Atheists are delightfully innocent, if you don't count the gulags and the genocide. They're innocent of logic, of course, and they're innocent of irony. Atheists lack the sense of the ridiculous in themselves, utterly. Richard Dawkins is the archetypal clueless atheist snob, but all polemic atheists share the blindness. They don't see how funny they are.
Ed Brayton was a stand-up comic, before he took up being wrong as an avocation, and he's still funny, not meaning to be.
To wit:
... Hurting the feelings of the irreligious is a crime in this country, Ed.
There's a veritable atheist industry of "I feel ostracized and excluded". Across this great land atheist after atheist after atheist turns to swooning litigious gelatin at the sight of a Christmas creche, or a cross on public land, or a prayer in a graduation ceremony or a football game, or a prayer mural on an auditorium wall.
The police are called, attorneys swarm, organizations whose sole mission is to flame allegations of injured godlessness march to courthouses, and grievously harmed atheists take the witness stand in federal court to recount through tears and shaking sobs the exclusion, ostracism, illegitimacy, otherness, disenfranchisement, and whatnot they suffer by the mere glimpse of the creche/cross/prayer/mural.
Shaken judges hit control-v on their Dells and churn out another batshit 'Alice-in-Wonderland' Establishment Clause ruling ('the plantiff suffered irrevocable harm when she heard the prayer... anything atheists don't like is an Establishment of Religion... the Ku Klux Klan initiation oath is a great basis for case law...') , decry the assault on the wall of separation that protects atheists from dissonance, threaten and fine the Godly assailants, and award fat attorney fees and pain and suffering to the sobbing prayer-victim.
The hurt hurts less with the award to the plantiff of a little "In God We Trust", if you get my meaning.
It's a fraud, Ed. You're right about Poland. Censorship sucks.
So why the double standard, Ed? You thoughtfully point out the injustice of religious people dragging irreligious citizens who express their views into court to answer to fake claims of "hurt feelings" of people who are really censors, not victims.
Why not point out the injustice when atheists use the courts to censor?
Oh, right, I forgot. In the U.S. atheists are just "protecting the Constitution", guarding the "constitutional wall of separation between church and state" that no one can seem to find in the actual Constitution, doing it for the benefit of us all, taking one for the team, keeping us free.
No one believes that crap, not even you, Ed. No one is harmed by a creche or a cross or a prayer. People who use courts to censor other people are money-grubbing publicity whores and bigots demanding judicial imprimatur for their hate.
So show some real love for the First Amendment. It's the charter of our freedom. It protects godless speech, even when we Christians don't like it, and it ought to protect Godly speech, even when you atheists don't like it.
And do try to work on getting a clue, Ed. Your befuddled irony is hysterical, and it's a shame that you can't appreciate it and laugh at it as hard as we do.
Ed Brayton was a stand-up comic, before he took up being wrong as an avocation, and he's still funny, not meaning to be.
To wit:
Another Reason to Love the First Amendment
January 20, 2012 at 9:29 am Ed Brayton
Here’s a very disturbing case out of Poland, where a singer has been fined by the courts for expressing doubt about the validity of the Bible during an interview. Apparently, hurting the feelings of the religious is a crime in that country:
Dorota Rabczewska, a singer who uses the stage name Doda, said in a 2009 interview that she doubted the Bible “because it’s hard to believe in something that was written by someone drunk on wine and smoking some herbs.”
A Warsaw court ordered her Monday to pay a fine of 5,000 zlotys ($1,450) for offending religious feelings.
But it seems they make this weird distinction:
The case comes months after another Polish court let off a death metal performer, Adam Darski, who tore a Bible during a 2007 performance. It deemed his act artistic expression.
So if she’d just put her thoughts into a song, that would be legal; saying it in an interview makes it illegal. Bizarre. And wrong either way. [Emphasis mine]Wait... wait... hot off the presses... A Breaking Story... from the Dissociated Press Newsdesk... Newsflash to Ed:
... Hurting the feelings of the irreligious is a crime in this country, Ed.
There's a veritable atheist industry of "I feel ostracized and excluded". Across this great land atheist after atheist after atheist turns to swooning litigious gelatin at the sight of a Christmas creche, or a cross on public land, or a prayer in a graduation ceremony or a football game, or a prayer mural on an auditorium wall.
The police are called, attorneys swarm, organizations whose sole mission is to flame allegations of injured godlessness march to courthouses, and grievously harmed atheists take the witness stand in federal court to recount through tears and shaking sobs the exclusion, ostracism, illegitimacy, otherness, disenfranchisement, and whatnot they suffer by the mere glimpse of the creche/cross/prayer/mural.
Shaken judges hit control-v on their Dells and churn out another batshit 'Alice-in-Wonderland' Establishment Clause ruling ('the plantiff suffered irrevocable harm when she heard the prayer... anything atheists don't like is an Establishment of Religion... the Ku Klux Klan initiation oath is a great basis for case law...') , decry the assault on the wall of separation that protects atheists from dissonance, threaten and fine the Godly assailants, and award fat attorney fees and pain and suffering to the sobbing prayer-victim.
The hurt hurts less with the award to the plantiff of a little "In God We Trust", if you get my meaning.
It's a fraud, Ed. You're right about Poland. Censorship sucks.
So why the double standard, Ed? You thoughtfully point out the injustice of religious people dragging irreligious citizens who express their views into court to answer to fake claims of "hurt feelings" of people who are really censors, not victims.
Why not point out the injustice when atheists use the courts to censor?
Oh, right, I forgot. In the U.S. atheists are just "protecting the Constitution", guarding the "constitutional wall of separation between church and state" that no one can seem to find in the actual Constitution, doing it for the benefit of us all, taking one for the team, keeping us free.
No one believes that crap, not even you, Ed. No one is harmed by a creche or a cross or a prayer. People who use courts to censor other people are money-grubbing publicity whores and bigots demanding judicial imprimatur for their hate.
So show some real love for the First Amendment. It's the charter of our freedom. It protects godless speech, even when we Christians don't like it, and it ought to protect Godly speech, even when you atheists don't like it.
And do try to work on getting a clue, Ed. Your befuddled irony is hysterical, and it's a shame that you can't appreciate it and laugh at it as hard as we do.
Obviously, Poland is in the wrong for fining this woman for speech. It offends my concept of freedom even if the First Amendment does not apply.
ReplyDeleteBut you're right, it pales in comparison to the whining from atheists in this country. Something is not automatically unconstitutional just because it makes someone feel ostracized. As a matter of fact, I fell ostracized when small children are told they can't talk about Jesus at school.
The First Amendment protects everyone's right to believe as they wish and to express those beliefs. It does not protect anyone's right to live in a religion-free zone. Those people need to get over their phobia and join the rest of society.
Ben
It's exceeding strange that, despite claims that Christianity is just fantasy and mythology, exposure to Christian artifacts has greater juridical import than exposure to "secondhand" smoke. Despite claims that God, the ultimate source of the discomfort and risk, "does not exist".
ReplyDeleteAnd the presence of a rosary, or the sound of a murmured prayer has a more palpable power to move the legions of attorneys and courts than, say, those electromagnetic emissions the readers of The New Yorker worry so much about. The emf lawsuits have never gotten much traction in court. And they say the effects of prayer are imaginary. :-)
Off-topic, but exceeding cool....
ReplyDeleteHere's how a chess Grandmaster thinks:
Yes, maybe Yanukovych erred by not using chemical weapons on [Kiev’s Independence Square]. Then he could have given them to Obama and Kerry to stay in power.
--- Garry Kasparov
I doubt very much that Ed Brayton loves the First Amendment. He probably hasn't even read it. He's in love with some very poorly decided legal cases, not with the First Amendment.
ReplyDeleteEveryone has the right to believe as they wish and to practice their religion. That applies even if people think that the practice of your religion is mean, as is the case with the constant cake battles that homosexuals are waging against Christian bakers.
It is also an atheist's right to be an atheist. Nowhere in this country is that right in jeopardy, despite their hysterical shrieking.
JQ
And Poland is wrong, wrong, wrong.
ReplyDeleteJQ
Off topic.
ReplyDeleteAt present I'm applying for Teaching jobs in Russia (Primary).
Does anyone have any relevant experience they could share?
Thanks in advance,
JR
There plainly is a difference, though seemingly lost on Egnor in this post, between efforts to enforce blasphemy laws and the like, which restrict the free speech of individuals, and efforts to enforce the Constitutions’ constraint against the government promoting religion.
ReplyDeleteA word should be added about the common canard that enforcing the Constitution is all about people easily offended. We’re not talking about the freedom of individuals to say or do something others find offensive; each of us has that freedom. We’re talking about the government weighing in to promote religion. Under our Constitution, our government has no business doing that--REGARDLESS of whether anyone is offended. While this is primarily a constitutional point, it is one that conservatives--small government conservatives--should appreciate from a political standpoint as well.
While the First Amendment thus constrains government from promoting (or opposing) religion without regard to whether anyone is offended, a court may address the issue only in a suit by someone with "standing" (sufficient personal stake in a matter) to bring suit; in order to show such standing, a litigant may allege he is offended or otherwise harmed by the government's failure to follow the law; the question whether someone has standing to sue is entirely separate from the question whether the government has violated the Constitution.
Indeap:
DeleteThe Constitution does not prohibit the government from "promoting" religion. The Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause both promote religion by prohibiting federal regulation of religion. It is specifically the censorship that you are promoting that the Constitution actually prohibits.
At the time of the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, many states had established religions, which were, and remain, entirely constitutional. The purpose of the Establishment Clause was to prohibit federal interference with state Establishments and with the right of the people to exercise religious belief without federal interference.
The argument (which you censors always assert at this point in the debate) that the 14th Amendment incorporates the Establishment Clause to the states is nonsense. The Establishment Clause denies the federal government the option to exercise regulation of religion over the states-- it is an anti-incorporation clause, therefore the 14th amendment can't incorporate an anti-incorporation clause in the First Amendment.
You are just an anti-Christian bigot, Indeap, using government force to suppress the faith you hate. Nothing new.
"therefore the 14th amendment can't incorporate an anti-incorporation clause in the First Amendment" - why Egnor flunked constitutional law in college. The professor must have busted a gut over that kind of analysis.
DeleteI understand that you harbor such a personal belief about the meanings of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The courts, of course, have long since decided that the law is otherwise.
ReplyDeleteGiven that, we are now talking about the difference between enforcing a law prohibiting individuals from saying or doing something offensive to those of certain religions and enforcing a law that prohibits government from taking sides in religious matters. My point, still unaddressed by you, is that "offense" is integral to the former, but not the latter, law.
OH brother.
ReplyDeleteWho in North america denies people are punished or corrected or warned if they hurt the feelings of some identity???
it shows those who most demand speech and thought control dON'T want everything controled especially what they don't care about.
It all shows the same equation.
who decides what is said or thought is decided by establishments and there is no existing social contract about freedoms of free men to think and say what they want .
Everyone can complain about what people say but today its not mere complaining but action and spirit to SILENCE people or else.
North America must take back our ancient rights and freedoms from the upper classes or anyone presuming to rule us.
if things are wrong that people say then society will handle and not those in power in society.
We can get along but someone wants to bring conclusions to what we think and say.
They are invaders to our civilization. they are dominators.
they show power so we must fight them carefully and make a better social contract.
If I may say so.
hope you don't handle a scalpel as bad as you try to respond.
ReplyDeletehttp://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2014/07/08/michael-egnor-doesnt-understand-analogy/