The conservative religious element is opposed to Faith Based Social Services because of the inclusion of "cults."  While these folks might have held their tongues while money was given to Jewish or Catholic organizations -- groups that increase their fold through fecundation rather recruitment -- it became a different matter when it dawned on the conservative Christians that money would also be going to non-Christians very active in proselytization and conversion.

     Pat Robertson has attacked faith-based social service funding because increased monies would go to programs already in place including some maintained by the Unification Church, the Hare Krishnas and the Church of Scientology.  After The New York Times mentioned that our government already supported social services run by these groups and that these groups were happy to increase the flow of money. Robertson used the same analogy I used weeks earlier — that faith-based social services opens "a Pandora's box."

     Marvin Olasky has expressed concerns over government control of evangelism.  "It is a tightrope [the Bush administration] may not be able to walk.  Any time they say, `We're going to allow evangelism,' they will be shot at by the left.  If they say, `We're not going to allow evangelism,' they will be shot at by the right." 

     Best of all, Dubya Bush was lambasted by Helen Thomas, the seasoned Dean of White House correspondents, whose career has spanned nine presidential administrations.  In a press conference on 2/23, Ms. Thomas asked, "Mr. President, why do you refuse to respect the wall between the church and state?"   And, "...you know that the mixing of religion and government for centuries has led to slaughter.  I mean, the very fact that our country has stood in good stead by having the separation -- why do you break it down?"

     Bush began to respond, saying, "Helen, I strongly respect the separation of church and state..." when Thomas interrupted to say, "Well, you wouldn't have a religious office in the White House if you did."

     Bush attempted a brief defense, arguing the constitutionality  of his Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, including a muddled reference to "the line between the  separation of church and state."

     Thomas reminded the president, "You are a secular official."   Bush responded, "I agree, I am a secular official." Thomas shot back, "And not a missionary."

      Still, many Americans do seem to favor the initiative.  It's really unclear what effect giving money to many different religious social services will have.  We can be certain that legal battles will ensue.  Remember: our Founding Fathers opposed government support of religion because of the problems resulting from the lack of pluralism and oppression by dominate groups.  Now that we live in a somewhat pluralistic country — though pluralistic by denomination more than religion — it is unclear what effect funding religious social services will have. Representatives of Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have expressed concerns about the plan.  It is certainly a bold experiment in violation of our constitution.

      Personally I can't wait until the Christian Scientists try to fund their time-honored faith-based approach to treating illnesses! 

Check out Americans United for tthe Separation of Church and State for the latest updates!  http://www.au.org/

     In the beginning -- or rather, at the end of a very lo-o-ng beginning -- George W. Bush made an earnest acceptance speech and urged our nation to "rise above a house divided."   He knows, he said, that "America wants reconciliation and unity," and that we all "share hopes and goals and values." After his speech he reached out, up and down and across aisles, to embrace Republicans, Democrats, Naderites, Palm Beach Buchananites, the disaffected, the disinclined.

     The only problem was what President-elect Bush wanted from me and "every American." "I ask you to pray for this great nation," he said. "I ask your prayers for leaders from both parties," and for their families too, while we're at it.  Whatever else I might have been inclined to think of Bush's call for comity, with his simple little request, his assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it was clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

     In an age when flamboyantly gay characters are sitcom staples, a Jew was but a few flutters of a butterfly wing away from being in line for the presidency and women account for a record-smiting 13 percent of the Senate, nothing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism. Again and again the polls proclaim the United States to be a profoundly and persistently religious nation, one in which faith remains a powerful force despite the temptations of secularism and the decline of religion's influence in most other countries of the developed world. Every year, surveyors like Gallup and the National Opinion Research Center ask Americans whether they believe in God, and every year the same overwhelming majority, anywhere from 92 to 97 percent, say yes.

     Devils and angels alike, it seems, are in the details. In one survey, 80 percent profess belief in life after death. True to the spirit of American optimism, an even greater percentage -- 86 percent -- say they believe in heaven, while a slightly lower number, 76 percent, subscribe to a belief in hell. When asked how often they attend church, at least 60 percent of respondents say once a month or more, and have said as much for the past 40 years. Three-quarters of all Americans proclaim a belief in religious miracles, and the same number concur with the statement that God "concerns himself with every human being personally."

     These statistics contrast starkly with those from many other nations. According to the International Social Survey Program, a  comparative study of beliefs and practices  in 31 nations, while a mere 3.2 percent of  Americans will agree flatly that they "don't believe in God," 17.2 percent of the Dutch concur with that statement, as do 19.1 of those in France, 16.8 percent of Swedes, 20.3 percent of people in the Czech Republic, 19.7 percent of Russians, 10.6 percent of Japanese and 9.2 percent of Canadians.

     Other countries are also noticeably more skeptical about miracles, or their personal prospects post-mortem. Anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of people in France, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Japan and the Czech Republic say, sorry, there probably is no life after death, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there are no Lazaruses.

     Only in those countries where the Catholic Church still reigns supreme, like the Philippines or Chile, does the extent of devoutness match or even surpass America's. So, too, does the devoutness of non-Christian nations like India, Indonesia and Iran.

     So who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today, a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining "what Jesus would do," and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional "freedom of religion" means "freedom from religion," or "indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion," and for his atheism-baiting receive the lightest possible slap on the wrist from his more secularized Jewish counterparts?

Who would want to be the low man on the voter poll? When asked in 1999 whether they would consider voting for a woman for president, 92 percent of Americans said yes, up from 76 percent in 1978; 95 percent of respondents would vote for a black, a gain of 22 points since 1978; Jews were up to 92 percent from 82 in the votability index; even homosexuals have soared in popularity, acceptable presidential fodder to 59 percent of Americans today, compared with 26 percent in 1978.

     But atheists, well, there's no saving them. Of all the categories in this particular Gallup poll, they scraped bottom, considered worthy candidates by only 49 percent of Americans, a gain of a mere 9 percent since 1978. "Throughout American history, there's been this belief that our country has a covenant with God and that a deity watches over America," says Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Atheism, in other words, is practically unpatriotic.

     It's enough to make one tell a nosy pollster, oh, yes, I believe in God. It's enough to make one not want to discuss belief in the first place, or to reach for palatable terms like "secular humanist," or "freethinker," or "agnostic," which sound so much less dogmatic than "atheist," so much less cocksure.

     So, I'll out myself. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.

     I don't need pollsters like Daniel Yankelovich to tell me that I'm in the minority. I'm in the minority even among friends and family. Not long ago I was startled to learn that my older brother believes in God. ("You got a problem with that?" he practically snarled.) My older sister is rearing her two kids as semiobservant Jews, and my niece recently won raves for her bat mitzvah performance. When I sent out a casual and nonscientific poll of my own to a wide cast of acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I was surprised, but not really, to learn that maybe 60 percent claimed a belief in a God of some sort, including people I would have bet were unregenerate skeptics. Others just shrugged. They don't think about this stuff. It doesn't matter to them. They can't know, they won't beat themselves up trying to know and for that matter they don't care if their kids believe or not.

     "My children's religious beliefs are their own," says Florence Haseltine, a scientist and advocate for women's health. "And as long as those beliefs do not require you to kill your parents, they're O.K. with me."  Rare were the respondents who considered atheism to be a significant part of their self-identities. Most called themselves "passive" atheists and said they had stopped doing battle with the big questions of life and death, meaning and eternity, pretty much when they stopped using Clearasil.

     "I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists," said Wendy Kaminer, author of Sleeping With Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety and an affiliated scholar with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. "I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about."
 To be an active atheist seems almost silly and beside the point. After all, the most famous group devoted to atheism, the American Atheists, was founded by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an eccentric megalomaniac whose greatest claim to fame, at this point, is that she and her son were kidnapped several years ago and are presumed dead. Other atheistic groups, like the Freedom From Religion Foundation or the Council for Secular Humanism, are more concerned with maintaining an unshakable separation between church and state than they are with spreading any gospel of godlessness. Katha Pollitt, an unabashedly liberal columnist for The Nation who says she is listed in the Who's Who in Hell, admits she used to feel more strongly about arguing against religion than she does today.

     "I'm anti-clerical, not anti-religion," she says.  "If somebody  believes there is God, I'm not  interested in trying  to persuade that  person there is no  intelligent design to  the universe. Where  I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers."

     Or, as Tom Eisner, a neurobiologist at Cornell, put it, "I don't ring doorbells saying I'm a Seventh-Day Atheist."

     And yet. there is something to be said for a revival of pagan peevishness and outspokenness.  It's not that I would presume to do something as foolish and insulting as try to convert a believer. Arguments over the question of whether God exists are ancient, recurring, sometimes stimulating but more often tedious. Arrogance and righteousness are nondenominational vices that entice the churched and unchurched alike.

     Still, the current climate of religiosity can be stifling to nonbelievers, and it helps now and then to cry foul. For one thing, some of the numbers surrounding the deep religiousness of America, and the rarity of nonbelief, should be held to the fire of skepticism, as should sweeping statistics of any sort. Yes, Americans are comparatively more religious than Europeans, but while the vast majority of them may say generically that they believe in God, when asked what their religion is, a sizable fraction, 11 percent, report "no religion," a figure that has more than doubled since the early 1970's and that amounts to about 26 million people.

     As Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.

End of Part 1

     The Boy Scouts of America has been around for 90 years and I have been a "card-carrying" member of this organization for 40 years out of the 90. That may not be a lot, but it's more than most. I mention this, because I think I know a little bit about Scouting.

     The current brouhaha between Scouting and the United Way is most unfortunate and, in my humble opinion, both organizations are wrong -- the United Way, for failing to do their duty "toward God and Country" and the Boy Scouts for being stupidly prejudiced, narrow-minded and archaic.

     The Boy Scouts may be a "private" organization, but a group of their ilk that is found in virtually every country in the world, requires dues payments for membership, solicits monies from anybody and everybody on an ongoing basis and promotes their organization, and "ideals" to "all boys" no matter where they might be.  That does not seem very "private" to me. And if Scouting is for "all boys", then which "all boys" are we talking about? In other words, BSA, get down off your high horse and quit trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the Supreme Court and, for that matter, the whole world! You may be "private" legally, but you certainly don't act like it!

     Scouting has three primary aims "building character, fostering citizenship and developing mental, moral and physical fitness." These ideals" are produced, in essence, by the promotion of leadership, self sufficiency, wilderness living and community responsibility. We are all familiar with the admonitions to "be prepared", "do a good turn daily" and "help other people at all times."

     The Scouting program is unique, wonderful beyond words and just about the greatest experience other than family that any boy could have. It is beyond reproach except for one thing. It is prejudiced.

     Years ago, prejudicial behavior was normal, almost desired, in some cases. Today it is not only not normal, it is abhorred detested, virtually criminal. We have always been a pluralistic society, but pluralism, today, covers a lot more than national, or ethnic, origin; it also covers behavior and whatever else you can think of within the law.

     So if we are a pluralistic society and they are supposed to be completely unprejudicial in every way, then why do the Boy Scouts of America deny membership in their organization to atheists and homosexuals as though somehow, someway, they are not even people not even boys? In other words, if you do not believe that there is a God (and no one has ever proved that there is) and you have no interest, whatsoever, in girls, then you are obviously not human and, consequently, should not be allowed to camp, or hike with the Boy Scouts of America!

     Question: Does "leadership training" or "community responsibility" have anything to do with homosexuality or atheism? I fail to see where it does. I have known several atheists and homosexuals during my life and all of them have been equally upstanding in their integrity and social behavior compared to any of my heterosexual, churchgoing friends; perhaps, in some cases, even better.

     There are a couple of things we should get through our heads before we start to profess our ignorance. First of all, homosexuals are not any more immoral than anyone else. The people who wrote the Bible did not know about genes, DNA, or, for that matter, hardly anything of what we know today, so please, let us use our heads instead of a 3000 year old history book. Homosexuality is largely genetic and cannot be changed.  Fortunately, we spend relatively little time having sex, and, other than sexual attraction, homosexuals are pretty much like all the rest of us -- human. Now, let's get over it.

     Secondly, I have been led to understand that there are, about forty million atheists in the United States and, of all the people in the world, only about 17% are Christian. The Boy Scouts, however, don't care if you believe in the Christian God, just as long as you believe in some kind of a "Supreme Being," somewhere. Apparently, believing in yourself, nature, your country and the wondrous, existence of the world and the universe is not good enough!

     The BSA is not a church and, other than special Scout units within the Mormon church and various church sponsored troops of other denominations, Scouting does not emphasize or adhere to any religion or denomination as long as there is a "Supreme Being", somewhere in the mix. In other words, if you are an atheist and don't tell anyone. Scouting would never know the difference, nor, for that matter, would you! I wonder is Scouting trying to tell its members that, in order to be a good person, believing in oneself is not good enough? Actually, the best church in the world is a tent under the stars.

     Obviously, a group of boys is an open invitation to pederasts, but the BSA has a simple safeguard for this problem and has had it for years: all it is a rule that essentially promises the world  that no single adult male will ever be in the presence of a single boy.  There will always be at least two or more adults or two or more boys never one on one. Also, can you imagine a Scoutmaster, or other adult, fooling  around with boys in a Scout troop and no one knowing anything about it?  Highly unlikely!

     In sum, I can understand concerns about adults who exploit young boys,  but when enacted, there are foolproof safeguards. Eight, ten, and twelve year old boys are not ready for  mature sexual relations.  In fact, most of them could care less about sexuality at this age.

     The same for atheism. Did you ever hear of a fourteen year old kid trying to talk some other kid out of being a Lutheran? Religion, to most young kids, it is a nonentity. They don't know what to think about it  and most of them couldn't care less. Young boys are not philosophers!

     The question is this: How can the Boy Scouts of America deny Scouting to any boy whose only interest in life is being a boy?

     The BSA is wrong! Think about it. 

-- Mervin E. Farmer 
     February 4, 2001