Category Archives: Atheism

Westernisation can provide a basis for a claim for leave to remain in the UK where individuals face a real risk of persecution if they would not be able to adhere to the norms of conservative societies, a tribunal has ruled.

A westernised family of five who fled Iraq in 2006 have won an appeal against the refusal of leave on the grounds that they would face a real risk of persecution because they are atheists.

Upper Tribunal Judge Gaenor Bruce said: They do not wish to adhere to conservative Islamic norms because they fundamentally do not agree with them. They should not be expected to do so simply in order to remain safe.

Bruce held that the Refugee Convention does not provide a protected and unfettered right to enjoy ones life in the way that one would like: there is no human right to listen to a particular kind of music, drink alcohol or to wear jeans.However, it can offer protection where the modifications required of the claimants amount to suppressions of the inalienable rights afforded to them by international law, she added.

Westernisation can also entitle an individual to protection where, if they have been living in the UK for a long time or is unfamiliar with the prevailing culture in their country of origin, there is a risk that their modified behaviour will slip.

The tribunal heard that the family, who were all nominally Muslim but have never been practising, previously lived in an affluent area of Baghdad where their atheism was simply never an issue.

However, Bruce said that the Iraq of 2021 is very different from the Iraq that they left and referred to expert evidence suggesting that today religion permeates the public space and that atheists often keep their views secret for fear of harassment, attack or even murder.

In that context an individual does not have to sell books, or shout on a street corner, to proclaim that he is not a Muslim: his lack of faith is apparent in his everyday actions, Bruce said.

[The father] will be regarded with curiosity if he permits his daughters to go out unchaperoned; that curiosity will rise to suspicion if he is never seen at mosque; suspicion would quickly escalate to hostility if the family fail to observe the fasts in Ramadhan or to don black during Muharram; that hostility could, at any time, give rise to persecution if, for instance, the women insist on remaining unveiled or the familys attitudes lead to them being identified as particularly wealthy.

She added:Although evidence about fashion, or entertainment preferences, appears at first glance to consist of little more than an appeal to pluralism, and thus lying entirely outwith the protection framework, that evidence must be carefully assessed.

First, to determine whether the lifestyle choices of the claimant are in fact an expression of beliefs prohibited or disapproved of in his country of origin. Second, whether there is a real risk of that claimant failing to effectively mask his "western" identity and thus exposing himself to harm.

The parents and their youngest childs human rights claims were previously allowed by consent, as the Home Office accepted that it would not be reasonable to expect their young child to leave the UK, and their two other childrens human rights appeals were also allowed.

Read more here:
'Westernisation' can provide basis for leave to remain in UK, tribunal rules - Law Gazette

The Libyan Ministry of the Interior in late-December 2021 issued a warning to citizens not to celebrate Christmas or New Years Eve.

This directive follows a police warning that Christmas and New Year celebrations are not in accordance with the countrys religion (Islam).

New Years Eve is often wrongly perceived as a Christian festival in Islamic contexts, partly because Islam follows a different calendar with its own date for New Year.

Celebratory gatherings on New Years Eve were until recent years commonplace among many Libyans, and much greater toleration existed of Christians celebrating Christmas. With the emergence of hardline Islamist politics, however, the government has adopted a much more restrictive stance.

The General Directorate of Criminological Investigations in Libya instructed all restaurants and cafs not to celebrate New Year, with the threat of closure for those refusing to comply.

In a nationwide campaign initiated to confiscate Christmas decorations, Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Obeidi, head of the government media unit, said the police were targeting decoration, gift and rose shops, where many Christmas trees of different shapes and sizes that were on sale were seized.

Al-Obeidi defended the seizures by stating that the items sold do not represent our religion or our religious beliefs, emphasising that goods associated with festivals other than the two Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, were contrary to Islamic law.

In Benghazi Al-Kubra Ibrahim Al-Shahr, a member of the Fatwa Sub-Committee, stated that celebration of the New Year and participation in Christian holidays were forbidden.

In May 2021, the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs instructed the General Authority for Communications and Informatics to close down and ban various web pages that incite youth to follow other religions, or those calling for atheism and devils worship.

Read more here:
Libyan authorities ban Christmas and New Year celebrations - Barnabas Fund

(RNS) Visitors to Patheos, the multifaith media platform that hosts commentary from writers in many of the worlds religions, may have noticed some changes lately.

Its nonreligious channel has become an empty hulk, bereft of most of the familiar names that once occupied the space, including its most popular blogger, Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist.

Mehta and 14 other nonreligious bloggers, along with the channel manager, have decamped to a new site, OnlySky Media, set to launch later this month.

The changes come amid new surveys showing the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has exploded in recent years, rising to 29% of the U.S. population, up from 19% in 2011. These nones, a catchall for a host of groups, including atheists, agnostics, humanists and just plain secularists, have established multiple service and advocacy organizations to serve this growing segment of the population. But there is no media platform solely dedicated to those who are not part of traditional religions.

RELATED: Poll: America growing more secular by the year

Efforts to reach Patheos management team were unsuccessful, but the departing bloggers and their channel manager, Dale McGowan, said that about a year ago, Patheos decided to change its editorial direction. Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stopped writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focused on how to live a good life within their own worldview.

The writing on the wall was that unless youre prepared to say nice things about religion you need to find a new outlet, said Mehta, who has written for Patheos since 2011, often posting multiple times a day, with a special focus on stories about religious hypocrisy.

Some 20 bloggers left the site in the last days of 2021. On Tuesday (Jan. 4), the top story on the homepage read, Dont Stop Believing: Faith for the New Year.

Patheos is owned by BN Media, which last year created a new umbrella organization called Radiant. It includes Patheos, the lifestyle site Beliefnet and three other wellness and spirituality platforms with a mission of helping people live their most fulfilled lives.

Beliefnet, once a vigorous journalistic site, underwent a similar transformation after it was twice acquired, first by the Fox Entertainment Group in 2007 and later BN Media, where it became an inspirational site focusing on spirituality, health and wellness.

What they were asking of us was not compatible with the editorial tone we had taken until then, said Adam Lee, who wrote the Daylight Atheism blog for Patheos. Many of us felt this would require an editorial shift to such an extent as to make our blogs unrecognizable.

McGowan said he was told last March that Patheos wanted to rebrand.

This was a business decision to position themselves for the long term, said McGowan. It may have been hard for Patheos to attract advertising among religious businesses while at the same time providing a forum for atheists to criticize religion, he said.

McGowan, the author of 10 books about nonreligious life, including Parenting Beyond Belief, had already been talking with investors about creating a new platform for nonreligious people.

When Patheos announced this change in direction, we realized it was an opportunity to provide a soft landing for some of these bloggers, he said.

Fifteen Patheos bloggers agreed to join OnlySky, where McGowan is now chief content officer.

The new media platform is envisioned as a site that combines storytelling and commentary exploring the breadth of the human experience from a secular point of view, said Shawn Hardin, its founder and CEO.

A Bay Area entrepreneur who has created several media products for AOL, Yahoo and NBC, among others, Hardin said he envisions a space that explores a wide range of secular values.

We think the unaffiliated are a woefully underserved segment of the population, Hardin said. Were pretty optimistic about our opportunity to build a business that meets the interest of the audience and can invest in its own growth.

(The name of the new media venture was inspired by John Lennons song Imagine, which envisions a world without heaven or hell above us only sky.)

Author Hemant Mehta. Photo by Steve Greiner, courtesy of Mehta

A key will be creating a sense of community for a diverse set of people who are searching for meaning and want to connect with others on a similar path. Whether nonreligious Americans want community is not yet clear.

The Sunday Assembly movement, which tried to create local congregations for nonbelievers, had 70 congregations in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. About half have shut down or gone dormant.

Beyond polls indicating their growing numbers, little is known about the nonreligious or whether they want to engage on issues as a group.

There are people passionate about secularism, atheism and agnosticism, perhaps because they dont like what they see about religion in the news, said Diane Winston, professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California. But thats a small minority of the people who make up the unaffiliated or disaffiliated. A lot of those people dont care one way or another.

Mehta, however, said he had high hopes.

There arent any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists, he said. All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but dont do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.

RELATED: The Sunday Assembly hopes to organize a godless future. Its not easy.

Read more from the original source:
What happened to the nonbelief channel at Patheos? - Religion News Service

The Atheists in Kenya Society (AIK) is accusing its former secretary Seth Mahiga of fraud.

Mahiga is alleged to have withdrawn an undisclosed amount of money from the societys bank account without the knowledge of the Executive Committee.

AIK President Nyende Mumia says members of the committee were shocked when they visited their bank on Friday, only to find a huge sum was missing from their account.

"The new executive committee, including myself, the incoming Treasurer Samson Mbavu and the incoming Secretary Mary Kamau had visited KCB today only to be informed that the former Secretary Seth Mahiga, had withdrawn funds from the Atheists In Kenya Society bank account without our authority," Mumia said in a statement.

Mahiga resigned from AIK in May last year, saying he was no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya as he had found Jesus Christ.

This evening, regretfully, our Secretary Mr. Seth Mahiga made the decision to resign from his position as Secretary of our society. Seth's reason for resigning is that he has found Jesus Christ and is no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya, Mumia announced in a press statement.

Until his resignation, Mahiga had served as the societys secretary for one and a half years. A video shared on social media showed Mahiga at church telling the congregation, Ive been going through some difficulties in life. Im so happy to be here.

AIK was registered as a society under the Societies Act, Cap 108 on February 17th, 2016.

The 2019 National Population Census placed the total number of atheists in Kenya at 755,750, representing about 2.5 percent of the countrys total population.

Kilifi County had the highest number of nonbelievers with 146,669, followed by Nakuru (67,640), Nairobi (54,841), Narok (45,617), Kiambu (30770), Kitui (23,778), Meru (20,985) and Mombasa (11,148).

Originally posted here:
Former 'Atheists in Kenya' Official Who Found Jesus Accused of Fraud - Mwakilishi.com

The free exercise of religion or, more precisely, the free exercise of conservative Christian religions is increasingly assuming the cultural, and even legal, stature of an inalienable American right. In the name of "religious freedom,"county clerks,doctorsandbakersopenly discriminate against LGBTQ citizens. Our rightward-charging judiciary lets worshippers congregate during a pandemic; religious devotion, apparently, trumps public safety.

To understand where this free-exercise fundamentalism may lead us, we need look no further than theinsurrectionists of last January and their boundless sense of religious entitlement. Michael Sparks, who was among the first to breach the Capitol, enthusedon Facebook: "We're getting ready to live through something of biblical purportions [sic] be prayed up and be ready to defend your country and your family." Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, intoneda prayer about the rebirth of America on the floor of the Senate, whose evacuation he and his co-rioters had just triggered.

On Jan.6, 2021, a mob filled with religious extremists, among others, nearly upended one of the world's oldest and stablest liberal democracies. Could any comparable display of free exercise have occurred in Franceor Canadaor Uruguayor India, or any country with clear constitutional guidelines about the relation between government and religion?

RELATED:How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

This unfortunate instance of American exceptionalism has many explanations. I call attention to one: the weakness of secularism in the United States. "Secularism" is a term that has been so relentlessly maligned by its enemies that its meaning is difficult to discern. Having just written a primer on the subject, let me note that political secularism, at its core, is a philosophy of governance.

Far from being equivalent to atheism, as its critics allege, secularism's origins may be traced to medieval Christian disputes about the papacy's expanding powers. During the Protestant Reformation, the terms of the debate shifted. The dilemma no longer involved curtailing the authority of the church, but rather how a government could prevent unfathomable violence between churches. Enlightenment thinkers concluded that religions those force-multipliers of human passions needed to be governed.

In "A Letter Concerning Toleration"(1689), John Locke outlined secular protocols of governance. The state must let citizens believe anything they wish about the divine (this is known as "freedom of conscience"). It must never establish, favoror ally itself with one or more faiths(this is often referred to as "disestablishmentarianism" or "state neutrality''). It must treat all religions and religious citizens equally (I call this the "equality" principle).

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Naturally, a secular state must permit citizens the free exercise of their religious beliefs. Yet here Locke added one crucial caveat. The right to free exercise, he insisted, is not absolute. Free exercise cannot diminish or endanger the rights of others, or the security of the state.

This position was neither controversialnor original. It was common sense. The 1663 Charter of Carolina granted free exercise as long as persons "do not in any wise disturb the peace." After a similar grant, the 1776 constitution of North Carolina warned: "nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of treasonable or seditious discourses, from legal trial and punishment."

Which brings us to the First Amendment, whose relevant clauses simply read: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Our Constitution fails to acknowledge what was abundantly clear to lawmakers a century earlier, not to mention almost every subsequent constitution in secular countries:Namely, there must be a limiton free exercise of religion.

Why James Madison omitted this obvious proviso is beyond my comprehension. I simply observe that his omission undercuts secularism's governing function. It thus leaves American democracy vulnerable to the types of ructions we witnessed last January.

American secularism must confront the poor hand dealt to it by the Constitution and chart a new legal course. Secularists might invoke the "equality" principle mentioned above. Letting the 14th Amendment interrogate the First, secularists could argue that unchecked free exercise deprives religious minorities of equal protection under the law.

Latter-day Saints were prohibited from practicing bigamy in the 1878 Reynoldscase. Native Americans' free-exercise right to ingest peyote was denied in the 1990 Smithdecision. As for "nones" those with no religious affiliation can they even possess free exercise rights?

For right-wing Protestants (and, increasingly, right-wing Catholics) free exercise has been a godsend. Via the Supreme Court, conservative Christian theological prerogatives are poised to shape every aspect of everyone else's life on issues ranging from reproductive freedomsto educationto gun legislation. Free exercise, as currently practiced, is a boon to the majority.

Secularists should steward a more sophisticated discussion of "religious freedom." Politiciansand assorted intellectuals lazily depict public expressions of faith as providing exponential benefits for the commonweal. Prayer circles at football games, candidates who do "God talk" on the campaign trail, Latin crosses on federal property all of it is assumed to make our nation stronger.

Perhaps, but the January insurrection reminds us of a craggy secular intuition: Religious passion has a dark side, a volatility that only the state can contain. Much is made of the condition of our democracy's "guardrails"; the time has come to recognize a functioning, re-energized secularism as a crucial defense against what happened lastJan.6.

Read more on the current state of America's religious wars:

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After Jan. 6, secularism is the crucial "guardrail" and it's fatally weak in America - Salon

PHILADELPHIA January 6, 2022 Below are the ten most frequently viewed MEForum.org articles of 2021 in ascending order. Traffic to the original sites of publication, where applicable, is not counted.

The selections reflect heightened reader concerns about Turkish imperialism and the interplay between Islam and Christianity. All are worth a (re)read.

10. Turkey Creates a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Occupied Syria

Saraya Square in Afrin, Syria has been renamed after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan

The 2018 Turkish takeover of the Afrin area in northern Syria led to the expulsion or flight of around 200,000 Kurds and the abduction of over 150 women. "Very grave violations of human rights are [still] taking place in the Afrin area, on a systematic basis. The situation remains largely ignored by both the global media and Western governments," writes Ginsburg/Milstein Writing Fellow Jonathan Spyer. This "large-scale forced movement of a population" is unique among the many atrocities in Syria's civil war in that it was "directed not by a pariah regime under Western sanctions, still less by an unaffiliated militia," but "rather was conducted by a NATO member state and US ally."

9. Daniel Pipes on Hamas vs. Israel: Will There Be a Fifth Round?

Assessing the outcome of the latest war between Israel and Hamas in May, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes disputes the widely held view that Hamas won politically. "The most important question is whether this fourth round of fighting will lead Israelis to make sure there is no fifth round. I think that is likely, in which case Hamas would be the big loser," he said in an interview with Global Review. Pipes called Hamas' much-touted success in inciting riots by Arab Israelis during the conflict a "positive," because it alerted Jewish Israelis "to the pending crisis on their hands with their Muslim compatriots ... which they have been unwilling to confront."

8. Western Islamists Welcome Taliban Takeover

Amid the Taliban's swift and brutal takeover of Afghanistan in August, Islamist Watch Director Sam Westrop maintained a running list of Islamists in the West who welcomed the murderous jihadists' proclamation of the "rebirth of the Islamic Emirate." It's surprising how unsurprising the quotations are.

7. Behind Dr. Oz's Curtain

Benjamin Baird, the Islamism in Politics (IIP) Coordinator for MEF's Islamist Watch, examines TV doctor and Senate candidate Mehmet Oz's troubling associations with Turkey's Islamist regime.

Since 2017 at least, the celebrity surgeon has served as the public face of Turkish Airlines, a state-owned company staffed by leading figures in Turkey's ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) close to the family of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan. Oz has also been involved with known regime proxies in the United States, such as the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC) and the Diyanet Center of America (DCA). "Oz should renounce the AKP and fully divest from AKP-owned businesses and lobbies," Baird writes in conclusion.

6. "Godless Saracens Threatening Destruction": Modern Christian Responses to Islam and Muslims

Part II of Daniel Pipes' essay on Christian responses to Islam and Muslims. Whereas Part I discussed the "uniquely hostile nature of European views toward Muslims" during the pre-modern era, when the latter enjoyed military superiority or parity, Part II examines the period from roughly 1700 onward when the Europeans enjoyed primacy. This disparity (Europeans conquered nearly all Muslim-majority areas of the globe in one-and-a-half centuries), combined with a reduction in Christian religiosity, permitted "more varied and nuanced views" of Islam and Muslims to prevail. However, the emergence of Islamism as a global threat and the upsurge of Muslim immigration in recent years are leading some in the West to again see Islam as a civilizational threat.

5. The Word or the Sword? Christianity and Islam Meet in Hyde Park

The July 2021 stabbing of Christian street preacher Hatun Tash in London's Hyde Park is the latest violent altercation in an ancient proselytizing contest between Islam and Christianity, writes Middle East Forum writing fellow Mark Durie. He shows that the use of force to win this contest was sanctioned by Muhammad himself and is today embraced wholeheartedly by jihadis. "However, as Hatun Tash pointed out, to resort to violence can also be taken as a weakness, suggesting the failure of reason and argument to support Islam's claims."

4. Atheism among Muslims Is "Spreading Like Wildfire"

Daniel Pipes documents the growth of atheism in Muslim communities and explains why this represents a challenge to "Islam as practiced today." Atheism among Muslim-born populations has historically been minor and was "nearly undetectable" just a few decades ago. Open disbelief in God and the rejection of Muhammad's mission was "historically illegal and unspeakable" in Muslim societies. However, "repression of heterodox ideas and punishment of anyone who leaves the faith" makes Islam "singularly vulnerable to challenge" if adherents depart in large numbers anyway. The growing turn toward atheism in recent years means the "Islamic future [is] more precarious than its past," concludes Pipes.

3. Turkish Imperialism: Erdoan's "Second Conquest" of the Christians

Anne-Christine Hoff, an assistant professor of English at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas, examines the impact of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan's "systematic policy of Islamic supremacism" on the country's 175,000-strong Christian community, from the conversion of Istanbul's famous Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque to the grotesque anti-Christian incitement and hate speech on state-run media outlets. Turkey's Christians are faced with four "stark choices," she writes: "exile; continued acquiescence in their longstanding third-class status; fighting that status at the risk of being mercilessly crushed; or conversion, in the hope of full integration in Turkey's Islamic order of things."

2. Turkish Imperialism: When Will Turkey Annex Northern Syria?

Syrian journalist Rauf Baker demonstrates in great detail how Turkey is pursuing a "systematic Turkification policy in areas under its control in northern Syria." This takes several forms: demographic (pushing Kurds out, Turkmen and Sunni Arabs in), economic (heavy infrastructure investment, controlling the olive trade, making the Turkish lira the de facto currency, etc.), and educational (e.g., making Turkish language instruction mandatory in hundreds of schools). "The question is not whether the Turkish state is seeking to annex northern Syria," Baker concludes, "but rather when."

1. Give War a Chance: Arab Leaders Finesse Military Defeat

Daniel Pipes addresses one of the strangest anomalies of the modern Arab world: "[D]isaster on the battlefield can be politically useful ... [M]ilitary losses have hardly ever scathed Arabic-speaking rulers and sometimes benefited them."

Six factors help account for this anomaly: the importance of honor in Arab culture (such that "maintaining it can count more than what is actually achieved" on the battlefield in the eyes of a leader's subjects); widespread fatalism (such that subjects see military defeat as Allah's will and thus "do not blame the leader"); conspiracism (subjects imagine enemy capabilities and objectives to be so vast that merely surviving the war is considered a victory); the power of bombast in Arab political life ("causing leaders and followers alike to be captivated by the power of words even if unrelated to reality"); publicity (e.g. sympathetic global press coverage); and the confusion that prevails when subjects lack access to accurate information.

The Middle East Forum promotes American interests in the region and protects Western civilization from Islamism. It does so through a combination of original ideas, focused activism, and the funding of allies.

For immediate releaseFor more information, contact:Gregg Roman, Director+1 (215) 546 5406Roman@MEForum.org

Continued here:
The 10 Most Widely Read Middle East Forum Articles of 2021 - Middle East Forum

Image source: Discovery Institute.

If there were no God, and no purpose to existence, could we rationally expect a cosmic home like ours a universe with a beginning, ultra-finely tuned for life, with living beings far surpassing in sophistication the most advanced human technology? Not a chance. In a brand new video for PragerU, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer asks, Whats Wrong with Atheism?

Dr. Meyers first video for PragerU, Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven, has been watched so far by more than a million viewers on YouTube alone, and a total of more than 2.4 million across the Internet. Now we are expanding out with the release ofFIVE NEW VIDEOSwith Meyer, on themes fromReturn of the God Hypothesis.See them all now at IntelligentDesign.org, where you can also take advantage of a free offer a mini-book by Dr. Meyer,Scientific Evidence for a Creator.To join us as the Center for Science & Culture moves into 2022, and maximize your own impact, please go here now to give whatever you can!

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Meyer: What's Wrong with Atheism? - Discovery Institute

Of course, the pagan culture of Rome was no small achievement. It had its artists and intellectuals, along with its robust natural religions, and could not simply be scolded and shamed out of existence. Paganism has always exerted a subterranean tug on the thinking of the Christian West. The Renaissance, with its rediscovery of Epicurus and Lucretius, is a familiar example.

Pagans thought that the collapse of their beliefs would mean the collapse of Rome. Many 21st-century conservatives believe something similar about the erosion of Christian values: that the liberties of our open society are parasitical on our Christian inheritance and that when that inheritance collapses, civilization will, too.

Ms. Delsol does not see things quite that way. The ethics of the Christian age, she notes, were shot through with unacknowledged borrowings from the pagan values Christianity replaced. (Consider stoicism or the Hippocratic oath in medicine.) In the same way, todays post-Christian progressivism comes with a large helping of Christianity. Why use Christian matrimony to unite gay couples, for example, rather than a new institution less wrapped up in Christian values? Because that is just the piecemeal way that civilizational change happens.

So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke. (The term means basically what it does in English, except that French people see wokeness as a system imported wholesale from American universities and thus itself almost a religious doctrine.)

Christianity the religion has teachings about loving ones neighbor and turning the other cheek that are impressively clear. For Christianity the culture, though, these can be sources of ambivalence. Christianity has produced some hardened moralizers, to put it mildly. But there has always been a tension between its teachings and its quest for political power.

Ms. Delsol worries that le woke has no such hesitation. Speech codes, elementary school consciousness-raising, corporate public service advertising in some ways our public order is coming to resemble that of pagan Rome, where religion and morality were separated. Religion was a matter for the household. Morality was determined and imposed by societys elites, with grim results for freedom of thought.

Whether or not a society is tolerant of rival ideas has less to do with its leaders idle ideological positioning and much more to do with their position in a historical cycle. When in A.D. 384 Christians succeeded in removing the pagan Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate, where it had stood for almost four centuries, the pagan statesman Symmachus understood that Romes tolerance would henceforth be denied to those who had built it. If we know Symmachus for one sentiment today, it is his condemnation of Christianitys dogmatic claims to truth as an affront against common sense. There cannot be only one path toward such a great mystery, he said.

More:
Opinion | Is the West Becoming Pagan Again? - The New York Times

This long, long year began with high hopes that it would be better than the tumultuous election year of 2020, which also saw a summer of hopeful but traumatic protests and the onset of the most significant global pandemic in a century. We awaited the arrival of a new president, believing oh, so innocently! It hurts to remember that politics might become "normal" again. The idea that American life could be boring in 2021 was seen as a positive, am I right?

Well, so much for that. Was this year exhausting, soul-draining, mind-boggling and sometimes terrifying? I'd check all those boxes. But boring? Not so much. Five days into the year, Democrats won an unexpected double victory in the U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, giving them a tenuous congressional majority after the puzzling and disappointing election results of November 2020. But you may recall what happened the day after that, on the 6th of January, when a joint session of Congress was to certify the electoral votes and declare Joe Biden the next president. It was a formality! Sometimes the opposition party squawks about it as Democrats had done in 2001 and 2005 but the business gets done and the country moves on. That's just how it is!

OK, so much for that too. It seems unnecessary to point out that that day and its as-yet-unfinished aftermath was the biggest news story of the year. And then things really got weird. We began torealize, gradually and uncertainly, that the Philip K. Dick alternate-universe dream state of the Trump years wasn't done with us yet. It waslike Neo realizing that what he takes to be the real world is still inside the Matrix or, more to the point, it was like when the characters in a "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequel realize they'restill asleep and there's no escape from the guy with the long spiky fingers.

Whether all the stuff that happened in 2021 really happened is perhaps a question for cosmologists and philosophers to dwell on in the years ahead (assuming there are any). What I can tell you is that the biggest stories in Salon's News & Politics vertical in 2021 focused on an extraordinary array of dubious characters, most of them newly arrived on the national scene, or at least new to the national spotlight. The good news is that most of our widely-read stories didn't focus directly on that guy who finally evacuated the White House last Jan. 20. But they certainly reflected his radioactive glow.

To cite the obvious examples, in 2020 Mike Lindell was still a guy who sold pillows on cable TV; Lauren Boebert was an internet conspiracy theorist, viewed as a joke even within the already-delusional Republican Party; and Joe Manchin was an obscure senator from an obscure state, arguably the last living specimen of the genus "conservative Democrat,"an important power bloc in Washington as recently as my 1970s childhood. I'm willing to bet you've heard more about those three people in the last year than in your entire life up till then (and quite possibly a lot more than you wanted to).

But that's not our starting point! Let's take these in chronological order.

Sen. Tom Cotton campaigned on his "experience as an Army Ranger" but he didn't have any

Barely two weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Salon investigative reporter Roger Sollenberger (since departed, and we miss him!) performed something of a demolition job on the reputation of Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who had positioned himself as a potential 2024 candidate and Trump heir by literally calling for the military to put down the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 with lethal force, if necessary. Roger simply noticed a fact that was already in the public record, but had been politely ignored: Cotton had built his political career on his military record, and specifically on the oft-repeated claim that he had served as "a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which simply wasn't true: Cotton had attended Ranger school, which allowed him to put a nifty little pin on his uniform, but "was never part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the elite unit that plans and conducts joint special military operations as part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command." The Cotton '24 campaign seems to have stalled out since then.

The entire Trump campaign was a scam and it is not over

Our only really big Donald Trump story of the year you remember him! was a commentary by long-running Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton, based on a New York Times report revealing exactly how much of a shameless, unscrupulous grift the 2020 Trump campaign had been. As Heather observed, the campaign seemed to run on the same principles as "Trump University," the multi-level seminar scam that wound up costing its notoriously cheap namesake a $25 million settlement:

[T]he campaign and its online fundraising platform WinRed hustled its most loyal supporters out of tens of millions of dollars with deceptive donation links on their emails and websites. It's unknown to this day how many people unknowingly signed up for weekly recurring donations and "money bombs" (agreements to donate a lump sum on a future date), but there were so many requests for refunds that at one point, 1-3% of all credit card complaints in the U.S. were about WinRed charges. The sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no-interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign [and] Trump's post-election "Stop the Steal" fundraising at least partially went to pay off those "loans" from the campaign, making the whole scheme very Ponzi-esque.

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

It's always gratifying, as an editor, when you publish a story you know is important but you suspect very few people will read and you're totally wrong. That happened in June, when Salon contributor Phil Torres, an academic philosopher who writes for us a few times a year, made his decisive rift with the "New Atheism" movement associated with intellectual luminaries like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Phil was once a true unbeliever, you might say, and wrote that when New Atheism emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as a counterweight to fundamentalism of all sorts, itappeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

His conclusion 15 or so years later was very different:

What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized.

Joe Manchin's "highly suspicious" reversal on voting bill follows donation from corporate lobby

Only days later, the gentleman from West Virginia made his first prominent appearance of 2021 in our digital pages. That came with Igor Derysh's report on the strikingconnection between Joe Manchin's flip-flop on the For the People Act the voting-rights package passed by the House and the sudden inflow of political donations to Manchin from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed the bill. This was long before we understood what a central role Manchin would play in torpedoing Joe Biden's presidency and rendering the Democratic majority useless, but the writing was on the wall.

As Igor wrote, Manchin was literally a co-sponsor of For the People when it was first proposed during the Trump presidency, but for reasons he has never adequately explained, changed his mind when it came to the prospect of actually passing the bill. Manchin's op-ed announcing his opposition "echoed the Chamber's talking points" and came shortly after the pro-business lobby "which has launched an expensive lobbying effort against the bill, resumed donations to Manchin's campaign for the first time since 2012. Reuters described this flow of corporate dollars as a 'reward'for Manchin's opposition to numerous Biden administration's initiatives, as well as his stalwart support for the filibuster, which has almost certainly doomed the For the People Act."

DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state

With Tom Cotton consigned to political oblivion and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri too deeply implicated (if that's even possible) in the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis became the leading alterna-Trump in Republican politics. (Whether DeSantis' master will allow him to run for president all on his own remains to be seen.) Salon's Brett Bachman was among the first journalists to notice perhaps the weirdest trick of DeSantis' troll-like governorship: a legal requirement that students and faculty at Florida's public universities must register their "political opinions and viewpoints" on an official survey.

As Brett wrote at the time, this is "part of a long-running, nationwide right-wing push to promote 'intellectual diversity' on campuses" and appears to reflect Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson's accusation that the Sunshine State's public universities were "socialism factories," an odd claim about institutions far better known for football than for Marxist study groups. In his already-patented fashion, DeSantis offered no specific explanation for why such a law was necessary and tried to sound vaguely reasonable, saying only that he knew "a lot of parents" who were concerned "about their children being 'indoctrinated' on campus."

Why did Lauren Boebert lead a late-night Capitol tour three weeks before Jan. 6?

Salon reporter Zachary Petrizzo spent much of the year trying to untangle the puzzling personal, professional and political stories of Rep. Lauren Boebert, the newly-elected Colorado Republican with a passion for guns and a number of connections to QAnon, the MAGA movement and the conspiratorial far right. But of all Zach's essays in Boebert-ology, nothing went deeper than the intriguing tale of a late-night U.S. Capitol tour she took with several family members on Dec. 12, 2020 which was the same day as the big "Stop the Steal" pro-Trump rally in Washington, and roughly three weeks before she was sworn in as a member of Congress.

That last part is what makes this tour an unsolved mystery:

There are several unanswered questions about this visit, which appears to have violated normal Capitol protocol in various ways. It's not clear who authorized it, since Boebert was not yet a member of Congress and had no official standing in D.C. It's perhaps even stranger that it occurred on a Saturday night, when the Capitol complex is closed. It's true that Boebert was a member-elect at the time, but that's an important distinction: She certainly was not a sworn member of Congress and had no office, no staff and no official status in the Capitol complex. It's even more puzzling that this tour took place on Saturday night. The guidelines for member-led Capitol tours state they are only available on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The only conclusion to draw here which we did not make in the context of a carefully reported news story is that someone in the Trump administration (like, a very well-placed someone) gave one incoming member of Congress special access to the U.S. Capitol after hours. We still have questions! And they will never be answered.

Rudy Giuliani ridiculed after clip of him shaving in airport restaurant goes viral

Sometimes in journalism, you just have to give the people what they want. And sometimes what they want is a viral video of Rudy Giuliani, the former LifeLock spokesperson and mastermind of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, shaving in a restaurant at JFK airport. As Salon's Jon Skolnik reported in August, the eating-while-shaving clip amplified in mockery by comedian Michael Rapaport was viewed more than a million times on Twitter within about three days.

Mike Lindell's meltdown begins: He recently sold a MyPillow plane to fund Dominion lawsuit

Zach Petrizzo's other principal beat of 2021, as no regular reader of Salon can possibly have missed, was his on-again, off-again bromance with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the man who has brought restful sleep to millions and who spent much of the year vowing he would somehow bring Donald Trump back to the White House. I haven't tried to count the number of stories Zach wrote about Lindell; it feels like one of those hypothetical numbers mathematicians theorize about but cannot precisely calculate.

Lindell's various deadlines for "reinstating" Trump to the presidency a thing that cannot in fact be done, we shall remind you have all come and gone with the goal nowhere in sight. But the acme or nadir of Lindell news came when Zach and Jon Skolnik worked together on a report that the pillow guy had been forced to sell one of his private planes to raise money to defend himself against the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

Leading up to Lindell's August "cyber symposium" in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which was intended to prove his extravagant claims about the 2020 election (but clearly did not do so) the plane registered to MyPillow was used in a number of Lindell's schemes, including his alleged efforts to transport and conceal Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines at various locations across the country. (No such machines materialized at his Sioux Falls event, despite many promises that they would.) Asked whether he had sold an airplane to raise money, Lindell called one Salon reporter "flying pond scum" and "slime."

(I don't actually know whether that was Jon or Zach.)

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Sometimes in journalism you try to answer the questions everyone is asking and sometimes you answer the questions no one has even thought to ask. Such as: What's the deal with the MAGA people and the all-black U.S. flags, which are barely recognizable as flags at all and are exceptionally unlikely to be linked to Black Lives Matter (at least in any positive way). Salon senior writer Chauncey DeVega, always attentive to the symbology of the scariest corners of the far right, was on the case in October:

Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents meaning nonwhite people, "socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America."

Salon could find no historical evidence for the MAGA World claim that black flags were used by the Confederates in the Civil War to signify "no quarter" against Union soldiers, but it appears that Trump followers, the "patriot" movement and other neofascist types believe it. Which isn't great.

Democrats hit the panic button. Is it too little too late for Joe Biden?

A few days after that story ran, columnist Amanda Marcotte captured the mood shift so many of Salon's readers were experiencing as the nation moved into fall: The pandemic wasn't over (and we didn't even know about omicron yet), Biden's agenda was going nowhere, the 2022 midterms were looking bleak and the Republican campaign to undermine or overthrow democracy was gaining speed. In other words, "normal" and "boring" were not happening and not likely to, anytime soon:

President Joe Biden's economic agenda is stuck in the mud, supported by 96% of Democrats in the Senate yet blocked by two senators whose massive egos and lobbyist addictions are causing them to turn against the party. Biden failed to enact vaccine mandates early enough or broadly enough so now millions of Fox News-addled Americans still are resisting vaccines, prolonging the pandemic and contributing to the national sense of despair. On top of that, Donald Trump has faced no real consequences for his attempted coup while the various criminal apparatchiks he surrounds himself with are also walking around happy and free. So efforts to stop the next coup are moribund, hitting the wall of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who love that lobbyist-pleasing filibuster more than they love democracy. No wonder voters are so depressed. A party that refuses to listen to voters is frustrating, but so is a party that hears them but still can't do anything about it. Either way, it may not feel to many worth the effort to even vote.

I'm sorry to leave you on a bummer as we head into another year, the traditional season of renewed hope. But the premise of our business, which isn't always pleasant, is to tell the truth as we understand it, not to tell people what we think they want to hear. You can't create change or create a more hopeful future without facing reality and political reality right now, in the United States of America, is kind of harsh. Find love and joy where you can, cherish your moments with friends and family as we turn the page to the New Year. Gather what strength you can. We're going to need it.

See the rest here:
A year of dubious characters and dark drama - Salon

Some varieties of atheism on right Explicit "positive"/ "strong"/ "hard" atheists assert that "At least one deity exists" is false. on right Explicit "negative"/ "weak"/ "soft" assert that "At least one deity exists necessarily" is false, without asserting the above. on left Implicit "negative"/ "weak"/ "soft" atheists include agnostics (and infants or babies) who do not believe or do not know whether a deity or deities exist and who have not explicitly rejected or eschewed such a belief.

Note: Areas in the diagram are not meant to indicate relative numbers of people.

Implicit atheism and explicit atheism are types of atheism.[1] In George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God, "implicit atheism" is defined as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it", while "explicit atheism" is "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it".[1] Explicit atheists have considered the idea of deities and have rejected belief that any exist. Implicit atheists, though they do not themselves maintain a belief in a god or gods, have not rejected the notion or have not considered it further.

"Implicit atheism" is "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it". "Absence of theistic belief" encompasses all forms of non-belief in deities. This would categorize as implicit atheists those adults who have never heard of the concept of deities, and those adults who have not given the idea any real consideration. Also included are agnostics who assert they do not believe in any deities (even if they claim not to be atheists), and children. As far back as 1772, Baron d'Holbach said that "All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God".[2] Smith is silent on newborn children, but clearly identifies as atheists some children who are unaware of any concept of any deity:

The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist.[1]

Smith observes that some motivations for explicit atheism are rational and some not. Of the rational motivations, he says:

The most significant variety of atheism is explicit atheism of a philosophical nature. This atheism contends that the belief in god is irrational and should therefore be rejected. Since this version of explicit atheism rests on a criticism of theistic beliefs, it is best described as critical atheism.[1]

For Smith, critical, explicit atheism is subdivided further into three groups:[1]p.17

For the purposes of his paper on "philosophical atheism", Ernest Nagel chose to attach only the explicit atheism definition for his examination and discussion:

I must begin by stating what sense I am attaching to the word "atheism," and how I am construing the theme of this paper. I shall understand by "atheism" a critique and a denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism. [...] atheism is not to be identified with sheer unbelief, or with disbelief in some particular creed of a religious group. Thus, a child who has received no religious instruction and has never heard about God, is not an atheist for he is not denying any theistic claims. Similarly in the case of an adult who, if he has withdrawn from the faith of his father without reflection or because of frank indifference to any theological issue, is also not an atheist for such an adult is not challenging theism and not professing any views on the subject. [...] I propose to examine some philosophic concepts of atheism...[3]

In Nagel's Philosophical Concepts of Atheism, he very much agrees with Smith on the three-part subdivision of "explicit atheism" above, though Nagel does not use the term "explicit".

The specific narrow focus on positive atheism taken by some professional philosophers like Nagel on the one hand, compared with the scholarship on traditional negative atheism of freethinkers like d'Holbach and Smith on the other has been attributed to the different concerns of professional philosophers and layman proponents of atheism,

"If so many atheists and some of their critics have insisted on the negative definition of atheism, why have some modern philosophers called for a positive definition of atheism -- atheism as the outright denial of God's existence? Part of the reason, I suspect, lies in the chasm separating freethinkers and academic philosophers. Most modern philosophers are totally unfamiliar with atheistic literature and so remain oblivious to the tradition of negative atheism contained in that literature. (see Smith (1990, Chapter 3, p.51-60[4]))

Everitt (2004) makes the point that professional philosophers are more interested in the grounds for giving or withholding assent to propositions:

We need to distinguish between a biographical or sociological enquiry into why some people have believed or disbelieved in God, and an epistemological enquiry into whether there are any good reasons for either belief or unbelief... We are interested in the question of what good reasons there are for or against God's existence, and no light is thrown on that question by discovering people who hold their beliefs without having good reasons for them.[5]

So, sometimes in philosophy (Flew, Martin and Nagel notwithstanding), only the explicit "denial of theistic belief" is examined, rather than the broader, implicit subject of atheism.

The terms "weak atheism" and "strong atheism", also known as "negative atheism" and "positive atheism", are usually used by Smith as synonyms of the less well-known "implicit" and "explicit" categories. "Strong explicit" atheists assert that it is false that any deities exist. "Weak explicit" atheists assert they do not believe in deities, and do not assert it is true that deities do not exist. Those who do not believe any deities exist, and do not assert their non-belief are included among implicit atheists. Among weak implicit atheists are included the following: children and adults who have never heard of deities; people who have heard of deities but have never given the idea any considerable thought; and those agnostics who suspend belief about deities, but do not reject such belief.[1]

See the rest here:
Implicit and explicit atheism - Wikipedia