There’s a comedy group calling themselves National Banana. Here are two of their videos.

Priest Off

(YouTube page is here)

The Politics of Stem Cell Research

(YouTube page is here)

Thomas Jefferson was probably the biggest proponent of religious liberty among the nation’s founders. Near the end of his life, he instructed that three of his accomplishments be listed in his epitaph:

• Writing of the Declaration of Independence
• Founding of the University of Virginia
• Co-writing (with James Madison) the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

Notice anything missing? How about being the third President of the United States! That’s quite an accomplishment. The fact that it’s missing from the list shows the importance Jefferson placed on the items that are included.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States were based largely upon the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. We can, therefore, look at the Virginia Statute for insight into the First Amendment.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the statute:

The 793-word statute is divided into three sections.

In Section 1, Jefferson argues that the concept of compulsory religion is wrong for the following reasons:

• The imposition of anything on a human mind, which God made to be free, is hypocritical and wrong.
• …God never coerced anyone to follow him, and the imposition of a religion by government officials is impious.
• The coercion of a person to make contributions—especially monetary—to a religion he doesn’t support is tyrannical and creates favoritism among ministers.
• Government involvement in matters tends to end in the restraint of religion.
• Civil rights do not depend on religious beliefs….

You’ve probably heard many of us say that “Freedom of religion includes freedom from religion”. In fact, we’ve said it enough that some fundies are sick of hearing it. I recently saw a bumper sticker that said “Freedom of religion does not include freedom from religion”. That’s similar to the way the Christians like to make a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish. They think they’re so clever!

As you can see by the first few items in that list, freedom from religion is clearly one of the intentions of the Virginia Statute and (by extension) the First Amendment.

Fundies would be well advised to read the fourth bullet item carefully. I don’t know why that concept is so alien to them. History has borne it out repeatedly.

Finally, look at that last bullet item. The actual text from the Statute is:

…that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry…

One fundie argument I hear a lot is that God has granted us these rights. No. Show me where in the Bible that the Bill of Rights, or anything like it, is laid out. The only thing approaching a Bill of Rights is the Ten Commandments. That isn’t a Bill of Rights for humans; it’s a Bill of Rights for God! It’s what he gets out of the deal! What do the people get?

We have granted these rights to ourselves. We got together and determined what the basic human rights are. Freedom of (and from) religion is one of those.

Sections 2 and 3 are fairly short, so we can look at them in their entirety. The text is written in that tortured 18th Century bureaucratic prose. I’m going to separate Section 2 into bullet items, just for ease of comprehension:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly,

• That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,
• nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods,
• nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief;
• but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion,
• and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

That first bullet item seems extremely clear to me. That means no prayer in the public schools. No form of creationism taught in the schools. No prayers at high school football games or graduation ceremonies. No private-school vouchers. No Ten Commandments hanging in courthouses. No “faith-based initiatives”. No “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Section 3 begins:

And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law;…

That’s a very long-winded way of saying that they can’t stop future assemblies from mucking up this document; however, they would like to make the following very clear:

…yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act shall be an infringement of natural right.

That’s an interesting statement. I don’t remember anything comparable in our own Constitution. They’re making it clear to succeeding generations that if they tamper with the rights specified here, they are going against the very principles that their state was founded upon. It’s a warning to be very sure of what you are doing. Rights should not be surrendered lightly.

In fact, that is one of the things I like about the Virginia Statute. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is only 45 words long, and it covers:

• Establishment of religion
• Free exercise of religion
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of the press
• Freedom to assemble
• Right to petition for redress of grievances

That’s a lot, and it’s only 45 words! That’s why we’re always fighting over what that amendment means. It’s too vague. What exactly is an “establishment of religion”? What exactly is a restriction on the press?

The Virginia Statute goes into great detail in spelling out what it means and the rationale behind it. If only our Constitution were as detailed. I mean, come on! What the hell does this mean:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Are they saying that the right to bear arms is dependent on the need for a militia? Or are they merely saying that a militia is one of the benefits of the right to bear arms? You can read it either way, to completely opposite conclusions! If the Second Amendment had been as verbose as the Virginia Statute, we wouldn’t be arguing over this.

Fortunately for us, the religion clauses of the First Amendment were based on the Virginia Statute. At least for this one amendment, we have the luxury of seeing what the Founders meant when they wrote what they did.

Appendix

Section 1 of the Virginia Statute has some good stuff in it. If you fancy yourself a Constitutional scholar, it’s worth reading the whole thing, which I’ve reproduced below. The rest of you can run along now.

I’ve broken it into bullet items at each semi-colon, for your comprehension pleasure.

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free;

• that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do;
• that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time;
• that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical;
• that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
• that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry;
• that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow-citizens he has a natural right;
• that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it;
• that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
• that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;
• that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
• and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Carnival of the Godless #89 is up over at the Rational Response Squad. As always, there are are lot of good articles.

The subject of militant atheism has come up again, this time at Homo Academicus. I don’t agree with everything in the article, but it’s good to see yet another opinion on it. Check it out, along with the other articles.

As we discussed in part 2, fundies like to deny that there is a problem with overpopulation, because traveling down that route leads to things they don’t like, such as birth control and abortion. And if stabilizing the population is bad in their eyes, imagine how bad any efforts to reduce the population must be!

Well, as if they didn’t have enough stuff to worry about, the fundies are actually looking decades out, and they think they see a depopulation boom. Here’s an email I received from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council:

You are Cordially Invited to Family Research Council for the documentary Demographic WINTER: the decline of the human family.

If you’re in Washington on May 12, you should RSVP. Penetrate the belly of the beast! Anyway, they go on to describe this film:

Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family explores the severe economic and social consequences of family decline and plummeting birthrates worldwide. In Demographic Winter scholars from many backgrounds give economic, social scientific, demographic and historic context to population decline and the impact families have on the strength and stability of society.

As you can see, the film is about the population issue, which already has the fundies concerned. But look at that other element: family. Somehow they managed to drag families into this. That gives them a one-two punch on this issue. Because, after all, only fundies care about the family.

OK. Let’s find out more about this movie that Tony Perkins is so excited about. The trailer is on YouTube. Please take a few minutes to watch the trailer now, and then we’ll discuss it on the other side.

(YouTube page is here)

There were a lot of claims jammed into that trailer. Obviously we need to see the movie to be able to discuss these issues thoroughly. But I do want to discuss what we can now, based on what they said in the trailer. Let’s start with some of the overblown fears.

Overblown Fear #1:
Economic Prosperity Requires Population Growth

Yes, our current economic model requires population growth, but our current economic model is wrong. The current economy requires consumption. It depends on the conversion of non-renewable natural resources into consumer goods. It is actually an illusion of prosperity, because we’re living off of a savings account, in this case the accumulated resources of the Earth: Forests, fishstocks, water, minerals, etc. All of these things are extracted from the Earth, consumed, and thrown away. As long as we keep extracting resources, we can continue our current lifestyle. More people means more consumers, which accelerates the depletion of resources, but generates even more money in the process. If population reverses, consumption declines, and the amount of money being created declines.

The problem, of course, is that resources are finite. Whether the population is growing or shrinking, once a resource runs out, the money stops.

What is needed is a different approach to economics. We need to create a sustainable economy based on sustainable levels of resource consumption. In fact, having a lower global population makes this goal much easier to achieve.

Overblown Fear #2:
Nobody to Run the Trains

Because of automation, robotics, computers, and other advanced technologies, today’s worker is way more efficient than the worker of days past. Every indication is that this trend will continue. This is a non-issue.

[Semi-] Overblown Fear #3:
Too Many Old People Sucking Services;
Not Enough Young to Pay for It

This one is a legitimate concern, but it is partially the fault of weak politicians. People are living way longer than they used to, and they will probably live even longer in the future. There is absolutely no reason for the retirement age to be where it is currently. If the government would raise the retirement age now, there would be enough money in the Social Security Trust Fund to carry that program through the end of the century.

(Or maybe not. The dirty little secret is that the government has already spent that money. The Social Security surplus has been financing deficit spending for years. When that money is due to be paid back, there won’t be enough taxpayers to foot the bill. That’s the other problem with weak politicians. They’ve destroyed the system from two different directions.)

There’s more to this issue than just Social Security. Health care is probably a bigger issue than that. We’re extending the sick end of people’s lives. We’re letting people get older, but they’re doing it while consuming medical services, usually the really expensive services.

I don’t have an answer for this problem, but you can’t solve it by increasing the birth rate. What happens when these new people get old? Now you’ve got an even bigger group of people who need expensive care. This is a pyramid that will collapse.

Somebody needs to come up with a clever solution to this problem.

Overblown Fear #4:
Depopulation

This documentary pretends that there actually will be a declining global population this century. There’s not much reason to believe that’s the case. Current projections show that the population is still rising and will continue to do so until the middle of this century. The projections suggest that a gradual decline will begin after that.

The problem is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen in the latter half of this century. You can only make projections so far out. We don’t know what economic, social, and scientific changes will occur in the future. The population could rise as easily as it might fall. Even if it does fall, as I pointed out above, that is not a problem.

How Does the Family Fit Into This?

One subject they focussed on was the family. Their experts said that the traditional family structure is the strongest, and it’s the best environment for children to grow up in.

I have seen data that suggests there is at least a little truth in these statements. The problem is, that one structure of the father, mother, and children is not realistic. Humans are more complex than that, and it’s naive to think you can force that structure onto every member of society.

This part of the documentary really appeals to the fundies, though. They can use this as a new way to attack all of those things they don’t like: women’s liberation; gay rights; divorce; pre-, post-, and extra-marital sex; etc.

It’s Not That There Won’t Be Enough People,
It’s That There Won’t Be Enough of the Right Type of People!

Much of the fear of declining birthrates is that it is the wrong people whose fertility is declining. They said in the trailer that it is only the developed nations whose rates were dropping.

That one guy said that there would be no native-born French who come from the traditional French population. He didn’t say there would be no native-born French. The country isn’t going to disappear. The demographic makeup of France will be very different. That’s what they don’t like.

The Nation magazine has a video, which discusses this aspect further. Check it out:

(YouTube page is here)

Then you’ll want to read the Nation article.

The 84th Skeptics’ Circle is now up over at Archaeoporn. There’s a lot of good reading. Archaeologyknits provided great summaries and excerpts, so it will be real easy to skim the entries looking for stuff that appeals to you.

Some people around here think I dislike all homeschoolers. Nope. Just the religious ones. One article from this week’s Skeptics’ Circle that addresses the issue is by Steve Shives: “Homeschoolers Who Don´t Learn Science Shouldn´t Receive a Diploma”. Well said. Check it out.

In part 1, we looked at how fundies don’t seem at all concerned about the environmental problems we face, apparently believing that their magical sky daddy will somehow fix things or prevent things from getting too bad. Not only are they not concerned, but many fundie leaders actually parrot (sorry, PL!) Bush administration talking points on issues such as global warming.

The issue I wanted to focus on today is overpopulation. Like global warming, fundies seem to be in complete denial. Let’s look at the reasons.

A recent article at LifeSiteNews is titled “[Ted] Turner’s Depopulation Plan”.

First of all, you should know that fundies hate Ted Turner. Ted Turner is a big supporter of the United Nations. Fundies hate the U.N., because they view it as the world government foretold in the book of Revelation. The end result of this is that fundies will hate anything that Ted Turner likes. If Ted likes environmentalism, then the fundies will hate it. If Ted likes nuclear disarmament, then the fundies will hate it. If Ted likes puppies, then the fundies will hate it. If Ted likes Jane Fonda, then the—oh wait. They already hate Jane Fonda.

The article begins:

In a wide-ranging hour-long interview on PBS, CNN Founder and billionaire environmental extremist Ted Turner…

Everybody on Ted’s end of the political spectrum is an “extremist” to these people.

…let the cat out of the bag on the real goal of climate change extremists—depopulation.

See? Anybody who believes in global warming is an extremist. I guess the majority of the population are extremists too, then.

Now here we begin to see the link between overpopulation denialism and global warming denialism. As we’re about to see, the overpopulation issue treads on fundie turf. So in fact it may be that the fundies’ anti-global warming stance is actually the result of their anti-overpopulation stance. (Since anti-abortion activists like to call themselves “pro-life”, I guess we should call the anti-anti-global warming people the “pro-warmers”. We can call the anti-anti-overpopulation people the “Duggars”!)

Before looking at the entirety of the next sentence, I want to examine one piece of it first:

…global warming, retooled to ‘climate change’,…

What’s wrong, fundies? Don’t like “climate change”? Tough, because it’s your word, or more accurately, the product of your beloved Republican White House!

Let’s take a side trip down mammary memory lane (Sorry. I shouldn’t daydream when I write these.). The substitution of “climate change” for “global warming” is the handiwork of Republican political strategist Frank Luntz. He found “climate change” to have more positive connotations among viewers, vs. “global warming”, which was more negative. I guess that’s one talking-points memo that the fundies never got.

Now let’s get back to the entire sentence:

Pro-life activists who have attended UN environment meetings where such issues were discussed have often been the subject of ridicule and derision for pointing out that the massive movement behind global warming, retooled to ‘climate change’, works hand in hand with the culture of death with the aim of depopulation.

So you see them admitting right there that the reason they refuse to acknowledge global warming as real is because they think it’s a clever plot by the Liberal Agenda to promote abortion!

And abortion, as well as other forms of the “culture of death”, is the reason they refuse to acknowledge the problems caused by overpopulation.

Although you mostly hear about abortion, the other half of this so-called “culture of death” is the pro-euthanasia, or death with dignity, movement. If somebody is terminally ill with a painful disease—or worse yet, brain-dead—the fundies absolutely refuse to allow that person to end the misery and die with dignity. Instead, they have to hang on and suffer in misery for many more months.

Fundies love suffering. The more you suffer, the closer to God you are. And it’s probably true that you are closer to God at that point. If you read the Old Testament, you’ll see that God inflicts more suffering than any other character in the book.

BTW, to a fundie, death with dignity is more than just allowing somebody who is suffering to end his life. Fundies apparently think that death with dignity is just step one on the Liberal Agenda to kill all sick people. And that is part of the “evolutionists” plan to remake society in the image of God Darwin’s survival of the fittest Nazi master race plan. As near as I can tell anyway. Fundies have such muddled logic, it’s hard to follow.

Turner stated plainly that next to nuclear disarmament the most pressing world concern is “global climate change”…. “We’re too many people. That’s why we have global warming,” explained Turner….

“Too many people” goes into the fundie brain, where it is translated into “Babies and sick people must die!”

Last year China boasted that its one-child policy, which has been criticized by many nations for including forced abortion and sterilization, had reduced greenhouse gases.

Nobody is in favor of forced abortion and sterilization, but here the article is implying that if the rest of the world tries to control population, they will all adopt such policies. China has a brutal totalitarian government. How they implement population control is in no way indicative of how it would be implemented elsewhere.

There are actually two parts to the population problem. The first is arresting our insane population growth, before we outstrip the carrying capacity of the Earth. The second part is bringing the population down to a sustainable level.

As I’ve shown in this article, the fundies are opposed to any population control measures, because they assume that means more abortions and Terry Schiavos. The fundies are already thinking ahead to the matter of depopulation. They don’t like that one bit. We’ll look at that in part 3 of this series.

Yes, our old friend, concerned “woman” J. Matt Barber of Concerned Women for America, is going to the movies, and he’s taking us along! Old Barbie has reviewed Expelled: No Intelligent Design Evidence Presented.

(S)He writes:

“Expelled” is intellectually honest, cerebrally stimulating and delectably provocative.

I don’t know about those last two, but “intellectually honest”?! Getting interviews under false pretenses is intellectually honest? Blaming the Holocaust on the fact that species evolve is intellectually honest? WTF, man! WTF?!

Evolution = Holocaust is a total non-sequitur! Not only is that not “intellectually honest”, it isn’t even logically honest!

People come onto my blog and leave comments grousing about how I keep calling creationists “retards”! Look at the evidence, people! J. Matt Barber has to be a blithering idiot to call Expelled “intellectually honest”! Does he not understand honesty? Does he not understand intellect? He’s obviously unacquainted with both.

He then continues:

[T]he general consensus among the evolutionary scientists interviewed was that all life, including human life, likely began when lightening [sic] struck a mud puddle (you know, like Frankenstein but without all the prefab body parts).

You’re right, Barbie! That sure is an absurd story. Not like this one:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…. [Genesis 2:7]

So tell me, Barbie. How does that story work? Like Frankenstein but without all the prefab body parts?

Continuing his review:

As the movie masterfully illustrates, we live in a cultural climate where secular elitists in academia, the media and the courts chew up and spit out anyone who dares to question the gospel according to Charles Darwin. They’re absolutely terrified to follow the scientific evidence wherever it may lead.

And that evidence is what, precisely? Your people have never provided any.

They don’t want to upset the morally relative applecart, which is loosely held together by the notion that we’re all just a bunch of monkeys with an instinctive, biological excuse for all our behavioral choices. To them, life’s a whole lot easier under the theory of evolution. Without a sovereign Creator to answer to, we get to scoot along and party hearty, free from accountability.

BINGO! That’s the payoff! Read that paragraph again. This is the entire foundation that the fundies’ anti-evolution campaign rests on. It’s the real motivation.

Fundies are convinced that without God, there can be no morality. They don’t understand that evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology very cleanly explain how morality evolves and develops within human societies and even other animal species.

Fundies believe that scientists don’t want there to be a God. Scientists, intellectuals, and their co-conspirators in the Liberal Media all want to be able to run around in sinful, materialistic debauchery. They don’t want to have to answer to God for their sinful ways, so they invent an atheistic science to “prove” that God does not exist.

Not only is this belief absurd, it’s logically bankrupt. If God exists, but you pretend he doesn’t so you don’t have to adhere to his rules, that doesn’t make him go away. If he exists, wishing him away won’t work. But that’s the logic that fundies think secularists use.

It’s crazy-town logic. It makes as much sense as saying that because species evolve, Hitler killed the Jews.

Here’s a short piece from Channel 6 News in Florida:

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida teens who believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy have prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.

Another myth is that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant, Local 6 reported.

State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida’s abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.

They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.

It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention.

Abstinence-only sex “education” strikes again.

(via The Wild Wild Left)