Our July AAW meeting was hopeful.

     Jim Cox will continue producing our newsletter and provide general guidance.  Jim Dew will produce our web page and hot line.  Mark Shahan will continue tracking membership and work on our Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies application.  Tom Koslovsky, Jacque Wilson and Jeff Reese offered support services as needed. Richard Russell will remain our activist at large.  And I will continue praying for miracles.

     Still at the top of the "Reinventing AAW" agenda are finding a
meeting location we can mostly agree upon, plotting a short- and long-term course and group priorities list, and completing the projects now on the table.

     My advice to all members is put yourselves in the loop if you want
to be there.  Explain your interests as well as your grievances, how and when you prefer to communicate, and what the group can do to help you feel welcomed and useful.

     As for me, my interest remains that AAW find our voice and assert
our place among faith, social and political communities.  My grievance is that what few members we manage to muster are for the most part occupied elsewhere.

     The August 8 meeting will be at the home of Jim Dew.

Dennis Coyier
AAW President

     The Capital Times has recently run several comments from writers and callers to the effect that the US Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

     To set the record straight, neither of those phrases appears in the Constitution.  What it says is this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

     The 1st part of that sentence, the very 1st words in the Bill of Rights, is called the Establishment Clause; it means that the government may not 
promote religion. The second part of the sentence, the Free Exercise Clause, means that government may not inhibit religion. So: neither pro, nor con -- neutral! 

     The phrase "wall of separation between church and state" isn't part of the Constitution, either. It's from a letter by Thomas Jefferson (author of the Declaration of Independence) to the Baptist congregation of Danbury, Connecticut, in which he tried to explain in metaphorical terms exactly 
what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the 1st Amendment. 

     The recent action of Congress in encouraging public officials all  across America to post copies of the 10 Commandments on their walls is the

     Catholics and Protestants place that commandment 1st, before disagreeing later in the sequence, while Jews place it second. Even in the process of choosing which version of the 10 Commandments to post, public 
officials end up having to choose sides among competing religions.

     But the take-home point is this: Right-wingers in Congress think it  should be the official policy of the US government that American citizens should have no other gods before Yahweh. If that isn't an establishment of religion, what is? 

     There are some cowards in Congress who opposed this bill but voted for it anyway in full realization that the courts would bail them out yet again and prevent this atrocious travesty from ever taking effect, but by failing to stand up for personal freedom, they make it all the easier for the people who really DO want to convert America into a theocracy to whittle away, whittle away, whittle away at our liberties. 

Richard S. Russell 
AAW Media Liason

     Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, in announcing his legislative agenda for the coming biennium, said he was going to push for "faith-based" methods of dealing with prisoners. It's obvious that Jensen, who aspires to succeed Tommy Thompson as governor, is already starting to cynically pander to the religious right. 

     But what if he were actually serious? What would this entail? Just 
imagine... 

     * There's a fight; a prisoner gets gets a knife between the ribs. 
Rather than send for a doctor, the warden organizes a prayer session. 

     * Over half the inmates are illiterate. But we'll have faith that 
letting them watch TV 12 hours a day will teach them how to read. 

     * Let's start a lottery. Every day we'll draw the number of 1 
prisoner, who will be promptly freed, because Jensen has faith that God wouldn't have let his number be chosen unless he'd been miraculously rehabilitated. 

     Idiotic? Of course. The same way that every "faith-based" process 
is idiotic.  Faith is absolutely the worst possible method of making decisions.  The only time people ever rely on faith is when they're trying to rationalize decisions that are entirely without reason or contrary to the evidence. A perfect example is the claim often made for faith itself -- that it can move mountains -- when there's not a shred of evidence that faith has ever moved even so little as a grain of sand. 

     We've seen the results of faith-based decision-making in government 
before: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the original witch hunts (beside which Joe McCarthy's look like a Sunday stroll in the park), book burnings, dead children of Christian Scientists, and so on. 

     The founders of this nation wisely set up a wall of separation between 
church and state. Let's not let political prostitutes like Scott Jensen 
remove even a single brick from that wall. 

Richard S. Russell 
AAW Media Liason 

     The United States Army has now been "boycotted" by the likes of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and other organizations sharing his "Christian" perspective. This is because the Army has chosen to officially recognize a revival of the pre-Christian nature religion known as Wicca.  Some members of the Army have chosen Wicca as their religious preference. 

     What is amazing about the hysterical reaction of certain "Christians" to the Army recognition of Wicca as a religious practice, with rights equivalent to those of other religions, is that Pat Robertson and his allies want the federal government to decide what religion is good" and worthy of recognition, and what religion is "bad" and unworthy. 

     This desire of the Christian Coalition to invoke the power of the state in matters of religion is simply another reminder that these particular "Christians" are afraid to compete in the marketplace of ideas and want the power of government to silence their opponents. This is religious fascism -- pure and simple. 

     The late Robert G. Ingersoll's wisdom should be re-called with profit as we ponder the efforts of religious fascists to use government to proscribe the religious beliefs of their fellow citizens: 

     "We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd.... (Preface, The Mistakes of Moses, 1878). 

     Chistians have their cherished myths and fables. Wiccans have theirs Fortunately, in America, we are free to cultivate the myth of our choice and to look with critical disdain upon the fables of others. We do not have the right to invoke government to sustain our fables nor to use it to suppress the mythologies we do not like. 

Robert E. Nordlander 
AAW Member 

     Election year 2000 is at hand and in the spirit of the millennium the presidential candidates of the major parties have got religion. This is not good news. If this thing sells, Y2K may herald the advent of a social disaster never envisioned by the voters. After all, religion in the abstract has such a warm fuzzy feel. But, as we atheists like to say, the devil is in the dogmas.

     Perhaps this religion thing is a side effect of prosperity. The dearth of economic issues leaves political hopefuls scrambling for something to promise. Clinton's alley-cat behavior and the on-going school shootings are apparently the best our politicians can come up with on which to hang a campaign. So they've hung theirs on "religious values." (This in a nation already awash like no other in religiosity-but whoever said election campaigns have to be based on reality?) We hear in nearly every speech how lacking we are in these values and how the speaker, if elected, will return us to those good old days of moral rectitude. (Those were also the days when a President's sexual behavior was kept secret and kids didn't have ready access to guns.) 

     As to what will reinstate those old-time values, there is little agreement except that government must be involved to provide the necessary validation, de facto coercion and-most importantly-funding. The Republicans (George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, et al), favor the "commandment" approach: 

     Thou shalt not have an abortion or same-sex 
relationships or meaningful sex education . . . the list goes on. Thou  shalt use public schools for public prayer and proselytizing and teaching creationism . . . this list goes on too.

     The Democrats (Al Gore and Bill Bradley), favor the "permissive" approach of welcoming values -- teaching religion into the public social services arena.  Although they reject the "thou shalt nots" of the Republicans, they see no problem with accommodating the "thou shalts."

     While Bradley is vague on this, Gore is not. In a May 28 speech to religion reporters he urged government partnership with "faith-based organizations." He also showed a narrow-minded disdain for those of us in reason-based  organizations who are on the "none of the above" end of the religious 
spectrum by referring to non-religious values as "hollow secularism," as though religious beliefs and rituals are necessary to validate human-centered activities.

     There is nothing "hollow" about the immense contributions nonbelieving secularists have made to science, education, social welfare and human rights. Religion-free human values were quite sufficient for: Florence Nightingale (professionalized nursing), Jane Addams (founded the settlement house system and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931), Stephen Girard 
(established the first free college for orphans in the U.S.), Andrew Carnegie (endowed our public library system); Eugene V. Debs (fought for workers' rights), Clarence Darrow (legal defender of labor and 
constitutional rights), Jean Henri Dunant (organized the International Red Cross), James Smithson (founded the Smithsonian Institution), Frances Wright (first person to buy slaves for the sole purpose of freeing them), Marie and Pierre Curie (discovered radium), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (early feminist leader), Margaret Sanger (fought for women's right to use birth control), Charles Lindbergh (aviation pioneer), James Lick (financed the Lick Observatory), John Dewey (educator), and Helen Keller (blind-deaf writer).

     The bi-partisan dismissal of secularism is only part of the problem a religion-saturated Y2K may generate. Unlike religion-free values, religious values come with strings attached.

     Bringing religion into government means taxpayer support for whatever values-promoting activities are carried out. It means religions need not hide their "mission." It means they are free to proselytize on government time and with taxpayer money. It means religions will be scrambling to dip into the huge, bottomless government pot of gold. It means horrendous political pressure for legislation favorable to one or the other religious institution as they strive for dominance and the financial and political power it brings.

     Finally, it means the end of the First Amendment, our nation's primary means of maintaining religious peace. Destroying the prohibition against an establishment of religion ultimately destroys the free exercise of religion. The politically dominant religion(s) will see to that. They always have.  They do now. They always will.

     We may come to understand too late that religious values, which sound nice as a general term, are not common values at all when spelled out. Nothing is 
more divisive than religion. Values beloved by one are abhorred by another.  As each religion tries to advance its own agenda through political pressure, our descent into a religious free-for-all and "us vs. them" mentality will accelerate. We may realize too late what Pres. James Madison meant when he wrote in an 1803 letter objecting to using government land for churches:

     "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."

     The real 2K problem is that catering to religion threatens social stability. 

Marie Castle 
Atheist Alliance President 

     I urge all those who can to go to my web page at: 

        http://www.execpc.com/~dcoy/rightwatch/
                 faithbasedsocialservices.html 

     Print it out and mull it over. This appears to be one of the hottest issues on radar from where I sit.

     What if anything should/can AAW do as a group?
     What can you do as an individual? 
     What is a good plan of attack? 
     What is a realistic time frame? 

     This is going to take far more than one or two brief and cramped monthly meetings. Let me know what if anything you are willing and able to do either individually or in concert regarding this issue. 

     Also please take a look at this:

     Do you have suggesting for sending this to remaining legislators and others? 

Dennis Coyier 
AAW President