tragic_pizza

What?

Other than that, very good. You guys seem to have a thing for eating entrails all of a sudden. I don't get it. It changes an otherwise-respectable rebuttal into hyperbolic finger-pointing.

Buffman

Geez, Ron. Both you and Bokonon make the same claim about Thomas Paine. Do you guys know something I missed?


My 4 Jul reply to Bokonon and to you)

Great letter! Just one item that I noticed that could do with further research. Thomas Paine was not an Atheist. He, too, was a Deist.
"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life." (Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason" Part First, para #3)

(Added)

Worth reading.

<a href="http://www.deism.com/paine_essay08.htm" target="_blank">http://www.deism.com/paine_essay08.htm</a>

Oresta

Ron,
I hope you sent your love letter on to Rochelle!

Ron Garrett

We have sanitized the mountain god Ya and his cult to the point where we step lightly past such interesting aspects as burning animal entrails and fat on the altar because the god want these portions for himself. We step lightly past the xenophobia that is part and parcel of Judaism and nice little stories of murering women and children in the name of the god (Numbers 31), and we could go on and on. Most of these theist dolts don't even know the very most basic things about their cult, that if revealed to them regarding another cult would invoke much disgust and finger-wagging about barbarism and superstition.

And again TP, I'm not running for office here or trying to score points in a debate. But I am through playing nice with the intellectually attenuated who feel god-authorized to tell me to shut my hole and conform to their delusion.

Ron Garrett

Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press sent me a reply:

My response:

Hi Rochelle:

I was surprised to get a reply, since I assumed you get a ton of mail from all directions on this. Thanks very much for taking the time.

You've probably already heard this, but in case you haven't:

You make the common apologetic mistake of quoting "endowed by their creator with certain inaleinable rights", which in fact comes from the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies in America. It is not a part of the law of our republic and never has been. It was a "Dear John" letter to King George. It was not an act of the then not yet existent United States. The founding document of the United States of America is the Constitution, which is law to this day, and states in the preamble:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The people, not the people under any god. In fact, since your very ability to work as a journalist is based in the First Amendment, I would think you would know that no mention whatever of any deity, creator or divine anything is contained in the founding document of our nation, the Constitution of the United States of America. I suspect you do know that. Since that amendment also specifically prohibits Congress from establishing religion, not a church, but religion, and since Judeo-Christian Monotheism is a religion, when Congress made a law placing a Catholic sponsored "under God" into the oath, it made a law that indeed established a religious pronouncement of monotheism as part of a mandatory loyalty oath. The court's legal analysis, however much theists may hate it, was perfect legal reasoning as nearly all but the lawyers of the 700 Club agree.

It is really utterly disingenuous of you or anyone to pretend that this change in the pledge was not intended and understood as an establishment of Judeo-Christian religion, and you in fact acknowledged this tacitly when you resorted to majority rule as a defense.

Majorities change all the time. The Constitution does not. The majorities of the southern states would have kept the members of your race in the fields picking cotton till the end of time. Happily, the Constitution does not simply say, "The majority shall do as they please to whomever they choose." The time will come when Christians are not a majority in this country, at which time the Constitution will prevent folks like me, those who see religion as a pox on humanity, from outlawing or regulating your religious life, or making pledges of positive materialism part of your children's daily public school ritual.

This nation functioned quite well for 178 years without "under god" in a pledge of allegiance. I was born before it was added, and I can assure you that not having "under God" in the pledge didn't keep America from saving the world from the Third Reich and the Japanese Imperialists. We were Americans then, pledging allegiance to one nation, indivisible (no "under God") and it was more than enough then and still is. Our original national motto "E Pluribus Unum" "Out of Many : One", was and remains the true strength of this country. History will judge us harshly if we throw that away for the sake of pandering to majoritiarian religous bigotry. History will remember the great liberators and the horrid tyrants, but the petty reactionaries ( those like Jerry Falwell who has migrated his bigotry over the years from blacks, to gays and now Moslems and atheists) will disappear in the dust.

Thanks again for writing. Stay cool. I remember Michigan summers with my aunts. Aieee Chihuahua!

Sincerely,
Ron Garrett

Shadowy Man

Excellent Reply!

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Jack the Bodiless

Yes, good letter!

As a non-American, I thought all this would pass me by (except for getting involved in Internet arguments, of course). But I received a spam email urging me to buy a "keep God in the pledge" T-shirt. I replied with an offer to recite the under-God pledge if he would pledge allegiance to "Satan, Prince of Darkness".

And I've ordered an Internet Infidels T-shirt.

tragic_pizza

OK, well, allow me to pick at nits for a moment. The burning of entrails was not for food, but for the aroma (Leviticus 1:9, 1:13, etc.)

A question: Native Americans were, a couple of centuries back, pretty barbarous. I think we can all agree that scalping an individual is a fairly cruel thing to do, can we not? Modern native Americans, however, do not at all engage in said practice, and to my knowledge no one holds a barbarous practice in past centuries against them.

Why, then, hold practices of millenia ago against modern Jews and Christians?

Ron Garrett

The answer is relatively simple. Theist Christians are still in my face telling me I need to go to hell and burn for all eternity because I do not accept the absolute infallability of their revealed by the deity religion.

I live in Baptist/Petnecostal fundie country where the Bible is the inerrant and infallible, verbally and plenarily inspired word of God. And I think last weeks episode of churchmen beating a child into kidney failure in conformity to this infallible revealed word of God illustrates that the barbarism is not a facet of the long lost past.

Christians were still hanging and burning witches in the early days of this country, and the Catholic Church has only suspended the heavy hand of the inquisition because it has lost the secular power to continue to harm its dissidents, not because it has seen the error of its ways and evolved.

And I really have to say that quibbling about the aroma being the point of sacrificing is really weak. Is it any less stupid and primitive and anthropomorphizing to say your god has a nose and a sense of smell than to say that your god consumes the offering in the fire? All such sacrifice began with the assumption that the gods needed to be fed just like people (which of course was promulgated to insure the priests got fed).

You can dye your roots, but the original color keeps coming back.