Monthly Archives: July 2017

Marie Alena Castle is the communications director for Atheists for Human Rights. Raised Roman Catholic she became an atheist later in life. She has since been an important figure in the atheistmovement through her involvement with Minnesota Atheists, The Moral Atheist,National Organization for Women, andwrote Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013). She has a lifetime of knowledge and activist experience, explored and crystallized in an educational series. The first part of this series can be found here Session 1and Session 2.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even with groups such as NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, the onslaught against womens rights, reproductive rights and so on, continue to take place. The most vulnerable poor and minority women tend to be the main victims, and so their children and the associated families and so communities. In a sequence, I see attacks on womens reproductive rights as attacks on women, children, so families, and so communities, and therefore ordinary American citizens. What can be some buffers, or defenses, against these direct attacks on the new media and communications technologies, e.g. to educate and inoculate new generations?

Marie Alena Castle:

Jacobsen: Who are the unknown womens rights heroes, men and women, that people should more into to self-educate?

Castle:They are the people who work at abortion clinics. They all have stories to tell. One of my friends managed a clinic and she was constantly threatened with violence and pickets at her house. I went there a few times to help in case the picketers got violent. One August I suggested she hook up her garden hose to a bottle of sugar water and set it to spray on the picketers and attract hordes of hornets. She wouldnt do it but I would have. The leader of the picketers was the local fire department chief (with expert knowledge of how to set her house on fire). She wanted to move but dared not for fear the fire chief would send a potential buyer to case the house for fire-setting purposes. She needed some carpentry done but feared getting someone she didnt know who would have a violent anti-abortion agenda. I got an atheist carpenter friend for her who was reliably safe.

Jacobsen: Once the shoe bites, people then become active, politically and socially, typically. These people can rise and protest in an organized and constructive way. Do you think this era of yes, alternative facts, but at the same time mass accessibility of information can hasten people realizing their shoe is being bitten, even when they werent aware before?

Castle:Lotsa luck on this. Most people really do assume that, as child bearers, women really are something of a public utility and in need of regulation. Why else would there be any discussion about how Roe v. Wade should be interpreted? What we need are new court challenges to Roe v. Wade that say it should be repealed and replaced with a ruling that says abortion is a medical matter to be handled by a woman and her doctor and is not the governments business. Lets have a major public discussion about womens bodily autonomy and why their bodies need government oversight.

(While Im at it, let me note that I am also opposed to men being drafted into the military. The government does not own their bodies any more than it owns womens bodies. You get men to voluntarily agree to kill people and you get women to voluntarily agree to give birth or you do without.)

Jacobsen: For centuries, and now with mild pushback over decades, the religiously-based, often, bigotry and chauvinism against women, and ethnic and sexual minorities is more in the open, and so more possible to change. Because people know about it, and cant deny it. And when and if they do, the reasons seem paper thin and comical, at times. What expedites this process of everyone, finally, earning that coveted equality?

Castle:The mild pushback has come because more people are losing interest in religion, and religion has always been the driver of bigotry and prejudice. The loss of interest has come from Internet sources that expose the absurdities and failings of religion.

To expedite the process you change the laws. You change the laws by organizing for and electing legislators who support civil rights. Then you elect a President who will appoint judges who support those rights. Nothing changes if the laws dont change. The laws helped bring civil rights to the South because it gave pro-civil rights citizens the protection they needed to treat people with respect. We started getting civil rights by public agitation that led to legislation that led to court review and rulings that did or did not affirm those rights. One exception: We got women covered by the Civil Rights Act when sex was introduced into the language in the expectation that it would be seen as such a joke that the Act would be voted down, but it passed.

To get women out of the public utility category, we need to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. That failed the first time precisely because opponents said it would give women the right to have abortions. What isabout abortion that sets some people off so violently? None of them show any real practical interest in born babies. Why this obsession with controlling women? Something about species survival? So many men with so many zillions of sperm and frustrated by womens limited ability to accommodate all that paternal potential? Who knows?

The only thing holding up equal rights for all is the Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist religions (and maybe also misogynistic Islam but we have to see how that immigrant population votes after being exposed to the relatively civilizing effect of living here). Its always those religions that protest against womens rights, gay rights, and that so ferociously supported slavery.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Marie.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. He works as an Associate Editor and Contributor for Conatus News, Editor and Contributor to The Good Men Project, a Board Member, Executive International Committee (International Research and Project Management) Member, and as the Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Executive Administrator and Writer for Trusted Clothes, and Councillor in the Athabasca University Students Union. He contributes to the Basic Income Earth Network, The Beam, Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Check Your Head, Conatus News, Humanist Voices, The Voice Magazine, and Trusted Clothes. If you want to contact Scott: [emailprotected]; website: http://www.in-sightjournal.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/InSight_Journal.

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Modern Women's Rights, Atheism, and Ideological Warfare - The Good Men Project (blog)

By 10:30 a.m., the assembly room has filled with people. Theyre four dozen strong, swirling about the long rectangular hall like in a hive, standing and laughing in small clusters, shaking hands and hugging latecomers, finishing coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen, leaning in close to hear a weeks worth of gossip whispered too low for lurking passers-by.

The congregations Sunday morning gathering is a cherished communal ritual that brings together newly joined 20-somethings, still groggy from a night on the town, with chatty retirees who have been members since the institutions founding. They come from across metro Denver to hang out and talk about whatevers on their mind: Donald Trump, National Public Radio, last nights Rockies game, the hiking trail du jour.

Inevitably, though, their conversation returns to the supernatural power that unites them: God.

This isnt church, though.

Its atheist church, jokes Ruth McLeod, who moved to Denver from Louisiana in 2012.Church doesnt have a monopoly on community.

Like most members of the Secular Hub, a nontheistic community center in Denvers Whittier neighborhood, McLeod doesnt believe in God. After abandoning her strict Christian upbringing in college, she turned to atheism, a solution to the silence of the cosmos that allowed her to jettison what she considers the contradictions of the Bible and the conservative social program of the church.

Her conversion has increasing resonance in the United States, where one in 13 adults identify as atheist or agnostic. American secularists, though, are not an organized tribe. Nontheists lack the elaborate institutional wherewithal enjoyed by the 160 million Americans who regularly attend religious services. In a country where faith is worth $1.2 trillion equivalent to the entire economy of Mexico God disbelievers have no colleagues in Congress, face pervasivecontemptand control few institutions of their own.

The Secular Hub aims to curb those realities by providing a central meeting space where the theologically marooned can stake out a home.

We think were the first secular community center in the United States, says Barb Sannwald, a professional computer programmer and founding member. Its much easier to be an atheist in Colorado than elsewhere.

The secular center hosts an assortment of compatible yet distinct deity doubters atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers held together by skepticism, faith in science and a commitment to free-ranging dialogue. Numerous affiliate groups also rent out the building for weekly meetings, including the local chapters of Freedom from Religion Foundation,United Coalition of Reasonand Freethinkers in AA, a nonreligious arm of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Two hundred twenty-five core members pledge $5 a month each for official status. Hundreds more float among groups, dropping in and out of meetings and get-togethers as wanted. Leaders strive to bring together the entire congregation through regular programming, which includes book clubs, movie screenings, meet-and-greets, meal discussions, and public lectures by renowned scientists and skeptics. On Sundays, everyone comes together for Secular Hubs flagship affair, Coffee & Community, which simulates the dependability of weekly church service without ceremony or sermons.

For a few years, Sannwald and other founders attended First Universalist Church of Denver, a liberal Christian group that embraces a wide array of beliefs from Eastern and Western religious traditions. Around 2007, a community newsletter alerted Sannwald to Humanists of Colorado, which held monthly meetings at the church. She began frequenting meetings, where she met a number of like-minded locals who valued the camaraderie of First Universalist Church but demurred on its doctrine, namely the emphasis on God.

There was a small group of us looking for the type of community that a church provides, Sannwald said. Churches are great places to find friends, to find comfort during difficult times and to meet others. But none of us were religious, so we didnt want to go to a church.

So in late 2012, she and a cohort of 20 Coloradans began raising money to open a space for agnostics, atheists, secularists and humanists in metro Denver. They initially considered asking a deep-pocketed donor to underwrite the startup.

Daniel Brenner, Special to the Denver Post

But we decided we wanted this to be a group effort, Sannwald said. So we had 23 founders put up the founding money to ensure broad-based support from the secular community.

In October 2012, representatives from Denver Atheist Meetup and Humanists of Colorado officially formed a nonprofit, which they called Secular Hub. A month later, the founders signed a lease at East 31st Avenue and Downing Street, where the organization still exists today.

The Hubs origin story speaks to a spate of nontheistic organizations popping up across the country. More than a dozen similar secular ventures have opened over the past decade, estimates Nick Fish, national program director of American Atheists.

Its certainly a growing feature of the humanist and atheist community, he said. The great thing about being an atheist is that no one tells you how to do it. But that can also be a struggle, as theres not always community support groups out there. Groups like the Secular Hub provide that for people who want and need that. What theyre doing is really important and worthwhile.

In the 4 1/2 years since the grand opening of Denvers first outpost for nonbelief on Feb. 12, which isDarwin Day,of 2013 the organization has grown from a core of committed nontheists to an emerging community of engineers, artists, immigrants, families, lifelong nonbelievers and recent religious defectors.

Andrew Forlines is one such religious turncoat. The 32-year-old grew up outside Cincinnati, home-schooled by archconservative parents who instilled Christian fundamentalism in their children. Forlines rebelled early. Despite never receiving formal education, he possessed an innate curiosity and habit for self-teaching that gradually led him astray from his anti-science parents and their faith founded inbiblical inerrancy.

When he moved to Denver two years ago, he wanted a community where he could make sense of his unorthodox upbringing. Through a Google search last July, he found Recovering from Religion, an affiliated group that offers guidance for spiritual renegades who have walked away from what Forlines calls indoctrination.

I was looking for a support group for people like me who struggle with a dogmatic religious upbringing, he said. I felt welcomed and embraced. Everyone was very nice. I felt a tremendous amount of relief to have found like-minded people.

Forlines immediately took to the community, where his values and background werent isolated or isolating but shared. In March, he launched two regular events of his own: a book club on social issues, and Dinner & Documentary, which hosts monthly film screenings and open discussions over food.

The Hub is what anyone makes of it, he said, emphasizing the organizations differences from a church. Its in between a stand-alone organization in your traditional sense and a physical meeting space for subgroups to utilize. Ive found that it often brings together people who make decisions based on science and empirical evidence.

As with secularism itself, the Hubs ideological flexibility and lack of firm hierarchy allow members such as Forlines to engage as frequently, widely and deeply as desired. Leaders want to meet nonbelievers where they are, welcoming potential members who might be skeptical about joining an institution devoted to skepticism.New members must pledge to follow only three rules for admission: honoring the separation of church and state; maintaining goodwill among members and avoiding hostility; and not promoting any beliefs in gods or other supernatural entities.

Sannwald and other leaders have been encouraged by a gust of interest, particularly among parents with young children. Yet the current facility with only 1,500 square feet of meeting space has little capacity for kids and no property outside.

Were growing to a point where we might want to move, Sannwald said. Its one of our goals. But we have no concrete plans yet.

A move, though, will require sufficient funds. The Hub currently subsists on membership dues, which help pay rent, utilities and little more. The all-volunteer board and staff take no commission for their work.

Growth will also test the bonds that hold together a piecemeal community with many peripheral groups and members. Religions have core texts that serve as a central spoke around which the community can coalesce. The Secular Hub, which lacks such a common code, lets the burden of communion fall on members themselves. Its a tall task that both challenges and liberates.

In a church, theres this feeling of needing to conform to dogma thats a lie, said Kimberly Saviano, a Hub founder who lives in Denver. Secularism and atheism do not have any particular ethical code. We are responsible to come up with our own.

To secularists such as Saviano, that responsibility poses a uniquely human task, one that reflects the problem and offers hope for all social networks.

Most of us have a deep need for community, somewhere we belong and have people who understand you, she said. Were trying to be there for each other if someones in the hospital or moving or going through a tough time. Thats the organizing force of community, making sure were taking care of each other. And theres nothing religious about that. You dont need God for that.

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Denver's Secular Hub unites non-believers in what one calls an atheist church - The Denver Post