"I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian.."

[lihan161051]

"..but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when.."..a governor in Texas can put on an "outdoorsy" looking jacket and pretend to open up to "regular folks" just to hitch his wagon to the "Christian persecution" meme that's so much the fashion in right-wing politics these days

Comments

Re: Clarification

[nyyki]

Well, some of the responsibility also has to fall on the shoulders of the Radical Atheist folks, who with their constant harassment of folks who just want to get their job done have resulted in said folks responding with whatever they can to shut these people up and get them off their backs.
Most people haven't realized yet that the Radical Atheist movement is just as fundamentalist as the most fundamentalist theists, with the added problem that you can't prove a negative beyond all doubt. And their obsession with the mainstream religions makes it clear to me that they're holding their beliefs out of some psychological damage done to them in most cases by mainstream faiths. Note how they always couch their denials of any higher power in the logical fallacies inherent in a Transcendent deity form, and when anyone starts to bring up Immanent deity forms they change the subject? This makes them not anti-theists, but Anti-Abrahamics. And as such, they thereby fall logically into the Christian/Jewish/Islamic pantheon, making them just another Abrahamic derived path in anthropological terms.
But they have culpability in this too. And note I specified the Radical portion of this area, as I know plenty of moderate Atheists who don't cause these types of problems. It's the ones who see Christian doctrine lurking behind every innocent statement that are the headache inducing ones.

Re: Clarification

[lihan161051]

That did stir up some memories for me. I was actually witness once to Madalyn Murray O'Hair protesting a prayer/invocation at a public school PTA meeting (as I was in the band that was performing in a concert for that meeting, and i couldn't quite *see* what was going on but could definitely *hear* angry raised voices) and that sort of set the tone for my overall perception of militant atheism for quite some time. (And possibly other people's perception as well .. I remember a rather startling amount of schadenfreude at her disappearance, whether it was publicly expressed or not. She was quite a notorious figure around Austin in particular.) And the anti-Abrahamic tone of the protests resonates -- it's arguable that the majority Abrahamic religions in the USA make particularly attractive targets, but you're right that there does seem to be a bit of a bias.

I can see militant atheism pushing the school toward a strictly unentangled posture with regard to officially organized holiday activities, because they're absolutely right that it's an Establishment Clause issue -- a technicality, perhaps, since Christianity of various sorts is a majority religion, but still an entanglement -- but venturing into students' individual expressions of holiday spirit sounds a bit more like heading off the battle-religion fanaticism of hardline dominionist kids and their families, to remove any ambiguity in policy that otherwise might serve as a loophole to allow unpleasant and disruptive acting-out behavior. Restricting individual expressions just doesn't strike me as a move to avoid militant-atheist criticism by itself .. that aspect of it seems far more likely to be intended to head off the militant-religionist activity. You could be right, but it seems like that particular tactic just goes farther than I've ever seen a school district pushed just by criticism from atheists.