – because if they blur the line between church and state, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status. At the very least, getting a letter from the IRS warning them that their political activity is dangerously close to the line may inspire them to cut it out.

Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code gives most nonprofit organizations, including churches, their tax-exempt status. Almost all churches are organized as non-profits and approved under 501(c)(3). That’s how tithes and offerings and other donations to them are tax-deductible. But, that special status comes at a cost: no 501(c)(3) organization may endorse, support, or oppose any candidate for public office. They cannot make contributions to political campaigns, and they cannot make any public statements for or against a candidate. They cannot take sides on any issue. Violation of this requirement will cause the IRS to strip the organization of its tax-exempt status.

Now, some minor politicking is permitted, but strict rules apply. No fundraising can happen at the event where the church or other 501(c)(3) organization does its politicking. If one candidate is invited, then all of the candidates running for that position – not just the one favored by the organization – must have an equal opportunity to be heard at the event. And most importantly, the organization cannot give even a hint as to which candidate it supports.

These rules also apply to ballot initiatives, referendums, and other matters voted on by the public. They apply to laws and constitutional amendments presented to the people for their vote. Gay marriage, abortion rights, gambling – all of these are issues churches like to weigh in on, and their publicly stated positions are grounds for them to lose their tax-exemption.

Why doesn’t the IRS do something? Because the IRS doesn’t have the time or the manpower to go around the country looking for these kinds of violations. It takes effort, proof, and a complaint to get them going. The only thing they routinely investigate without a complaint being filed are income tax returns, randomly selected for audit.

The IRS will investigate a church or other nonprofit organization if one of its higher-ranking agents has a “reasonable belief” that the organization’s activity violates its 501(c)(3) restrictions. It’s up to us to provide a basis for that reasonable belief, because the IRS won’t police each and every church. Thank the FSM, we are perfectly capable of recognizing and supplying concrete proof of these violations, so as to create that “reasonable belief” in the minds of the upper echelon of the Internal Revenue Service. We non-theists are all about reasonable beliefs!

Revocations of these tax-exemptions actually can happen. They don’t happen as often as we might like, but it’s up to us to help change that. As far as I know, the tax-exempt status of only one church was ever revoked, although the tax-exempt status of other nonprofits violating this rule have been revoked over 40 times.

The notorious case of the IRS pulling the tax-exempt plug on a church is Branch Ministries v. Rossotti. Branch Ministries and its church bought a full-page ad in the Washington Post and USA Today opposing Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. The advertisement clearly said that the church had placed the ad, and it solicited tax-deductible contributions to help pay for the ad to be run in additional newspapers in large markets. The ad claimed that Clinton supported abortion on demand, homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. It cited various Biblical passages and said, “Bill Clinton is promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws … How then can we vote for Bill Clinton?”

The bigger question for Branch Ministries became, “Since we’re overtly supporting a particular candidate and letting the world know about it, how can we maintain our status as a 501(c)(3) organization?” Answer: It could not.

How do we make sure that more churches are investigated, and that more churches pay taxes? Not every church will do us the favor of being so blatant about its political activities. Therefore, we must report what we see. We have to give the IRS proof to support that reasonable belief that a church or nonprofit group engages in political activities. They won’t self-report these violations any more than an illegal immigrant will self deport. It’s up to us to do it through the available legal channels.

The IRS needs documentation. It can get that documentation from any number of sources, but the most reliable are:

• Newspaper or magazine articles or ads
• Television and radio reports
• Internet (yes, the IRS apparently believes everything it reads there)
• Voters guides created and/or distributed by the church
• Documents on file with the IRS (e.g. a Form 990-T filed by the church)
• Church records in the possession of third parties or informants

That last bit is where we come in. The IRS says that information obtained from informants must be reliable, so we need to do more than just send an email to complain. Proof will get the church’s tax-exempt status revoked. Send photos, audio recordings, video recordings, news articles – anything that provides independent proof that the activity has happened. Heck, if you can tolerate sitting through a religious service close to election day, go to church and record the pastor or priest’s political rants. You know they’re giving them in pulpits across the nation.

Here’s an example of how it’s done.

There’s a church near where I live that is also a polling place. Churches as polling places are an issue for another day, so let’s leave that for now and focus on something even more in-your-face egregious.

One of the ballot initiatives in our area has to do with medical marijuana. This particular church has taken it upon itself to say that legalization of marijuana for medical purposes is a moral issue. There are reasons for and against legalization of marijuana that I won’t get into here – whether or not the ballot initiative should pass isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about whether someone’s church should be allowed to tell them how to vote on the issue.

This church was featured on my local news a few days ago. I have a link to the news report, and I have IRS Form 13909, which can be downloaded as a PDF file or completed online. This is the complaint form to use when you see nonprofit organizations engaged in the political process. If you bookmark no other IRS form, bookmark this one.

The form asks for the basic information about the church. Its name and address are easy enough to find with Google, but the form also needs the church’s EIN, or tax identification number. You can usually find that number on the website of the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Now, this particular church doesn’t appear in that list. This probably means that it is simply holding itself out to be a church under Section 508 of the Internal Revenue Code, without ever going through the 501(c)(3) approval process. No matter – the same rules apply. If it’s going to go around telling folks how to vote, it’s going to lose its tax-exempt status.

The rest of the form is fairly self-explanatory, but the instructions are attached to the form at the link I’ve provided. Once you’ve completed the form, it can be emailed to the IRS at eoclass@irs.gov; mailed to IRS EO Classification, Mail Code 4910DAL, 1100 Commerce Street Dallas, TX 75242-1198; or faxed to 214-413-5415.

Easy, peasy.

Do this, and become a law-motivated atheist activist today.

(This post originally appeared at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2012/11/lesson-one-become-an-atheist-activist-today/ )

Yesterday in Little Rock, ground was broken on something amazing.

I say it’s amazing, because here in the Bible Belt, there is precious little tolerance for non-Christian points of view. If one isn’t Christian, one is unknowably alien, and to some, one is completely suspect.

Isn’t this a Christian nation? (Well, no, actually this country isn’t a theocracy at all.) Without Christian values, aren’t we likely to devolve into moral depravity? (No. Christians don’t have a monopoly on moral behavior – never have had and never will have.) But we all should accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior! (Says who? Jesus? That has all the logic of a parent whose justification is, “Because I said so!”)

“Anne, you’re an atheist.” I hear the condemnation, and I take umbrage. I prefer the term “polyatheist.” There are a lot of gods I don’t believe in. And no doubt, anyone reading this is also a polyatheist. There are lots of gods that have been worshipped over the eons of humanity, and I’d bet my money that not a single reader of this essay believes in very many of them.

Christianity adopted many pagan traditions as it evolved. Celebration of the solstices and equinoxes are among those traditions. Christmas falls within a few days of the winter solstice, as does Hanukkah. Likewise, do the celebrations called Saturnalia, Maruaroa o Takurua, Deuorius Riuri, Amaterasu, Yule, Bodhi Day (also known in Buddhism as Rohatsu), Hogmanay, Soyal, Zagmuk, Beiwe, Shabe-Yalda, Lussi Night, Meán Geimhridh, Brumalia, Lenaea (the ancient Greek Festival of Wild Women), Alban Arthuan, Choimus, Inti Raymi, Maidyarem, Karachun, Makara Sankranti, Ziemassvētki, and Perchta. This list is by no means exhaustive. We will never know the many ways the winter solstice and the days surrounding it were marked by paleo-humans, but they left unwritten records of the fact that the event was noted and celebrated. Places like Stonehenge make drawing this conclusion inescapable.

So what is so groundbreaking in Little Rock?

The fact that a group of non-Christians have been allowed to place a display on the capitol grounds explaining the significance of the winter solstice. Last year the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers asked the Arkansas Secretary of State for permission to erect a display and were refused the opportunity. This year, they again asked permission and again, were denied. So they filed suit through the ACLU.

And WON!

This, in a place where the State Constitution makes discrimination against atheists legal!

You don’t believe me? See Article 19, Section 1 of the Arkansas Constitution:

“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”

Last February a rational thinking legislator tried to get a resolution passed to pave the way to repealing that section of the Constitution, but, sadly, it went nowhere.

But hope springs eternal. Perhaps even Arkansas will someday be seen as progressive, or at least not medieval.