The Mad Professah Lectures

Hemant Mehta points out this story of yet another Christian feeling "their God" compels them to flout the law about praying at public graduation ceremonies.

What [Fox News's Todd] Starnes and [Christian student Marcus] Hamby don’t understand is that there are times when it’s inappropriate to talk all about your personal beliefs regarding crispy, crunchy, delicious Jesus. When you’re at a public school function attended by students and their family members who aren’t all Christian, talking about how correct your faith is isn’t kind or gentle. 

It’s just a combination of ego and martyr-complex. 

(Plus, you *know* the same crowd applauding Hamby would’ve lost their [censored] if anyone gave a speech about Islam or atheism.) 

Just to be clear, what he did wasn’t courageous. Not even close. You don’t need to be brave to make references to Christianity when the majority of the audience already agrees with you. 

It does, however, take maturity to realize that there are others out there who disagree with you — and a graduation ought to be a time to celebrate everyone’s accomplishments instead of opening up about your personal theological views.

That's today's post on godlessness!

Hemant Mehta over at Friendly Atheist looked more closely at the recent Gallup poll about marriage equality that I blogged about yesterday and noticed that he is a member of all of the top five groups which strongly support marriage equality: Liberals (77%), "No religion" (76%), Democrats (70%), 18-34 years old (69%) and Rarely/Never attend church (67%). These are all well-above the level of support given by all American adults to marriage equality: 52%.

Since this is a Godless Wednesday® post I must also point out that the groups most opposed to marriage equality are 55 and older (58% opposed), Protestants (58% opposed), Republicans (66% opposed), Conservatives (67% opposed) and attend church weekly (73% opposed).

I think this explains why House Republicans (who as a group are widely oversampled in at least 3 of these groups) were willing to blow millions of tax payer money on defending DOMA all the way to the Supreme Court and are so virulently opposed to marriage equality.

Watch this video of Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, discussing his views on agnosticism. Basically, Hemant says that people who say that they are agnostic are really just being "wishy-washy" because they have already concluded that there is not enough evidence to determine whether God exists. (They also have concluded that there is not enough evidence to determine whether God does not exist.) But he makes the point that in place of the word "God" in the two previous sentences one could use the words "flying unicorn" and people generally take the default position that flying unicorns don't exist. I used to describe myself as agnostic myself and so I agree with Hemant that many people who are actually pretty convinced God does not exist shy away from using the word "atheist" to describe themselves even though that is probably a more accurate term.

I think the "agnostic/atheist" situation is somewhat similar to the reluctance of women (and men) who believe in complete equal rights based on gender (or sex) but refuse to call themselves "feminist." If you believe in equal rights based on gender (or sex) then you are a feminist! Similarly, if you really think that it is unlikely that God exists, you might as well as call yourself an atheist.

The one aspect of the agnostic/atheist debate which I think Hemant misses is that I think that if you really believe in religious freedom you also have to support people's right to call themselves whatever they want. So if someone wants to call themselves an agnostic they have every right to do so, but it also does not stop other people from pointing out that agnostics are oftentimes really atheists who are just reluctant or afraid or ashamed to claim the word atheist.

And what agnostics often don't understand (and this is what caused me to move over to the atheist side myself) was that the religious side views everyone who doesn't believe in their religion as equally wrong anyway, because in their minds atheism and agnosticism is a distinction without a difference. (One could make the argument that it shouldn't matter what other people think when one is choosing one's own self-definition, but for a lot of people other people's views definitely affects their decision-making.

Regardless of whether you are agnostic or atheist you are still a "Godless heathen" and in my book, that's a good thing!