8 Ways Christian Fundamentalists Make People Convert -- to Agnosticism or Atheism.

AlterNet / ByValerie Tarico

Here are some top ways Christians push people out the church door or shove secret skeptics out of the closet.

If the Catholic bishops, their conservative Protestant allies, and other right-wing fundamentalists had the sole objective of decimating religious belief, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it.


Testimonials at sites like ExChristian.net show that people leave religion for a number of reasons, many of which religious leaders have very little control over. Sometimes, for example, people take one too many science classes. Sometimes they find their faith shattered by the suffering in the world – either because of a devastating injury or loss in their own lives or because they experience the realities of another person’s pain in a new way. Sometimes a believer gets intrigued by archaeology or symbology or the study of religion itself. Sometimes a believer simply picks up a copy of the Bible or the Koran and discovers faith-shaking contradictions or immoralities there.


But if you read ExChristian testimonials you will notice that quite often church leaders or members do things that either trigger the deconversion process or help it along. They may turn a doubter into a skeptic or a quiet skeptic into an outspoken anti-theist, or as one former Christian calls himself, a "devangelist."


Here are some top ways Christians push people out the church door or shove secret skeptics out of the closet. Looking at the list, you can’t help but wonder if the Catholic bishops, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and their fundamentalist allies are working for the devil.



1. Gay Baiting. Because of sheer demographics, many gay people are born into religious families. The condemnation (and self-condemnation) they face if their families see homosexuality as an abomination can be excruciating, as we all know from the suicide rate. Some emotionally battered gays spend their lives fighting or denying who they are, but many eventually find their way to open and affirming congregations or non-religious communities.


Ignorant and mean-spirited attitudes about homosexuality don’t drive just gays out of the church, they are a huge deconversion issue for straight friends and family members. When Christians indulge in slurs, devout moms and dads who also love their gay kids find themselves less comfortable in their church home. Young people, many of whom think of the gay rights issue as a no-brainer, put anti-gay churches in the “archaic” category. Since most people Gen X and younger recognize equal rights for gays as a matter of common humanity, gay baiting is a wedge issue that wedges young people right out of the church. That makes Fred Phelps a far better evangelist for atheism than for his own gay-hating Westborough Baptist Church.


2. Prooftexting. People who think of the Bible as the literally perfect word of God love to quote excerpts to argue their points. They often start with a verse in 1 Timothy: All scripture is given by inspiration of God (as if this circular argument would convince anyone but a true believer). They proceed to quote whatever authoritarian, anti-gay or anti-woman verse makes their point, like, Whoever spares the rod hates their children...Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being or Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. In doing so, they call into question biblical authority, because the Bible writers so obviously got these issues wrong. Literalists who prooftext are a tremendous asset to those who would like to see Bible worship fade away – because prooftexting on one side of an argument invites the same in return, and it is easy to find quotes from the Bible that are either scientifically absurd or morally repugnant.

Many liberal or modernist Christians see the Bible as a human document, an attempt by our spiritual ancestors to articulate their best understanding of God through the lens of imperfect human cultures and minds. Suppose such a Christian is confronted with a verse that says, for example, Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man (Numbers 31:17-18), or No man who has any defect may come near [to God in the temple]: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect,...(Leviticus 21:17-23). He or she can simply shrug and say, “Yeah, that’s ugly.” A couple of years ago a group of liberal Christians even kicked off an Internet competition to vote on the worst verse in the Bible. Their faith doesn’t stand or fall with the perfection of the Bible. Biblical literalists, on the other hand, give someone like me an excuse to talk about sexual slavery or bias against handicapped people in the Bible – in front of an audience who have been taught that the good book is uniformly good. For a wavering believer, the dissonance can be too much.

3. Misogyny. For psychological and social reasons females are more inclined toward religious belief than males. They are more likely to attend church services and to insist on raising their children in a faith community. They also appear more indifferent than males to rational critique of religion, like debates about theology or evolutionary biology. I was interested to notice recently that my YouTube channel, Life After Christianity, which focuses on the psychology of religion gets about 80 percent male viewers. Women are the church’s base constituency, but fortunately for atheists, this fact hasn’t caused conservative Christians to back off of sexism that is justified by – you got it – prooftexting from the Old and New Testaments.




Evangelical minister Jim Henderson recently published a book, The Resignation of Eve, in which he urges his fellow Christians to take a hard look at the consequences of sexism in the church. According to Henderson, old-school sexism has driven some women out of Christianity permanently, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For those who stay, it means that many are less enthusiastic and engaged than they would be. Churches rely on women to volunteer in roles that range from secretary to director of children’s programs to missionaries. That takes a high level of confidence in church doctrines and also a strong sense of belonging. Biblical sexism cultivates neither. Between 1991 and 2011 the percent of women attending church in a typical week dropped by 11 points, from 55 to 44 percent.



4. Hypocrisy. Christians are taught – and many believe—that thanks to the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit they are a moral beacon for society. The writer of Matthew told his audience, “You are the light of the world.” That’s a high bar, and yet decent believers (along with many other decent people) try earnestly to meet it. But the added pressure on those who call themselves the "righteous” means that believers also are prone to hiding, pretending, posing, and turning a blind eye to their own very human, very normal faults and flaws.



People who desperately want to be sanctified and righteous, “cleansed by the blood of the lamb” – who need to believe that they now merit heaven but that other people’s smallest transgressions merit eternal torture—have a lot of motivation to engage in self-deception and hypocrisy. High-profile hypocrites like Ted Haggard or Rush Limbaugh may be loved by their acolytes, but for people who are teetering, they help to build a gut aversion to whatever they espouse. But often as not, the hypocrisies that pose a threat to faith are small and internal to a single Bible-study or youth group. Backbiting and social shunning are part of the church-lady stereotype for a reason. They also leave a bitter taste that makes some church members stop drinking the Kool-aid.



5. Disgusting and Immoral Behavior. The priest abuse scandal did more for the New Atheist movement than outspoken anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (The End of Faith) or Bill Maher (Religulous) ever could. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your point of view) Bill Donohue of the Catholic League seems to be doing everything possible to fan those flames: On top of the abuse itself, followed by cover-ups, he is now insisting that the best defense of church property is a good offense against the victims, and has vowed to fight them “one by one.”



The Freedom from Religion Foundation publishes a bi-monthly newspaper that includes a regular feature: The Black Collar Crime Blotter. It features fraud, drug abuse, sex crimes and more by Protestant as well as Catholic clergy. The obvious purpose is to move readers from religion isn’t true to religion isn’t benign to religion is abhorrent and needs fighting. Moral outrage is a powerful emotion.



6. Science Denial. One of my former youth group friends had his faith done in by a conversation with a Bible study leader who explained that dinosaur skeletons actually are the bones of the giants described in early books of the Bible. Uh huh. Christians have come up with dozens of squishier, less falsifiable ways to explain the geological record: The "days" in Genesis 1 were really "ages." Or God created the world with the fossils already in place to test our faith. Or the biblical creation story is really sacred metaphor. But young-earth creationists who believe the world appeared in its present form 6,000-10,000 years ago are stuck. And since almost half of the American public believes some version of this young-earth story, there are ample opportunities for inquiring minds to trip across proto-scientific nonsense.

Like other factors I’ve mentioned, science denial doesn’t just move believers to nonbelief; it also rallies opposition ranging from cantankerous bloggers to legal advocates. It provides fodder for comedians and critics: “If the world was created 6,000 years ago, what’s fueling your car?” It may produce some of the most far-reaching opposition to religious belief, because science advocates argue that faith, even socially benign faith, is a fundamentally flawed way of knowing. The Catholic church, perhaps still licking wounds about Galileo (it apologized finally in the 20th century), has managed to avoid embarrassing and easily disproven positions on evolutionary biology. But one could argue that its atheism-fostering positions on conception and contraception similarly rely on ignorance about or denial of biological science -- in this case embryology and the basic fact that most embryos never become persons.

7. Political Meddling. If you look at religion-bashing quote-quip-photo-clip-links that circulate Facebook and Twitter, most of them are prompted by church incursions into the political sphere. A spat between two atheists erupted on my home page yesterday. “Why can’t ex-Christians just shut up about religion and get on with building a better world?” asked one. “Why can’t we shut up?!” screeched the other. “Because of shit like this!” He posted a link about Kansas giving doctors permission to deny contraception and accurate medical information to patients.

I myself give George W. Bush credit for transforming me from a politically indifferent, digging-in-the-garden agnostic into a culture warrior. He casually implied that, when going to war, he didn’t need to consult with his own father because he had consulted the big guy in the sky, and my evangelical relatives backed him up on that, and I thought, oh my God, the beliefs I was raised on are killing people. The Religious Right, and now the Catholic bishops, have brought religion into politics in the ugliest possible way short of holy war, and people who care about the greater good have taken notice. Lists of ugly Bible verses, articles about the psychology of religion, investigative exposes about Christian machinations in D.C. or rampant proselytizing in the military and public schools –all of these are popular among political progressives because it is impossible to drive progressive change without confronting religious fundamentalism.



8. Intrusion. Australian comedian and atheist John Safran flew to Salt Lake City for a round of door-to-door devangelism after Mormons rang his doorbell one too many times on Saturday morning. More serious intrusions, in deeply personal beginning- and end-of-life decisions, for example, generate reactive anti-theism in people who mostly just want to live and let live.



Catholic and evangelical conservatives have made a high-stakes gamble that they can regain authoritarian control over their flocks and hold onto the next generation of believers (and tithers) by asserting orthodox dogmas, making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition. Their goal is a level of theological purity that will produce another Great Awakening based largely on the same dogmas as the last one. They hope to cleanse their membership of theological diversity, and assert top-down control of conscience questions, replenishing their membership with anti-feminist, pro-natalist policies and proselytizing in the Southern hemisphere. But the more they resort to strict authoritarianism, insularity and strict interpretation of Iron Age texts, the more people are wounded in the name of God and the more people are outraged. By making Christian belief an all-or-nothing proposition, they force at least some would-be believers to choose “nothing.” Anti-theists are all too glad to help.

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Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

5 Things You Should Always Recycle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From:

https://www.recyclebank.com/live-green/5-things-you-should-always-recycle/

 

 

Chances are you're already recycling the cans, bottles, and paper that gets picked up at the curb, but what about all that other stuff that's lurking in your drawers or closets - like outdated gadgets and dead batteries - that you're not sure how to recycle? The following household items are especially important to donate or recycle because they contain materials that can contaminate the environment if they wind up in landfills or that can easily be reclaimed for use in new products. Here are some convenient ways to keep them out of the trash:

 According to the EPA, recycling just one computer CPU and one monitor is equivalent to preventing 1.35 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from being released and recycling one television prevents four to eight pounds of lead from being added to the waste stream.

1. Electronics: All Office Depot, Staples, and Best Buy stores accept larger electronics like desktop computers for recycling for a small fee (usually $10) and smaller ones like cell phones and PDAs for free. Goodwill stores accept used computer equipment (some locations also accept televisions) for free.
   And you can earn RecycleBank Points by recycling MP3 players/iPods, laptops, and cell phones through our partners at Collective Good, FlipSwap, and Gazelle.
   
   Why: You'll keep toxic materials like lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and brominated flame retardants out of landfills. And useful materials will be recovered, saving energy and resources.
   
   
   
2. Rechargeable batteries: From cordless phones and power tools, digital cameras, and other gizmos - these can be recycled for free at 30,000 drop-off points nationwide, including retailers such as Home Depot, Lowe's, RadioShack, Sears, and Target. Enter your zip code at Call2Recycle to find one near you.
   Unfortunately, it's more difficult to find places to recycle alkaline (or single-use) batteries. Try Earth911 to find drop off locations or order a box (for $34.50, including prepaid shipping) from Battery Solutions and send them up to 12 pounds of alkaline and/or rechargeable batteries for recycling.
   
   Why: Like many electronics, batteries contain heavy metals and other chemicals best kept out of the waste stream. Plus, recyclers reclaim metals from them that are used to make, for example, new batteries and steel.
   
   
   
3. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs use 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs, but they contain a small amount of mercury and shouldn't be thrown in the trash. Take them to any Ikea or Home Depot store for recycling or go to Lamp Recycle to find other drop off locations near you.
   Why: CFLs in landfills can break and release mercury, a neurotoxin, into the environment.
   
   
   
   
4. Plastic Bags: Even if you've switched to reusable bags for your shopping, you probably have a bunch of these stored in your home. Luckily, lots of retailers like Wal-Mart, Safeway, Albertsons, Wegmans, Krogers, and Giant now have bins where you can recycle plastic grocery bags (and newspaper, drycleaning, bread, and sealable food storage bags). To find a drop off location near you, go to Plastic Bag Recycling or Earth911.
   Why: They're made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource, and when thrown away they take a very long time to decompose. Recyclers will turn them into new products like plastic lumber.
   
   
   
5. Anything you don't need that could be of great value to others — for instance, you can donate your used prescription glasses to the nonprofit OneSight at any LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Target Optical, or Sears Optical location (or go to One Sight for more locations near you). You can also donate unused, unexpired medications including antibiotics, pain relievers, and others by mailing them to the Health Equity Project. The glasses and medications will be distributed to people in need in developing countries.
   

Keep in mind that you should always recycle hazardous substances like paint, pesticides, propane gas tanks, and motor oil at your town's household hazardous waste collection events or permanent collection center. Go to Earth911or call 1-800-CLEANUP to find collection sites and events.

Global CO2 Emissions Hit New Record in 2011, Keeping World on Track for 'Devastating' 11°F Warming.

 

 

 

 

Climate Progress / ByJoe Romm

The scientific literature now makes clear that even 7°F warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon.

First the bad news from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Thanks to a huge jump in Chinese emissions, “global carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011.”

 

The worse news is that, “The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close,” according to IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol. Why does that matter? As Reuters reported:

 

 

Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.

Darn you truth-telling scientists, always ruining the party (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

And the worst news, as Birol told Reuters, is that:

 

“When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

As Birol said of 11°F warming late last year, “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.” If only school children ran the country.

In fact, the scientific literature now makes clear that even 4°C (7°F) warming would destroy the livable climate 7 billion people have come to depend upon (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

So what is the ‘good’ news? We have has been reducing our emissions:

 

 

CO2 emissions in the United States in 2011 fell by 92 Mt, or 1.7%, primarily due to ongoing switching from coal to natural gas in power generation and an exceptionally mild winter, which reduced the demand for space heating. US emissions have now fallen by 430 Mt (7.7%) since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. This development has arisen from lower oil use in the transport sector (linked to efficiency improvements, higher oil prices and the economic downturn which has cut vehicle miles travelled) and a substantial shift from coal to gas in the power sector.

Actually, the change in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) predated the downturn. VMT “began to plateau as far back as 2004 and dropped in 2007 for the first time since 1980,” as Brookings has reported. Indeed, per capita driving saw “flat-lining growth after 2000 and falling rates since 2005.”

The point is that given Obama’s strong new fuel economy standards and the reality of peak oil (that high oil prices are here to stay absent a global depression), the U.S. could meet its Copenhagen target of a 17% reduction in CO2 from 2005 levels with a pretty modest carbon tax (see “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal“). And that is the prerequisite for a global deal that would take us off the 6C path and give us a fighting chance at 2C.

Michael Tomasky on Mitt Romney’s Economic Failure in Massachusetts.

 Mitt Romney gestures during a recent speech at the Latino Coalition economic summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. (Evan Vucci / AP Photo)

by Michael Tomasky

Mitt Romney loves to attack Barack Obama’s record of job creation as president. Too bad Mitt’s record as Massachusetts governor pales in comparison.

Bain? Dude, that’s so last week. Let’s talk Massachusetts. President Obama dropped little hints toward the end of last week that Romney’s job-creation record as the Bay State’s governor would also be on the table. So let’s get the facts. They do not support, frankly, an argument from Obama that he is the better job-creator as chief executive than Romney. But they do support an argument that Romney—when working in the public sector, not the private, as he obviously would be as president—had a downright embarrassing jobs record, especially for a state with higher-than-average education levels. And they do support an argument that, if you subtract the difficulties that were sitting there to smack each man in the face when he took the oath of office, Obama has had the better of it. And though he might have a hard time making that case, the case against the opposition is plain and direct.

Romney avoids talking about his health-care policies because they're too liberal, but he also doesn’t want to talk about jobs because his record here is so lame from any ideological perspective.

Here you will see the official Bureau of Labor Statistics month-by-month lists of total nonfarm payroll employment in Massachusetts for every month from January 2002 to April 2012. The relevant dates here are January 2003 through December 2006, Romney’s tenure. This chart lists totals, not gains or losses, so I had to do a little math. Romney took office January 3, 2003 (not January 20, so we can lay the whole month on him, assuming few to zero jobs were lost during the Rose Bowl). In January 2003, the state’s payrolls had 3.224 million workers. Within a month, 15,000 jobs were shed. The year ended with 3.179 million on the payrolls, for a first-year net loss of 44,700 jobs.

In 2004, the state gained back 20,500 jobs. The next year it gained back 24,400. So after three years in office, Romney was up a grand total of 200 jobs. Finally, in his fourth year, another 40,500 jobs were added, so he wound up with a net gain of 40,700 jobs. This, as has been often noted, put Massachusetts at 47th in the nation, only ahead of of Michigan, Ohio, and Katrina-ravaged Louisiana.

Why? The general explanation is that the high-tech economy benefited Massachusetts more when it was booming and it hurt it more when it collapsed. So the 2001 recession figures in here, which Romney and his defenders have mentioned in the past. But there is also such a thing as policy. When Romney saw his numbers sinking in the state about midway through his term, he decided not to seek reelection and to run for president, and at that point came the inevitable ascent, if we can call it that, into the Palinosphere. In a state where biotech is vital (Harvard, MIT, etc.), he blocked a stem-cell research bill that could have created jobs, quit spending much money on infrastructure repairs, and took Massachusetts out of a regional greenhouse-gas initiative that has benefited other states.

Okay, now, Obama’s record. Here is the exact same BLS chart for the whole United States from January 2002 to April 2012 (except that this shows jobs gained and lost, not total numbers). It starts out ugly. If you give him one third of the 818,000 jobs lost in January 2009 (he was sworn in on January 20, of course), a total of 4.59 million jobs were lost through February 2010. March 2010 brought the first net positive jobs report of the Obama term (189,000). There were losses that summer, but the numbers have all been positive since October 2010. So measuring since that March, 3.745 million jobs were gained. That’s a net loss of 845,000 jobs, and Romney has a right to say that, because it is technically true.

But ... what reasonable person would say that Obama caused those first several months of crushing losses? It may be fair game, such as these things are defined, for 30-second ads, but it isn’t real life. Real-life Obama-blaming starts sometime later. In his seminal book Unequal Democracy, political scientist Larry Bartels measured the effect of each president’s policies on the economy since Harry Truman by giving them all one year for their policies to start to kick in. Hey, it’s not the only thing Julius Caesar came up with that we still abide by.

If we use the Bartelian calendar, Obama is relieved of almost all of “his” job loss—4.48 million, or all but 110,000 lost jobs. Now, even though this is a respected social-science technique, if Obama tried to say something like that, it obviously would not pass a general laugh test. But it is worth pointing it out, for the sake of the historical record, and it is still true—still!—that more Americans blame Bush than Obama for the economy (56 to 29 percent, found CNN not long ago). And what president doing exactly what could have stopped 2009’s hideous immiseration? And please, don’t say “John McCain” and “cutting taxes and regulation.”

So by Bartels’s rules, Obama has created a net 3.635 million jobs. Applying the same rules to Romney’s numbers through the same time period—that is, through April of his fourth year in office, 2006—we credit Romney with 64,500 jobs. So he grew jobs by 1.9 percent. Obama’s job-growth rate is 2.35 percent.

It’s worth going into these numbers because it’s worth knowing what’s true and what kinds of arguments might strike a chord. It is pretty hilarious that Romney hardly talks about Massachusetts. As my colleague Paul Begala noted in March, you usually can’t get governors running for president to shut up about their infernal records. Romney is trying to avoid talking about his health-care policies because they're too liberal, but he also doesn’t want to talk about jobs because his record here is so lame from any ideological perspective.

Obama obviously doesn’t have a lot to boast about on the jobs front. But Romney clearly can make no claim whatsoever that he has access to some magic tonic that grows jobs. Combining his record as governor with the plans he insists he’ll inflict on us as president—gargantuan tax cuts for the rich, a gaping deficit, severe cuts to all manner of government investment in research and innovation and environmental protection so we can make sure that Lebron James gets another half million or whatever returned to him—adds up to a lurid scenario of a society becoming both more unequal and more stagnant, and a picture of a man who seemingly cannot under any circumstance utter an unfalse word about himself.
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Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Is Texas Waging War on History?

 

 

Photo Credit: bioraven | Shutterstock.com

 

 

Comment Is Free / ByKatherine Stewart

 

Christian-nationalist zealots are rewriting US history, airbrushing slavery and enshrining creationism in Texas schools.

 

Don McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a “young earth” creationist. He believes the earth is 6,000 years old, that human beings walked with dinosaurs, and that Noah’s Ark had a unique, multi-level construction that allowed it to house every species of animal, including the dinosaurs.

He has a right to his beliefs, but it’s his views on history that are problematic. McLeroy is part of a large and powerful movement determined to impose a thoroughly distorted, ultra-partisan, Christian nationalist version of US history on America’s public school students. And he has scored stunning successes.

If you want to see a scary movie about this movement, consider taking in Scott Thurman’s finely-crafted documentary Revisionaries, currently making the festival circuit, which records the antics of McLeroy and a hard right majority on the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) as they revise the textbook standards that will be used in Texas (and many other states).

The first part of this documentary deals with the familiar “science wars”, in which one side seeks to educate children in the sciences, and the other side proposes to “teach the controversy” in order to undermine those aspects of science that conflict with its religious convictions. But it’s the second part of the movie where the horror really kicks in. As I explain in more detail in The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, the history debate makes the science debate look genteel. While the handful of moderates on the SBOE squeals in opposition, the conservative majority lands blow after blow, passing resolutions imposing its mythological history on the nation’s textbooks.

Cynthia Dunbar, a board member who has described public education as a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion,” and who homeschooled her own children, emerges as a relentless ideologue. During the hearings, she yanks Thomas Jefferson from a standard according to which students are expected to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas … on political revolutions from 1750 to the present,” and replaces him with the 13th-century theologian St Thomas Aquinas. Moderate Republican board member Bob Craig points out that the curriculum writers clearly intended for the students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson in this part of the standard, not a mix of Protestant and Catholic theologians, but the resolution passes anyway.

Dunbar isn’t very subtle about her agenda. In one scene, the filmmakers track her to a prayer rally in Washington, DC, where she implores Jesus to “invade” public schools.

The board goes on to remove the word “slavery” from the standards, replacing it with the more benign-seeming “Atlantic triangular trade.” They insist on calling the United States a “constitutional republic” rather than a “democracy” – largely because they want students to think of their country as Republican, not Democratic. So convinced are they of the timeless superiority of American/Republican values that one of them introduces a standard asking students to “explain three pro-free-market factors contributing to European technological progress during the rise and decline of the medieval system.”

Historical figures of suspect religious views (like Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin) or political tendency (like union organizer Dolores Huerta) are ruthlessly demoted or purged altogether from the study program. Meanwhile, the board majority makes room for an eclectic array of ancillary figures from the revolutionary period, such as Charles Carroll and Jonathan Trumbull. What these marginal figures have in common, other than being dusted off from high shelves and promoted by the board, is the fact that they were loud defenders of orthodox Christianity.

Even by their own admission, the board members were hopelessly unqualified to make judgments about the history. So they appointed a committee of academic “experts” to vet the standards. The committee was a model of “bipartisanship” in the modern era. For their part, the moderates on the board appointed credible historians, professors at Texas universities; one was defended by a moderate Republican board member as “a good Republican … not some kind of crazy liberal.”

The conservatives, on the other hand, appointed Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries, a group that seeks to “reclaim America for Christ” and is “dedicated to helping to restore America to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America’s Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival.” They also appointed pseudo-historian David Barton, the former vice-chairman of the Texas GOP and founder of the Black Robe Regiment. The latter, sinister-sounding organisation is an association of “concerned patriots” whose goal is to “restore the American Church in her capacity as the Body of Christ, ambassador for Christ, moral teacher of America and the world, and overseer of all principalities and governing officials, as was rightfully established long ago.”

Barton is known for fabricating quotes from America’s founders, or taking them out of context to build his case that America was established as a so-called “Christian nation.” And here’s the gruesome kicker: the Texas board actually ignored advice from its own, balanced committee whenever it contradicted the agenda of the far-right majority.

Sometimes, the most important characters in a story are the ones who don’t show up. In the Texas battle over history, the heroes who went missing were the kind of people and organizations that might have defended the teaching of history in the way that the scientists mobilized to defend the teaching of biology. The scientists are reasonably well-organized. When creationism rears its paleolithic head in state legislatures or on school boards, it faces the opposition of organizations such as the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Center for Science Education, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and others.

Defenders of biological sciences can also fall back on court rulings such as Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District and Edwards v Aguillard, which prohibit teaching of creationism. They also have a wealth of popular treatments of scientific issues to draw upon, such as explanations of evolutionary theory by Richard Dawkins and other scientists.

History, however, is often left to fend for itself.

To be fair, in the Texas proceedings, some historians and activists made valiant attempts to contain the damage. Kathy Miller, spokesperson for the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based research and advocacy group, was allocated several minutes for her impassioned defense of religious and political neutrality in public education. Professor Steven K Green, director of Willamette’s Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy, used his five minutes in front of the board to remind them that “the supreme court has forbidden public schools from ‘seeking to impress upon students the importance of particular religious values through curriculum.’” The board majority smiled and looked away.
So, where are history’s defenders?

Part of the problem here has to do with a common fallacy about history. We think of history as a “soft” subject. We know that it always involves some degree of interpretation, that the “narratives” are always “contested”, and that the answers are never so obviously right or wrong as they are in science. We also know that there have been leftwing versions of the history that are just as distorting as the rightwing propaganda served up by McLeroy and friends. But it’s plain wrong to think that we can only throw our hands in the air and conclude that history is whatever anyone chooses to say it is.
Some academics have gotten too used to speaking only with one another. Many could do a more forceful job of seeking to protect the public from disinformation. When I was researching my book, I came across plenty of academic historians who were dismissive about David Barton in private; but few were willing to go public, or to invest the effort in refuting him in detail.

Barton recently came out with another piece of propaganda, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. To their credit, a pair of professors who identify themselves as conservative Christians, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, have stepped forward to debunk Barton’s latest exercise in their book, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. But that hasn’t stopped Barton’s book from becoming a bestseller.

Maybe, we find it easy to underestimate the harm that bad history can do. McLeroy and his cohorts desperately want students to be taught that America is beyond criticism. It’s greatness, they believe, stems from the values, principles, and methods of America’s conservatives, and the only safe path to the future is to suppress or eliminate whatever does not conform to their image of a purified America. These “revisionaries” are far from the vision of the US bequeathed by the same founders whom the far right claims to revere.

The “glory of the people of America” as James Madison actually said, is that they broke free from the “blind veneration” of the ways of the past and learned how to draw on the “lessons of their own experience” in order to build the world anew.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Katherine Stewart is the author of "The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children" (PublicAffairs).

Dear Girls -- Here's Why Nasty Old Religious Men Are Terrified of You.

 

AlterNet / BySoraya Chemaly

 

 

 

Women are powerful beyond words, because they threaten to unravel the control of corrupt men who abuse their authority.

 

Dear Girls,

You are powerful beyond words, because you threaten to unravel the control of corrupt men who abuse their authority.

In the United States last week there were people who wouldn't let boys play a baseball championship final because a girl was on the opposing team. She'd already had to sit out two games because of their demands. Why? Did she, a competitive athlete and a member of her team, chose to? Was she being good and respectful when she acceded to their demands? Why were they not asked to forfeit their games? What messages were sent to her and her teammates? This is not complicated. It sent the wrong messages. Confusing messages. Incoherent messages. You need to know that she should have been allowed to play and not have had to sit out two games. These people, and others like them, all over the world, led exclusively by religious men, are scared of you and will not let you be. You worry them constantly.

If you were not powerful, they would not take you so seriously and they take you very, very seriously. You should, too. You can set the world on fire.

It doesn't feel this way, I know. If that were true, you think, I would not have to sit out baseball games out of respect for religious beliefs that require my subservience and call it a gift. I would not be turned away from serving God with my brothers. I would not be taught that I'm an evil temptress or the virtue keeper of boys. I would not have virginity wielded as a weapon against me and my worth determined by my womb. I would not be spat on and called a whore by men when I am eight because my arms are bare. I would not be poisoned for going to school. I would not be forced, at the age of 9, to carry twins borne of child torture. I would not have to kill myself to avoid marrying my rapist. If this were true, they would pursue my rapists instead of stoning me for their crimes. I, and thousands others, would not be killed for "honor."

Girls, these things happen because there are men with power who fear you and want to control you. I know that I have equated relatively benign baseball games with deadly, honor killings but, whereas one is a type of daily, seemingly harmless micro-aggression and the other is a lethal macro-aggression they share the same roots. The basis of both, and escalating actions in between, is the same: To teach you, and all girls subject to these men and their authority, a lesson: "Know your place." I also know that there are places where girls are marginalized and hurt that are not religious. But all over the world these hypocritical, pious men, in their shamefully obvious wrongness, represent the sharp-edged tip of an iceberg, the visible surface of a deep and vast harm. They employ the full range of their earthly and divine influence to make sure, as early as possible, that you and the boys around you understand what they want your relative roles to be. Where there are patriarchal religions girls, in dramatically varying and extreme degrees, disproportionately suffer. Understand these men for what they are: bullies. Do not internalize what they would have you believe.

Your very existence makes them anxious. And their anxiety is particularly high because you have something no generation of girls has had before -- globally connected communities of men and women who support your equality and freedom. Like guns, germs and steel, this transformative technology, which enables me to write to you here, alters geography, changes societies and dismantles systems of control -- it makes the world a smaller place and it creates, even if slowlyin some places, positive change for girls like you. You see, until now, these men could count on, indeed they could ensure, that you and the women around you were house-bound and isolated. Many of you still are. But now, there are millions and millions and millions people who are thinking about you and challenging these men every single day. You have the speed of light on your side and unless someone permanently turns the lights out, those days are gone. So, although you might feel like you are alone, you are not.

How do you threaten them? A girl, alone? By being able, strong, confident and yes, shameless. You may not "naturally" be interested in domesticity, piety, purity and submission, and they rely on your commitment to those things to order their worlds. Their actions, from one end of the spectrum to the other, are designed to fill you with self-doubt and, ultimately, fear -- either bodily or spiritual -- because otherwise you, and the young boys around you, will be fully aware of your strength and potential.

Because of this, they single-mindedly focus their attention on you, your body, your clothes, your hair, your abilities, your physical freedom. When their "manners" and "morals" are not universally applicable, but different for boys and girls, you can be sure that this is why. They seek to teach you, subtly, through small slights and gendered expectations, that you are "different," weak, unworthy, incapable. The sadness is that, in their perception, if you are none of these things, then they are not strong, worthy and capable. This is not an excuse, but an explanation. It's why they find infinite "benevolent" ways to undermine and disparage you, all in the name of "God's word." When that fails, they resort to violence. All over the world, their anxiety is manifest in a spectrum of actions ranging from mild paternalism, respectful of "proper boundaries," to deadly enforcement of their rules.
Fear is why these men "officially" investigate Girl Scouts while perversely shielding child rapists. It's why they obsess over your "purity." It's why they segregate you in public and private spaces. It's why they instruct girls and boys that girls' bodies are either shameful and dirty or sacred and belonging to men. Fear motivates them to teach that you pollute others by your very nature. It makes them intent on making sure you stay home and not be fully engaged in the world. It leads them to sanction marriages of 8-year-olds to old men. It convinces them that rape and its consequences are a "gift from God." It's why they empower others to stone you to death and disfigure you with acid.

Even "beating the gay" out of children, especially boys who are "more like" you, is aimed at you. Because if boys are "more like girls," something these men believe is fundamentally inferior, then you can be "more like boys." That causes ambiguity and destroys their carefully defined hierarchies and that is intolerable to them.

Fear is why they insist there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Don't believe them. Fear is why they want you to cover your body. There is nothing wrong with your body, and your body is not to blame. Whether you chose to expose your body or to cover it up, consider the degree to which either choice is defined by a reduction of your character to narrow sexuality by a culture that refuses to hold men accountable for their actions and requires you to either radically display ourself for men's pleasure or withdraw from the world and be held in reserve. Either way, ask who is defining your worth and by what measure. Fear is why they tell you you are so different from boys. You, and the boys you know, understand that your bodies are different, but that you are far more alike than dissimilar. Threatened, insecure, adult men say otherwise. Don't give in. Even if you're quiet. The differences these religious authorities exaggerate are simply pillars of oppression used to teach boys and girls that women's subjugation is "natural" and "divine." Reject them and their ideas.

This is hard to do. It requires that you, individually, be brave, strong, determined, fearless and confident. It requires that you demand that the adults around you pay attention and change their behavior. This is even harder.

First, and perhaps the most difficult to understand as a girl, is that women who love you and care for you often enable these men. This is what people say, "It's not JUST men!" And they are right, women support them, individually and in groups, in ways that have private, public, political and societal consequences. But, make no mistake -- although women are the enforcers of rules, they have no real, systemic authority in conservative religious hierarchies, and they know this. Yes, without their supportthese men could not continue, but until these women are truly free -- bodily, economically, physically, politically -- and their practical and spiritual salvation is no longer mediated by these very men, they will continue to support them. Enforcing the rules is a rational choice that enables them to survive, the world over, in unjust environments. You scare them too, because you call in to question their own complicity and cause conflict within.

Second, it is confusing that these men say they do what they do for your own good. They talk about respecting you and your dignity. You want to believe them; they have power and authority over you, your parents, your community and your access to God. They are often kind and benevolent and they love you. So, they must be right. But they are not. They demonstrate their own hypocrisy over and over and over again. They say they know what is best. They do not. You do. Don't believe them when they teach you in hundreds of ways, through sacred text, careful words, cherished traditions, hidden threats and frightening examples, that you are inherently more sinful, base and corrupt, less worthy and in need of constant male guidance. Reject them.

The adults around you may not appear to support you when you take your humanity to its logical religious conclusions. Do not let them off the hook. Do not let them use "tradition" as an excuse or say it "really doesn't matter." Do not allow them to get away with asking you to "sit out games," "be a good girl," "don't make a fuss," and "put something on." These are micro-aggressions that result in macro-aggressions. Adults often don't think these things through. Sometimes it's scary to them, too.
You can say: "There is nothing wrong with me. There is something wrong with you and your world."
Otherwise, when you get older, these same men, the ones who fear and hate you, will continue to undermine you. They will seek to control your body, keep you out of the public sphere, subjugate you in the name of a narrowly defined "family," create impediments to your equality, shame you at every turn and justify your continued oppression in convoluted ways that defy reason and morality. They will investigate you for being strong, violate you, stone you to death, charge you with witchcraft,punish you in every conceivable way to set an example for ... your children.

So, know that you are strong and powerful. Use your reason. Trust your instincts. Seek out those that would support you and, yes, know your place: on the field, in the street, on the bus (in the front), in school, at work and in public office.

You are not alone and you are brighter than the sun.

Take a look at 10 inspiring religious women here.

The Stunning Truth About Health Care Pricing.

By Deep Harm | Sourced from DailyKos

 

 

A story in today's LA Times describes in rare detail why US healthcare is insanely expensive. It's not due to patients who expect too much, high-tech medicine or burdensome regulations. No, it's the result of insurance industry bureaucracy and greed. While many consumers have long suspected that, hard evidence has been elusive. Now, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times has turned up that hard evidence.

Evidence shows that healthcare costs are arbitrary and capricious.

The LA Times article, "Healthcare's High Cost: Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills," provides data showing that healthcare costs are neither realistic nor consistent. Americans purchase insurance with the expectation of getting reduced out-of-pocket healthcare costs, but instead pay more than they would if they just paid cash--sometimes, much, much more. Example:

Los Alamitos Medical Center, for instance, lists a CT scan of the abdomen on a state website for $4,423. Blue Shield says its negotiated rate at the hospital is about $2,400.

When The Times called for a cash price, the hospital said it was $250. [LATimes]

Similar cost disparities exist at other hospitals, according to the Los Angeles Times and Dr. David Belk, MD, and insurance companies pocket the difference.

Healthcare reforms passed in the Obama administration require hospitals to disclose their standard charges, i.e., list prices. But, only a sucker pays the list price. The real cost of medical procedures remains hidden to most consumers.

The insurance industry can make exorbitant demands because it has full control of healthcare

Dr. Belk gives free talks around the country about the true costs of healthcare. The following video of one such talk is available on his website, along with a treasure trove of related information.

In his video, Dr. Belk counters insurance industry propaganda with facts and figures, concluding, "Every price is jacked up...we're looking at 10 times on average." There is no reason, he says, why a CT scan should cost more than a plane ticket or a transmission overhaul.

"How many of you use your car insurance to pay to fill your gas tank or change your oil? How many of you use your homeowner's insurance to pay your electric bill? Why is it that healthcare is the only industry in which we use our insurance for absolutely every expense, no matter how mundane? And, in a sense, we're forced to because if we say, "I'd rather pay for it myself," you're fined...you're fined ten times the actual value of the service you're getting." Moreover, the system limits what the physician can do even when a patient offers to pay cash.

"We're both stuck in this system where the insurance companies dictate everything we do. They control every dollar that goes into medicine--and not only do they control every dollar that goes into medicine, they can have complete control of the message. They can tell us whatever they want, and who are we to argue with them, because we have no understanding of what these costs are."

Thus, "They have us all looking in the wrong direction, and all talking about the wrong thing."

Overpriced healthcare undermines health and the economy

One of the implications of exorbitantly priced healthcare is that many people do not receive needed care, and some die as a result. Another implication is that huge expenditures on healthcare reduce our ability to pay for other things.

The average healthcare cost for a family of four is $20,728 a year. The same amount of money would buy a new, mid-priced car, the LA Times points out--or a year's college tuition. No wonder many college students rack up massive student loan debt.

Were it not for the high cost of healthcare, the average American could purchase vastly more non-healthcare goods and services. By co-opting consumer dollars, over-priced healthcaredestroys jobs in other parts of the economy.

Conclusion

With new evidence in hand, consumers are empowered to demand a better healthcare system. That might be a private system combining high-deductible major medical insurance with patient direct pay for routine expenses, or a "single payer" government program, or something else entirely. In any case, the healthcare casino must be shut down. But, that will not happen until Americans demand it, insisting that politicians address it in their campaigns and pass reforms in their terms of office.

The time for change is now.