Homosexuality, Equality and Secular Humanism

This weekend New York passed the Marriage Equality Act which allows gender neutral marriages for same sex/opposite sex couples as well as protects religious organizations from penalty for refusing to sanctify or recognize a marriage that contradicts their religious beliefs.

This is yet another landmark in the ongoing homosexual civil rights issue. The New York Times published several touching stories about middle aged, life long partners finally being able to have their relationship validated by the state. For the first time hundreds of American families in New York are being treated equally.

Well, not completely equally.

Because of the Defense of Marriage Act, same-sex marriages are not recognized by the federal government. What does this mean? This means that gay and lesbian spouses are being explicitly denied the roughly 1,049 federal protection laws that all heterosexual spouses enjoy. In addition DOMA says that no state is obligated to recognize a same-sex marriage. This means that whatever state rights exist to protect a same-sex marriage (this varies by state) become completely obsolete as soon as you leave the state.

1. Federal Rights.

Of the 1,049 federal laws that homosexuals are being denied the highest of these are in the categories of Federal Civilian and Military Service Benefits (275), Taxation (179), Social Security (82) and Employment Benefits (67).

There are all kinds of horrific stories that bear out the consequences of being denied these rights. Imagine that your lover of 30 years is hit by a car on a late night stroll. Without marital status you may be legally prohibited from riding in the ambulance, visiting in the hospital, making decisions for your partner's medical treatment, and even honoring their funeral wishes. Why? Because you are technically a legal stranger.

You are not entitled to exemption on Inheritance or Death taxes. You are not entitled to employee benefits such as medical leave to care for a spouse or bereavement. You are not given a break on property tax in the event of your partner's death which, in most cases, means that you lose your home because you can no longer afford it.

You are not entitled to social security or VA pensions should your partner die. These are rights that even divorced heterosexual couples have, folks.

If you are the non-biological parent of a same-sex partnership and your partner dies you have no federal rights that validate or protect your relationship with your child.

Until very recently if you were a homosexual serving in the military you couldn't even list your partner as an emergency contact for fear of being discharged, let alone the VA benefits offered to every other heterosexual couple. One tragic story involves a lesbian Air Force Captain. A few weeks before deployment her partner of 14 years was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. When she told her superiors why she could not be deployed she was immediately discharged. Even when her partner died and she brought a death certificate to the appeals for her unfair discharge she was still accused of using the event to get out of her military obligations.

Every right I have listed (maybe 15 out of the 1,049) are unequivocally given to heterosexual marriages. This is clearly not equality.

2. State Rights.

There are about 300 state rights that come with marriage. Even the most progressive states like California and New York do not offer these rights fully to civil unions. For an example of how important this is consider that if you study the California Code with regard to marriage, you'll get 4,000 hits where spousal status makes a difference.

The important thing to know about State rights is that, because of DOMA, state rights do not apply when you leave the state. This means that the couples who married this weekend in NYC are not necessarily protected by the laws of marriage in ANY OTHER STATE.

Bill and Brad have been together for 24 years. They finally got married this weekend in New York City and are taking a cross country road trip for their honeymoon. In Utah they are hit by a drunk driver and Bill is taken to the hospital in a devastating coma. Brad, 

who has no federal or state rights in Utah as a legal spouse, is treated as a legal stranger and has no authority to decide on Bill's medical treatment. And so on, and so forth.

Folks, this is not equality. This isn't even CLOSE to equality. This is not an appeal for the homosexual community to have "special rights." It is an appeal for "equal rights."

Secular Humanism and the Fight for Equality

It is a fact that the loudest resistance to homosexual equality is the religious right. They continue to use the same dishonest tactics by drawing debunked correlations between the homosexual community and the degeneration of the family. In my essay on Homosexuality and False Victimization I said this:

"Although the American Psychological Association makes it clear that the longstanding consensus of the behavioral and social sciences and the health and mental professions is that homosexuality is a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation, some people still seem to think that it is a mental disorder. Although homosexuality can be observed in nature (lions, pigeons, giraffes, bison, elephants, gulls, bonobos, dragonflies, sheep, dolphin, just to name a few) some people still consider it a dysfunctional CHOICE. Although study after study continues to show that there is an equal level of commitment and relationship satisfaction amongst both gay and straight couples, some people still think that homosexuals are incapable of having healthy and lasting relationships. Although studies show that children raised by same-sex couples are just as mentally healthy as other children, some people still think that homosexuals are not fit parents. Although studies show no correlation between homosexuality and child molestation, some people still consider homosexuals a threat and a danger to children."

I'm not ignoring the many religious folks who are open and accepting of gay rights and marriage equality. There are many fine religious folks out there who I stand arm in arm with on this issue. However, the advancement of the LGBT movement is largely due to increasing secular values.

I recently read an article about Willow Creek Community Church, a huge, trend-setting congregation in Chicago, cutting ties with anti-gay ministries. Churches and mainstream evangelicals are beginning to disassociate with the anti-gay bigotry of Christianity's (not so distant) past.

Why are they doing this? Well, it certainly isn't because they think any differently about homosexuals. Church officials at Willow Creek described the move as a shift in approach rather than a change in belief.

So, they still consider the homosexuals a project. A target with which to inculcate their straightness. The truth is that they want to be culturally relevant. Cultural relevance, these days, is dictated by secular humanism. This is the same thing that happened during the abolition of slavery and the advent of inter-racial marriage. Just like the religious fundamentalists today, the religious right back then believed that God was on their side. A Virginia judge had this to say during the interracial marriage breakthroughs:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Are we seeing a pattern of religious based bigotry here folks? Who are the secular humanists fighting against same-sex marriage? They do not exist.

The war is over. For every enemy of gay rights there will be someone like me ready to fight them with logic, reason, science, rational thought and human compassion. We are growing and we will dismantle their hatred with our wit, our evidence, our free commitment to the values and dignity of human life. We have no rule book. We have our consciences. We have no gods or cosmic authorities telling us who, what, and how to love. We have our hearts and the pervasive drive to fight the suffering of the world.

Which side will you stand on? Will you be apologizing to the world like those who defended slavery and made interracial marriage illegal? Or will you stand with those of us who fight for the inherent dignity of all human beings? 

It's pretty simple. Get on the right side of history.

In Reason,

Clint Wells

Christians Say Interesting Things Part Two: "Pray For Me"

I've been thinking about this prayer thing for years now. I've even written two essays (linked below) using reason and logic to explore the irrationality and ineffectiveness of prayer.

Over the last few months as natural disasters have ripped through the south and the midwest and as I have personally dealt with the death of one of my best friends, I've seen, more than ever it seems, appeals for people to pray for them. During a calamity all of my social networking sites are clogged with people petitioning for prayer.

I simply don't understand it. Even when I was an evangelical Christian devoted to the teaching of the Bible I found it ineffective and slightly embarrassing to ask people to pray for me. As a progressive believer (meaning a believer more or less in touch with observable reality) I had relegated prayer to some abstract form of faith exercising. In my dialogues on the below essay's I've even heard some of you say this very thing. You pray because it changes you in an abstract sense, not because it actually changes reality.

And that brings us to my point. Here are some logical questions I have in response to people using social media to ask for prayers in the wake of an approaching thunder storm:

1. Is your god capricious enough to reserve help simply because not enough people prayed for it?

2. Don't you believe that god is in control of everything? Doesn't this include the very storm on it's way to potentially destroy your life? What is the goal of prayer here? To honor your god's will or to thwart it?

3. How do you explain the fact that there are people in this world who probably pray harder and better than you and who are still susceptible to the same natural disasters as yourself?

One Christian, who is fairly well known as a musician in a successful Christian band, had this to say in response to making it through a storm that others were destroyed by:

"We were *blessed* this line arrived after sunset. Avoided a tornadic outbreak. Feels good to get a reminder of Who is in charge."

I pointed out that this was incredibly offensive to those who were devastated by the storms and, according to this logic, "unblessed" by the Big Man in charge. He responded by saying he didn't consider it offensive to be thankful not to get hit by a tornado.

Do you see the cognitive dualism here, folks? It's like missing a flight that ends up crashing and thanking god for his goodness and his blessings while hundreds of lives were lost and thousands destroyed.

This is nonsense. If you want to pray to gods or to Elvis or to your dead loved ones then by all means, I want you to have the freedom to do that. But when you start publicly petitioning for prayer and thanking your god for sparing you while thousands of others are picking up the pieces then you deserve some social criticism.

Prayer quite obviously is a complete denial of reality. It is the ostrich burying it's head in the sand. It is childish and it is time to grow up, folks. What we need in a time of crisis is human solidarity and tangible resources. We don't need to waste our time praying to an invisible being who, whether that being exists or not, isn't going to do a damn thing for us. We don't need to proliferate wish thinking as a viable method of coping with tragedy.

We must use the tools of reality to face reality. Together.

In reason,

Clint Wells

Praying for Oil to Touchdown Jesus: Counting the Hits and Ignoring the Misses

Prayer, Science and Haiti

Christians Say Interesting Things Part One: Epistemology and Reality

Christians Say Interesting Things Part One: Epistemology and Reality

I was recently followed on twitter by a preacher who runs a twenty-something ministry I won't name here. His website/blog advertises itself as "intellectual/spiritual wanderings from a reform(ing)ed, emerging, gen-X-er..."

That's all fine and good, but what I found particularly interesting was his short twitter bio which simply says:

"I preach the gospel out of an unshakable need for it to be true."

For reasons you may well imagine, this bothers me a great deal. No belief should be held to, espoused, or preached for such a meritless reason as the need you have for it to be true. Reality must be pursued beyond our petty biases and needs.

As an atheist I am often accused of turning away from god because I want to live a particular life of sin, debauchery and hedonism. The idea here is that I may know or suspect that God exists, but it wouldn't flatter my wants and needs and therefore I reject it. Atheism is what I want and therefore it is true to me.

Well, this is partially true and partially false. It's true because, as far as I've read, the god of historical Christianity is a capricious megalomaniac and it would likely be man's worst nightmare if such a god existed. While I am open to any verifiable evidence of the existence of such a god, I am happy that none yet exists. It's false because swallowing the mortality of myself and the ones I love and cherish is a bitter pill indeed. I'd like to believe that somehow I and the ones I love might survive death and that we may live together in communion for a long, long time. I'd like to believe that my body won't decay or that my prostate won't become swollen or that my mind won't weaken. I'd like to believe that the sun will not explode in five billion years destroying Earth and and every living thing on it.

In some dark moments I may even feel the need for these things to be true.

However, this changes nothing about observable reality. Simply needing something to be true does not make it so. Nor does finding current evidence unpalatable make a claim untrue.

I've heard people say, "Well, I simply cannot imagine not existing."

Really? It's actually not that hard. To people in Paris right now, you don't exist. You didn't exist for 14 billion years before you were born. There are a million thought experiments you can do to prove this point.

If you believe in Jesus or Zeus or L. Ron Hubbard or Santa Claus....I honestly don't care. But when you proselytize on the basis that you NEED it to be true...well that's when I get fired up enough to spend ten minutes writing a blog that no one reads.

Booya.

In Reason,

Clint Wells

Religious Logic and Child Sacrifice

This week a woman in Illinois was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for stabbing her six year old daughter to death. When the authorities showed up they found the body in a room with a butcher knife and a picture of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The little girl had been stabbed eleven times in the neck and chest.

Eleven times.

After the mother did this she attempted suicide by slitting her wrists but a neighbor called the cops before she could bleed out. At first her story was that she murdered her daughter in self-defense. However, she later admitted that the real reason was because she feared the little girl was possessed by demons. Allegedly the only evidence for this was a case of sleep walking, an entirely common phenomenon especially in children.

I've written about this elsewhere in an essay called "Religion and Mental Illness" but I feel compelled to reiterate this point because, unfortunately, crazy people are still killing their children because of unfounded beliefs in demons, possession, spirits and gods.

What I simply do not understand is why religious people can call the story of Abraham and Issac a tale of heroic faith and yet share my disgust when a woman stabs her poor child to death. How can these people claim to get their absolute morality from a book containing a story of premeditated child sacrifice and then have any logical coherence when condemning this sort of thing in the modern world.

We both likely agree that this woman is, at best, mentally ill and unfit for society. My question to the Christian is: why do you believe this?

Common Misconceptions Part Five: The Burden of Proof and the Presumption of Atheism

I often wrestle with the idea of debate. My general position is that debating someone privately tends to have little or no value. Most people approach an issue with such intense bias that the likelihood of convincing or persuading them out of their default position is not worth the time or energy spent making good arguments. However, having a debate on a public platform, formal or informal, really can have an intellectual impact on those who are watching while sitting on the fence. When it comes to big issues such as evolution, abortion, religion, or racism I have personally been affected by many avenues of dialogue. Self education, individual debates, public debates, religious literature, critical literature, scientific/philosophical literature, YouTube videos, scientific studies and experience (amongst others) have all helped shape my current worldview.

In my experience, debating theists/creationists is often futile because they simply cannot make their arguments without shadowboxing, willfully or ignorantly confusing claims and terminology, invoking emotionalism, misunderstanding basic science and philosophy, ignoring criticism, drawing unfounded correlations, name calling, unabashed arrogance, false humility, and other disingenuous tactics of argumentation.

For example, let’s consider the burden of proof and the presumption of atheism. The theistic position makes a positive claim (i.e. There IS A god). Atheism is not a positive claim (i.e. There IS NO god) but rather, a rejection of a claim (i.e. I see no good evidence to believe there is a god). Please take note that this is not a semantics issue. No serious atheist claims to KNOW that there is no god. No one is ever called upon to prove a negative. Therefore it is a non sequitur for a theist to ask an atheist to prove their rejection of a claim. The burden of proof rests on the one making a positive claim.

As a thought experiment, try disproving this positive claim: There is an invisible, anthropomorphic guitar that lives in my closet. Only I can hear him and he tells me the future but I am not allowed to disclose the information he gives me. If you don’t believe in him on faith then you will burn in hell for all of eternity. Try disproving that. It should become clear to you in a matter of seconds that not only is it impossible to disprove this, but you are under no philosophical burden TO disprove it. And so it is with any positive supernatural claim, including theism.

Consider the theory of evolution. I believe that evolutionary theory is the best explanation for the diversity of life we see around us. You may rightly ask me to prove this positive claim. If you did, I would point to things like DNA, genetics, the fossil strata, observations of evolution through sexual and environmental selection, fruit fly experiments, transitional fossils, artificial selection, etc. If you proved all of this wrong (congrats you just won a Nobel Prize) then you would STILL have to prove your alternative positive claim. If you believe that evolution is wrong because your version of God made the Universe, then disproving evolution is only half of your burden.

If we should rest under the presumption of theism then which god should we believe in? Zeus, Thor, Jesus, Allah, Poseidon, Ares, or any of the other thousands of god on offer? At some point (Immediately, in my opinion) the presumption of theism crumbles. This is because theism is a positive claim requiring proof and atheism is the default position until compelling evidence is provided.

Common Misconceptions Part One: There Are No Contradictions in the Bible
Common Misconceptions Part Two: Atheists Are Arrogant
Common Misconceptions Part Three: Atheism Is a Religion
Common Misconceptions Part Four: Evolution Caused the Holocaust

Evolution Misconceptions Part One: Evolution Is Just a Theory
Evolution Misconceptions Part Two: Evolution and the Origins of Life

Thoughts About Atheism and Religious Knowledge

Perhaps you've seen all the headlines today describing a Pew Forum which shows that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than believers. The religious community seems to be puzzled by this revelation. As the non-believing community continues to hold the title of largest American minority and as it seems this trend is in no danger of slowing, I think it's crucial to understand the reasons for this new information.

Although it's true that all human beings are born atheists (without gods) it is an unfortunate reality that by the age of five, the most fundamental years of psychological development, most Americans are either indirectly exposed to or directly indoctrinated with religion. Most religions target children for this very reason, at the age when appeals to authority are absolutely imperative for survival. But just like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, there comes a time in a person's life when they must, for themselves, weigh the evidence of certain claims.

The adult atheist in America has a lot to lose by rejecting religious claims. Family ostracism, professional discrimination, the narrowing of social community, etc. Atheists are commonly likened to dogmatic mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin as well as being accused of all base immorality. George Bush Sr. even pronounced the unbelieving community as unpatriotic sub-citizens.

While considering these remarkable sacrifices the atheist must make sure that her decision to reject religious claims is built upon the firm ground of reason. This naturally involves a studious education of the holy books as well as a sober view of how the teachings of these holy books play out in the world around us. For many these observations are so unlikely and scientifically unverifiable that the most reasonable response to the claims of religion is agnosticism. We just don't know. For others of us the claims of religion are so devastatingly irreconcilable that we simply must reject the claims out of conscience.

The Catholic church in the pre-Reformation/pre-printing press era built their empire on the ignorance of the masses. Why was this? I submit it was because they knew that, left to think for themselves, the masses would see enough of these holy books to warrant a safe amount of skepticism about their claims.

A philosopher once said that the only book you need to suggest for someone to convince them that Christianity is not true is the Bible. This is my story and the story of many of my beautiful, unbelieving friends. It doesn't mean that there are not intelligent Christians or that there aren't dumb atheists. It just means that most atheists have weighed the evidence. We know our holy books. We've sat in the pews and read the theology books and paid the tuition fees for seminary.

And as much as it may rub the religious, the evidence indicates that we've taken it a lot more seriously than the believers. That should be a sobering thought. Lots of love and kind thoughts to you all as you continue to investigate the truth in this strange, beautiful world. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of belief, we're in this thing together. I hope this finds you well.

In reason,

Clint Wells

Common Misconceptions Part Four - Darwinian Evolution = The Holocaust (Physical Evidence and Reasoned Logic Vs. Plugging Your Ears)