The Labour Humanist

Is Karl Rove an atheist?

Here's a fascinating thought, is Karl Rove actually an atheist and, indeed, is George W Bush not quite the fervent believer he is often portrayed? This article, if it eventually turns out to be true, is amazing stuff and would show the Bush administration to be far more cynical than even most of its critics would have believed.

Pat Robertson and other US evangelicals are turning their attention to Europe

I wasn't aware of this one, so thanks to evangelical right for highlighting the growing number of American right wing evangelical organisations - including one set up by Pat Robertson - who are starting to lobby and interfere in various domestic European issues:

"-- In Britain, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), an organization founded by American evangelical leaders, is funding a lawsuit brought by a Christian man who was fired for refusing to work on Sunday. It is also helping to develop the legal strategy.

-- In Sweden, ADF played a key role in persuading the Supreme Court to dismiss charges against Ake Green, a pastor who was convicted of hate-crime charges after he delivered a sermon in which he called gays a "deep cancerous tumor in the entire society."

-- In Aruba and the Czech Republic, Pat Robertson's legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), helped defeat bills that would have legalized same-sex unions.

-- In France, ACLJ affiliate ECLJ (the European Center for Law and Justice), is staging a legal challenge against an antisect law that it says is being used to clamp down on evangelical Christian churches.

-- And on the European Union level, ECLJ is lobbying to block funding for embryonic stem-cell research."

The Republicans and their "secular problem"

What's the biggest block to the Republicans reconnecting with the US electorate? According to Bill Scher on the Huffington Post it's their "secular problem".

In the 2006 midterms the Democrats crushed Republicans among secular voters, broadly defined as those who attend church seldom (favoring Democrats 60% to 38%) or never (67% to 30%). Republicans retained strong support among those who attend church more than weekly. But among those who only go weekly -- the larger portion of the religious vote -- the Republican lead shrunk from 15 points to 7.

Scher argues:

"Republicans failed to be competitive among secular voters, while Democrats were at least competitive among regular churchgoers. And since the secular vote is roughly equal to the regular churchgoing vote, according to the last several national election exit polls, that means Republicans and their conservative base have a far bigger secular problem than their rivals have a religion problem."

And a possible solution:

"One symbolic act that might be useful would be to have some conservative politicians come out of the closet and announce they are atheists or agnostics. If it was clear that conservatism fully embraced religious diversity, including those who do not worship God, that would allay concerns that conservatism is about installing a soft theocracy."

Speaking from this side of the Atlantic it would also help if some Democrats demonstrated a bit more back bone and "outed" themselves as non-religious instead of pandering to anti-atheist prejudice. The Secular Coalition for America is about to announce the results in a contest to find the highest elected atheist/humanist/freethinker in the US...an interesting exercise but also a very depressing one which might find that although the non-religious make up close to 20% of US voters they constitute exactly 0% of elected officials in Congress or the Senate.

JFK as inspiration in responding to the religious right

Thanks to Susan Jacoby writing in Dissent Magazine on how the left should respond to the rise of the religious right in the USA, for reminding us of President John F. Kennedy’s appeal to combine reason and moral passion.

At Kennedy's 1963 American University commencement speech he spoke of peace as “the necessary rational end of rational men” and declared, “Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again...our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

As Jacoby observes: "Could there be a more reasoned yet passionate statement of secular morality than the assertion that we owe our children a peaceful world not because we are immortal but because we are mortal?"