Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

A federal judge in Texas acts to uphold the Constitution against attacks by Christians in government even though Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing school districts for not violating the First Amendment.

Without trying to be potentially divisive, I just no longer believe that MAGA cares about the Constitution.

On the right, Judeo-Christian values are out and Christian nationalism is in.

Florida adopts the “Phoenix Declaration”, to further blur the distinction between church and state and weaken religious neutrality in schools.

Atheist students increasingly call for campus policies that go beyond “tolerance” and towards inclusion of secular identities.

Atheist Patrick John Lee wins a landmark UK tribunal ruling, defending his fact-based criticisms of Islam. But even laws that are dormant continue to create chilling effects, affecting atheist expression and secular critique.

Blasphemy laws in Pakistan continue to entrap minorities.

Almost half of Spaniards no longer identify with a religion.

World of Woo:  Fishy sperm facials.

Environment:  These 3 dangerous climate breaking points are looming.

People who frequently perceive meaningful coincidences or have a distorted sense of randomness tend to be more open to pseudo-scientific claims.

The decline and fall of stars in the Universe.

New clues to the origins of complex life revealed by MSU biologist.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy needs some fluoride.

Long Reads:

Today, November 23^rd, is Christ the Christian Nationalist Sunday.

The Nones Project: Well Being without a personal relationship with an imaginary god.

This article on the top 6 atheist countries helps frame global trends in secularization and gives context for where atheist voices might have larger cultural impact.

What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’.

How the Internet made the Far-Right.

Our phosphorescent world.

George Bell served 24 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Sunday Book Club:  WARHEAD. A gripping look at military strategy and a brave new world of future conflicts.  See also final video below.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Videos: Top 10 Tips for being a Conservative Christian. The Jewishness of Jesus. Elizabeth Warren speech on Equal Justice under Law. The Psychology of War: Could you make a moral choice in Wartime?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week everyone and a peaceful and pleasant Thanksgiving.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

As I prepared Sunday School this week, I noticed that it had quite a few posts about Christian Nationalism. That got me thinking about how Ireland in the past functioned very much like a Christian Nationalist state, even if that term wasn’t used at the time. Not fascistic Christian Nationalism like the U.S. fringe wants today, but a soft tacit theocracy where the Church didn’t just influence society, it governed major parts of it.

This started to fail after 1990 when the Catholic Church was revealed to be club for child abusers that make Epstein look like a saint. Catholic moral doctrine dominated law. The state outsourced core functions to the Church, like Education, Hospitals and Workhouses for mother and child slavery, the adoption system, censorship of books and movies. Dissenting beliefs were treated as deviant or disloyal. The Constitution itself referenced the “special position” of the Catholic Church but removed it in 1973.

The abuse revelations didn’t create secularism. What they did was to shatter the illusion of righteousness and rip the moral curtain away. Once the population saw the scale of institutional abuse the spell broke. Suddenly priests no longer had an unchallengeable authority over people. Bishops could no longer override civil law, and the Church could no longer operate beyond accountability. We could not even vote without a Bible being on display on every table in every polling booth. (I fixed that one!)

The post about Texas AG Paxton is from the ‘Project 2025’ playbook of Christian Nationalism. If a judge finds it unconstitutional in one school district, then it is unconstitutional in every district across America. But they keep changing State laws in open violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution to blur the line between church and state until the state becomes an instrument of the church.

They pass laws that clearly promotes one specific religion. And then pretend their sectarianism is “heritage” or “tradition”. But when their privilege is challenged and they are treated as “Equal before the Law” they claim persecution. To someone accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Removing mandatory Ten Commandments displays from schools simply puts Christianity on the same footing as every other belief system. Stopping mandatory prayer is not stopping voluntary personal prayer. Nobody is trying to stop them talking to their god via telepathy, or however it works. Neutral public spaces feel “hostile” because they’re no longer Christian by default.

Christian Nationalism thrives precisely because it romanticizes a past where their worldview was uncontested and re-frames any modern leveling of the field as a “war on Christianity.” Secularism doesn’t diminish their rights. It protects them and the rights of all belief equally. The “Equal before the Law” is the referee for fairness and not the opponent. Without secularism, denominational warfare is inevitable. (I have argued this point for years via Atheism Ireland and other groups). Freedom of conscience and non‑belief are vulnerable under laws designed to protect dominant religious norms. But Christian Nationalists never think that far ahead. they assume their version of Christianity would always be the one in charge.

Just as the Catholic Church in Ireland used to be. It is now in its final death throes, the last spasms of an institution that has lost its monopoly. I do not want to hear any more commentary about anything from them, but I respect the rights of others to listen to them so long as they respect my right not to.

Ireland today is what a healthy secular society looks like. It is pluralistic, more rational (expect from some terrible McCarthyite fervor about Israel), better governed, more humane, less afraid of blasphemy and no longer held hostage by clerical veto power. Secularism didn’t destroy religion in Ireland. It just liberated personal belief from institutional control. People can still be Catholic if they want. They’re just no longer forced or socially coerced to be. I was very surprised when I read the post above about the rise of Secularism in Spain which was, until recently, very much a Catholic country.

The problem in America is that Christian Nationalists confuse “Christian cultural influence” with “Christian state”.  America was never a “Christian Nation”.  Yes, early America had a Christian-majority culture. That’s a demographic fact. But a country having lots of Christians is not the same as Christianity governing the country. Britain is culturally Christian but legally secular. France has a Catholic history but a fiercely secular constitution. India has Hindu cultural dominance but a secular legal framework.

Religious liberty was designed precisely because the founders didn’t want a Christian government. They didn’t create secularism despite many of them being religious – they created it because they were religious and didn’t trust each other’s denominations to run the state.

The problem Ireland had was not because Catholics are uniquely flawed, but because any religious group given unchecked power will behave the same way. That’s human nature, not church doctrine. When the state picks a side and the law blesses that side you get censorship, institutional control, clerical legal privilege, two-tier citizenship and inevitably, abuse behind closed doors.

The Christian National argument that a tiny group of Puritans in the 1600s defines the legal identity of a nation formed in the late 1700s is historically, demographically, and logically nonsense. The roughly 200 Puritan separatists (and not even the majority of the Mayflower passengers) do not define a continent-sized nation that was already populated by millions of people with their own cultures, beliefs, and systems.

But they are fighting a losing battle. Christian Nationalism isn’t a sign of confidence or an indication of the merits of a religion. It’s the panic of a worldview realizing that it no longer owns the culture. It is the start of death knell for religious power. So, keep fighting the legal cases. Once a religious cult loses legal and cultural dominance, it shrinks back to what it should have been all along; a voluntary private association. A system built on religious privilege cannot survive once its moral credibility collapses. Secularism will survive in a strong democracy where everyone has “equal justice under law”.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

On the right, Judeo-Christian values are out and Christian nationalism is in.

From the story:

This week, for example, Washington Post columnist Jason Willick looked at how Tucker Carlson has been pointedly criticizing the Hebrew Bible. He’s “shocked by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it” and emphasizes that “Christianity alone — alone, unique” — claims that people should be treated as individuals and not as members of a collective.

Tucker Carlson is decidedly not very self-aware or a good reader.

The God of the Hebrew Bible destroyed the world once with the Great Flood, but that same God in the Christian Bible wants to destroy the world again by fire in the book of Revelation. And according to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, all individuals are equally pieces of shit. And doesn’t Tucker treat all Jews as a collective with every podcast?

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