Morality Watch
As secular humanists, we are interested in ethics and morality. As a result, we have a patriotic duty to make sure that the politicians who call themselves moral are held to a high standard.
The opinions on this web page do not necessarily represent the view of the Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH) Board or Directors.
Atheist soldier says Army punished him
A soldier claimed Wednesday that his promotion was blocked because he had claimed in a lawsuit that the Army was violating his right to be an atheist.
...Maj. Freddy J. Welborn was named in the lawsuit as the officer who prevented Hall from holding a meeting of atheists and non-Christians. It alleges that Welborn threatened to file military charges against Hall and to block his re-enlistment. Welborn has denied the allegations.
The lawsuit alleges that Gates permits a military culture in which officers are encouraged to pressure soldiers to adopt and espouse fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and in which activities by Christian organizations are sanctioned.
Hall's attorneys say Fort Riley has permitted a culture promoting Christianity and anti-Islamic sentiment, including posters quoting conservative columnist Ann Coulter and sale of a book, "A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam," at the post exchange.
Atheists continue to have to make the case that there ARE atheists in foxholes. We don't have to be religious to be deeply patriotic and willing to serve the country.
March 6, 2008
Survey: U.S. religious landscape in flux
The U.S. religious marketplace is volatile, with nearly half of Americans leaving the faith of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a survey finds.
...The religious demographic benefiting the most from this religious churn is those who claim no religious affiliation. People moving into that category outnumber those moving out of it by a three-to-one margin.
The majority of the unaffiliated - 12 percent of the overall population - describe their religion as "nothing in particular," and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.
Atheists often think that there are more of us out there than are willing to admit it. More and more polls show that even though only a small percentage of people, in this case 4%, call themselves atheists overtly, many more are in the "nothing in particular" category when it comes to religion.
February 26, 2008
The real problem with Islam is not the religion, but Saudi Arabia
Michael Hirsh, "The Growing Power of Petro-Islam", Newsweek, Jan. 14, 2008
We need to have an honest discussion about the nature of this strange state [Saudi Arabia], which contains as much as 20 percent of the world's oil reserves. Saudi Arabia has always been a nation run by a family, the vast network of Saud princes who operate in a manner more reminiscent of the Sopranos than a modern, relatively transparent government, says a former senior CIA and FBI official with long experience in the country. The Saud family's legitimacy is built not on law but on an extremist brand of Islam, Wahhabism, in which Osama bin Laden was schooled, much as Tony Soprano's power is based on violence. (Remember when people used to talk about forcing the Saudis to change their radical Islamist views after 9/11? Didn't happen. Instead we invaded somewhat secular Iraq--at least it was next door to the real problem--and found ourselves preoccupied.) Imagine if Tony S. ran much of the world's oil supply and used the vast profits to fund more Bada-Bing fronts for organized crime all over the world? Don't you think governments would band together to stop it? Well, that's not unlike what's happening today, with Saudi Arabia's financing of anti-Western sentiment--but no one's doing anything about it, starting with George Bush. Simply because it's the Saudi government. Our "friends."
Clearly King Abdullah and other senior members of his government are not unfriendly to Washington. But many other Saudis are. This is what some experts have called petro-Islam. The Saudis have used their vast profits to fund not Bada-Bing clubs but Wahhabist mosques around the world, even in the United States. Wahhabists...believe in a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and a pure, self-contained Islamic state. Many also embrace the idea that integration into the West--or American society--is profane. This never represented mainstream Islam. In fact, the creator of Wahhabism, the 18th-century thinker Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was notorious among Muslims of his time for being something of an extremist himself. He vandalized shrines, and he was denounced by many Islamic theologians for his "doctrinal mediocrity and illegitimacy," as the scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb notes in "Islam and Its Discontents." The upshot is that Western consumers are paying hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits to help educate and fund their own potential murderers.
None of this would have happened had it not been for the petro-dollar. The Saudis would have stayed obscure Bedouins and Wahhabism little more than a cult. But because of their oil wealth, the Saudis were able to spread Wahhabism's seed worldwide, making it far more mainstream than it would have been otherwise. As one Egyptian intellectual described it me, "It's as if Jimmy Swaggart had come into hundreds of billions of dollars and taken over most of Christianity."
The biggest problem with Islam is not that we have to co-exist with a billion moderate Muslims. The problem is that Saudi Arabians, including Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, subscribe to an extreme version of Islam that preaches, conquer the infidels or die trying. This is the country that we should be dealing with, not Iraq. Anyone who is frightened of another 9/11 attack should be doing all that they can to reduce American and European dependence on Saudi oil, so that we stop giving huge amounts of money to these radicals.
What Does Mitt Romney Believe?
Jon Meacham writes in Newsweek (Dec. 17, 2007 p. 30-33):
In a telephone interview with Romney on Friday evening, I asked him why he had, to many ears, seemed to fail to reach out to those of no religious belief: "I was struck that you did not explicitly extend the definition of religious liberty to those who believe nothing at all..."
"I don't think I defined religious liberty," Romney replied. "I think it spoke for itself...but of course it includes all, all forms of personal conviction."
"Or lack thereof?"
"Yeah, the lack..." He paused. "But--well, the people who don't have a particular faith have a personal conviction. I said all forms of personal conviction. And personal conviction includes a sense of right and wrong and any host of beliefs someone might have. Obviously in this nation our religious liberty includes the ability to believe or not believe."
Romney also conflated religion and morality, quoting John Adams.... True--but note that Adams spoke of morality and religion as separate things. Acts of charity and grace need not be religiously inspired; many are and many are not. Religious people can be intolerant, cruel, and exclusionary; they can also be broad-minded, kind, and welcoming. The same can be said of people who adhere to no religious faith.
After citing Adams, Romney said: "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." The second part is an ancient theological tradition: without free will faith is not faith but coercion. The first point, however, is arguable, for societies can be secular, free, and successful.... It is a mistake to think that one need be religious to be moral.
Romney's failure to make a noble public stand for the rights of atheists and skeptics is tactically understandable if intellectually disappointing.
Why isn't everyone a humanist?
Joyce Carol Oates answers (The Humanist magazine, Nov./Dec. 2007):
Q) Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
A) Homo Sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
For earlier entries into the Morality Watch, click here.
The opinions on this web page do not necessarily represent the view of the Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH) Board or Directors.
Have any suggestions or comments? Send them to
info @ bsh.wash.org; or WASH, attn: web page, P.O. Box 198, Abingdon, MD 21009.