The March, 2001 issue of Church & State contains the article, "A Ruse by Any Other Name: Bush Tells Bishops That School Vouchers Need a New Name."

     Names are important. How you package a closely contested issue may be the critical difference between winning and losing. Thus the advocates of a woman's right to an abortion label themselves not as "pro-abortion" but as "pro-choice"; their opponents claim not to be "pro-governmental-control" but "pro-life." Similarly, business interests out to rape the environment present themselves as "pro-job" and form coalitions like the "Council on Environmental Issues," and advocates of an even more bloated military refer to their latest boondoggle not as "the biggest pork barrel to ever roll down the road" but as "National Missile Defense," despite the fact that it couldn't ever effectively defend the entire nation against a missile attack even if it worked perfectly, the very first time, the way it was designed.

     Same thing with "charitable choice."  People like to think of themselves as charitable, and free choice is practically a sacred concept in a country that prides itself on being "the land of the free."  No wonder the advocates of this particular raid on the public treasury chose it as their rubric.

     A similar situation existed with respect to schools.  At one time they came in 3 flavors: public (owned and controlled by the government), private (owned and controlled by private, profit-making business entities), and parochial (owned and controlled by religious organizations).  About 20 years ago the advocates of parochial schools succeeded in blurring the distinction between themselves and the for-profit schools by starting to use the term "private" to refer to BOTH private and parochial schools.  This, in fact, was a distinction enacted into law here in Wisconsin during the time I worked for the Department of Public Instruction.

     Now it's difficult for opponents of school vouchers to make the case that they violate the separation of church and state because, after all, aren't they going to PRIVATE schools?  (Or, even more appealing, to PARENTS who can choose either public OR private schools?)  The ability to distinguish between aid to private schools and aid to parochial schools has been stripped away because, as with the Newspeak of George Orwell's 1984, the ability to make these distinctions has been obliterated by purposely making the relevant terminology ambiguous.

     Which leads me to the point of this message, which is that there needs to be two new terms introduced into the whole "charitable choice" debate: 

     * Term #1 would be a synonym for "charitable choice" itself, something that refers to the exact same kind of public policy but that doesn't have the hifalutin, appealing overtones -- indeed, something that preferably conveys a sense of opprobrium and distaste (similar to what "parochiaid" used to do in the school-voucher context).

      * And Term #2 would be the equivalent of the old meaning of "private school" -- that is, a reference to the method of service delivery that, as far as I can tell, NOBODY objects to, the kind where government funds are distributed and managed by private but scrupulously non-sectarian agencies. We don't want to make it seem as if we are against THESE groups continuing to get public funding, but, absent a label to make the distinction for us, that's exactly the way we will be perceived.

     Americans United is the recognized leading organization arguing for separation of church and state. If the ingenious folks on your staff can come up with words or phrases for these 2 concepts, I can pretty much guarantee that they will be widely adopted -- and put to good use -- by the separationist community.

     But if we let the opposition literally set the terms of the debate, we're already starting off with a strike against us.
~~~~~~~~~

     This last week, the office manager where I work sent out some offensive religious e-mails to the office personnel and some of her family.  She included me in the mailing, though she knows I'm an atheist.  One was a poem allegedly written by "a kid in Arizona" that begins, "Now I sit me down in school, where praying is against the rule..."  The other was in a similar vain — how God was taken out of the schools and immorality introduced.

     I replied to her and others in the mailing that U.S. citizens are generally more religious than folks in other nations and this is due to the separation of church and state.  Also, this principle was forged to protect us from the conflict seen in countries with established religions and countries that try to outlaw religion.  Finally, I told her that sending this to me at work was inappropriate and illegal.

     She replied that this was my opinion and that she would only send me work-related e-mails in the future.  Now the office manager is Catholic and, like a great number of Americans, does feel that the country is getting worse and is out of control.  Little do they realize that this feeling has always existed and has been exploited by those in power throughout history.  Also this woman is totally unaware that she's being sucked in by historical reformers who are mostly Protestant.

     Being emotionally involved in this topic as I am, I replied to her that I felt in good company with my opinion and I pasted the church-state separation quotes from John F. Kennedy found on the Positive Atheism website (www.positiveatheism.org/).  Then, I happened to come across the letter to the editor from Bob Nordlander.  Bob referred to the Edgerton Wisconsin Bible banning case of 1890.  This case is described below.  As for the office manager — she'll think twice before sending me religious drivel!

The Edgerton Bible Case

      Religious differences played a much larger role in late 19th century American society than they do now. Many German immigrants, Catholics and Protestants alike, held fast to their particular sects and their particular versions of the Bible as a means of preserving their cultural identity and of slowing assimilation. The state constitution prohibited "sectarian instruction" in the public schools, and in 1883 the Legislature prohibited the use of textbooks which had a tendency to inculcate sectarian ideas. However, most Yankees regarded generic Protestant prayer and instruction as nonsectarian, and readings of the King James version of the Bible were part of the curriculum in many public schools.

      In 1890 Humphrey Desmond, a Catholic lawyer and editor in Edgerton, challenged such readings on the grounds that Catholics recognized only the Douay version of the Bible as the true Bible. In the past similar challenges had been mounted in other states but all of them had been rejected by the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court broke new legal ground and held, with qualifications, that Bible readings violated the sectarian instruction clause of the state constitution.

     The court rejected the Edgerton school board's argument that Catholic students were protected because they could withdraw from religious exercises and Bible reading. The court was careful to hold that "fundamental teachings" in the Bible, such as the basic moral teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and passages of historic and literary value, were not sectarian and could be taught in the schools. However, purely "doctrinal portions" of the Bible could not be taught. The court did not base its decision on the First Amendment guarantee of separation of church and state, but it did note that:

     "Many, perhaps most, of these immigrants came from countries in which a state religion was maintained and enforced ... What more tempting inducement to cast their lot with us could have been held out to them than the assurance that, in addition to the guaranties of the right of conscience and of worship in their own way, the free district schools in which their children were to be, or might be educated, were absolute common ground, where the pupils were equal, and where sectarian instruction, and with it sectarian intolerance ... could never enter?"

     Although the court's decision irritated many Yankees, it soon became recognized throughout the United States as a landmark case.

reprinted from www.wisbar.org/wislawmag/archive/history/pt10.html
see also www.wisbar.org/sct/24bible.html
~~~~~~~~~~~

     "Survey data point to an overwhelming belief in God, but when you go down a couple of layers, it can be pretty vacuous," says Cromartie. "It's striking how many people say they're Christian but don't know who gave the Sermon on the Mount."

     Moreover, it seems that even good Christians sometimes lie when a pollster comes calling. Stanley Presser, a survey methodologist and sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his colleague Linda Stinson of the Bureau of Labor Statistics were impressed by the apparent stability of the number of Americans, 40 percent, who, year in and year out, told pollsters like the Gallup organization that they attended church every week. To check on the accuracy of such self-reported conscientiousness, the researchers turned to time diaries they had compiled for the Environmental Protection Agency -- accounts of the daily activities of 10,000 respondents nationwide to help the agency gauge public exposure to pollutants.

     "We asked people, tell us everything you did in the last 24 hours so we can know what chemicals you might have been exposed to," Presser says. "If somebody went to church, they ought to tell us, but if they didn't go, they shouldn't manufacture it. We didn't do what most polls of religious belief do, and ask, ‘Did you go to church in the last seven days?' Which some might interpret as being asked whether they were good people and good Christians."

     According to their time-diary analysis, only 26 percent of Americans in 1994 went to church weekly, although the Gallup poll for the same period reported the figure at 42 percent.

     What's more, in some quarters, atheism, far from being rare, is the norm -- among scientists, for example, particularly high-level scientists who populate academia. Recently, Edward J. Larson, a science historian at the University of Georgia, and Larry Witham, a writer, polled scientists listed in American Men and Women of Science on their religious beliefs. Among this general group, a reasonably high proportion, 40 percent, claimed to believe in a "personal God" who would listen to their prayers. But when the researchers next targeted members of the National Academy of Sciences, an elite coterie if ever there was one, belief in a personal God was 7 percent, the flip of the American public at large. This is not to say that intelligence and atheism are in any way linked, but to suggest that immersion in the scientific method, and success in the profession, tend to influence its practitioners.

     "It's a consequence of the experience of science," says Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor of physics at the University of Texas. "As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science -- that it has made it possible for people not to be religious."

     So long, that is, as the nonbelievers remain humble. Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked. When the singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor ripped apart a photograph of John Paul II to protest what she saw as his overweening power, even the most secular humanists were outraged by her idolatry, and her career has never really recovered.

     "Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities," says Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. "If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. But if I say something insulting about Democrats or Republicans or the Green Party, one is allowed to get away with that. Hiding behind the smoke screen of untouchability is something religions have been allowed to get away with for too long."

     Early in December, I visited the kind of person who should be as rare as an atheist in a foxhole: a freethinker in a fire station. Bruce Monson, an affable, boyish-faced 33-year-old firefighter and paramedic who works in the conservative city of Colorado Springs, where evangelical religious organizations are among the biggest boom businesses, had challenged some of the religious literature, quoting New Testament Scripture, that members of the Fellowship of Christian Firefighters posted on the taxpayer-financed station's bulletin board. Fighting fire with fire, Monson posted literature of his own, this time quoting some of the less savory sections of the Old Testament, like when Lot sleeps with his daughters and impregnates them.

     The Christian firefighters were outraged and demanded that Monson's posts be removed. "I was told by my superiors to take my stuff down and leave the Christian material alone," Monson said. Monson pursued his fight up the chain of command and finally won the right to his postings on the department's Web page, but not without being described by any number of colorful terms and being told where he should, and would, go.

     "I'm not antireligion," he said. "I'm anti-shoving- it-down-your-throat. Is it too much to ask for tolerance?"

     Oh, yes, tolerance. How sweet a policy of respectfulness and hands-off might be, were it mutually adhered to. But when The Atlantic Monthly asks, in the headline of a feature article by Glenn Tinder, "Can We Be Good Without God?" the answer is, of course, "Hell, no!" And when conspicuous true believers like Lieberman make the claim that religion and ethical behavior are inextricably linked, the corollary premise is that atheists are, if not immoral, then amoral, or nihilistic misanthropes, or, worst of all, moral relativists.

     "There remains a sense among a lot of Americans that someone who actively doesn't believe in God might not be morally reliable, or might not be fully trustworthy," says James Turner, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame. Yet the canard that godliness and goodliness are linked in any way but typographically must be taken on faith, for no evidence supports it. In one classic study, sociologists at the University of Washington compared students who were part of the "Jesus people" movement with a comparable group of professed atheists and found that atheists were no more likely to cheat on tests than were Christians and no less likely to volunteer at a hospital for the mentally disabled. Recent data compiled on the religious views among federal prisoners show that nonbelievers account for less than 1 percent of the total, significantly lower than for America as a whole. Admittedly, some of those true-believing inmates may have converted post-incarceration, but the data that exist in no way support the notion that atheism promotes criminal behavior.

     In fact, the foundations of ethical behavior not only predate the world's major religions; they also predate the rise of Homo sapiens. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, has written extensively about the existence of seemingly moral behavior in nonhuman species. "I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species," he said. "In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy,  reciprocity, a  willingness to follow  social rules. Dogs  are a good example  of a species that  have and obey social  rules; that's why we  like them so much,  even though they're  large carnivores."

     As humans have  sought to move  beyond simple  reciprocity to  consider abstract  issues of fairness, or  to grope toward  something like a  universal declaration  of human rights,  established religions  have played a surprisingly small part.

     "Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy," Dawkins says. "We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion."

     That's not to say religion has no potential to do good, or to inspire brilliant thought, art, music, indeed many of the jewels of civilization: the Song of Solomon, Handel's "Messiah," the Hagia Sophia. Perhaps Mary McCarthy was right in her lovely claim that "religion is good for good people." What remains open to question is whether religion makes anybody good or great who would otherwise be malicious or mediocre.

End of Part II
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Gawd,

The sacred day of Easter comes, 
    When every Christian household hums. 
Baskets with eggs and bunnies too, 
    and kiddies get some clothes, all new.

Just everyone is seen in church. 
    The preacher sits upon his perch. 
Tells of your son whose blood dripped down 
   to save the sinners of the town.

I squirm each time I have to hear 
    that torture tale of death and fear. 
They put your son then in a tomb, 
    a big one with a lot of room.

He wouldn't stay; three days went by, 
    and he was as alive as I. 
I find that yarn real hard to take. 
    God, didn't you make a big mistake?

If you're powerful like they say, 
    couldn't you find a better way? 
All sungods seem to be connected, 
    `Cause all were killed and resurrected. 

reprinted from The Willamette Freethinker, 
newsletter for the Corvallis Secular Society, 1999

     Modern-day Easter is a blending of two traditions: one Judeo-Christian and the other Pagan. Both Christians and Pagans have death and resurrection themes on or after the Spring Equinox. Both Neopagans and Christians continue to celebrate religious rituals in the present day. Wiccans and other Neopagans hold their celebrations on the day or eve of the equinox. Christians wait until after the next full moon.

     The Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE.) a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe.  Similarly the Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility was known variously as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos." Her name was derived from the ancient word for spring: "eastre."

     Many, perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox.  Around 200 B.C.E., mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult, centered on Vatican hill.  Cybele was the Phrygian fertility goddess. Associated with the Cybele cult was worship of her lover, Attis (similar to the older demigods Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, and Orpheus). Attis was the god of ever-reviving vegetation.   Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The spring festival March 22  to 25, began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection. 

     Christian worship of Jesus and Pagan worship of Attis were active in the same geographical area in ancient times, Christians "used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on the same date; and pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was the true prototype and which the imitation." Many religious historians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Ancient Christians had an alternate explanation: they claimed that Satan had created counterfeit deities in advance of the coming of Christ in order to confuse humanity. 

For more information see: www.religioustolerance.org/easter.htm