Monthly Archives: February 2022

Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. Thats it. Despite common stereotypes, atheists arent necessarily anti-religion, nor do they worship themselves instead of a god.

Atheists dont hate Godits impossible to hate something if you dont believe it exists. Atheism indicates what someone does not believe, but it says nothing about what someone does believe.

For that, other terms like naturalist, secular humanist, and even Pastafarian connote a rejection of religion while also defining the substance of an individuals philosophy or worldview.

Atheism is avaluable critique of outmoded, regressive religious systems with its vision of a universe upon which meaning was never imposed from above.

Atheism and freethought trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on rational inquiry and curiosity about the workings of nature.Other sources included early Chinese Confucianism, ancient Indian materialists, and Roman Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Submerged during the Dark Ages, freethought re-emerged in the Renaissance.

TheRichard Dawkins Foundation is one of the premier atheist and secular organizations in the world. RDFs mission is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values and have been a division of CFI since2016.

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What is Atheism? A Lack of Belief in Gods - Center for Inquiry

In my last column, I made another reference to secularism, and it occurs to me this term and concept deserves further consideration. As it happens, a much-needed book has just been published by Routledge titled Secularism: The Basics by Jacques Berlinerblau. The author was also interviewed in the Jan. 25 edition of the Religion News Service online. My remarks here have been suggested by his book and that interview.

I have made use of the phrase steadfast secularism, intending to mean something that could also be called hard secularism or atheistic secularism. Secularism in its original form referred to the principle of striving to conduct human governmental affairs based on secular, naturalistic considerations, maintaining something of a separation between church and state.

However, there is a form of secularism, which took shape through the 20th century, that goes much further and aggressively maintains the reason for such a separation is because religion of any sort is a pernicious relic of the past and needs to be stamped out of all societies for the welfare of humanity. In the late-20th century, the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al) were of this ilk. Of course, earlier in the 20th century, Marxism took the same position.

Contrary to the above, the origin of the idea and term secularism in the English language can be traced to the British writer George Holyoake (1817-1906). He wanted a term and idea that was not as harsh as atheism, but would indicate an approach in government and philosophy whereby there could be cooperation with religions and believers of all types this is soft secularism. He did not intend that a government which accepted secularism as a principle, would seek to shut down religions or their influence on cultures. That further step, hard secularism, took place later in 20th-century fascist movements in Europe and in the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Today, some are noticing aspects of hard secularism filtering into many First World societies.

As Berlinerblau is careful to explain in his new book, there is a world of difference between hard and soft secularism in fact, they are pretty much opposites. Hard secularism seeks to destroy religion, whereas soft secularism seeks to accommodate and cooperate with religion, recognizing its value.

Making matters worse here in the United States, many if not most voters dont understand the difference between hard and soft secularism. This leads to the accusation, coming from the religious right, that the left-leaning Democratic Party wants to ram through atheistic secularism and to persecute religions and religious people. This would be absolutely true if the Democratic Party were aiming to align itself with hard secularism, but it isnt. It is only aiming for soft secularism that is to say, aiming for a government that defends religious freedom and does not align itself with any one religion to the exclusion of the others.

But the Democratic Party and politicians are fumbling this message over and over and they do this at their extreme peril. Americans are a very religious people even the ones who have stopped going to church. Voters in the U.S. are way more religious than western Europeans. So the Democratic Party cannot let itself be overly influenced by what flies in Europe with the public. It wont fly here.

We need to remember those famous words of the rabbi Jesus, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and unto God the things that are Gods. In a divinely inspired aphorism, that is exactly the type of secularism needed in order for religion and government to understand each other. These are two separate realms which, in 2,000 years of Christian social teaching, have been called the two swords and the two realms: the material and the spiritual. We live in both.

I am very much in favor of secularism, the right kind of secularism: the kind of secularism that reflects the meaning which is right there inside the words etymology. Secular comes from the Latin word saecularis (of an age/era) from the root saeculum (age/era). Secular values are values of an era, of an age, of politics). There are plenty of times when those sorts of values need some guidance from values that have stood the test of multiple eras and multiple political fights values that we sense come from a higher plain, a higher level.

I hasten to add that this does not mean they come from a literalist reading of Christian, Jewish or Islamic scripture. It means that there are core life-affirming and life-preserving values held in common by the worlds great monotheisms and their best teachers and we cannot let governments and corporations trample these values. We did not get the ideas of human rights, human flourishing and human charity from corporate bylaws or political party platforms.

The best sort of secularism recognizes its limitations. It must recognize that it cannot take the place of religious and spiritual value systems. Rather, it realizes that our societies must make a place and places for religion and spiritual development in our private and our public lives. There must be a constant dialog between the secular and the spiritual.

As humans, we live in the secular and the spiritual worlds simultaneously. When we forget that, its not pretty. When political parties forget that they either die, if were lucky; or they become tyrannical and that is very unlucky for us, indeed.

John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia Universitys Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part-time in Mexico.

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On Faith: Secularism vs. atheism | Perspective | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

In a Feb. 5 appearance on Glenn Beck's talk show which Beck called "probably the most important podcast perhaps that we've ever done" self-proclaimed critical race theory expert James Lindsay issued a dire warning. While discussing dark right-wing theories about "The Great Reset" and Democratic-run reeducation camps for the unvaccinated, Lindsay warned that a severe reckoning was at hand for the world's elites: "It's coming for them. They're going to lose all of their power. They're going to be exposed for crimes the likes of which we've never seen in human history."

Beck, perhaps a close second to Alex Jones as the reigning conspiracy theorist of the right, seemed to glow with enthusiasm as the two agreed that a revolution was coming and "if they don't have us all in cages, they're in a lot of trouble."

The appearance was one of many Lindsay has conducted in recent days, as he promotes his new book, "Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Practice," published on Tuesday and, as of Wednesday, the top title in Amazon's "philosophy criticism" section. If his digression into fantasies of bloody revolt against a cadre of bankers, media and George Soros what one Lindsay-watcher called "straight-up Hitler talk" seems like an odd detour, it's one of many he's made over the years: an academic turned intentional academic fraud, a "new atheist" who now counsels Christians on heresy, a blue-no-matter-who Obama volunteer turned intellectual leader of the far right. So meet the man behind the man behind the right's most consuming contemporary moral panic.

RELATED:The critics were right: "Critical race theory" panic is just a cover for silencing educators

In 2018, as a math PhD running a business that fused massage therapy with martial arts, and a supporting character in the foundering New Atheism movement, Lindsay became a national name by pulling off a deft hoax that made liberal academics look dumb. Along with two co-conspirators, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, Lindsay drafted 20 fake research papers with outlandish premises to research canine "rape culture" at dog parks, or a proposition that men use dildos on themselves to overcome transphobia and submitted them to a series of often obscure scholarly journals.

Around a third of the papers were accepted, and in 2018, the hoaxers, all of whom then called themselves liberals although Boghossian was closely associated with accused white supremacist and "race realist" Stefan Molyneux, who has argued that Black people are "collectively less intelligent" than other races revealed the experiment as an expos on the terminal wokeness of academia, particularly the identity-oriented fields that the three called "grievance studies."

The stunt received massive attention, including front-page treatment on The New York Times and airtime on Joe Rogan's podcast. When Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp asked Lindsay whether he feared their prank would become a "tool of the right," Lindsay took umbrage, asking, "Have you seen me go on Tucker Carlson yet? Do you think he hasn't asked?"

RELATED:Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

Lindsay still hasn't done that, but Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow credited with sparking the right's obsession with "critical race theory," absolutely has. In September 2020, Rufo appeared on Carlson's broadcast with a direct challenge to Donald Trump, demanding that the then-president issue an executive order banning CRT from any federal training programs. The following morning, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was on the phone with Rufo to sort the details out.

But while Rufo has been heralded as the little man behind the big war, Rufo himself credits Lindsay. In a joint August appearance with Lindsay on right-wing personality Jack Murphy's podcast, Rufo said that he had relied on Lindsay's theoretical explanations of CRT in order to craft his more populist appeals.

"James is really the theory expert," Rufo said. "I mean, James is an encyclopedia of theory connecting all the dots laying out the casecreating this giant content to guide all of us into this world. And then I think I come in as a complement to what James is doing, really following his lead with the praxis or the practice, which is translating the theory into the realm of practical politics and then translating this kind of esoteric knowledge that school moms and school dads can use at school board meetings and hammer their school boards with."

RELATED:Meet Christopher Rufo leader of the incoherent right-wing attack on "critical race theory"

Sam Hoadley-Brill, a fellow at the progressive think tank African American Policy Forum, which recently launched an initiative to defend the teaching of CRT against right-wing critics, has tracked Lindsay's evolving arguments for the past two years. These began with the anti-racism protests of the summer of 2020, which initially drew support even from numerous conservatives, but quickly prompted a right-wing backlash. And as corporations began responding to the movement by instituting or publicizing new diversity programs, Lindsay was ready.

That August, Lindsay and Pluckrose published a co-authored book, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everyone," that was widely-discussed on the right and landed on several bestseller lists.

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By the following spring, after the new Biden administration had reversed Trump's executive ban on CRT, Lindsay was tapped to narrate a Cliff Notes version of the conservative case against CRT for the right-wing media organization Prager U. In it, he argued that CRT "holds that the most important thing about you is your race"; that the theory was "not a continuation of the civil rights movement" but a "repudiation of it"; and that there hadn't been "a social movement so obsessed with race" since the Nazis or South Africa's apartheid regime. "Defend yourself," Lindsay concluded the video. "While you still can."

Around the same time, reported Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch, a speech Lindsay gave at the Leadership Institute a longstanding training ground for young conservative activists was turned into an e-book that the Institute used to recruit potential candidates for a right-wing "school board takeover."

And despite his long association with militant movement atheism including co-writing three books about it in the spring of 2021 Lindsay also waded into Christian communities' internal debates around CRT, warning that the best way to "end Christianity" is to "make [it] woke." As Bob Smietana reported in Religion News Service, Lindsay interjected himself into the Southern Baptist Convention's bitter 2021 feud over CRT, appearing in a documentary and a promotional video created by Founders Ministry, a conservative faction within the denomination that seeks to "return Southern Baptists to their roots." Lindsay also appeared on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler's YouTube show, where Mohler praised "Cynical Theories" as an "intellectual tour de force."

Smietana's investigation also revealed that Lindsay's website, New Discourses, is owned by right-wing activist Michael O'Fallon, president of the Christian nationalist group Sovereign Nations, who believes that George Soros has bought off most Christian leaders and who seeks "to start a new reformation to counter the social justice movement in the church."

This January, Lindsay followed up by calling on the SBC to oust leaders, including Mohler, who had failed to denounce CRT forcefully enough. "[W]e really don't want to see our large religious institutions taken over by a totalitarian ideology that's trying to infect and command everything," Lindsay said in a New Discourses podcast last month. "We want to have something that can stand up against it."

Lindsay went on to call CRT, which a number of Black Southern Baptists have embraced, "an explicit and intentional act of heresy." Christians who incorporate elements of it or intersectionality into their practices, he continued, "can damn well bet, Christians damned well bet, like condemned, like damned, like y'all demons if you're doing this you're falling for a demonic trick."

In 2021, Hoadley-Brill founded a Substack to debunk anti-CRT claims, starting with Lindsay's. In reference to Lindsay's @ConceptualJames handle on Twitter, where he's an exhaustively prolific commenter, Hoadley-Brill named his website "Conceptual Disinformation." In it and elsewhere, he chronicles the sometimes ridiculous aspects of Lindsay's crusade: He described himself in a virtual New Hampshire legislative committee session as a self-taught "world-level expert in critical race theory"; or his frenetic participation in a Dr. Phil roundtable; or his recent confounding remarks to Beck about "Fasho-Communism."

But Hoadley-Brill is motivated by a deeper concern: that as in the "grievance studies" hoax whose success largely rested on intentionally and grotesquely misrepresenting nuanced academic arguments, even those that deserved legitimate criticism the current anti-CRT movement relies on misrepresentations that most people outside the academic world will never even perceive.

"That hoax was so successful is because the entire point was, 'Look, we'll do the reading for you. People aren't qualified to go in and parse all the stuff in these fields, so we went and immersed ourselves in it, and it's all a bunch of bullshit,'" said Hoadley-Brill. "That's what led me into pushing back against these people: because the attention and credulity that people were giving them is now fueling this right-wing backlash, and people are being manipulated."

But since he started tracking the movement, Hoadley-Brill says Lindsay has continued to move rightward. "It was my perception that Lindsay was jealous of Rufo getting all this attention, and in response, he started to get more radical with his propaganda," he said. "With his messaging, the only further audience to capture is further to the right. So you start seeing him saying things like, 'CRT is just the tip of a 100-year long spear to infiltrate the United States with Marxist ideology,'" which Hoadley-Brill describesas "straight up neo-Nazi conspiracy theorizing."

While Lindsay used to acknowledge on his website that "Cultural Marxism," a term embraced a few years ago by the alt-right, was associated with antisemitism and white supremacy, and warned people against using it, nowadays such caution has been thrown to the wind. In Lindsay's new book, Hoadley-Brill notes, he argues that "neo-Marxists" have successfully redefined Cultural Marxism to smear it by association with antisemitism. Last fall, Lindsay published an episode of his podcast entitled "Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education," which argues that sex-ed classes aren't "just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times" but "a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century." On Twitter, he responds to people concerned about the spread of "Don't Say Gay" bills with the pithy, "Ok groomer," effectively accusing anyone who believes children should learn that LGBTQ people are part of the human community of being a pedophile.

RELATED:A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Antisemitic conspiracy theory, reloaded

And in a Tuesday pub-day appearance on far-right commentator and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka's livestream show on Rumble, amid ads for gold, silver or Mike Lindell's pillows, Lindsay argued that queer theory which he sees as part of a grander suite of fields, alongside CRT, that comprise "woke Marxism" was one aspect of a decades-old Cultural Marxist plot to wage "a war on objective reality" and "separate one generation from the previous."

"This goes back to the first Cultural Marxist, Georg Lukcs," he said, referencing the Hungarian Marxist intellectual, "who became deputy commissar for education, and what did he implement? Comprehensive sex education. Exactly the stuff we see with the gender theory, the queer theory, these very perverted books in the school library teaching children to become sexually active and sexually aware. Why? Because what are they going to do? They're going to become, frankly, little perverts and they're going to go home, and their parents are going to say no, and they're going to use the rebelliousness of the teenage years of the youth to say you don't understand me." If you can thus "separate a new generation away from its parents," family, religion and culture, he concluded, they can be led wherever you want.

(It's true that Lukcs, who is farbetter known as the author of dense works of Marxist philosophy and literary criticism, was deputy commissar of education and culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic an embattled Communist state that existed for about four months in 1919. It seems unlikely he had time to enact ambitious educational reforms, but a century later, he's become the face of right-wing narratives about "The Communist Sexual Agenda.")

Lindsay's conversation with Gorka wound up in similarly ominous territory as his talk with Beck, complete with insinuations of violence.

"I've been screaming about this for years. It's like screaming into a hurricane," said Lindsay. "And now all of a sudden, the wind has changed. The wind's at my back now." As parents and the working class wake up to the "nonsense" of CRT, he said, and also to what he called "this radical agenda, especially with the gender and sexuality stuff and the pedophilia, that your children are genuinely in danger of groomers that the Marxists have brought in," said parents were reaching the point where they'd "die for [their] kids."

Lindsay claimed a political scientist had imparted this wisdom: "There are just a couple ways a cultural revolution gets stopped. One is you have a character like Putin come in and start killing journalists and take authoritarian power and stamp it out. The other is that parents wake up." In Lindsay's telling, those things sound eerily similar.

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Meet James Lindsay, the far right's "world-level expert" on CRT and "Race Marxism" - Salon

The Revolution happened five years ago, but this was the first year when Soviet power was established in the whole country. How did it change the scenery?

After the 1917 Revolution instigated by the Bolsheviks, the massive Civil War between the red socialists and white monarchists began. The year 1922 officially marked the last year of the Civil War and the final operations undertaken by the Red Army in the Far East.

After the battle.

Red Army soldiers in Vladivostok. Their poster reads: Peace, order and tranquility are brought by the Peoples Revolutionary Army.

The protracted war affected the country a lot, caused many deaths and a huge hunger which children suffered the most. Pictured are children preparing for evacuation from the starving Chelyabinsk Province to Bashkiria.

A group of communists aboard the Trasbalt vessel. The poster reads: Workers of the world, unite!

Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Mikhail Kalinin, making a speech in Petrozavodsk.

The Red Square parade celebrating the 5th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.

Celebrations on the Palace Square in Petrograd.

A giant budenovka hat named after Red Army cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny.

On April 3, 1922, Joseph Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Bolsheviks party Central Committee, an important position that in the future would actually mean the leader of the country. Pictured with Vladimir Lenin.

Its still two years before Vladimir Lenins death. He is still a leader of the country and head of government. However, in 1922, he was already ill. Pictured below with his life and revolutionary comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya. Read more about the Soviet first First Lady here.

At the same time, in 1922, Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission), which was in charge of all the red revolutionary terror, became part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD) - and kept its purges under the head of an unchangeable leader, The Iron Felix (Dzerzhinsky).

In 1922, one of the countrys most popular soccer clubs, Spartak, was established. Read more about the turbulent fate of its founders here.

A mother and daughter posing for a photo.

A sewing factory (now the Bolshevichka factory) in Moscow.

Workers of a Moscow shoe factory installing sewing machines.

In 1922, the first pioneer organization was formed in the USSR - the future All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V. I. Lenin.

On a Moscow street.

Former Imperial institutions were either abolished or nationalized. The Petersburg theater of opera and ballet became the state-owned one. Pictured below is Russian ballet dancer Olga Spesivtseva performing Aurora in the Pyotr Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty.

Famous poet Sergei Yesenin married an American dancer Isidora Duncan, who came to Russia to set up a dancing school.

The Bolsheviks, busy with political and war issues, hadnt managed yet to take care of arts (and basically censorship), so the 1920s was a heyday for arts, including the famous avant-garde art, which took fine arts, films, theater and literature by storm. Pictured below: poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his beloved Lilya Brik.

Avant-garde artist and designer Varvara Stepanova preparing her innovative scenography for a theater performance Death of Tarelkin, staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Varvara Stepanova and her husband, famous avant-garde photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

Anna Akhmatova was a great poet who suffered the most from the Soviet power. A year before, her husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, was killed - and in the 1930s, her second husband and son would be sent to Stalins jails.

At the same time, the Soviet authorities launched the anti-religious campaign, pursuing the priests and assuming the church property: church items, precious metals and icons decorated with jewels. Pictured below is the interrogation of Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, who was later executed.

The commission in charge of the 1922 confiscation of jewelry from churches.

Muscovites crowded near St. George Church (later demolished) during the seizure of church valuables.

Members of the Petrograd council opening Alexander Nevskys shrine. The remains of the Russian saint were moved from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra to the new Museum of religion and atheism.

READ MORE: How the Bolsheviks sold off Romanov treasures to the West

Bus traffic started in earnest in Moscow in 1922. Pictured below is one of the first buses of the Moscow Automobile Plant.

Leon Trotskys innovative automobile sleigh.

A group photo of rabbit breeders.

A Moscow family portrait.

The Bolsheviks launched the Likbez campaign of eradication of illiteracy. Pictured are Caucasian women during literacy class.

On December 30, the First All-Union Congress of Soviets took place in Moscow, which approved the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR.

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What Russia was like in 1922 (PHOTOS) - Russia Beyond