I have spent the last few days putting my thoughts to digital paper but they weren’t really my thoughts. They were thoughts that I only think are mine but really have come about from reading Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers, A History of American Secularism. In my first post on the matter I mentioned how profoundly this book has changed my view. How I feel to some extent a sense of connection with the past.

I liken it very loosely* to what I can imagine perhaps a homosexual in America might feel and may I be so bold as to draw a comparison between FreeThought and Homosexual Rights. The first step in the acceptance of homosexuals was the acknowledgement that “they” exist and that there is a community of them. I suppose step 2 was try not to get killed but then came step 3 begin to discover a shared history. There hasn’t been much of history for the GLBT community to draw on, they sort of sprang out of nowhere as you might be led to believe. Of couse, it’s becoming more and more apparent that there is an extensive “gay history” however it hasn’t been very pleasant and we’ll never know the full extent to which the homosexual community has always been around.

I suppose this is the natural evolution, if you will, of all groups as they struggle for identity.

This brings us to the main point of this article, the Future of FreeThought. What does tomorrow or even 5 years bring. Maybe we should be saying to ourselves, “Forget about the future. What does the present look like?”

Where we stand today

There are plenty of very good reasons to be pessimistic about the future of FreeThought considering the last 20 years in one sense hasn’t been that great. We’ve seen the ascendancy of the Religious Right during the 70’s through such organizations as Falwell’s Moral Majority and their ability to shape the political landscape of today (not to mention their power within the Republican party out of proportion to their numbers). The 80’s brought us the almost laughable Satanic Panic. The 90’s brought us the Republican Revolution and the rise of the Christian Coalition led by Ralph Reed. The 21st century was kicked off with a bang, specifically 4 bangs on 9/11. An event that should have led to soul-searching within religious circles on the power of faith and that without some kind of check or measure like reason and evidence all ideology particularly religious ideology can lead to some of the greatest atrocities of mankind. Instead, in America, the various Christian sects circled the wagons and drew Us vs. Them distinctions while the liberal left called Islam the Religion of Peace and tried to categorize the 19 young men as fundamentalists or extremists. No doubt they don’t represent the mainstream muslim but there are some very basic questions that are not being asked.

Today secularists and skeptics, atheists and agnostics face some of the same recurring issues that have cropped over the decades, nay, centuries. That thing called Intelligent Design (AKA warmed-over creationism) has been making inroads or at least the strategy has changed again to “academic freedom” bills. The broad support for faith-based initiatives and school vouchers is a reincarnated version of the very same kind of bill that was working it’s way through the Virginia Assembly that attempted to get the state of Virginia to fund religious education. The very thing that Madison and Jefferson worked vigorously to oppose and many evangelical groups of the day also opposed.

Susan Jacoby begins the final chapter of her book with a recent speech given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia [full text here],

… the real underpinnings of Scalia’s support for the death penalty are to be found not in constitutional law but in the justice’s religious convictions. He believes that the state derives its power not from the consent of the governed - “We, the People,” as the [Constitution] plainly states - but from God. God has the power of life and death, and therefore lawful governments also have the right to exact the ultimate penalty. Democracy, with its pernicous idea that citizens are the ultimate arbiters of public policy, is responsible for the rise of opposition to the death penalty in the twentieth century. “Few doubted the morality of the death penalty in the age that believed in the divine right of kings,” Scalia noted in his speech. He would have been just as accurate had he pointed out that most subjects in absolute monarchies also supported the right of kings to torture and to impose the death penalty by drawing and quartering. To bolster his argument, Scalia turned to the perennial favorite of conservative politicians the evangelist Paul: [quotes Romans 13:1-4]

And this is from a Supreme Court justice. What happens when abortion makes it’s way to the SCOTUS? I wonder what a devout Catholic will make his decision based on, clearly not case law or prior precedent or any other impartial manner. I wouldn’t doubt if he quotes Psalms 139:13-16 in his opinion.

Now all of that is kind of a drag and I’m generally an optimistic person.

A Plan for the Future

If you are looking for me to start making predictions of what will happen in the future you can stop reading now. I don’t know and neither does anybody else but I do have some ideas about what we can begin to build today.

1) Identify that non-believers exist, acknowledge that you exist

• A recent Pew Study shows that approximately 10.3% of the U.S. population identifies itself as either atheist, agnostic or secular-unaffiliated, there’s an additional 5-6% of the U.S. population that is religious-unaffiliated, maybe they just need to be told it’s OK to not believe. 
• Read that again 10% (that’s about 30 million people). We more than exist, we are significant chunk of the population.

2) Recognize that you have a history

• I hope the last 3 posts have given you a taste of the extremely rich history that secular and free thought have in America. If you don’t know about the last 3 posts here they are:

1. Revolutionary FreeThought
2. The Golden Age of FreeThought
3. FreeThought in the 20th Century

3) Get involved

• Join a group or start one. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, not exactly a liberal bastion by any stretch. We have a group, you can find us here, freethoughtfortwayne.org. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in starting your own.
• Groups like CFI On Campus provide excellent resources for starting college campus groups.
• Write letters to the editor, attend speeches and conferences promoting secular thought, scientific literacy and freethought.
• Write your story, start a blog, write a book. We don’t live in an age anymore where you have to jump through hoops and sell your soul to get published anymore. You can self-publish. Every piece of literature out there adds to the growing number of freethought voices.

4) Begin Building Bridges

• Instead of fighting or resisting religious groups, we should be defining where we have common ground. I suppose this goes back to that old adage, “The frontiers that trade won’t cross, armies will”, or something like that. If we won’t engage with religious groups we will only ever exchange volleys and that won’t get us anywhere
• I’ve said it before and I say it again, we really should promote advocacy for secular government within the religious community.

Let’s do what we can to change the tone and tenor of the nation. If you are unhappy about the invasion of religion into every nook and cranny of our political discourse then speak up. Write your congressman, yours can’t be any worse than mine, Mark Souder (R) - 3rd Dist. IN. He or she works for you, remember that.

I would be interested in your comments. AM I missing something? Am I too optimistic?

* Of course, I’m a heterosexual, middle-class white guy, so what do I really know about being gay or even oppressed for that matter. Like I said “very loosely” based on the recent history of homosexuals.

This is the 3rd in a series of posts exploring the Past, Present and Future of FreeThought. In this installment I would like to discuss how poorly FreeThought faired in the early parts of the 20th century but I promise to end on a high note. The primary focus will be from the turn of the century to the about the 70’s.

Comstock Laws, Contraception and Catholics

To understand the problems that eventually overwhelmed FreeThought in the first half of the 20th century we must first start with the enacting of the Comstock Laws of 1870’s. These laws essentially allowed the federal government the right to inspect and seize anything moving through the U.S. Postal service deemed “obscene” as determined by the local postmaster. Those things that were deemed obscene were anything from “diatribes against marriage to advertisements for veneral disease remedies”. Ingersoll himself spoke against the government being in the business of censoring and ultimately defining what was obscene.

Until the early 20th century the Catholic church held very little sway and was still considered a suspicious minority religion. However despite their small numbers the Catholic church actively began to crusade against public (and therefore secular and godless) education and contraception. Margaret Sanger, the inventor of the term birth control and it’s biggest crusader was ultimately arrested in New York City at the prompting of the local Catholic clergy. While opposition of contraception didn’t seem to win the Catholics any Protestant fans their eventual embrace of some of the most virulent, anti-communism would finally assuage the mainstream Protestant fears.

Bolshevism and the Red Scare

As the dawn of the Great War approached many freethinkers were imprisoned for sedition (such as Eugene Debs, a socialist, vocal opponent of the America’s entry into the Great War and an Indiana State Representative). After the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution created a backlash against those that were perceived as godless and therefore un-American. Mainstream Protestantism began to link bolshevism and eventually communism with evolution much like the Catholic church linked communism and atheism. While true the Bolsheviks ostensibly embraced atheism it didn’t prevent them from replacing the State as the new religion. This of course didn’t stop the link from being made.

During the decades preceding the second World War, 2 Catholic personalities emerged on the national stage, Charles Coughlin and Fulton Sheen. Charles Coughlin was,

… dubbed “the father of hate radio” by a recent biographer, was destined to rise no higher in the church than the priesthood: his early populist message of Christian justice for the working man turned in the thirties into an anti-New Deal, pro-Nazi, and anti-Semitic - as well as anticommunist - platform. Coughlin’s diatribes were tolerated by Vatican officials and encouraged by his bishop for much of the thirties, but he was finally muzzled by an embarrassed hierarchy after Pearl Harbor.

Fulton Sheen on the other hand was an unblemished darling of the church hierarchy. His Catholic Hour radio show was broadcast by 106 radio stations throughout the 1940’s to eventually become a television star in the 1950’s with his show, Life is Worth Living, reach an estimated 5.5 million viewers. There is no doubt Sheen was virulently anticommunist as Coughlin even going so far as to advocate for spying on school teachers who might celebrate May Day (a socialist holiday, and one shared by labor unions). A close friend of J. Edgar Hoover, that bastion of free speech, Sheen would often get his personal friends appointed to what would ultimately become the FBI.

What does all of this mean for freethought in the first half of the 20th century? Nothing good. Freethinkers were more often labeled socialist (which many were) or communists. In general, an unpleasant period in freethought history.

Let the good times roll

I will end this section on a high note before I delve into my opinions on the Future of FreeThought. A number of important court cases would be decided in the mid-century. Everson v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum v. Illinois (194  would all but prevent public funds (even indirectly) from being used for religious instruction. The McCollum case would directly challenge “released time” when students would be released during the school day to receive religious instruction from local religious groups. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) which desegregated schools. Engel v. Vitale (1962) found that even non-denominational school prayer was unconstitutional. Roe v. Wade (1973) which protected a woman’s right to have an abortion.

Within the political arena a Catholic would be elected president and give a speech clearly stating that, “I do not speak for my church on public matters - and the church does not speak for me”. A clear difference that was lost on Mitt Romney. Of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would finally pass The Congress.

I won’t detail the activities of secularist involved in the struggle for civil rights, such as, Andrew Goodman Michael Schwerner and James Chaney (who were eventually killed by racist shitbags), Stanley Levison and W.E.B. Du Bois. And modern day feminism, such as, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. I will simply assume you know all about it

More in this series:

• Revolutionary FreeThought
• The Golden Age of FreeThought
• FreeThought in the 20th Century (You Are Here)
• The Future of FreeThought

In my continuing series on the history of freethought and secularism in America I would like to spend a little time focusing on the “Golden Age of FreeThought”. It’s called by the author of Freethinkers, A History of American Secularism, Susan Jacoby, the Golden Age for good reason. During the period following the Civil War it was perhaps the most open period in American history to disagree with religious authority and even mock the more irrational aspects of religion. This openness wasn’t nearly as utopian as it may sound.

Unbelief during the Civil War

Perhaps the most telling comments about the status of secular thought during the 19th century comes from the following passage of Susan Jacoby’s book,

Today’s Christian conservatives frequently use the slogan “let’s put God back into the Constitution,” thereby implying that “secular humanists” have managed to overturn what was originally intended to be a marriage of church and state. Nineteenth-century clerics knew better and were honest about their desire to reverse what they regarded as the founders’ erroneous decision to separate church and state.

The late nineteenth-century was merely a foreshadowing of the kinds of vitriol that would be poured out on our elected leaders in recent decades. “In God We Trust” was first engraved onto our currency during the end of the Civil War and was soon made the butt of a number of jokes, such as “In gold we trust” during the debates surrounding the removal of U.S. currency from the gold standard. 

Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most devout Christians ever to be elected president, attempted in 1907 to dispense with the motto precisely because of the sacrilegious puns. He succeeded only in arousing a storm of criticism from ministers who had previously been among his strongest supporters. Roosevelt, who had dubbed Paine a “filthy little atheist,” was himself called an infidel for his attempt to remove God from American money.” 

Ah, the irony is overwhelming.

The Great Agnostic

Much as Thomas Paine was perhaps the most reviled infidel of his time, Robert Green Ingersoll was much admired and called the Great Agnostic. Ingersoll wrote many pamphlets during his time (c. 1870-1899), including the Gods and Other Lectures and Some mistakes of Moses.

Unlike today, the American people often went to see speakers give lectures. In fact, you could make quite a living going on the lecture circuit. Ingersoll was an extremely popular speaker with many connections to the Republican party of the day. In many of his talks he did not pull any punches in his ridicule of religious belief and social issues such as slavery and women’s rights.

From the Gods and other lectures, after quoting Deuteronomy chapter 20 from the Old Testament detailing the slaughter of men and the… uh… acquisition of the women,

Is it possible for man to conceive of anything more perfectly infamous? Can you believe that such directions were given by any being except an infinite fiend? Remember that the army receiving these instructions was one of invasion. Peace was offered upon condition that the people submitting should be the slaves of the invader; but if any should have the courage to defend their homes, to fight for the love of wife and child, then the word was to spare none - not even the prattling, dimpled babe.

And we are called upon to worship such a god; to get upon our knees and tell him that he is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that he is love.

…

The book, called the bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!

Reading Ingersoll is like reading Dawkins or particularly Hitchens. In fact, I dare say The God Delusion and god is not great are modern day versions of the very lectures that Ingersoll was so famously recognized for and the Four Horseman are so roundly criticized for.

FreeThought Activism

I don’t want to make it sound like the late-nineteenth century was a free and unfettered time to be a freethinker. In fact, the roots of what would ultimately become the “red scare” and much of the McCarthy-ist persecution was beginning to take root at this time particularly during the turn of the century. I will wait to delve into those issues with the next post, FreeThought in the 20th Century.

Among perhaps one of the most astounding things of the mid to late-1800’s was the prevalence of Freethought literature, newspapers and pamphlet printing organizations. Throughout the 1800’s FreeThought periodicals began popping up everywhere, the most famous of the bunch would be D.M. and Mary Bennett’s Truth Seeker. Some of the other periodicals were the Boston Investigator, the Blue Grass Blade, the Free-Thought Ideal and Free-Thought Vindicator, and my personal favorite the Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. Of course, like all “movements” they are rarely centralized and cooridinated as evidenced by the Iconoclast of Austin, Texas run by William Cowper Brann, a strident racist who was ultimately shot in the back by an enraged Baptist. The diversity of thought among those who wore the FreeThought banner was loosely held together by the almost universal opposition to organized religion and their support for a clear separation of church and state.

During this time period the roots of feminism were planted beginning with attempts to gain women the right to vote and the dissemination of information regarding contraception. There are so many famous figures from the women’s rights movement who came to fame during this time period, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and Ernestine L. Rose.

There are so many things that happened during this time period that I have only barely scratched the surface. I only glossed over Ingersoll’s life and almost the entirety of the women’s suffrage movement and spoke nothing about the emancipation of the slaves and Abraham Lincoln’s beliefs. I guess you’ll just have to read the book

More in this series:

• Revolutionary FreeThought
• The Golden Age of FreeThought (You Are Here)
• FreeThought in the 20th Century
• The Future of FreeThought

I have recently finished reading Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It is in my opinion an essential read in understanding the history of FreeThought and Secularism in America. I have re-read a number of sections and followed up on other articles and a number of historical points.

It’s hard for me to understate what an enormous impact this book has made in my understanding of freethought and secularism. I’ve had bits and pieces before, like the secular roots of the American Constitution, Robert Ingersoll and the role of many humanists and secularists during abolition, women’s suffrage and the early civil rights movement. But I’ve never had these pieces woven together into a cohesive history.

I’m so impressed I’ve decided to write a 4-part post on this one book alone. I won’t make any one post too lengthy however it looks like the book and the history of secularism in America could be broken into 4 rough periods. The first is the remaining portion of this post, Revolutionary FreeThought (c. 1776-1861)*, specifically the role that secular thought played in the founding of America, the way minority religious sects embraced secularism and the early foundations of freethought activism in the form of abolition and feminism.

I have posted in the past regarding the secular and specifically non-Christian origins of the American Constitution however this book spends only a small portion of the first chapter talking about the beliefs of Jefferson, Adams, Madison and other Founding Fathers. Instead, Jacoby focuses on the debate that raged around the wording of the Constitution and how any mention of any God was a strong point of contention among religious clerics at the time..

Secular Thought During the Revolution

During the formation of this country with rare exception each State had an official and established state church. And in some of those states you had to take an oath supporting that church in order to hold public office, elected or appointed. The Founders knew that if there was going to be strong and unified Federal government then religious tests for office would have to be eliminated and hence the following line shows up in Article 6 of the Constitution

…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States

To further extend the clear fear that the Founding Fathers, particularly Jefferson and Madison, had of sectarian strife within the new nation, they clearly infused the American Constitution with the same philosophy that embodied Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom. Madison conveyed his views on the dilemma posed by sectarian differences (let alone the pluralistic society we live in today) to the Virginia Assembly to proposed funding of religious schooling

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? 

Thomas Paine

Perhaps the most notable Freethinker during this revolutionary period was Thomas Paine. A man that contributed directly to the people’s support of the American Revolution to only be reviled as the Arch-Infidel upon his return from imprisonment in France. Of course, the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, the former a support for the American Revolution and the latter a support for the French Revolution and a critique of hereditary rule, was looked upon quite differntly after publishing The Age of Reason.

The Age of Reason was a scathing critique of many of the Biblical doctrines at the time. He soundly rejected divine revelation and miracles. He wholesale discounted all supernatural aspects of the Bible, Old and New Testament alike. He puts forth not a disbelief in God, despite the accusations of atheist at the time, but a belief in a deistic God. One who could be known through Nature’s Laws.

Religious Support of Secular Government

The most notable subplot, if you will, during this period was the role that early Evangelicals played in supporting the secular nature of government. As you can imagine some of the most outspoken critics of the Constitution at the time came from established, state-sponsored Christian denominations, such as The Episcopal Church (official church of Virginia) or to Protestantism in general. Catholics in America at the time were highly distrusted due to the perceived dual obligations to the papacy and to the civil governments. For example, Massachusetts only allowed Catholics to hold office if they renounced the papacy’s authority in all matters civil. New York, ironically, allowed Jews the right to hold office but not Catholics.

In the previously mentioned debate in Virginia regarding special assessments to fund private, religious education it was the minority religious sects, such as, the Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians who opposed the special assessments and ultimately would support Virginia’s religious freedom act.

It’s not at all surprising although ironic that the early roots of the Evangelicals around today would fight so strongly to oppose religious language only to turn around in the 20th century to fight to have it included. It only goes to show that the Founding Fathers were right to fear the mixing of religious and political power. Because yesterday it was the Episcopal Church and today it’s the Baptists.

I have also posted over on FreeThought Fort Wayne’s blog about a need to cultivate religious advocacy of secularism in America. I now have a better understanding that I wasn’t proposing anything new and that there is a history of support that needs to resurface

• Revolutionary FreeThought (You Are Here)
• The Golden Age of FreeThought
• FreeThought in the 20th Century
• The Future of FreeThought

* I know the timelines don’t have “clean” demarcation but it helps to give an idea of the time periods involved.

I just finished doing 3 experiments from the book, How to fossilize your hamster. All of the experiments we did are from the book. We made a bomb with baking soda and vinegar, by the way, use a small ziplock bag, the large ones are too big. We did the Diet Coke and Mentos experiments. We also made slime from corn starch and water.

These were very easy to do and very fun as well. The book is worth the read even if you don’t do any of the experiments in the book. The author, Mick O’Hare from the New Scientist magazine, does an excellent job of laying out the experiment and the science behind what you are seeing. The book is sprinkled with just the right amount of humor to keep you chuckling to yourself.

Ha! Richard Dawkins just put out an awesom parody of Expelled called Sexpelled.

Also, SciAm has a very brief but perfect article on the Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know.

My favorite is Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust. Read the article because you have no idea how badly they selectively quoted Darwin, to the point of actually making Darwin say the exact opposite of what he wrote. If Darwin were alive today I would think he would have a basis for a lawsuit.

I would like to first congratulate the pope on finally acknowledging in the strongest language possible that the sex abuse by catholic priests was wrong and that it is completely incompatible with catholicism. Sad that it even has to be said but important that he said.

“I am deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible so this cannot happen again in the future,”…

“We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry,” Benedict said, speaking in English. “It is more important to have good priests than many priests. We will do everything possible to heal this wound.”

Pedophilia is “absolutely incompatible” with the priesthood,” Benedict said.

About freakin’ time. It only took you 7 years after publicly being embarrassed about it. Of course, like any closed group they won’t say what they are doing to stop it, what they are doing to existing priests (read the Philadelphia Grand Jury report if you can stomach it) but a strong condemnation is important. The only complaint (well…) I have is the following comment,

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church [in] general and for me personally that this could happen,” Benedict said. “It is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betray in this way their mission … to these children.”

Poor pope and his suffering [please read with as much derision and condescension as possible). Try being a 12 year old boy forced to wear a diaper and chained in a priests bedroom. You Douche Bag!!!

Cool little interview of Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from the AV club.

And hence the reason I love Mythbusters.

AVC: You guys don’t have any formal scientific training, but you generally seem to follow scientific methods and procedures when you’re testing myths. To what degree are you attempting to scientifically prove something, vs. just indulging your own curiosity?

JH: If it turns out that we’re doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that’s the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we’re not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science. We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources—it’s a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so. That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, that makes what we’re experiencing a little bit more accessible to the viewers. If we actually knew what we were doing ahead of time, it would just be like talking at you, instead of experiencing the situation with you.

AS: We don’t necessarily stand by our faults every time, but we will always stand by our methodologies and ethos. And the methodology is much more important to us. Given the restrictions of television, we understand why our results might not be unassailable, but whenever, for instance, on the Discovery Channel online message boards, people pipe in and say we’re idiots and we don’t know what we’re doing and we got something totally wrong, interestingly, the people who jump most vigorously to our defense are working scientists. These are people from everywhere, from Lawrence Livermore and JPL and Sandia National Labs, the FBI, all over the place, real scientists who see what we’re doing, and they consistently thank us. “I agree your results aren’t always right,” they’ll say, “but your methods are clearly showing that science is a re-creative process, and it’s an interesting process because it’s messy, and no other shows show that.”

I know this is old news but man it’s funny, http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38575

Money quote,

“We now believe that the [Law of Difficulty] theorem is 99.999% likely to be true, after applying these incredibly complex statistical techniques that gave me a splitting headache,” Farian said. “A theorem is like a theory, but, I don’t know, it’s different.”

Here’s an interesting YouTube video with some statistics regarding atheism. It’s an interesting video however there are not enough citations of where these statistics came from. There is one statistics that 16% of Americans are atheists and references a Pew study, hmmm…. that number I believe a) significantly diverges from the 4%-5% that I believe is generally agreed upon (and I discussed on my personal blog), and b) that number seems to neatly correlate with this Pew study’s categorization of the number of U.S. citizens that are “Unaffiliated” with any particular religion, not necessarily that they are atheist/agnostic. Ah well, you know what they say about statistics…

via FriendlyAtheist