Nato summit 2019 Watford where is The Grove Hotel and which member countries are attending? – The Sun

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TODAY is the main event of the 2019 Nato summit in Watford.

Here's everything you need to know, including the venue, attendees and road closure information.

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The main event takes place today, Wednesday, December 4.

Politicians from around the world arrived on Tuesday, December 3, for the talks.

2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the alliance's meetings.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), started out in 1949 with just 12 countries as members.

FULL ITINERARY FOR WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4

The Nato 2019 summit is being held in Watford, Herts.

Some of the world's most important leaders are meeting at The Grove Hotel at Chandler's Cross.

Nato summits are a periodic opportunity for Heads of State and Heads of Government to meet and evaluate Nato's current strategies, evaluate the alliance's current position and brainstorm strategic direction.

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Donald Trump touched down in the UK on Monday, December 2, ready to attend the summit.

He was met by protesters ahead of an event at Buckingham Palace the following evening where he and other leaders were greeted by the Queen and Prince Charles.

The leaders met at the palace to mark 70 years of the alliance.

FULL LIST OF ATTENDING MEMBER COUNTRIES

The summit's main event is the Nato leader's meeting.

The alliance includes 28 member states,with countries including Germany, Spain, Greece and Turkey joining, andrepresents a population of more than 900 million people.

The organisation isconsidered to be thelargest and most powerful military alliance in history.

Attending the meeting in Hertfordshire will be Donald Trump, who is visiting the UK during the first week of December.

According to the BBC: "President Trump will have separate talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and attend a working lunch with representatives from Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and the United Kingdom."

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The summit will see heightened security, road closures and traffic - with police warning of significant disruption.

Nato, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, is an intergovernmental military alliance established in 1949.

It was formed with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 by 12 member states - Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK and the US.

Since then it has expanded to 28 member states,with countries including Germany, Spain, Greece and Turkey joining, andrepresents a population of more than 900 million people.

The organisation isconsidered to be thelargest and most powerful military alliance in history.

Heads of government and state have met at 26 Nato summits since 1949 - the one before Watford's was held in Poland.

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Nato summit 2019 Watford where is The Grove Hotel and which member countries are attending? - The Sun

A short history of the EU and NATOs uneasy relationship – Quartz

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In the face of growing security challenges to Europe, from an antagonistic Russia, to instability in the Middle East, cyberwar, and terrorism, there is a growing recognition that enhanced cooperation between the EU and NATO will be key to an effective response.

Calibrating such cooperation to respond to perceived common threats, however, has never been straightforward. The political context, as well as rivalry between the EU and NATO, have often hampered the capacity of the institutions to work together.

The meeting of NATO leaders in London on December 3-4 offers an occasion to further move that relationship forward. But having tracked EU-NATO relations for over a decade, I wouldnt count on any major strategic or political breakthroughs.

Ever since NATO was created in 1949, with the dual aim of keeping the peace among the Allies and providing a security alliance against the Soviet Union, there has been a tension between whether or not NATO should drive the security agenda in Europe.

Since 1949, a number of European-wide organizations have tried to coordinate European defence policyfrom the failed attempt at a French proposal for an integrated European Defence Community in 1954, to its alternative, the Western European Union (WEU), a military alliance of the UK, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

The precursor to the EU, the European Community, didnt really put security matters on its agenda. So it was in the mid-1990s following the Maastrict Treaty that the newly-formed EU began to develop its own common foreign and security policy and the relationship with NATO began to shift.

NATO had already developed a good working relationship with the WEU, but this really became germane in 1996 with attempts to use the WEU as an institutional bridge between the EU and NATO.

As long as the EU remained an organization without a defence component to support its common security policy, and NATO an organization focused strictly on collective defence of its members, the EU had little need to develop military ties with NATO. However, as some EU member sates started to consider an autonomous EU defence and security instrument towards the end of the 1990s, this relationship became unavoidable.

After a 1998 joint summit between the UK and France at Saint Malo, the formal process began towards creating the EUs Security and Defence Policy (ESDPnow termed CSDP). Attention started to focus on an alternative arrangement to the WEU as the bridge between the two institutions.

Once the EU formally adopted the WEUs Petersberg Tasks, which set out the conditions under which militaries could be deployed, the relationship between the EU and NATO changed from one of informal meetings to something more institutionalized. Formal committees and structures began to be mapped out by 1999.

However, cultural and institutional differences between the EU and NATO still had to be reduced before any official arrangements could be finalized. NATO retained a very strict security regime dating back to its Cold War years, while in contrast, the EU was designed as an open and transparent organization. In order to adapt to a stricter security policy, the EU modelled its security framework on NATO. This was also helped by the fact that most EU states have also been NATO member statescurrently 22 are members of both.

By 2000, both the US and France had overcome enough of their initial reservations about the relationship to pursue joint EU-NATO committees, set up to tackle various common security challenges. Formal political exchanges started up between NATO and the EU, such as those between the EUs Political Security Committee (PSC) and NATOs North Atlantic Council (NAC).

The Berlin Plus agreement was then negotiated between 1999 to 2002. This became the framework agreement between the two organizations to allow the EU to access NATO assets and capabilities that it did not possess (and in some cases, still do not) for its own operations such as the EU-led military Operation ALTHEA in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Berlin Plus arrangements also created an EU-NATO security agreement to allow non-NATO members access to classified NATO documents.

The American NATO expert David Yost set out the problems at the heart of the EU-NATO relationship in a 2007 book. As he put it: Difficulties include institutional and national rivalries, the participation problem, and disagreements about the proper scope and purpose of NATO-EU cooperation.

The participation problem is a central impediment to formal EU-NATO relations that stems from the ongoing dispute between Turkey (a NATO-only member) and Cyprus (an EU-only member). This led to Turkey directly blocking formal EU-NATO cooperation in 2004 beyond that of Operation ALTHEA. Formal meetings between the PSC and NAC were suspended as Turkey objected, and still does, to Cyprus sitting in on such meetings without a NATO security agreementwhich Turkey refuses to allow.

Informal meetings do take place but these have been described to me by both PSC and NAC ambassadors during my research as dull, highly scripted, and uninspiring. As a result, there has been a move towards enhancing cooperation at the inter-organizational level to compensate for deficiencies at the formal political level.

As I have argued elsewhere, the reality today is that the EU and NATO cooperate far more outside of the formal Berlin Plus relationship than they do inside it. There has been a renewed impetus to enhance relations since the signing of a EU-NATO Joint Declaration in 2016 but there are still major obstacles to an effective strategic partnership between the two institutions.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A short history of the EU and NATOs uneasy relationship - Quartz

Putin got exactly what he wants from NATO this week, thanks to Trump – INSIDER

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Russia is not a member of NATO, obviously, and thus Vladimir Putin is not present at the NATO meeting in London on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

Nonetheless, the Russian leader got pretty much exactly what he needed from the meeting, thanks in large part to US President Donald Trump.

The context here is "Article 5," the fundamental guiding principle that underpins the US-Europe military alliance, and its role in deterring military aggression from Russia. Article 5 states that if any member of NATO is attacked, then all of NATO will rush to defend that country.

On paper, it's a scary prospect for Moscow: If Russian troops were to attempt maneuvers in even a small country such as Slovakia or Latvia which both used to be part of the Soviet Union then troops from the US, UK and Turkey would rush into war to defend them.

Of course, NATO only works as long as all its 29 countries remain continuously on board with the promise that they will fight even if the war doesn't directly involve them.

This week, Trump said Article 5 was merely a "question."

"I'm going to be discussing that today," he told reporters. "And it's a very interesting question, isn't it?"

Russia's main strategy to deter NATO around its borders is to encourage splits and division within NATO that will paralyze its ability to respond to aggression in a unified way. From Putin's point of view, it doesn't matter that NATO controls up to 3.5 million military service personnel 500,000 more than Russia if the NATO troops are too busy arguing amongst themselves when the tanks start rolling.

This "mindset" is a key difference between the way Putin views the world and the way NATO's leaders do.

Since the end of the Cold War, Europe and the US have enjoyed the "peace dividend." They went into the 21st Century assuming the big global conflicts were over. Future wars would be minor, asymmetric skirmishes that superior firepower would easily quash. The Western mindset, in other words, is that the world would be a largely benign place in which democracy would flourish.

Putin, by contrast, is a creature and a product of the former Soviet Union, the KGB, and its successor agencies. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw many of its former countries and territories cede away from Moscow and ally with Europe.

This wasn't just a blow to Russia's national ego. For the Russian state's national security apparatus, it represented a security threat.

For decades, Russia has officially regarded the growth of NATO as an "encirclement" that threatens Russia, in much the same way that the West's Cold War alliances did.

Its defence against the threat is to make sure it retains as much influence as possible in the countries that line its borders. Failing that, it wants those countries weak and disabled, so that they form a confusing buffer zone around Russia's actual border.

The conflict in Ukraine is a good example of that. Russia has outright invaded Crimea, claiming it for its own. Simultaneously, it is conducting low-level, ongoing guerilla combat operations in Donetsk and Donbass, making it impossible for Ukraine to control its territory, but not explicitly declaring it part of Russia.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

The strategy is clever. It creates a situation where even if NATO wanted to wade-in full scale to reclaim Ukraine's borders, the mission would be confusing and diffuse. Which place would be the priority Crimea or Donbass? And would NATO be willing to keep troops in both territories, given that the Russian military would be amassed in comfortable readiness, indefinitely, just yards across the border?

NATO, in other words, largely assumes peace is the world's default setting. Russia assumes conflict is the norm.

That false assumption on the NATO side has had disastrous consequences for the UK's military readiness. Military funding has dwindled. The British military is no longer big enough nor capable enough of defending the country against a Russian attack, according to General Sir Richard Barrons, the recently retired chief of the UK's Joint Forces Command.

In a 10-page "private" memo to the UK Ministry of Defence, he warned that Britain no longer had the military management or training to defend the country.

"Neither the UK homeland nor a deployed force let alone both concurrently could be protected from a concerted Russian air effort," he wrote, in a copy of the memo obtained by the Financial Times.

The divisions in NATO don't end there. Internally, as Insider's Mitch Prothero reported in August, NATO officials regard Trump as a national security risk. The president has a famously chummy relationship with Putin, and willingly takes meetings with him that no one else attends.

This makes them afraid to take a hard line against Russia's provocations such as testing nuclear-propelled weapons or tell the president national security information. He might just blurt it out in a conversation with Putin.

Trump has tweeted classified information in the past, including one incident where he published a photo of an Iranian rocket launch site. That gave the US's adversaries a clearer idea of the US's intel-gathering capabilities.

Turkey controls the largest military force in Europe, and the largest force in NATO outside the US. It also occupies the most strategically sensitive area of NATO the border with Syria, Iraq and Iran. Its military is constantly active.

And yet Trump has gone out of his way to annoy Turkey. In 2018, he imposed economic sanctions on the country, beggaring its currency and plunging the nation into a sharp recession.

In response, Turkey made a $2.5 billion arms deal with Russia for a new missile system. That deal will give Russia NATO's main enemy a new microscope into the capability of Europe's most important military force.

Trump is so divisive that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is afraid to be photographed with him. Last night Johnson hosted drinks for the NATO leaders at Downing Street. According to Politico, "Johnson was so keen not to be photographed with the U.S. president that he did not even greet him at the door when he and wife Melania arrived at No. 10."

Trump with French president Emmanuel Macron. Peter Dejong/AP

This is why French president Emmanuel Macron told The Economist: "What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO." Macron believes Europe stands on "the edge of a precipice."

Trump's actions have helped Russia's strategy to sew confusion inside its rivals. The rot has reached Article 5, the fundamental basis of European defence. Europe cannot fight a war against Russia unless NATO is a functioning institution. Right now, Trump is raising questions about that capability.

Putin could not have hoped for more.

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Putin got exactly what he wants from NATO this week, thanks to Trump - INSIDER

NATO survives to fight another day but will that fight be with Trump? – Toronto Star

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Turning 70 should be a special birthday to celebrate, but for the troubled NATO alliance this week, surviving the party in one piece will be seen as victory enough.

However fractious an anniversary summit it may have been in London, there were actually fewer bodies than expected left on the battlefield.

And if this means the challenge of figuring out NATOs new 21st-century-role will be left to another day, then that appears to be just fine.

After all, many western leaders, like most Americans, seem hopeful that a post-Trump world is on the horizon even though, more ominously, they fear that the Europe-U.S. relationship will never return to the way things were since 1949.

It was 70 years ago that NATO was founded to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Unions Joseph Stalin. But at the London summit, it sometimes appeared that much of NATO now sees Americas Donald Trump as its primary foe.

First, there was that clash between Frances Emmanuel Macron and Trump over the fate of Syrias ISIS fighters.

Then there was the scene at Buckingham Palace where several western leaders, including Canadas Justin Trudeau, appeared to mock the U.S. president.

And then in response to that, Trump abruptly cancelled his final news conference and dismissed Trudeau as being two-faced.

If this sounded like a typical week of global diplomacy in this Trump era, indeed it was although, as the title of a cherished British childrens book once put it, it could have been worse.

There have been increasing fears that Trumps hostility towards NATO will lead to the demise of the alliance, particularly if he is re-elected next year.

John Bolton, Trumps former national security adviser, warned in a private speech last month that Trump could go full isolationist if he is elected again, NBC News reported, pulling the U.S. out of NATO and other international alliances.

This seemed to confirm earlier reports in the New York Times that Trump discussed his desire to withdraw from NATO several times last year.

In spite of this, Trump was actually mildly supportive of NATO as an organization during the London meetings, even as he ranted against individual leaders for not spending enough on their military budgets.

Trumps comments about NATO were part of an attack on Frances president for being nasty and very insulting in recent remarks about the alliance. Emmanuel Macron had been quoted as saying that NATO was suffering brain death in what was widely regarded as criticism of Trumps handling of Turkey, Syria and the Kurds.

Incredibly, Trump responded by saying that NATO was serving a great purpose even though he had earlier ridiculed it for being obsolete. But his annoyance at Macron aside, there is no real evidence that Trump has become a fan of NATO.

Knowing that, Macron seemed determined to trigger a controversial debate inside NATO about the future of the organization, and its reliance on the U.S., in light of Trumps views.

In an interview last month with The Economist, which was criticized by Germanys Angela Merkel, Macron argued that Europe needs to rethink its defence posture in a world with an American president who doesnt share our idea of the European project.

Macron has recently been promoting a new European defence co-ordination project that doesnt include the United States and is separate from NATO.

Even though European leaders are deeply divided about whether any strategy that weakens the Europe-U.S. relationship is realistic, there seems to be a growing consensus that the genie is out of the bottle that, even after Trump, the extraordinary closeness and consistency of the past 70 years between Europe and the United States cannot be recaptured.

What has shocked many Europeans is that Trumps views have been embraced by so many Americans, particularly Republicans but others as well.

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In other words, even if Trump is defeated, how can the United States be trusted again?

As the impeachment process in Washington moves closer to the prospect of swallowing up Trump himself, the forces that led to his presidency will inevitably remain.

And that enduring reality will affect more than Europe.

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NATO survives to fight another day but will that fight be with Trump? - Toronto Star

atheism | Definition, Philosophy, & Comparison to Agnosticism …

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Atheism as rejection of religious beliefs

A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these faiths believe that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing and who has absolute sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of course, human beingswho are not only utterly dependent on this creative power but also sinful and who, or so the faithful must believe, can only make adequate sense of their lives by accepting, without question, Gods ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs.

Atheism, however, casts a wider net and rejects all belief in spiritual beings, and to the extent that belief in spiritual beings is definitive of what it means for a system to be religious, atheism rejects religion. So atheism is not only a rejection of the central conceptions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; it is, as well, a rejection of the religious beliefs of such African religions as that of the Dinka and the Nuer, of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome, and of the transcendental conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.

It is necessary, however, if a tolerably adequate understanding of atheism is to be achieved, to give a reading to rejection of religious belief and to come to realize how the characterization of atheism as the denial of God or the gods is inadequate.

To say that atheism is the denial of God or the gods and that it is the opposite of theism, a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and seeks to demonstrate his existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. First, not all theologians who regard themselves as defenders of the Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam regard themselves as defenders of theism. The influential 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above finite beings. God, for him, is being-itself, the ground of being and meaning. The particulars of Tillichs view are in certain ways idiosyncratic, as well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been influential; and his rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, is not eccentric in contemporary theology, though it may very well affront the plain believer.

Second, and more important, it is not the case that all theists seek to demonstrate or even in any way rationally to establish the existence of God. Many theists regard such a demonstration as impossible, and fideistic believers (e.g., Johann Hamann and Sren Kierkegaard) regard such a demonstration, even if it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view it would undermine faith. If it could be proved, or known for certain, that God exists, people would not be in a position to accept him as their sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all the risks that entails. There are theologians who have argued that for genuine faith to be possible God must necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious ultimate reality, whose existence and authority must be accepted simply on faith. This fideistic view has not, of course, gone without challenge from inside the major faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above characterization of atheism inadequate.

Finally, and most important, not all denials of God are denials of his existence. Believers sometimes deny God while not being at all in a state of doubt that God exists. They either willfully reject what they take to be his authority by not acting in accordance with what they take to be his will, or else they simply live their lives as if God did not exist. In this important way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists (unless we wish, misleadingly, to call them practical atheists). They are not even agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him in other ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said, atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that Gods existence is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

Yet it remains the case that such a characterization of atheism is inadequate in other ways. For one it is too narrow. There are atheists who believe that the very concept of God, at least in developed and less anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is so incoherent that certain central religious claims, such as God is my creator to whom everything is owed, are not genuine truth-claims; i.e., the claims could not be either true or false. Believers hold that such religious propositions are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and there are agnostics who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they are true or false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical empiricists.

While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too broad. For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight. They believe in God not because it is probable that he existsthey think it more probable that he does notbut because belief is thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise Pascal or a Soren Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T.H. Huxley or a Sir Leslie Stephen) from an atheist such as Baron dHolbach. All believe that there is a God and God protects humankind, however emotionally important they may be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of probability. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization of atheism.

It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. There are no ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of Gods existence. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God. If the atheist could somehow survive the death of his present body (assuming that such talk makes sense) and come, much to his surprise, to stand in the presence of God, his answer should be, Oh! Lord, you didnt give me enough evidence! He would have been mistaken, and realize that he had been mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God (assuming that he could have them), what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. Knowing with certainty is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take.

An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is one) is by definition a very recherch realitya reality that must be (for there to be such a reality) transcendent to the worldthe burden of proof is not on the atheist to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of that order. Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence for Gods existencei.e., that there is such a reality. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality. He needs to show that there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the theist that there are in addition to varieties of empirical facts spiritual facts or transcendent facts, such as it being the case that there is a supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist can assert that such facts have not been shown.

It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may bring. There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist.

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atheism | Definition, Philosophy, & Comparison to Agnosticism ...

Church of Atheism might worship science, but it is not a religion, court decides – National Post

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A self-styled church of atheism has been denied charity tax status after the Federal Court of Appeal agreed with the Minister of National Revenue that it is not actually a religion, even though it claims to have a minister, 10 commandments, and a worshipful relationship to the sacred texts of what it calls mainstream science.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada put up a determined fight in its appeal. It made a Charter argument that the ministrys denial was discriminatory, which failed because non-profit corporations do not have the same equality rights as people do in Canada.

The Church claimed it should be a charity because its activities contribute to the advancement of religion, which is one of four purposes sufficient to get charity status.

But religion is otherwise undefined, so it was left to the court to decide whether this particular expression of atheism qualifies. A three-judge panel, including Justice Marc Nadon whose appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada was overturned in 2014 on eligibility grounds, found it does not.

For something to be a religion in the charitable sense under the Act, either the Courts must have recognized it as such in the past, or it must have the same fundamental characteristics as those recognized religions, reads the judgment, written by Justice Marianne Rivoalen. These fundamental characteristics are not set out in a clear test. A review of the jurisprudence shows that fundamental characteristics of religion include that the followers have a faith in a higher power such as God, entity, or Supreme Being; that followers worship this higher power; and that the religion consists of a particular and comprehensive system of faith and worship.

Claiming to venerate energy as an unseen power just does not cut it, theruling shows.

The new ruling is a reminder that atheism has never made it very far as a formal religion, and not for lack of trying.

There have been moments in recent history when formal disbelief in a deity seemed to be on the verge of widely adopting the grand trappings of the more familiar religions, such as doctrine, observances, and soul-stirring use of art, literature and music.

Back in 2012, for example, as a promotional stunt for his book Religion for Atheists, the writer Alain de Botton even claimed to be moving ahead with construction of a Temple to Atheism in central London. It was to be a 46-metre-tall, open-air structure representing the age of the Earth, with fossils lining the interior walls, the human genome inscribed on the exterior, and a millimetre-thick band of gold at the bottom to put humanitys lifespan in perspective.

It was a catchy idea for atheists, who then seemed to be on the cultural rise. But the charmingly fire-breathing arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens had just died, and the other Three Horsemen Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins all lacked his charisma. In time, as with many movements enabled by the Internet, New Atheism turned increasingly nasty and lost its cultural momentum. The Templewas never built.

Since then, atheist groups have tended to pitch themselves as the Church of Atheism of Central Canada does, as a self-help club.

In denying it status as a religion, the court did agree with earlier rulings that the Charters section on freedom of conscience and religion does protect the right of atheists to practice their beliefs however they see fit. But it also found that denying this group status as a charity does not interfere with that right in any more than a trivial or insubstantial way.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration, the court ruled. Charity status is actually a tax subsidy by the government designed to encourage the charitable behaviour. It is not the right of any non-profit group that seeks it.

The Ministry that initially denied the status evidently had some trouble with the churchs professed beliefs, such as our Ten Commandments of Energy are sacred texts because they were created by a wise human being who consists of pure, invisible Energy and has acknowledged Energys existence.

An actual deity is not required to call a group a religion, as Buddhism exemplifies, the court noted. But the Church of Atheism could not even demonstrate that it has a comprehensive system of doctrine and observances.

Mainstream science was not a sufficient system under the law, as it is neither particularly specific nor precise.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada is hardly a big player in the atheism world. A website once listed for it has gone blank. It has a Twitter account with zero followers. Its address is a rural property with a single family home and a garage in McDonalds Corners, between Kingston and Ottawa. No one was answering the phone there on Wednesday.

The Church was represented by Christopher Bernier, who lives at the property and is identified in an online profile as the Churchs Minister of the Gospel of Atheism. He could not be reached for comment.

Email: jbrean@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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Church of Atheism might worship science, but it is not a religion, court decides - National Post

Can you be both a Christian and an unbeliever? – The Irish Times

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New atheists attract a lot of hostility but, if youre not one yourself, consider how infuriating it must be to see church worship on the rise internationally despite all the scientific evidence undermining religious superstition.

Atheists of whom I count myself as one look upon stubbornly high rates of supernatural belief (84 per cent of the worlds population identifies with a religious group) a bit like the way liberals look upon the electoral success of Donald Trump in the United States. It really is hard to fathom!

Just why has atheism been slow to catch on?

Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed God is dead in 1882. Yet, writes historian Alec Ryrie: The dominant religious story of the past two centuries is surely the spread of Christianity and Islam around the globe, a race in which those two hares have so far outpaced the secular tortoise that it takes a considerable act of faith to believe it might one day catch up.

In a new book, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, Ryrie explores the forces behind Western secularism. He reminds us immediately what a unique cultural project it is, describing secularism as an offshoot of European Christendom, and in particular . . . of the Protestant world.

Unbelief has been carried along two main streams, he argues. One is of anger at among other things the hypocrisy of priests and preachers and the abuses of religious leaders. The other is of anxiety, whereby earnest faith turns in on itself and discovers an empty hole.

Though Ryrie is a Church of England lay minister, he is generous to followers of all religions and none. Carefully tracing the many manifestations of unbelief from Martin Luther to Father Ted, he highlights how dissent and doubt are cornerstones of the Christian experience just as much as faith. In the process, he hints at an inherent weakness in the atheist stance.

Christianity may have been its own gravedigger as sociologist Peter Berger once claimed but unbelief also seems to contradict itself because lack of faith is impossible to sustain entirely. Ryrie discusses further as this weeks Unthinkable guest.

Why has atheism been slow to catch on?

Actual hard atheism the assertion that there is no God isnt just, in its own way, an act of faith, and a combative stance. Its also an empty position, an assertion of what someone doesnt believe, not what they do believe.

Some very successful philosophies Marxism for much of the 20th century, humanism in our own times include or can include atheism, but they catch on, or dont, for their own reasons, not chiefly because of their religious or anti-religious claims. In other words, atheism can certainly catch on but only if its tied up with a belief or value system that has its own appeal. The same is of course true of the assertion that there is a God.

On its own, the question of whether or not there is a God is like whether or not parallel universes exist: interesting in the abstract, but not very relevant to daily life. It becomes relevant when its part of a wider system like Marxism, or Christianity.

You highlight the way in which Christianity has always had a current of unbelief. Can you be both a Christian and an unbeliever?

To be a Christian you have to be an unbeliever: you reject belief in Ganesh, Maoism, the Force and lots more. The Bible is full of searing, scornful unbelief directed at the idols of the Gentiles. So to be a Christian or a Jew, or a Muslim, or many other things you have to believe some things and disbelieve others.

Faith has never meant believing anything you are told. The trick is to know what, and why. Most of the great moments of renewal and revival in Christian history have been spurred by unbelief by some Christians refusal to accept the easy answers they were being given, but instead to keep searching.

Were supposed to build houses on rock, and how do you know that youre building on rock unless you do some digging first?

You note that mockery of religion by unbelievers tends to be targeted not at God himself, but his earthly representatives. Should believers view ridicule of their religion as a kind of constructive feedback?

Yes! Churches often perhaps usually deserve it, for the simple reason that they consist of human beings. It seems to me that the appropriate Christian response to mockery is neither to lash out nor even, sometimes, to argue back, but to embrace it with humility and to try to deserve it a little less next time.

Whats the single best argument today in favour of Christianity?

I dont think its really a matter of argument, trading debating points back and forth. The intellectual cases for and against Christianity havent really changed much in the past century. The new atheists are most rehearsing old arguments. In fact, much of the discussion remains the same as in Roman times.

We mostly choose belief or unbelief for intuitive, emotional reasons and then find ways of rationalising our choices after the fact. Thats not a bad thing, as long as were aware of it. Its what human beings do, and our intuition can be surprisingly wise sometimes.

Which is to say: the best argument in favour of Christianity is the account of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. If youre won over by his moral authority, then the rest is just tidying up. If youre not, then theres not much more to be said.

Ask a sage:

Question: What are the odds of there being a God?

Blaise Pascal replies: Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails.

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Can you be both a Christian and an unbeliever? - The Irish Times

Review: Evaluating the Rich Ambiguities of Western Atheism – The Wire

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When, in the 11th century, the great Central Asian Islamic philosopher Ibn Sn or Avicenna (as he was known in his Latin reception) composed his commentary on the main works of Aristotle (384-322 BC), he also commented on the latters Meteorology. After summing up Aristotles view that humans inhabited both the northern and the southern hemispheres while the tropical zone in between was too hot for habitation, Avicenna rejected the idea that there were humans in parts of the Earth unknown to Islamic geographers. After him, Ibn Rushd or Averroes (d.1198), another canonical Aristotelian Muslim philosopher, and Ibn Tibbon (d.1232), a Jewish philosopher who wrote Aristotelian commentaries on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes and translated Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew, would repeat Avicennas rejection.

The scholar Franois de Blois proposes an explanation for why these Muslim and Jewish thinkers, like St. Augustine in the early fifth century AD, rejected what pre-Christian thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus found an acceptable possibility:

For the monotheist religions of the Abrahamic tradition, for Jews, Christians and Muslims, the idea that there might be people in inaccessible parts of the earth, or indeed of the universe, is a profoundly distressing one. God created Adam and Eve from whom all mankind is descended [] So are the people in inaccessible continents deprived of any hope of salvation? How does this fit in with Gods justice?

He concludes that all these objectors to Aristotle belong to the same tradition in that they share the same aversion of the Abrahamic religions to any notion of religious or cultural pluralism, adding that the circumnavigation of South America and Africa in early modern times not only debunked this Abrahamic attachment to universal Adamic descent, it also heralded the return to, may I say, the cultural relativism that is one of the more endearing traits of the world of ancient paganism. But such early modern cultural relativism did nothing to prevent the European genocide and colonisation on Christian grounds of such circumnavigated lands.

Seven Types of AtheismJohn GrayAllen Lane, 2018

At any rate, this dogma of universal human monogenesis forms one half of the object of John Grays critique in Seven Types of Atheism. The other half is the idea, also the invention of Christian monotheism according to him, of universal progress through history. In acknowledged imitation of William Empsons 1930 study of linguistic-poetic ambiguity,Seven Types of Ambiguity, John Grays book evaluates the rich ambiguities of the word atheism as it figures in modern Europe and America, discerning seven broad types in seven chapters respectively.

The first of these is scientific atheism or the position that sincereligion is bad science it can be debunked and replaced by good science, a position that originated in 19th-century European Positivism. Among its descendants, notes Gray, is the Soviet Union that declared hundreds of thousands of members of former clergies of all religions to be former persons and sent them with their families to their deaths in camps as part of a campaign for scientific atheism.

Also among its descendants are the racist evolutionary humanism of Julian Huxley (d.1975) and the American new atheist Sam Harris who calls for a science of good and evil, assuming without evidence that it would support liberal values of human equality and personal autonomy while defending the practice of torture as being not only permissible but necessary in what he describes as our war on terror.

To Grays genealogy, we must add Chinas ongoing genocidal campaign to remake Uighur Muslim identity on the model of state-mandated scientific atheism. Gray writes: Typically, exponents of scientific ethics have merely endorsed the conventional values of their time. His chapter on this type is brief because he finds it too easily refutable: religions arise as natural human responses to the need for values and science, no matter how good it gets, cannot close the gap between facts and values.

Grays second type concerns secular humanists which include Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell among others. What members of this group share beneath their overt differences is an understanding of historical time as progressive for humanity. Whether through a single apocalyptic upheaval or after the Protestant Reformation gradually over time, they held that humanity could only improve over time.

Whereas for Plotinus (270 CE), the non-Christian founder of Neoplatonism, the ultimate aim of human endeavour was returning to the cosmogonic principle of reason by exiting time, for St. Paul, St. Augustine and their consciously or unconsciously Christian legatees the ultimate aim was collective improvement in time. Marxs philosophy of history is Christian theodicy repackaged as humanist myth, Grays writes. Mill remained a Christian even in his explicit repudiation of Christianity, argues Gray, because he founded the orthodoxy of the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion. Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity even as he earned liberal opprobrium by reporting from Soviet Russia that methodical mass killing was central to the Bolshevik project.

Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity. Credit: Anefo/Wikimedia Commons, CC0

The method by which Gray traces intellectual genealogies is not, as George Scialabbas review of this book characterises it, guilt by somewhat far-fetched association. For what these thinkers share with Paul and Augustine namely the idea of collective human progress is not just a trope and does not form part of other pre-modern religious traditions. However one judges Grays positions on Marx, Mill and Russell or on Nietzsche and his vulgarisation in America by Ayn Rand which forms the focus of this chapters last part acquaintance with even just the broad features of pre-modern Islamic, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist models of historical time confirms the correctness of Grays main contention.

The Jain view of time as a beginningless, endless cycle, writes John E. Cort, scholar of Jainism, does assign privileged place to the human. But neither here nor in Mahayana Buddhist traditions (which reserve Buddhahood for humans), nor even in Hindu ones, do we see any conception of humanity as a whole or of that whole improving over time.

Not even all Islamic universal histories, despite sharing the schema of Adamic descent with Christian and Jewish salvific histories, always conceived of humans as a collective subject progressing through time. Rashiduddin Fazullah, the remarkable early 14th-centuryJewish-Muslim historian to the Mongol Emperors of Iran, composed A Compendium of Histories, a universal history in Persian unlike any of his Persian-Arabic models. Whereas his models had traced human diversity back up to Adam and Eve and triumphally down to the authors own patron dynasty, Rashiduddin followed such a monogenetic account with accounts of spatially dispersed Jewish, Christian and Buddhist communities that were irreducible to the Biblical schema. Evidently, the sheer demographical diversity of the Pax Mongolica and distinctively Mongol nomad heritages combined to undo the dogma of Adamic descent. Something of this seems to have passed into conceptions of historical time among thinkers in the great early modern states of the Islamic world the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires.

For these thinkers, time did indeed contain improvements on previous empires and in various practices. But it contained no sense of collective human improvement towards a goal. The Emperor Akbar (d.1605) thus took personal credit for improved matchlock rifles and getting elephants to mate in captivity among scores of other improvements. But his chief ideologue Abul Fazls Institutes of Akbar, which showcases such improvements, does not yield a cumulative terminus for all humans or even some. The Emperors human and non-human subjects reposed in his justice and justice was a changeless excellence.

Nor does it appear that even all Christian thinkers were in thrall to St. Augustines meliorism. Pseudo-Dionysus, the Christian Neoplatonist of the early 6th century, conceived of human improvement as ascent to divine unity rather than as earthly projects of collective improvement. In this sense, Grays true enemies are Paul, Augustine and their theist and atheist inheritors alone. For Plato and Plotinus, Gray writes, history was a nightmare from which the individual mind struggled to awake. Following Paul and Augustine, the Christian Erigena made history the emerging embodiment of Logos. With their unending chatter about progress, secular humanists project this mystical dream into the chaos of the human world.

Grays third chapter takes aim at the kind of atheism that makes a religion of science, a category that includes evolutionary humanism, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism and contemporary transhumanism. If the first type of atheism aimed to displace the bad science of religion with good science, this type sacralises science. Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution that had actually maintained that natural selection was a purposeless drift with no progress, the best-selling German biologist Ernst Haeckel (d.1919) proposed a scientific anthropology according to which the human species was composed of a hierarchy of racial groups, with white Europeans at the top.

Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution, German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a scientific anthropology. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Whether Julian Huxleys early 20th century defences of scientific racism or A.N. Whiteheads (d.1947) evolutionary theology, such theories depended on a misreading of Darwin that held to the idea of collective human evolution towards a higher purpose. Such misappropriations of science to justify racism, Gray argues, were following in the steps of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment (we read damning quotes here from Hume, Kant and Voltaire) whose racism was a necessary consequence of their vision of humanity:

Voltaires views of Jews expresses, in an extreme form, a theme that runs throughout the Enlightenment. Human beings become what they truly are only when they have renounced any particular identity to become specks of universal humanity [] Once this is understood the riddle of Enlightenment anti-Semitism is solved.

It was a scientific reformulation of morality in terms of Marxs class struggle that led Leon Trotsky to argue in 1938 that anything that promotes a proletarian revolution is justified including the taking and shooting of hostages, a practice Trotsky pioneered in the Russian Civil War.

Qualifying his admiration for the currently best-selling Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Gray notes that while Harari rightly recognises transhumanism as a contemporary version of a modern project of human self-deification, he mistakenly affirms the idea of humanity, a humanist myth inherited from monotheism. Humanity, Grays writes, does not exist. All that can actually be observed is the multifarious human animal, with its intractable enmities and divisions. This disaggregated view of the human animal echoes the aforementioned Rashiduddins vision of humanity as peoples dispersed without design as it does that of thinkers from the ancient world like Lucretius. What would it mean for any human today to adopt such a view as Gray commends?

Yuval Noah Harari. Photo: ynharari.com

Levelling his sights against the millenarian idea that humanity can be transformed in one cataclysmic upheaval, Grays third chapter on Atheism, Gnosticism and Modern Political Religion infers this millenarian pattern in a series of projects. Jan Bockelsons 1534-35 Anabaptist communist state in Munster which involved sexual communism that forced women on pain of execution to be everyones sexual property; Jacobinism of which Gray writes the human cost of the French Revolution runs into hundreds of thousands of lives; Bolshevism in connection with which Gray observes that Lenin aimed to purge Russia of the human remnants of the past and that according to official statistics collected at the time around 80% [of the inmates in the camps of the Soviet secret police] were illiterate or had little schooling; and Nazism which, though a Counter-Enlightenment movement in its rejection of the egalitarian morality professed (if rarely consistently applied) by Enlightenment thinkers, replicated the Enlightenment fantasy of a science of man based in physiology. While acknowledging some differences in motivation, Gray holds that all of these movements fuse a millenarian vision of a universal and sudden transformation of life on earth with the modernised Gnostic notion that dissatisfaction with and salvation from this malformed world could be achieved in history through specialised knowledge held by Gnostic adepts.

A mix of such Gnostic and Pauline-Augustinian progressivism also forms the intellectual core of liberalism, argues Gray. Whether explicitly grounded in the belief in God as in John Locke (d.1704) or implicitly Christian in its overtly non-theistic progressivism, modern liberalisms share an evangelical zeal to impose their values all over the world. In a rare admission of the kind of modern political order he himself validates, Gray closes the chapter by saying that liberalism remains among the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal like other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed. What, then, would a non-imperialist liberalism that is content to remain local rather than impose itself internationally mean for universal human rights? Wouldnt the very idea of such rights have to be abandoned in abandoning the idea of humanity? Might that necessarily be a bad thing if it was accompanied by new worldwide conceptions of justice that included non-human animals among the agents with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights? Grays book leads us to raise such questions while only gesturing towards answers.

John Gray. Credit: University of Oxford

Those gestures do not appear in the next chapter that he gives to God-haters like the Marquis de Sade who hated God only to resurrect Him in the Nature he embraced; or like Dostoevskys Ivan Karamazov who refuses without positive alternatives the Christian project of theodicy the attempt to reconcile belief in Gods omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness with the fact of evil in the world.

Rather, it is in the last two chapters Atheism Without Progress and The Atheism of Silence that Gray upholds kinds of atheism that he approves of. Apart from selectively upbraiding Gray for his anti-Communism, Terry Eagletons review of this book accuses him of lapsing in these final chapters into a kind of transcendence without content, of which there is no finer example than what one might call Hollywood spirituality.

But it is not clear that this is the case. The materialism of at least one Grays exemplary atheists the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (d.1952) conceived of nature as a creative energy that produces everything in the world, including the human species and all its works. Like Spinozas (d.1677) monism that Gray admires, Santayanas philosophy was a kind of anti-Platonic materialism that, in contrast to modern materialisms, validated religion as one of many natural or material phenomena that conveyed truths that could not be conveyed otherwise. It also has the virtue of refusing any belief in universal progress. In this sense, Santayana consciously echoed the ancient Hindu philosophical tradition of Samkhya that Eagleton would find hard to characterise as Hollywood spirituality. The problem, rather, is that Gray does not tell us by what criteria Santayana asserted these positions. Were they based on science or just individual observation? Insofar as Gray does not tell us, his evaluation of Santayana remains nothing more than the un-tested assertion of a philosophical anthropology.

This is also the problem with Grays validation of the novelist Joseph Conrads (d.1924) atheism that maintained like Bertrand Russell that the human was a machine burdened with consciousness in a godless and progress-less universe symbolised in his fiction by the sea. But Conrads vision reverts to an ancient tragic model without testing it against many models of historical explanation not all of them necessarily meliorist that were unavailable to ancient thinkers but available to him. In this sense, his misanthropic atheism remains falsifiable even with the negative virtue of not subscribing to universal progress.

Grays qualified admiration for Schopenhauers (d.1860) atheism is admiration for his appropriations of the Hindu Vedanta philosophical tradition to assert, against Christian hopes for salvation in history, that redemption lay in exiting time after purposeless striving. The reappearance in this book of Hindu-Buddhist philosophical motifs is telling. They appeal to Grays atheists and to Gray himself because they were indifferent to historical time and non-universalist. This is also possibly why Islamic thinkers make no appearance in Grays worldwide range of references. Pre-modern Islamic historians typically worked in and assumed governments by means of which they or their kings intervened in history.

Gray is not the first thinker to argue that modern understandings of progress are mistakenly secularised versions of Christian salvific history. Of the cluster of German philosophers of history responding to the Second World War and the Holocaust it was Karl Lwith who first argued this at length in his 1949 Meaning in History, writing:

While the lords of the history of the world are Alexanders and Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers, Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Kingdom of God and therefore of secular history only insofar as the history of the world hides a redemptive meaning.

But the history of the world gives no evidence of such meaning and purpose, Lwith argued, and the world is today as it was when the Visigoths sacked Rome, only our means of oppression and destruction (as well as reconstruction) are considerably improved and are adorned with hypocrisy.

Without saying so, Grays book takes Lwiths misanthropic thesis as a stable assumption on which to mount seven examinations of seven self-professed modern Western atheisms, finding five to be crypto-Christian and two more successfully non-Christian in their non-progressivist indifference towards humanity as a whole. But Grays interventions rest, like Lwiths, on his untested assumption that human nature has been the same mostly just nasty from its beginnings. Does a history that decries most atheisms for being universalisations of Christianity not undermine itself by this unargued universalisation of human nature?

Prashant Keshavmurthy is associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

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Review: Evaluating the Rich Ambiguities of Western Atheism - The Wire

Elizabeth Warren Was Asked About Her Plan to Protect the Rights of Atheists – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

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During a rally in Iowa City last night, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was asked by an audience member, What is your plan for protecting the rights of atheists and other non-believers?

Warren gave a roundabout answer that didnt really answer the question. Instead, she spoke about the importance of religious freedom. Actual religious freedom. Where theres no government discrimination against anybody based what faith they belong to, even if they choose not to have any at all.

Thank you, Anne. So it starts with the Constitution of the United States, right? It protects anyone to worship the way they want, or not to worship at all, and I think that is powerfully important.

You know, the way I see this is, I am a person of faith. I grew up in the Methodist church. Its part of who I am. I was a Sunday School teacher. But I see it as a fundamental question about what it means to be an American. And I think what it means to be an American is that, at core, we recognize the worth of every single human being. Thats part one. And part two, were called to act on that. That we are responsible for our actions consistent with that. That we dont take advantage of people, we dont cheat people, we dont hurt other people. And we do what we can to support other people, and to build opportunity for other people.

If those are the core values, right down at the heart, that make us Americans, I think that leaves us all the room in the world for worshiping differently or for not worshiping at all.

And thats the kind of America I want us to be. Does that work? Good. Thank you.

Her answer last night wasnt controversial. It wasnt even all that newsworthy or, frankly, interesting. But at a time when conservative Christians have so much power, its nice to see a serious presidential candidate address the topic of atheism without any sort of dismissiveness or revulsion.

A little more substance would be helpful. Id love to know how shed integrate non-religious voices into her government, or if shed allow faith-based groups to discriminate using taxpayer money, or if shed include atheists in any kind of religious advisory board. (Neither President Obama or Donald Trump did that.) Id also like some acknowledgment from her as to the sorts of issues atheists actually have to deal with right now, whether were talking about government endorsement of a specific brand of Christianity or younger atheists being pressured to say the Pledge of Allegiance or pray with their coaches.

Its not that I disliked her answer. I just know that was politician-speak for Let me give you an answer that wont ruffle any feathers. But still. It couldve been worse. Maybe the bigger question is how the Religious Right will frame her innocuous response as proof shes a godless liberal hell-bent on destroying Christianity.

***Update***: The woman who asked the question, Anne, tells me she wasnt happy with Warrens response:

I was disappointed in Warrens answer, however. I didnt hear a plan, and I didnt hear recognition of how difficult it can be for nonbelievers in this country. What I heard was an answer that was socially and politically palatable.

(Thanks to Justin for the link)

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Elizabeth Warren Was Asked About Her Plan to Protect the Rights of Atheists - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Anti-Theism Conference Organizer Defends Sexual Misconduct in Bizarre Rant – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

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This April, theres a conference scheduled to take place in Brighton, England called the Anti-Theism International Convention 2020. Okay. Fine. Its not weird to see local organizers setting up conferences with speakers well known to those of us who read about or watch people commenting on atheism online.

This particular event, however, is being co-organized by John Richards, the Publications Director of Atheist Alliance International, the organization that just hired David Silverman, whos been accused of sexual misconduct. One of the main speakers is Lawrence Krauss, whos also been accused (many times over) of sexual misconduct.

Those arent the people you want center stage if youre eager to bring new, diverse people into a movement.

YouTuber David Worley even asked the other organizer, Lance Gregorchuk, about Krauss presence at the event. Why invitehim? Whats the benefit to inviting someone with his tainted reputation to a conference like this? What safety precautions are being put in place to make sure attendees are safe?

During an hour-long interview in which Gregorchuk repeatedly insulted Worley for not asking challenging enough questions, he also dismissed the very notion that Krauss was a problem before defending his own alleged groping of women because, you never got wrong signals from a girl that you thought, she likes me [but] she doesnt like you, and you touched her?

Get ready to cringe around the 5:05 mark in the clip below:

It gets worse:

come on, dude. I did it. You did it something. Look, come on, were not the best looking guys in the world Did you know? Come on! When you were 15, 16, 17, did you get the signals? I didnt get them. I have no fucking idea what girls want andKrauss hes just in the higher limelight. Thats all it is. They couldve nailed me, you, anybody else

Im just being honest. If I dont know the signals, and I put my hand on your knee, what do you want me to say?

So, in summary, its fine to touch women who dont want to be touched, and women who accuse men of unwanted advances are doing it to everybody. (Watch out! Youre next!)

And then Gregorchuk sarcastically joked to Worley about how, if he attends the event, Im gonna put my hand on your knee. Im gonna rub it up your leg. And you can say what you want. (Hilarious, this guy.)

Incidentally, the allegations against Krauss werent just about an unwanted touch or misinterpreted brush-up against someones leg. The main incident looked like this, as explained by the victim:

They made a plan to eat in the restaurant at the Washington, DC, hotel where Krauss was staying, [she] recalled. But first he asked her to come up to his room while he wrapped up some work. He seemed in no rush to leave, she said, ordering a cheese plate and later champagne, despite her suggestion that they go down to dinner.

Then, [she] said, Krauss made a comment about her eye makeup, and got very close to her face. Suddenly, he lifted her by the arms and pushed her onto the bed beneath him, forcibly kissing her and trying to pull down the crotch of her tights. [She] said she struggled to push him off. When he pulled out a condom, [she] said, she got out from under him, said I have to go, and rushed out of the room.

Thats what Gregorchuk is apparently okay with, to the point where he wants Krauss speaking to a group of people on behalf of atheists. Thats also what the other speakers are apparently okay with since theyre still on the website despite Krauss inclusion. Richard Dawkins will even be receiving a Lifetime of Service to Rationalism Award from Krauss.

The Atty Awards [Anti-Theism International Awards] are probably the most prestigious Awards in the Atheist Community and winning a Atty Award will not only get you recognition within the Atheist Community, it will give you a chance to enjoy giving worldwide speaking engagements as well as Keynote presentations at many events around the world. The Awards will be presented by some of the most famous atheist on the planet and the winners will be invited to the VIP area of the after awards ceremony for photo opportunites and press talks.

Thats a lie.

An award thats never been given out before isnt prestigious, and winning an award at a conference that is brand new (or even one that isnt!) doesnt suddenly lead to anything as a result, much less speaking gigs around the world. Its like a participation trophy. It might make the recipient feel nice. No one else really cares.

In any case, if you want to spend 199 for early tickets, or 249 for regular tickets, or 699 for VIP tickets, theyre still available.

Wear pants. Bring mace. It should be an exciting celebration of reason and rationality and laughing off allegations of sexual assault.

I should add that I asked several of the scheduled speakers for comment about their involvement in this conference. Two of them, Aron Ra and Maryam Namazie, told me they will be pulling out of the event. Their names should be removed from the website shortly.

So far, I have not heard back from Dawkins or several of the other speakers.

***Update***: In addition to the featured comment below, co-organizer John Richards has sent me this statement on behalf of the organization, which he asked me to publish (emphases mine):

Unfortunately, my former business partner, Lance Gregorchuk, got a little drunk and had a train wreck of a podcast interview, which has had some fallout on The Friendly Atheist Patheos site.

Some commenters have interpreted his attitude as misogynistic so I have fired him; he no longer holds a position in the Anti-theism International organisation.

I am seeking an interview on the same podcast to make a statement on behalf of the company.

A-T I strongly deplores any form of misogyny or denigration of women.In fact, faith inspired malicious treatment of women is one of the harms that we are very much against and wish to combat.

However, as you are aware, to use Hitchens phrase, religion poisons everything; its not just misogynistic.

Many theists condone the victimisation of homosexuals, the denial of a liberal education for children, the coercion of donations under threat, the mutilation of childrens genitalia, cruel punishments (including death) for disobedience and the committing of acts of terrorism.

There is no doubt that, in the present world, religions cause more harm than good by instigating a spurious reason for division, demonisation and conflict.

Given that there is no evidence for any deity, we should not tolerate religiously inspired human abuse by those who claim power in the name of a god.

Consequently, I am not prepared to be intimidated by a few who have a singular focus, particular as improved female safety is a policy that we support.

The International Convention goes ahead as planned; we already have attendees signed up from the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the UK, the USA and Canada.We already have many nominees for the Awards and at least two artists wishing to paint the portrait of Christopher Hitchens.

If any of you would like to make suggestions for our celebrity judging panel, please let me know. The task is not onerous, being done online, and the reward is a free ticket for the Banquet.

Just to state the obvious, firing Gregorchuk is fine, but it hardly resolves the underlying problems with this conference, many of which are laid out in the post and in the comments below.

(Screenshot via Facebook)

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Anti-Theism Conference Organizer Defends Sexual Misconduct in Bizarre Rant - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

‘Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt’ Book Review – National Review

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Detail of a portrait of Michel de Montaigne, 1570s(Wikimedia Commons)Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie (Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $27.95)

In his 1580 masterwork Essays, the French writer and statesman Michel de Montaigne drew a straight line between the Protestant Reformation and the execrable atheism that had begun to sweep through Europe. The problem, according to Montaigne, lay in the difficulty of preserving the average mans religious faith in an age that had taught him to question long-established Church doctrines. Once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of [the common peoples] religion, he wrote, they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty, having no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those [beliefs] you have just undermined. That Montaigne, a Roman Catholic famously skeptical of the power of human reason, should lay unhappy consequences at the doorstep of Protestantisms priesthood of all believers is perhaps to be expected. What is more surprising is that Alec Ryrie, a self-proclaimed licensed lay minister in the Church of England, wholly endorses Montaignes thesis.

Which is not to say that this new book by the author of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World is merely a close examination of one alleged side effect of the Reformation. Rather, Ryrie, a prize-winning historian as well as an ecclesiastic, has broadened his scope to take in nearly 750 years of doubt and disbelief in the professedly Christian West. The continent-roiling movement commenced by Martin Luther gets its fair share of attention Ryrie is, after all, one of our foremost experts on the subject but Unbelievers has a larger story to tell, one whose roots touch medieval Europe and whose fruit still blooms today, whether or not one wishes to taste it. Because Ryrie has written an emotional history, to borrow the language of his subtitle, his concern is with religious unbelief as it has played out in the psyches of the masses across centuries. The result is not only a convincing rejection of what one might call the Great Godless Man theory of history but a stirring glimpse into the souls of everyday citizens, whose struggles to maintain their faith in a complex world feel all too familiar.

In Ryries telling, the traditional narrative concerning the emergence of atheism in the West has long given undue weight to the scientists and intellectuals whose frontal assault on God during the Enlightenment rendered religious sentiment increasingly problematic. Against this standard account, Ryrie puts forward a populist counterargument: that unbelief clearly existed in practice . . . before it existed in theory and that historians of religion have not only been looking at the wrong centuries but profiling the wrong suspects. In furtherance of this claim, Ryrie asks readers to imagine two streams of popular unbelief, each feeding a river of elite opinion that would crest with the publication, in 1670, of Baruch Spinozas Theological-Political Treatise, one of the foundational texts of modern atheism. As a member of a world-bestriding intellectual class, Spinoza is clearly worthy of historical consideration, and his treatises attacks on the credibility of the Bible successfully anticipated the arguments of many of this centurys anti-scriptural polemics. Yet like all philosophical documents, Spinozas work was fed by source waters. It is to those that Ryrie wishes to draw the readers eye.

The first such tributary, Ryrie argues, was a stream of anger flowing from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and comprising an unbelief of suspicion and defiance held by women and (especially) men who refused any longer to be taken in or ordered around by priests and their God. Among the many figures whom Ryrie plucks from medieval obscurity are Durandus de Rufficiaco de Olmeira, a French merchant who was overheard to say, in 1273, that the doctrine of transubstantiation was false and that financial profit was superior to virtue; Uguzzone dei Tattalisina, a moneylender who told Mass-goers in 1299 Bologna that they might as well venerate their dinner as the consecrated bread; and Jacopo Fiammenghi, an Italian monk who, that same year, responded to accusations of debauchery by denying the existence of the soul. What all these men had in common was their hunch, formalized in Niccol Machiavellis The Prince two centuries later, that religion was a political trick played by the powerful. To deny the Churchs precepts was to reject an arbitrary authority governing ones behavior and to free oneself to operate in the world as one wished. Though Ryrie is quick to concede that religious disbelief rooted in anger was insufficiently widespread to become a movement, its existence nevertheless proves that the more complicated doubts that would arise during the Reformation did not sprout in virgin soil in which no seed of unbelief had ever been sown.

Where Reformation-era atheism did represent a new phenomenon was in its unique intellectual tenor, a quality that leads Ryrie to characterize it as an unbelief of anxiety. This second stream of pre-Enlightenment doubt, deplored by Montaigne in his discourse against Protestantism, was the unexpected (though perhaps inevitable) consequence of reformers tendency to make witty mockery of the absurdities of the papists, in the words of John Calvin. Because Protestantism taught that certain Catholic doctrines were simply too ridiculous to be true transubstantiation chief among them the Reformation undermined the ability of the laity to accept any irrationalities where religious dogma was concerned. Thus did the Protestant elite transform doubt into a weapon of mass theological destruction. In the process, Ryrie suggests, they stirred up anxious unbelief like never before.

Though Unbelievers provides example after example in support of this contention, two cases in particular stand out. The first is that of Sarah Wight, a pious young woman in 1640s London who made multiple suicide attempts in an effort to free herself from religious uncertainty, recalling, after one of them, I felt myself, soul and body, in fire and brimstone already. The second is that of Hannah Allen, an English teenager of the same generation, whose doubts regarding the possibility that she could be saved (There was never such a one [as wicked as me] since God made any Creature) led her to the very brink of giv[ing] up all for lost, . . . clos[ing] with the Devil, and forsak[ing] my God. While both cases are extreme, they nevertheless illustrate the anxiety and intensity of Protestant piety. Because that piety necessarily found expression in a religious environment scrubbed clean of Catholicisms institutional certainties, it could no longer be founded upon a simple, unreflective acceptance of universal truths. It had to be built on something else instead.

What that something else looked like in the centuries after the Reformation is the subject of much of the rest of Unbelievers, a tour that includes not only the faithful Protestants who overcame an unprecedented license to doubt but the Schwenckfeldians, Spiritualists, Muggletonians, and Ranters who were corrupted by it. Of the many post-Reformation radicals whom Ryrie examines, the most fascinating by far are the Seekers, whose utter paralysis in the face of doctrinal uncertainty led to the abandonment of any religious practice at all beyond a periodic gathering to discuss what is good for the Commonwealth. Like their spiritual heirs in 21st-century progressive Evangelicalism, Seekers came to the erroneous conclusion that the only way to truly follow God was to abandon dogmatism, striving instead to adhere to a supposedly universal moral law. As Ryrie concludes, and as many an orthodox Christian already knows, that may be magnificent, but it is not religion.

What it is instead is a striking ideological forerunner of what Ryrie calls the inflection point of the 1960s, when a newly muscular secularism appeared in the global West and a linked set of principles about human equality and bodily and sexual autonomy began to displace traditional biblical doctrines. To the extent that Christianity was willing to align itself with these new values, it could retain its place in the public sphere. Yet when Christianity and the new humanism were in conflict with each other, the faithful too often found that their humanist ethics [had] made their religion appear redundant. This is not, of course, a cheering thought. It is merely the most astute diagnosis of post-war irreligiosity that many readers will have encountered.

In February 2014, Adam Gopnik famously took to the pages of The New Yorker to declare that we need not imagine that theres no Heaven; we know that there is none. For those who wish to understand the cultural evolution that made so bold a statement possible, Alec Ryrie has written a necessary book.

This article appears as That You May Disbelieve in the December 22, 2019, print edition of National Review.

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'Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt' Book Review - National Review

Bill Would Constrain Some Police Use of Facial-Recognition Tools Across the US – Defense One

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A 72-hour limit on tracking individuals would become the first, and somewhat arbitrary, federal line in the sand.

Police would need a warrant to use facial-recognition tools to track an individual for more than three days under a proposed law that would place the first federal limits on law enforcements use of thetechnology.

The bills sponsors, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware. and Mike Lee, R-Utah, say their Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act would prevent the sorts of governmental abuses common in China andelsewhere.

Under the new law, a police officer could, for instance, run footage from her body camera device against a database of people with outstanding warrants and use facial recognition to find matches. But that officer would not be able to use networks of closed circuit cameras to track an individual for longer than threedays.

The bills sponsors admit that the 72-hour limit is somewhat arbitrary. But they are seeking to strike a tricky balance between law enforcement groups that say facial recognition is a useful tool for solving and preventing crimes and privacy advocates who are pushing for more regulation or outright banning of the technology by policedepartments.

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China shows why limits are important, the senators said Thursday at a Brookings Institution event. That government uses facial-recognition and other technology to monitor dissidents and suppress public activism. Russia, too, has been weaving the tech into its surveillance nets in Moscow and other cities, aiming to help suppressdissent.

In the United States, courts have ruled that people cant expect privacy when they appear in public. However, some rulings suggest the use of technology to track individuals can be regulated. In 2018s Carpenter v. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police had violated the plaintiffs Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure when they obtained digital location data from his phone without a warrant. Another is 2012s Jones v the United States, in which the government secretly placed a GPS tracker on the plaintiffs car and followed him for a month. Both rulings held that the government runs a clear risk of violating Fourth Amendment rights when it uses technology to track peoples location without a warrant even if that tracking is occurring in public. Coons and Lee aim to curb specifically the use of facial recognition for thispurpose.

The growth in facial recognition software for law enforcement in the United States is forecast to nearly triple from $136 million in 2018 to $375 million in 2025. Business forecaster IHS Insight predicts that the world will be watched by more than a billion surveillance cameras by 2021, nearly one-third more than today, thanks largely to China. A majority of Americans, about 56 percent, trust law enforcement to use the technology wisely. But examples of racial bias in the outputs of facial recognition searches, and other civil liberties concerns, have led some cities, such as San Francisco and, most recently Portland, to ban thetechnology.

Yet closed circuit camera footage is almost always of private property, owned by building managers or security companies. Right now, there are no laws that prohibit the way they collect image data on people in the public domain and there are no laws to prevent them from applying simple machine learning algorithms on that data to run their own tracking onindividuals.

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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt – Techdirt

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from the double-double dept

I'm not sure when or if this has happened before: this week we've got cross-category winners in both the first and second place spots, both in response to the latest example of a SLAPP suit filed by a supposed free speech supporter. Norahc won first place for both insightful and funny by putting a name to this increasingly common hypocritical phenomenon:

Hereafter, this should be referred to as the Nunes Effect.

Meanwhile an anonymous comment took second place for both insightful and funny with a response to someone misusing the notion of "freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences" as though it was meant to include lawsuits:

Interesting theory. Then for the US, I propose a new civil law that allows people to sue others for owning guns. Like, if you are unhappy that someone owns a gun, you can sue them for up to a million dollars. Thankfully this would not infringe on the 2nd Amendment, since they are still free to own guns, just not free from the consequences.

And since that's all the winners right there, we now move straight on to editor's choice for both categories! On the insightful side, we've got a pair of comments about the ongoing privacy wars on multiple fronts. First it's That One Guy responding to the states that argued against the Pennsylvania ruling that compelled password production violates the 5th amendment:

A telling, and worrying, argument

"In a joint amicus brief in support of the Commonwealth, various states provide an interesting history of modern encryption, press the troubling consequences of Appellants position including the altering of the balance of power, rendering law enforcement incapable of accessing large amounts of relevant evidence and warn that adopting Appellants position could result in less privacy, not more, in the form of draconian anti-privacy legislation."

'If you don't let us violate constitutional rights we'll pass unconstitutional laws in order to let us do so' is really not the sort of thing you want multiple states arguing, as that shows a mindset that considers constitutional protections and privacy of the public not limits to be respected and something to uphold respectively, but obstacles to be worked around and/or undermined.

Law enforcement has never had access to all of the evidence they've wanted, and the fact that there are more ways for people to protect their privacy, even if that includes really terrible people, is not grounds to start giving them that which they have never had and never will have, especially when it will come at such a great cost to the general public.

Next, it's Bergman responding to our post about the EU telling the US to ban strong encryption:

Nerding Harder

The US government has over a hundred times greater access to people's communications, personal papers and everything else now than it did when the Fourth Amendment was written. The US government has surveillance capabilities beyond the worst nightmares of our founders.

Our law enforcement has never had a problem finding anyone from petty thieves to traitors, from illegal immigrants to foreign spies. But they're saying now that their incredible wealth of information is insufficient, that we are at risk of them being unable to catch all these bad people if we return to a level of government surveillance that persisted for most of our history, that they had zero problems with then.

The answer is as simple as it is obvious. The tech sector is not the group that needs to nerd harder. They people who need to nerd harder are the government agencies that are apparently slacking off, because with greater capacity to find bad guys they are claiming a reduced ability to actually pursue them.

Giving them more tools when they aren't fully utilizing the ones they already have is silly, they just won't fully utilize those either.

They just need to nerd harder at the NSA, DOJ and ICE.

On the funny side, we start out with allengarvin responding to our post about the court that tossed 82 pounds of marijuana because of the deputy's pretextual traffic stop:

"The rental car was only doing 60 mph in a 70-mph speed zone"

That crime is far worse than carrying 82 lbs of marijuana. If you're not passing someone, GET OUT OF THE DAMN PASSING LANE!!

And finally, we've got an anonymous response to our post about cord-cutting in which we accused cable execs of sticking their heads in the ground:

Pretty sure that is NOT where they are sticking their heads...

That's all for this week, folks!

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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt - Techdirt

First Amendment Activities | United States Courts

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Apply landmark Supreme Court cases to contemporary scenarios related to the five pillars of the First Amendment and your rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances."First Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Cox v. New HampshireProtests and freedom to assemble

Elonis v. U.S.Facebook and free speech

Engel v. VitalePrayer in schools and freedom of religion

Hazelwood v. KuhlmeierStudent newspapers and free speech

Morse v. FrederickSchool-sponsored events and free speech

Snyder v. PhelpsPublic concerns, private matters, and free speech

Texas v. JohnsonFlag burning and free speech

Tinker v. Des MoinesFree speech in schools

U.S. v. AlvarezLies and free speech

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The History of the First Amendment – ThoughtCo

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The Firstand most well-knownAmendment of the Constitution reads:

James Madison was instrumental in drafting and advocating for both the ratification of the Constitution and the U.S. Bill of Rights. He is one of the Founding Fathers and is also nicknamed "the father of the Constitution." While he is the one who wrote the Bill of Rights, and thus the First Amendment, he wasn't alone in coming up with these ideas nor did they happen overnight.

Some important facts to know about James Madison are that even though he was born into a well-established family, he worked and studied his way into the political circles really hard. He became known between his contemporaries as "the best informed man of any point in debate."

He was one of the early supporters of the resistance to the British rule, which probably later reflected in the inclusion of the right to assembly in the First Amendment.

In the 1770s and 1780s, Madison held positions on different levels of Virginia's government and was a known supporter of the separation of church and state, also now included in the First Amendment.

Even though he is the key person behind the Bill of Rights, when Madison was advocating for the new Constitution, he was against any amendments to it. On one hand, he did not believe that the federal government would ever become powerful enough to need any. And at the same time, he was convinced that establishing certain laws and liberties would allow the government to exclude the ones not explicitly mentioned.

However, during his 1789 campaign to get elected into the Congress, in efforts to win his oppositionthe anti-federalistshe finally promised he would advocate for adding amendments to the Constitution. When he was then elected into Congress, he followed through with his promise.

At the same time, Madison was very close with Thomas Jefferson who was a strong proponent of civil liberties and many other aspects that are now part of the Bill of Rights. It is widely believed that Jefferson influenced Madison's views regarding this topic.

Jefferson frequently gave Madison recommendations for political reading, especially from European Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Cesare Beccaria. When Madison was drafting the Amendments, it it likely that it wasn't solely because he was keeping his campaign promise, but he probably already believed in the need to protect individual liberties against the federal and state legislatures.

When in 1789, he outlined 12 amendments, it was after reviewing over two hundred ideas proposed by different state conventions. Out of these, ultimately 10 were selected, edited, and finally accepted as the Bill of Rights.

As one can see, there are many factors that played into the drafting and ratification of the Bill of Rights. The anti-federalists, along with Jefferson's influence, states proposals, and Madison's changing beliefs all contributed to the final version of the Bill of Rights. On an even larger scale, the Bill of Rights built on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the English Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.

Similarly to the entire Bill of Rights, the language of the First Amendment comes from a variety of sources.

As mentioned above, Madison was a proponent of the separation of church and state, and this is probably what translated into the first part of the Amendment. We also know that JeffersonMadison's influencewas a strong believer of a person having the right to choose their faith, as to him religion was "a matter which [lied] solely between Man and his God."

With regards to the freedom of speech, it is safe to assume that Madison's education along with literary and political interests had a great effect on him. He studied at Princeton where a great focus was placed on speech and debate. He also studied the Greeks , who are known for valuing freedom of speech,toothat was the premise of Socrates' and/or Plato's work.

In addition, we know that during his political career, especially when promoting the ratification of the Constitution, Madison was a great orator and gave an enormous number of successful speeches. This, along with similar to the free speech protections written into various state constitutions also inspired the language of the First Amendment.

Besides his call-to-action speeches, Madison's eagerness for spreading ideas about the importance of the new Constitution also reflected in his vast contribution to the Federalist Papersnewspaper-published essays explaining to the general public the details of the Constitution and their relevance.

Madison thus highly valued the importance of the uncensored circulation of ideas. Also, until the Declaration of Independence, British government imposed heavy censorship on the press which early governors upheld, but the Declaration defied.

Freedom of Assembly is closely associated with the freedom of speech. In addition, and as mentioned above, Madison's opinions about the need to resist the British rule likely played into inclusion of this freedom into the First Amendment as well.

This right was established by the Magna Carta already in 1215 and was also reiterated in the Declaration of Independence when the colonists accused the British monarch of not having listened to their grievances.

Overall, even though Madison wasn't the sole agent in the drafting of the Bill of Rights along with the First Amendment, he was unquestionably the most important actor in its coming to existence. One final point, however, that is not to be forgotten, is that, just like most other politicians of the time, despite lobbying for all kinds of freedoms for the people, Madison was also a slave-owner, which does somewhat taint his achievements.

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The History of the First Amendment - ThoughtCo

1st Amendment – constitution | Laws.com

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First Amendment: Religion and Expression

What is the First Amendment?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment Defined:

The First Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights, which are the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution and the framework to elucidate upon the freedoms of the individual. The Bill of Rights were proposed and sent to the states by the first session of the First Congress. They were later ratified on December 15, 1791.

The first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution were introduced by James Madison as a series of legislative articles and came into effect as Constitutional Amendments following the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States on December 15, 1791.

Stipulations of the 1st Amendment:

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the passing or creation of any law which establishes a religious body and directly impedes an individuals right to practice whichever religion they see fit.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a part of the Bill of Rights and the amendment which disables an entity or individual from practicing or enforcing a religious viewpoint which infringes on the freedom of speech, the right peaceable assemble, the freedom of the press, or which prohibits the petitioning for a governmental evaluation of grievances.

In its infancy, the First Amendment only applied to laws enacted by Congress; however, the following Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court developed that the Due Process Clause attached to the Fourteenth Amendment applies the fundamental aspects of the First Amendment to each individual state, including all local governments within those states.

The Establishment clause of the First Amendment is the primary pronouncement in the Amendment, stating that Congress cannot institute a law to establish a national religion for the preference of the U.S. government states that one religion does not favor another. As a result, the Establishment Clause effectively created a wall of separation between the church and state.

How the First Amendment was created:

When the original constitution was created there was significant opposition due to the lack of adequate guarantees for civil freedoms. To offer such liberties, the First Amendment (in addition to the rest of the Bill of Rights) was offered to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789 and later adopted on December 15, 1791.

Court Cases tied into the 1st Amendment

In Sherbert v. Verner, the Supreme Court applied the strict scrutiny standard of review to the Establishment Clause, ruling that a state must demonstrate an overwhelming interest in restricting religious activities.

In Employment Division v Smith, the Supreme Court went away from this standard by permitting governmental actions that were neutral regarding religious choices.

Debs v. United States on June 16, 1919 tested the limits of free speech in regards to the clear and present danger test.

1st Amendment: Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech in the United States is protected by the First Amendment and is re-established in the majority of state and federal laws. This particular clause typically protects and individuals right to partake in even distasteful rhetoric, such as racist or sexist comments and distasteful remarks towards public policy.

Speech directed towards some subjects; however, such as child pornography or speech that incites an imminent threat, as well commercial forms of speech are regulated.

State Timeline for Ratification of the Bill of Rights

New Jersey:November 20, 1789; rejected article II

Maryland:December 19, 1789; approved all

North Carolina:December 22, 1789; approved all

South Carolina: January 19, 1790; approved all

New Hampshire: January 25, 1790; rejected article II

Delaware: January 28, 1790; rejected article I

New York: February 27, 1790; rejected article II

Pennsylvania: March 10, 1790; rejected article II

Rhode Island: June 7, 1790; rejected article II

Vermont: November 3, 1791; approved all

Virginia: December 15, 1791; approved all

Georgia, Massachusetts and Connecticut did not ratify the first 10 Amendments until 1939

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First Amendment rights in the 2010s – UConn Daily Campus

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CharlesDickensunwittingly described our current political situationwhen writingA Tale of Two Cities:It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

United States citizens live in an age of unprecedented rights. Our Supreme Court in 2015upheld the right for gay people to get married.Recently,civil asset forfeitureis being reconsidered, and theapparatuses supporting the war on drugs arebeginning to be dismantled.The currentgenerationhas upheldtheimportance of Miranda Rightsin Florida v. Powelland more broadly questioned the importance of the police state. Thecourts agree that speech includes the right to spend money onadvertising ideasand that corporationsalso are entitled tospeechprotection.This generation realizes that patriotism should not stifle dissent. In fact,the United States Supreme Court recognizes in Snyder v. Phelps that one isevenable tolegallypicket a service members funeral.More charter schoolsare becoming another school choicefor poorer Americansand,as a result,are producing better-educated students.The death penalty is illegal in 21 states,andthe First Step Act is a good start to sentencing reform. In many ways, were living in the best of times.

On the other hand,all is not well in theUnited States. Thecurrent president workedvigorouslyto deport millions of undocumented immigrants, wanted to use extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants and tried toencouragea Muslim registry. His efforts todecry independent mediaandhis support for the death penalty andfor unconstitutionalstop-and-friskpoliciesaredisgustingremnants of a worse time.However, thedandyDemocratsare no lesser of a poison.Rather than condemn authoritarianism, the DemocraticParty has looked toward ways of making power polite.ElizabethWarrens specific brand of economic populism callsfor wealth taxes,which will increasegovernment intrusion into the lives of citizens ina way never before seen. Additionally, Warren calls for eliminating charter schools,which primarily benefit poorer children,while ironicallysending her son to a private school. OtherDemocratic darlingslikeBetoORourke claim that theyre forcibly going to be taking guns from the American populace.

Outside the larger political scene, First Amendment rights have been largely upheldby the Supreme Courtin the 2010s.Janus v. AFSCME successfully argued that labor unions collecting fees fromnon-union members violates the First Amendment provisions relating to free association and freedom of speech.In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court upheld the right of conscience relating to artistic and religious freedom. In 2017, Lee v. Tam upheld the right of trademarking an offensive name.In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley, the freedom to be associated with a religious group does not make one ineligible for government benefits and thus upholds free association.Another landmark win for free expression took place in 2017 whenPackinghamv. North Carolina struck down the statute that prohibited sex offenders from accessing social media. In Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, tax breaks and grants were further allowed to be given to churches and other religious organizations. Furthermore, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and Schoolv. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission established that discrimination laws do not apply to organizations selections of religious leaders. In 2012 notably, United States v. Alvarez struck down exceptions to the First Amendment relating to stolen valor.

The trend through the 2010s showsan increasingly broad look on rights. By denying restrictions on churches, free assembly, artistic freedom, etc.,we strengthen the values of dissent and discourse that allow our country to thrive.

However, outsideof the Supreme Courtthe First Amendment has fared worse.Former PresidentBarackObama actively encouraged IRS action against conservative nonprofit organizations. In 2013, journalists protested the exclusion of press photographers from news events and criticized the first amendment case of Citizens United. Thats not to say that our current president has done any better.President Trump frequently bashes the mediaas fake news andwants to change libel laws. Also, our students are increasingly hostile to freedom of speech. According to a Brookings Institution poll, 40% of students believe the Constitution does not protecthate speech. Nineteen percentof students said that physical violence is an acceptable way to deal with offensive speech,and 50% of students said the appropriate response to speech they disagree with is to shut it down.

Overall, while the First Amendment is increasingly being upheld by higher courts, the cultureand political will upholding expressionhas weakenedand needs to be bolstered.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual writers in the opinion section do not reflect the views and opinions of The Daily Campus or other staff members. Only articles labeled Editorial are the official opinions of The Daily Campus.

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Zick’s new book examines the First Amendment in the Trump era – William & Mary News

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by David F. Morrill, W&M Law School | December 3, 2019

Writing his latest book on the First Amendment his fourth in 10 years William & Mary Law ProfessorTimothy Zickdecided to try something a little different. His new volume would be slimmer, more accessible to general audiences, and ripped from the latest headlines.

And as of Oct. 28, its also in eager readers hands.

In "The First Amendment in the Trump Era," Zick, the John Marshall Professor of Government and Citizenship at William & Mary Law School, not only examines the growing number of First Amendment controversies in the past three years, but also connects present concerns to episodes throughout American history. He also relates recent First Amendment controversies to the concept of dissent.

Indeed, dissent looms large, beginning when Zick dedicates his book to all the noisy dissenters past, present, and future.

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Zick believes that dissenters deserve a significant amount of credit for doing the hard work of checking governments and influencing citizens, often at considerable cost to their own safety and livelihoods. Although he has not chosen the path of activism, Zicks First Amendment scholarship highlights public contention and dissent.

I am a true believer in the power of dissent to facilitate social, political and constitutional change, Zick said.

Zick wrote his most recent book with minimal legal jargon or extensive discussions of cases or doctrines. He wants it to be read by people whether they support the current president or not.

I think the principles involved in the lessons Im drawing to the current era are useful to know and to embrace regardless of your partisan stripe, Zick said. I didnt want to write a book that was anti-Trump so much as pro-First Amendment.

Cracks in that amendment were forming well before the 2016 election, the result of what Zick refers to as preexisting conditions. Among them were the weakening of the institutional press, heightened political polarization, the rise of the Internet and the distrust of experts and institutionsall of which the President took advantage of when the time arose.

Digitized culture gives you democratic speech cheap and efficient speech, Zick said. But it also gives you a culture that trades on instant conflict, hate and take-downs; its a very mixed bag. Zick added, Trump is an archetype of the erahyper-communicative, hyper-combative and deeply polarizing.

Witnessing increasingly strident speech before and during the 2016 campaign, Zick knew a book was imminent. He noted that candidate Trump incited his supporters to rough up protesters, promised to open up the libel laws, and even proposed shutting down parts of the Internet to thwart terrorists. Many of these themes and patterns continued after Trump became president.

As of a year into his presidency, I thought there was already enough material for a book, Zick said. And the President just kept on talkingand tweeting.

With more and more examples piling up after the publication of the book, and the possibility of a second Trump administration, Zick does not rule out a second edition with, at the very least, an updated introduction or prologue.

I dont know if Trump will emphasize new themes or issues if he is re-elected or just go back to the old attacks, Zick said, So you just might get more examples of things that I point out in the book. Even so, the presidents views on free press and speech, and those of his supporters, are worth examining.

As noted, this book is very different from Zicks previous works. His other books include, "Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places," "The Cosmopolitan First Amendment: Protecting Transborder Expressive and Religious Liberties" and "The Dynamic Free Speech Clause: Freedom of Speech and Its Relation to Other Constitutional Rights." These books were written primarily for academic audiences. The current book is aimed at a much broader audience and is about events happening in real time.

Its happening in front of you, and that poses challenges for trying to write with some dispatch, but it also means that the book connects to current and timely concerns, Zick said.

Pondering an audience beyond the academy, Zick hopes that readers will learn about the many misperceptions people have about the First Amendment. Its one thing, for example, for a president to speak about a subject from a bully pulpit, Zick says, but its quite another for him to coerce others or regulate speech.

And then there is the misunderstanding about the press in general the idea that there is a separate Constitutional provision the Free Press Clause that gives the institutional press a broad set of rights or immunities. The reality is that the institutional press does not generally have any special rights and privileges. The press rests on far shakier constitutional ground than many Americans realize.

I think its important to remember that the press has always been both problematic and essential, Zick says. Its always had excesses like any other institution, but its also been critically important to self-government, the search for truth, and other First Amendment values.

Above all, Zick hopes readers learn about the value of dissent. He notes that noisy dissent has long been considered part of the American ethos, but the reality is that the citizenry have an increasingly low tolerance for opinions that they dont agree with, from those who attend Trump rallies to students on college campuses.

Although headlines seem more clamorous as a new election looms, Zick nevertheless feels cautiously optimistic, particularly given the evidence that people still exercise their right to disagree and disrupt. He cites as examples the March for Life, the Womens March after the 2016 election, and protests at airports after the initiation of the Muslim travel ban.

These were pockets that suggest dissent is very much alive, and people havent caved into efforts to suppress public contention, Zick said.

Early reviews of "The First Amendment in the Trump Era" have been favorable. Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, says the book makes a truly important contribution to our understanding of the contemporary First Amendment. Nadine Strossen, the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School and past president of the ACLU, calls the book a must read and says, Zicks book shows how the lessons of the past can helpfully guide us through the unique First Amendment challenges we face today.

Zick says his next project might be about public protests. In the meantime, he is enjoying talking about his latest book and sharing it with others.

I have friends and neighbors who are reading it, and asking questions, Zick says. Those conversations have been gratifying, and I hope others will learn about the First Amendment by reading the book.

Zick graduatedsumma cum laudefrom Indiana University andsumma cum laudefrom Georgetown University Law Center, where he received the Francis E. Lucey, S.J. Award for graduating first in his class. While at Georgetown, he was a Notes and Comments editor of theGeorgetown Law Journal. Following law school, he was an associate with the law firms of Williams and Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he assisted in the defense of congressional term limits in the Supreme Court of the United States, and Foley Hoag in Boston.

Zick served as a law clerk to the Honorable Levin H. Campbell of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He also served as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the United States Department of Justice, where he defended the constitutionality and legality of a variety of federal programs and statutes.

A frequent commentator in local, national, and international media regarding public protests and other First Amendment concerns, Zick testified before Congress on the Occupy Wall Street protests and rights of free speech, assembly and petition. He received the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence in 2011, 2013 and 2017.

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Zick's new book examines the First Amendment in the Trump era - William & Mary News

First Amendment Loses as Pipeline Industry Scores Another Win in Wisconsin – In These Times

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A pincer of police closes in on the front line camp, built on unceded Indian land north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, on October 27, 2016. (Image: Law Enforcement Photo / The Intercept)

A recent pair of United Nations climate reports make at least one thing clear: It is critical that we stop constructing new fossil fuels infrastructure.

Unfortunately, some people seem to have misread the warnings: On Nov. 20, Wisconsins governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed a law that, instead of penalizing oil pipelines, penalizes protesters who disrupt the construction of such critical infrastructure.

The new law makes it a felony, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to six years in prison, to trespass on the property of an oil pipeline or storage facility.

The Wisconsin law did not generate in a vacuum. The bill, which is similar to model critical infrastructure legislation promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was a response to the Lakota-led uprising at Standing Rock, N.D., against the Dakota Access Pipeline, during which protesters built a sprawling camp in the pipelines path, chained themselves to construction equipment and marched onto the pipeline right-of-way to halt construction. After Standing Rock, industry groups such as Koch Industries, Marathon Petroleum Corporation and Energy Transfer Partners mounted a lobbying campaign in state legislatures across the country to advocate such anti-protest laws.

The effort has been successful. According to Greenpeace, Wisconsin is the 10th state to institute such a law, and at least 13 others are considering similar measures.

But thats not the only context that matters. The latest U.N. Emissions Gap report, issued Tuesday, made headlines with its bleak finding that because the Earths governments have failed to cut emissions in the last decade, steeper cuts are now required much more quickly if the world hopes to avoid catastrophic climate change. According to the New York Times, the report found that even if every country fulfills its current pledge under the Paris Agreement, average temperatures would be on track to rise by 3.2 Celsius above the baseline temperature at the start of the industrial age. Bleaker still, many countries, including the United States, which has begun to officially pull out of the agreement, are not on track to meet their modest pledges under the Paris Agreement.

Bizarrely, even as they pledge to reduce emissions, many signatories to the Paris climate accord continue to ramp up fossil fuel production. According to the U.N. Production Gap reportissued on Nov. 20, the same day that Gov. Evers signed the bill to squelch pipeline proteststhe Earths governments plan to extract 50% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with a pathway to 2 C of warming and 120% more than would be consistent with a pathway to 1.5 C of warming. While the production gap is largest for coal, according to the report:

Oil and gas are also on track to exceed carbon budgets, as countries continue to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure that locks in oil and gas use. The effects of this lock-in widen the production gap over time, until countries are producing 43% (36 million barrels per day) more oil and 47% (1,800 billion cubic meters) more gas by 2040 than would be consistent with a 2C pathway.

The report goes on to explain the maniac logic countries use to justify increasing production:

Many countries appear to be banking on export markets to justify major increases in production (e.g., the United States, Russia, and Canada) while others are seeking to limit or largely end imports through scaled-up production (e.g., India and China). The net result could be significant over-investment, increasing the risk of stranded assets, workers, and communities, as well as locking in a higher emissions trajectory.

In short, if governments really did their jobs, they would criminalize pipelines, not protesters.

In response to the reports, Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director for Food and Water Action, says our most urgent task is to cut off the supply of fossil fuels at their source. He says, We have no time left to waste on neoliberal market tweaks.

Jones, however, holds out hope that the task may yet be accomplished by policy makers and political leaders. Others, especially people in frontline and indigenous communities who witness the destruction of fossil fuel extraction first hand, arent waiting on the government to act. Faced with the abdication by their elected leadership, as detailed in the U.N. reports, these communities are taking the matter into their own hands, and forging a decentralized global movementthat Naomi Klein dubs blockadiato resist, disrupt and defeat new fossil fuel infrastructure. The movement burst into international visibility on the Dakota plains, but it did not stop there. As it were a milkweed pod, the North Dakota authorities who crushed the Standing Rock camps in February 2017 succeeded only in spreading the seeds far and wide.

Given this context, the Wisconsin law and others like it should be seen for what they are: maneuvers in the climate war, made by mad men intent on strapping us all into their doomsday machine and sealing the exits.

These laws are evidence, also, of how afraid they are that the blockade-at-the-source tactics that have proliferated since Standing Rock just might work.

In These Times has been selected to participate in NewsMatchthe largest grassroots fundraising campaign for nonprofit news organizations.

For a limited time, when you make a tax-deductible donation to support our reporting, it will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the NewsMatch fund, doubling your impact.

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First Amendment Loses as Pipeline Industry Scores Another Win in Wisconsin - In These Times

First Amendment Rights of Licensed Teacher Litigated in Federal Court – JD Supra

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First Amendment Rights of Licensed Teacher Litigated in Federal Court - JD Supra