People have been talking in the “What do you make of the trend in atheist proselytizing?” thread about how religion encroaches on their life and makeds being an athiest hard. I’ve heard this statement before and I just can’t wrap my head around it.
I can really only think of three things that happen in life that would make religion encroach on someone who didn’t want it…
Money says “In God We Trust” on it.
School age children speak the words “Under God” during the Pledge.
And “swearing on a Bible” in court. But I’m pretty sure the oath to tell the truth is the important part and a Bible is optional.
Is there more that I’m missing? I don’t understand it. Are some athiests that angry their money has the word “God” on it?
But is that really happening? Are there really laws being created based solely on religious belief? And if there are, aren’t those laws being shot down before they’re even enacted?
I want to know how religion is encroaching on daily day-to-day life.
Most atheists don’t care that much about “In God We Trust” on the money. It’s a technical violation of the Establishment Clause (for which the Supreme Court has fabricated a loophole called “ceremonial deism”), but it’s not something nontheists tend to get all worked up about. Certainly, it’s nothing compared to the hysterical outrage which would be incurred if the word “God” was replaced by “Alla” or “Krishna.”
The kinds of encroachment which are troublesome involve attempts to legislate religious moralism into law. Opposition to same-sex marriage , abortion, end-of-life decisions, the teaching of evolution in public schools (and the attendant campaigns to teach mythology as science) are all attempts to undermine the civil rights of others by forcing everybody to adhere to a particular interpretation of a particular religious morality.
Then there’s just the nuisance of constantly being prostelytized.
Laws against abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage are based solely on religious belief, yes?
If you come to Colorado and want to buy a car or a bottle of wine on Sunday, you’ll find religion encroaching on your life.
On preview, DtC beat me to it and, as normal, said it better.
It’s entirely possible to live for decades and feel unaffected by this issue, until you run afoul of laws that were created and are being enforced for religious reasons, at which point the burden becomes considerable. Do you have a female relative who might one day want an abortion? Are your parents still alive and do you anticipate one day seeing them in a vegetative state, kept alive only with a ventilator? Do you want to enjoy pornography in the privacy of your own home? It turns out that there are plenty of people who would eagerly invite themselves into your life, whether you want them there or not. Picture the Jehovah’s Witness that rings your doorbell on a Saturday morning. Now picture them entering your house with a signed warrant while your neighbors can’t wrap their heads around how this could possibly upset you.
This particular presidential administration highlights the issue because of hiring policies that favour those who claim fealty to the philosophical principles shared (or at least lip-serviced) by the president, rather than personal competence and integrity. You can probably lay low and they’ll never notice you, but if they do and they don’t like what you’re up to - watch out.
Medical decisions are still made by the most immediate family members
And a few keystrokes in Google would give me a lifetime of porn in a number of different permutations.
Religious nutters yelling into the wind does not mean these laws change to suit them. And they don’t appear to be making any traction in their attempts to change these laws.
There is now a federal law which forbids doctors to use the safest method of abortion in the 2nd trimester and requires them to use a less safe method instead. There are a host of state legislatures which have imposed are or trying to impose any number of other obstacles and restrictions to abortion rights. Women and doctors are routinely harrassed, stalked, threatened and killed for exercising their rights and performing legal procedures.
The Governor of Florida and the US Congress tried to intervene in one such decision and did so admittedly as an effort to appease their religious base. Michael Schiavo was demonized and slandered relentlessly by the religious right. He needed bodyguards for his family because Christians were threatening to kill him and his children. His lawyer needed bodyguards because religious fanatics were threatening to kill his family. Having to fear for your life in the face of a Christian fatwah sounds like an encroachment on daily life to me.
For now, but we recently had an Attorney General (one who was so uptight that he draped curtains over the aluminum boobies of a statue of Lady Justice) who made it his mission to wipe it out.
It doesn’t? Better look again. Did you catch a recent Supreme court decision? How about the failure of states to allow gays to marry and the success of some states of enacting laws to prevent such. {Which I noticed you failed to mention}
Should we be concerned about our president appointing graduates from a third rate religious school to important positions over other more qualified people?
Since this country first formed religion has tried to encroach on the lives of others and fortunately there are those who have stood against it. I think this president has stirred the resentment of that encroachment because his religious right supporters feel empowered to push their agenda.
Well, why do you think that is? I would suggest it’s because of a determined effort by more level-headed people to keep nuttiness at bay (and as D the C points out, the effort is not always successful). But for this vigilance, do you have any doubt that the energetic and irrational would get a lot more laws passed based on their beliefs and the encroachment would quickly go from affecting a relatively small number of Americans to being sufficiently intrusive that even non-head-wrappers such as yourself might start to notice it? Frankly, if the U.S. population let things slide to the point where the problem would finally be obvious to the oblivious, life would probably be fucked up beyond all recognition.
Anyway, I’m going to assume this is some kind of effort at Socratic irony.
But, due largely to religious influences, it has been made effectively impossible for some people, due to the reduced number of clinics and the geographic distance between them.
People often claim that the pro-life stance, for example, is borne out of nothing but religious belief. I’d like to seem them support that claim. While religious belief is often consonant with the pro-life view, this does not mean that only religious folks espouse pro-life beliefs… nor does it mean that pro-life arguments are exclusively religious in nature.
All of these examples are extreme one-of-a-kind events that have very little effect on the average person and a great deal of effect on the people involved. No laws are changed to accomodate the nutters and the general public continues looking at them as the nutters they are.
You’re right, I didn’t. Because same-sex marriage has always been illegal. It wasn’t considered at all when laws on marriage were first written. Therefore, there’s no religious push to change it. There’s a religious push to keep it illegal (which I think is stupid, let gay people suffer like the rest of us), but there is no change to a gay person’s life from the push to keep something illegal that they can’t do anyway.
I would agree.
JThunder brings up another point. I’m not anti-abortion because of any religious beliefs I have. I’m anti-abortion because I think abortion is murder. There should be birth control and sexual education for all.
I would suggest that the sheer volume of Christian voters that put other Christians in positions of power is a problem due to the decision making abilities of those people. People who are holier-than-thou rarely tend to enact laws that are good for the whole, IMO.
Are you defining yourself as the average person so that what doesn’t affect you personally can’t possibly be affecting any average person?
Laws are not fixed, though. They can and should change over time. The religious push, in this case, is against people (themselves pushing) who feel current laws are outdated and seek to change them. A push to keep some things the same when the surrounding conditions have changed can be as bad or worse than a push to change things.
Are you aware of religion-based initiatives that seek to forbid this? If you have a child and feel that child should receive sex-ed and some federal, state or local law prevents or discourages it, would you consider that encroachment? Because it turns out such laws do exist (or are being heavily promoted) in various venues around the U.S. Encroachment isn’t just “you sneaked onto my property”; it’s also “you keep trying to sneak onto my property and if I don’t watch out, you’ll succeed.”
This may not have much to do with you personally, but what about laws requiring the teaching of intelligent design in public schools? It took a federal judge to tell the “nutters” to knock it off. See Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
As Kitzmiller shows, laws don’t need to be changed to accommodate anyone. Sometimes, all it takes is a backdoor approach. One school board meeting later, and suddenly, the beliefs of a small group of people are being inflicted on everyone else, and a public school district involves a lot of people, both students and parents. And when the people involved are your friends and neighbors and members of your church, well, you may not see them as “nutters” at all.
Murder, rape, incest, theft, adultery, cannibalism, graft.* I can’t stand how religious people keep imposing their will upon me by being the clear and absolute majority in a Democratic society, keeping me from doing all the fun things I want to do.
*Save the nonsensical arguments about whether or not Atheists can be moral too. The morality was derived from religious cultures, whether it’s Jews, Catholics, Babylonians, Sumerians or Iroquois. For those who love to read WAY too much into things, yes I do believe atheists are capable of being moral NOW, that morality has been developed. Speculate all you like as to whether or not morality would have ever developed without a religious influence, it doesn’t matter, because it didn’t happen that way.