Dylan Matthews wrote an interesting interview with Douglas Laycock over at Vox on Monday, Why a Pro-Same-Sex-Marriage Law Professor Supports Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law. It’s generally interesting because Laycock has a different take on the law. But I’m not especially interested in that right now. More interesting is the case of Mary Stinemetz. She was a Jehovah’s Witness in Kansas who was on Medicaid. She needed a liver transplant, but she insisted upon a bloodless liver transplant, because the JWs do not believe in blood transfusions. But no one performed that procedure in Kansas and the Medicaid program wouldn’t pay for out of state treatments. The case took two years to make its way through court, and by the time Stinemetz won, her condition was so much worse than she could no longer get the procedure and later died.

This is a tragic story. I’m no expert on bloodless transfusions, but it seems like it is the way of the future. The costs are roughly the same — maybe even less. And there are fewer post-operative complications. This is assuming, of course, that the patient isn’t anemic. The problem is that bloodless transfusions are relatively new and so they aren’t nearly as widely performed. I remember getting a terribly invasive hernia surgery about 20 years ago simply because my insurance (Kaiser) didn’t cover the more recent laparoscopic surgery. So I have a hard time seeing this as especially the fault of Kansas Medicaid.

Why JWs Refuse Blood Transfusions

The whole thing got me wondering why it is that JWs don’t believe in blood transfusions. For one thing, it seems odd that they think mixing blood is wrong but mixing organs isn’t. Not surprisingly, the justification for this makes as much sense as the justification for Christian Scientists allowing bones to be set but not cancer to be treated. Basically: nowhere in the Bible does it say that you shouldn’t take anyone’s body parts. A loophole!

According to the Jehovah’s Witnesses website, there are five Bible verses that instruct them not to use this 500 year old medical technique: Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:10 and 17:14; Deuteronomy 12:23; and Acts 15:28-29. Note that only one of them is from the New Testament. I always love that. When it comes to the most ridiculous beliefs, going back 2,000 years isn’t enough; they have to go back another 500 years. But okay, let’s look at these verses.

Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:14, and Deuteronomy 12:23 are all pretty much the same thing. The New American Standard Bible translates Genesis 9:4 as, “Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Leviticus 17:14 is, “For as for the life of all flesh, its blood is identified with its life. Therefore I said to the sons of Israel, ‘You are not to eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.'” And Deuteronomy 12:23 is, “Only be sure not to eat the blood, for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the flesh.” Clearly, these are about eating animal blood — not human blood.

Leviticus 17:10 cut off from everything else sounds like it might have something to do with human blood, “And any man from the house of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, who eats any blood, I will set My face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people.” But the whole context of this section of Leviticus is about how God thinks that blood should be used for the purpose of sacrifices to him. From the context of Christians, this seems a particularly odd verse to focus on because Jesus was supposed to make such animal sacrifices unnecessary because Jesus’ blood cleansed the sins of all humanity. You know: Jesus as the “lamb of God”?

And that brings us to Acts 15:28-29. It says:

Again: animal blood. And it is about sacrifice. God could not have been referring to human blood, because the whole idea of the story of Abraham and Isaac is that God doesn’t want the Israelites to sacrifice humans. So none of these Bible verses make the case against the use of human blood — especially for the purpose of preserving human lives and allowing the followers of God to “do well.”

Over at Catholic Answers, Robert Brom noted a curious inconsistency as well:

I understand that one could make an argument that these verses mean that God doesn’t believe in blood transfusions. But you really have to work at it. That conclusion doesn’t fall out of a serious reading of the Bible. One of the reasons we know this is because only a tiny fraction of Christians believe this. And it doesn’t include all Jehovah’s Witnesses. The church existed (although not with its current name) for roughly a century before the issue even came up — despite the fact that blood transfusions were a common medical procedure during that time. It was only in the 1940s that people in the church started to push against the idea of blood transfusions. And it was only in 1961 that it became an official “disfellowshipping offense” to knowingly get a blood transfusion. But to show just how loony this all is, the church allowed people to get transfusions for their pets until 1964!

Dangerous Idiosyncrasies

I am all for government programs making accommodations for people’s idiosyncratic beliefs — as long as their requests are not too taxing on the resources available. But there is no reason to think that such idiosyncrasies are noble. Mary Stinemetz died primarily because she had an extremely dangerous idiosyncrasy. I wish that the government had dealt better with her. But she is no different than anyone else who does things that are not medically advised. She wasn’t a victim of religious persecution.

I don’t actually care what Phil Robertson has to say on any subject at all. He is, however, useful in demonstrating that one can be educated and rich and still be ignorant and parochial. Of course, Robertson is fun in that he’s spent his whole life being the most educated guy in a very ignorant crowd. So he’s always got this ostentatious air to him that makes his pronouncements especially nutty. As a result, he is useful as a pedagogical object for teaching basic subjects about Shintoism and the like.

Most recently, Robertson stood before the Vero Beach Prayer Breakfast and engaged in some very creepy fantasies about teaching an atheist father and husband a lesson about the existence of God through the use of rape, murder, and castration. It doesn’t really matter the details. Robertson is an extremely troubled man who is living proof of hell on earth. He’s also an excellent advertisement for atheism. The best advertisement for Christianity is a caring person who is a follower of the religion. Robertson shows that for most people, Christianity is really all about exclusivity and hatred. Other than people already in the tribe, he doesn’t win converts — and he clearly pushes people away.

But his example with the brutal violence perpetrated on an atheist family is based on a common misunderstanding of atheism. To him, atheism is a relativist philosophy. To such simple minds, there cannot be any morality unless it is imposed from without. That’s a curious notion given that atheists don’t act less morally than Christians. But it is deeper than that. Like most Americans, Robertson is a proponent of what I call “Santa Claus Christianity”: he is good because if he isn’t, God will be mean to him; and if he is, God will reward him.

Note how this is quite distinct from what more thoughtful Christians claim the religion is all about. Supposedly, the spirit of Jesus Christ comes into a person and makes them behave morally. This is largely what the earliest Christians believed. It was only later in the 2nd and 3rd centuries that the church developed the idea that we were all sinners and that we were only saved through Jesus. But American Christians have taken this to a whole new low where all they have to do is “believe” in Jesus and all their sins are washed away. Linus’ system for The Great Pumpkin makes more sense — at least The Great Pumpkin judges on the basis of sincerity.

What Christians don’t seem to have a handle on is that God’s laws are not an absolute when the God in question is slippery. The evidence for God is at best weak. And then there is the question that there are literally thousands of gods that people have posited. Different gods want humans to do different things. What is absolute about that? Wouldn’t a good and moral God just be clear? Why all this game playing? Why allow people in the hills of Afghanistan to go their whole lives without ever being exposed to the One True God that is whatever god you worship? Phil Robertson chose the God he was going to believe in. (Shockingly, it was the same God that everyone else in his tiny world believes in!) And then he followed those rules (maybe). Once he made the first choice, the rules were absolute. But first he had to make a choice of religion, which is no different than making a choice of which of God’s laws you are going to follow.

Consider something else. Morality evolves over time. Today, for example, slavery in its strict sense is universally considered wrong. The Bible is just fine on the issue of slavery. If God were really interested in micromanaging our morality, wouldn’t he have either (1) got it right in the first place or (2) occasionally provided updates the way that the Oxford English Dictionary does? Of course, we know why none of this happened: God (at least the micromanaging kind) doesn’t exist. Religion is a human invention, and — most tellingly — a later invention than morality. Morality existed before God — much less before Jesus.

There are sociological reasons why we have the morals we have. In a species that depends upon working together as a group, behaviors that harm the group badly enough are pushed out of the realm of acceptable behavior. This is why we are not a bunch of psychopaths killing everyone we see. But in Phil Robertson’s mind, raping children, murdering people, and castrating men would be “fun” if only God weren’t wagging a finger at us. Except such acts aren’t fun. That isn’t how morality works. I’m an atheist and yet I find each of those acts repugnant. Of course, Christians throughout the ages have gleefully done at least two of those three.

Relativism is not a useful concept when it comes to this debate. All Phil Robertson has done is create a straw man — and an incredibly common one at that. But he isn’t alone. Throughout the conservative blogosphere, people have defended Robertson on the grounds that atheists are relativists. In a sense we are — but only in the sense that Christians are too. But at least atheists are upfront about it. I kind of doubt that Phil Robertson never eats shellfish or never has sex with his wife during her period. And I don’t know of any atheists going around fantasizing about torturing Christians to prove to them that God doesn’t exist. But I guess because the Bible doesn’t say anything against it (In fact, it is kind of in favor of it!), it can’t be wrong.

Last week, Usaid Siddiqui wrote an amazing article over at Aljazeera America, New Atheism’s Astonishing Hypocrisy Toward Islam. It focused on Sam Harris, of course. Harris has claimed that the murder of the three Muslims in Chapel Hill had nothing to do with the murderer’s atheism. And he might be right. But Siddiqui went on to discuss other cases like the French man who was recently convicted of shooting at a mosque for explicitly atheistic reasons. But more important, he talked about the way that the explicitly atheistic Chinese government is oppressing religious minorities.

The response by New Atheists to these things is actually quite reasonable: it is far more complicated than just a question of their atheism. I totally agree! The problem — hypocrisy, as Siddiqui correctly noted — is that such complex sociological and political explanations don’t ever seem to occur when New Atheists talk about violence coming from Muslims. In those cases, Sam Harris can grab some awful passage from the Quran and say, “See?!” And the New Atheists except this as proof rather than pushing him aside and noting that he’s just a bigot.

Another aspect of this is to claim that such atheists don’t really get it. And this speaks to another troubling aspect of New Atheism: its inbred character. That’s right: the nice upper middle class white people who can afford to go to Skepticon aren’t violent! Yeah, that tends to be the way. The thing about having power is that the violence that your lifestyle depends upon is farmed out to other people — or drones. Sam Harris may get to write articles defending torture and casual murder from the sky, but he knows he will never have to do it himself.

What’s more, this idea that atheists who go around physically attacking Muslims are not true New Atheists is a standard rhetorical fallacy: No True Scotsman. And it is one that I hear all the time from Christians. But I accept irrationality from Christians — after all, they’re Christians. But how is it that the “I don’t believe anything I don’t have proof for” crowd should so easily fall into this trap? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. We all know why: the New Atheists are no more rational than anyone else, they just think they are.

It all reminds me of David Brook’s entire career. He thinks the only reason the poor are in a bad state is because they don’t act like the rich people who he hangs out with. And that’s what we get from the New Atheists: a lot of tired “us versus them” thinking mascaraing as clear-eyed rational debate. And it isn’t. It’s just age old hatreds.

If Christopher Hitchens hadn’t died, there would be three main figure in the New Atheist community — the other two being Harris and Richard Dawkins. And they are more known for their anti-Muslim beliefs than anything positive about atheism. Most people are to be forgiven that the primary belief of atheism is a hatred of Muslims. I don’t like this, given that I am a traditional (or old) atheist. In addition, this kind of thinking tilts decidedly to the political right. It still amazes me that atheism — long associated with humanism — has largely be co-opted by neoconservatives.

But what do I know? I’m just one of those stupid liberals who want to make everything complicated. I’m like Obama who sees the Iranian regime in the context of history and politics, and doesn’t realize — like Christopher Hitchens — that it is all due to Islam and that our only choice is to bomb them into submission. This is the state of New Atheism: simplistic answers to complex political questions. But they all believe in evolution! And that strikes me as a rather low bar, given that they share that fact with Pope Francis.

I was just listening to a lecture by PZ Myers about the Backlash Against the New Atheists at Skepticon 2 back in 2009. That’s actually a bad title for the talk, because Myers is really discussing the claim that the New Atheist movement is doomed to failure. In particular, some have argued that the movement is already fracturing into a bunch of subgroups who fight with others. Myers pooh-poohs this idea because atheists are not in open rebellion — as though Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses couldn’t all get along at a conference where all they did was mock atheists.

The truth is that there is a problem in the New Atheist movement. I am an atheist. Yet I won’t self-identify as a New Atheist. For one thing, I don’t want to be associated with Richard Dawkins, who seems to think that totally legitimate complaints about sexism in the movement were invalid because western women’s genitalia aren’t being mutilated. Dawkins waited three years before offering the most pathetic of apologies. Unfortunately, the truly vile public statements made by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris will never even get that. In Harris’ case, I’m afraid we will have to live through decades of him finessing his racism.

But my problem with the New Atheist community is much deeper than this. As long as the movement is talking about religions, it is okay. But once they start talking about what they believe in, they show the true depth of their thinking. The following is a condensation of everything that you will hear at Skepticon about what atheists believe:

This is patently false. Think about the Big Bang. As a physicist, I think it is reasonable to say that I know a lot more about it — especially the reasons why it is our current best theory for the origins of the universe — than the vast majority of atheists. Yet my knowledge is still based upon my faith in a whole lot of other people. I haven’t read Penzias and Wilson, much less Doroshkevich and Novikov. And because I have been on the inside of it, I have a much more skeptical attitude towards the scientific process than most atheists. But I do have faith in it because it works. The plumbing in my house works. The lights go on when I flip the switch. I have good reasons for believing, but believe I do.

I’ve long said that the strongest argument for creationism is “God is testing me!” It goes like this: God doesn’t want to make it easy for me to get into heaven. So he created the universe 6,000 years ago — Saturday afternoon — about tea time. And he did it in such a way as to make arrogant science types like myself just think that the universe is 14 billion years old and that humans evolved from single cell organisms. I’m not joking: this is the strongest argument for creationism. The reason it is strong is that it can’t be argued against. It might have happened. And unlike the “missing transitional fossils” and other creationist arguments, it never has to be updated.

If we go even deeper, we see that humans are not nearly as rational as we think. And atheists understand that to one degree or another. They understand that regardless of how much they try, their decisions about what president you vote for will not be rational. But they will doubtless be able to rationalize it. So why is it that religious faith is so important to condemn but not political faith in choosing a president? Most religious people are not fideists. I’d be happier if we stuck to attacking that, but the assumption in the New Atheist community seems to be that any religious person is a fideist, and that is not, you know, a rational or “evidence based” assumption.

The New Atheist community would be better off with this statement of belief, because it is more defensible:

Of course, you have to be careful even there. I’m constantly amazed that people say things like, “Placebos don’t work.” That’s actually something you hear quite often from skeptics. But the truth is that placebos do indeed work. If they didn’t work, then scientists wouldn’t have to include them in their drug trials. The point of such trials is to find out if some expensive drug works better than a placebo, not to see if it works at all. The brain is complex and it is able to do amazing things.

So I think the question here is whether religion works. And I think, for many people, it does: for both good and ill — often in the very same person. And to not admit this strikes me as a very unappealing form of closed-mindedness. Probably the best example of New Atheist irrationality is the notion that there will come a day when people get beyond religion. The evidence for this? Zip. It seems much more rational to me to believe that in the year 2525, man will not still be alive.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I am more rational than the rest. It’s most likely that I have rejected the New Atheists because I feel rejected by them. Ontology-ignorant New Atheists (about as close to a redundant phrase as you get) love to tell me that I’m not really an atheist. Instead, I am supposedly an agnostic. For the record, I am as agnostic about God as I am about whether World War II took place.

The point is that there are divides in the New Atheist community. Why are the members of Atheism Plus going to want to continue to affiliate with the likes of Sam Harris and Penn Jillette? Movements are based upon what people believe. And ultimately, people who believe in social justice will care a whole lot more about that than in what happens to religion. And Penn Jillette will care more about keeping his taxes low. And Sam Harris will care more about his guns or whatever it is he’s into these days. What is this great thing that the New Atheists believe in? Evolution? So do Catholics! What does that prove? I know a whole lot of Republicans who believe in evolution, but that doesn’t make me a Republican.

I don’t see the New Atheist movement dying out. But I also don’t see it taking off. Even while America gets less religious, it doesn’t seem to be getting more atheistic. It will always be like libertarianism — a small, but important group — mostly because it attracts wealthy and privileged people. But I suspect that the New Atheist movement gains members at roughly the rate that it loses members — like me.

Afterword

The image at the top of this article is of the “four [straight white] horsemen”: more or less the very definition of New Atheism. Notice that it consists of two bigots, one sexist, and Daniel Dennett.

After Afterword

I finally listened to the rest of the lecture. Most of the rest of the lecture is even worse. It amazes me that someone as smart as PZ Myers could be so clueless when he gets out of his area of expertise. I think the people arguing for the end of the New Atheist movement are wrong, and yet his counter arguments don’t hold up. It may be due to the fact that making good counter arguments would reveal just what an elitist (and thus limited) a movement New Atheism is. Regardless, you can’t counter a likely evolutionary basis for religious belief with, “But life would be better without religion!” Life might be better without meat too, but I still think that vegetarianism will always be a minority position.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote a very thought provoking article, Is Obama a Christian or Not? It’s Almost Impossible to Say. It is following off Scott Walker’s comment that he didn’t know if Obama was a Christian. Bruenig is a PhD student in religion at Brown University. I’ve quoted her before. She’s brilliant on issues of religion. And she is very insightful here. Basically, she says there is no way to know if anyone is a Christian unless you know them really well. But then she goes on to discuss just how poorly defined “Christian” is. Although I appreciate what’s she’s getting at, I think she is missing the point because she takes religion far more seriously than Americans in general.

If you ask them, you will see that roughly three-quarters of Americans consider themselves Christians. That’s too high a figure to mean anything. That’s “do you believe that motherhood is a good thing” range. If we drilled down into those numbers, we would find that almost to a person Christians disagree about what it is to be a fellow traveler. Ask one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and they will tell that pretty much none of those other so called Christians qualify. Most mainstream protestants don’t accept Mormonism as Christianity. When I look out on the great sea of American Christianity, I see nothing but indifference and heresy.

So the question is not, “What is it to be a Christian?” The question is, “What is it to be an American Christian?” Because Christianity in American public life has almost nothing to do with religion. “Christianity” is just what all right thinking Americans believe. There is increasing room for other faiths — especially other Abrahamic faiths. But there is really no room to speak of with regard to someone like me: a mystic atheist. If I wanted to go into politics, I simply couldn’t. What I am is, to be blunt, far too theological for the American electorate. They aren’t interested in a discussion of ontology and morality; they just want to hear the magic words, “I’m one of you.”

In this environment, what it means to be a Christian is that one claims to be a Christian. I am not a Christian because I don’t claim to be. You might have some problems with Graham Greene — an avowed atheist — who still called himself a Christian and continued to go through the rituals to his death. But Obama is not questionable at all. He claims to be a Christian. He has a history of going to church. He publicly talks about God in the same way that other American Christians do.

The conservatives can’t have it both ways. They claim that America is a Christian country even though most Christians never go to church and have the vaguest form of faith. (I once heard a “Christian” say he didn’t believe Jesus was the son of God!) But then they want to nullify any given Christian because she doesn’t worship in what the conservatives think is the right way. It’s nonsense. American Christianity is far more a cultural signifier than an actual religion. So looking for clues to prove that Obama isn’t a “real” Christian is just nonsense. And ultimately, it is part of the whole racist “birther” movement that wants to say that Obama is not a “real” American.

There is some very interesting news out of the United Kingdom from Cathy Newman, a news reader on Channel 4 News. The Muslim Council of Britain does this thing called #VisitMyMosque day. It is an effort for the general public to come and meet Muslims and see that they are just like everyone else. It reminds me of that reality television show a few years back, All-American Muslim. It was canceled, apparently because — What a surprise! — the Muslims were just as boring as everyone else. There was no bomb building going on or grampa shouting about Zionist dogs. I’ve never been inside a mosque, but I suspect that it is very much like the inside of a Catholic church — except with more floor space.

But not all British mosques wanted to invite the general public in, because they didn’t want people to see them building bombs. I’m kidding! My assumption would be that having your mosque descended upon by the public would create various problems and might get in the way of the worshippers — if you have a very busy mosque. Based upon The Muslim Council of Britain’s website, 23 mosques participated in the event. It’s all very sweet if you ask me; I like to see this with all groups. And let’s be frank: most Christian faiths are not that keen on this unless your interest is in joining the faith.

And that brings us to Cathy Newman. She wanted to go check out #VisitMyMosque day. I think her instincts were good. But prejudice runs deep in all of us, regardless of how we fight it. Apparently, she showed up to the South London Islamic Centre. She did her best to be respectful by covering her head and wearing no shoes. The problem was that the South London Islamic Centre was not taking part in #VisitMyMosque day. So a man at the Centre apparently directed her to a nearby mosque that was taking part. But Newman did not perceive the interact this way.

She took to twitter to complain. First, she tweeted, “Well I just visited Streatham mosque for #VisitMyMosque day and was surprised to find myself ushered out of the door…” The South London Islamic Centre is located in Streatham, so that must be what she was referring to. Then she tweeted, “I was respectfully dressed, head covering and no shoes but a man ushered me back onto the street. I said I was there for #VisitMyMosque mf.” And finally, “But it made no difference.”

Later, Huffington Post UK got its hands on security video at the mosque and found that her take on it was mistaken. She came in, a man talked to her, she left. No one ushered her out. In fact, it seems she even understood the situation because she later found her way to Hyderi Islamic Centre, which was taking part in #VisitMyMosque day. She even tweeted it out:

In the end, Newman apologized, was clearly embarrassed, and that’s that. But it just goes to show how our biases affect us even when we are doing everything we can to reach out and be understanding. I’m assuming the best about Cathy Newman, of course. Maybe she just wanted to make a little news. But I suspect it was all a misunderstanding. She is this pasty white woman with an upper class pasty white life. Being spoken to by a swarthy working class man who wasn’t a taxi driver was probably threatening to her. It’s important to remember that England has a class system that is almost as rigid as we have here in the United States. The take away from this is not that Muslims and non-Muslims need to spend more time together. It is that we need to destroy our class systems. But the pasty white people with their upper class pasty white lives are not likely to see that as an acceptable solution to the many problems that plague our societies.

Somehow, I managed not to write about last year’s release of The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities (pdf). It’s a great book — very well made — and filled with the good wholesome teachings that I’ve come to expect from The Satanic Temple. That’s not sarcasm. I’ve written about it before, Seven Tenets Beat Ten Commandments. Most people think of The Satanic Temple as a joke meant to poke Christians in the eye. Well, it is that. But it is also an honest effort at a religion that is far more moral than any of the Abrahamic faiths. In the teachings of The Satanic Temple, you won’t find justifications for slavery and murder.

The activity book was a response to a decision in Orange County, Florida to allow Christians to distribute religious material to students at public schools. If the schools were going to allow that, then certainly The Satanic Temple should be allowed to distribute its materials. And as one who has gone through the whole activity book, I can tell you that the Christians were going to lose. Not only are the Satanists a more playful group, but Satanic iconography is a lot more fun. Be honest: would you rather see friendly goats and pentagrams or the tired old cross and a baby in a food trough?

I learned from Steve Benen over the weekend that the school board decided that they wouldn’t let any religious material be distributed to the kids. This was a foregone conclusion as soon as The Satanic Temple muddied the waters. But I think the whole thing is pathetic. It shows that people don’t respect Christianity in this country out of any regard for its teaching. It is all about how popular Christianity is in this country. If I had young children, I certainly wouldn’t want them exposed to the truly terrifying images found in the Book of Revelation. And that’s to say nothing of the truly vile and immoral content that makes up much of the Old Testament.

There is absolutely nothing offensive in The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities. The problem that the school board has is that Christians don’t like the idea and the name Satan. The truth is that Satan really isn’t that bad a guy in the Bible. Mostly, he’s just there to keep humanity honest. He certainly isn’t what most modern Christians make him out to be. In discussing Satan with Christians, I get the idea that many of them are not monotheists. They believe in a limited form of polytheism where God represents “good” and Satan represents “evil.” In my estimation, 90% of all American Christians would have been burned alive in the middle ages because their many heresies.

The school district showed its true colors on this most recent debacle. What they’ve demonstrated is that they believe that some religions are fine while others are not. There is no difference between these school board members and those Romans of the early days of Christianity who didn’t accept that the new cult was valid. They don’t want an honest debate between religions. So it is fine to indoctrinate the kids into the teachings of Christianity, as long as they hear nothing else. And once they get a little push-back from The Satanic Temple, they fold up shop. And why not? The United States is already almost 80% Christian. They don’t need to have an honest fight for the hearts and souls of the people; they can just depend upon tradition to keep their iron age folderol going.

But let me just remind you of what The Satanic Temple stands for, because it is an unquestionable good. Compare it to the idea that you should murder your son if God tells you to. And then ask who exactly is preaching evil.

1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forego your own.
5. Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
6. People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

The cowardly bigots at the Orange County school board had better hope that there is not a just Abrahamic God, because there will be hell to pay — literally.