Atheists & Agnostics

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Christmas gift for The Telegraph: Atheist content to copy and paste

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'Tis the season to attack the season, at least in American Atheist country. So here they go with the newest round of billboards sneering at Christmas, this time in the Bible Belt.

The atheists knew it would get a sleighful of media coverage, though with varying degrees of friendliness. But some media, likeThe Telegraph, settled for copy & paste of the atheists' release material.

The summary lede is conventional enough:

Atheist activists are taking their campaigns to the Bible Belt this Christmas with a provocative billboard campaign that is expected to stir controversy in America's religious heartlands.
The giant advertising hoardings in the Tennessee cities of Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Fort Smith, Arkansas show a mischievous-looking young girl writing her letter to Father Christmas: "Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is to skip church! I'm too old for fairy tales," she writes.

Then the story starts lifting content, with almost no rewriting, from the American Atheists. Here's a paragraph from the atheist's webpage:

“Even children know churches spew absurdity, which is why they don’t want to attend services. Enjoy the time with your family and friends instead,” said American Atheists President David Silverman. “Today’s adults have no obligation to pretend to believe the lies their parents believed.  It’s OK to admit that your parents were wrong about God, and it’s definitely OK to tell your children the truth.”

Now here's one from the Telegraph:


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CNN offers readers an atheist veteran, smiling down from heaven after his suffering ends

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CNN offers readers an atheist veteran, smiling down from heaven after his suffering ends

If anything has changed, over the 10 years-plus your GetReligionistas have been doing what we do, then it has been the number of questions we hear from readers about that blurring line between basic news writing and commentary.

At first we tried to ignore this, saying that we just write about hard news -- period. Eventually, this rising tide of journalistic confusion became impossible to ignore, in part because readers kept asking us about it.

So what we have here is a perfect example, a CNN feature under the headline, "Soldier broken by war silenced by death." A longtime GetReligion reader who closely follows atheist issues sent it in, basically asking, "What the heck?" or words to that effect. I agree that this is a strange one.

For starters, this article was located in the U.S. news section and it is not flagged as an analysis piece. Yet, right in the lede, the writer -- Moni Basu -- breaks into first-person voice and frames the story in terms of direct contacts with the subject, paralyzed Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. First person? That would normally mean that this is a column, right?


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Yes, I saw the New York Times piece on Marvin Olasky and World magazine

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It's interesting -- "ironic" may be a better word -- how many people sent me emails asking if I saw the New York Times "Beliefs" column this week focusing on the work of Marvin Olasky and World magazine, the one with the headline: "A Muckraking Magazine Creates a Stir Among Evangelical Christians."

"Ironic"? We'll get to that.

Columnist Mark Oppenheimer later noted, on Twitter, that many readers didn't seem to realize that the word "muckraking" is -- among real journalists -- a word that can be used as a compliment. That was the point of his column, in a word.

Before we go further, please understand that Olasky is I friend of mine, yet a friend with whom I have enjoyed many years of debates over very important questions about faith and journalism. You could not ask for a more interesting man with whom to have a meaningful and productive argument.

It is very old hat that many people on the political and religious left (liberal evangelicals, in particular) really, really, do not like Olasky's brand of advocacy journalism, which is interesting since he is a convert to Calvinist Christianity who was once a Jewish atheist and a member of the Communist Party. Oppenheimer focused -- note the headline -- on the fact that Olasky also gets under the skins of many people on the political and religious right because he is not a PR man for the Republican establishment. Ditto for the evangelical establishment, come to think of it. The typical World issue contains few, if any, ads from evangelical book publishers.


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Your weekend think piece: Interesting historical background about atheists in foxholes

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Veteran GetReligion readers will know that my academic background is in history, just as much as in journalism and mass media. I have always been fascinated with the history of religion in America (this helps on the religion beat) and, in particular, church-state studies. While doing a master's degree in church-state studies at Baylor University, I focused my thesis research on civil religion in the Vietnam War era.

You can't study church-state issues and a war as controversial as the one in Vietnam without hitting issues linked to conscientious objectors, which leads you into studies of tensions between the military establishment and minority forms of religion. You also end up studying the tensions that have, for generations, swirled around the work of military chaplains.

What a paradox this is. How do people serve in the military without the support of clergy? The idea of a military force without chaplains is hard to contemplate. Yet how do you maintain doctrinal integrity in settings where it is impossible for a wide variety of faiths to be represented? How do you keep a rabbi on a submarine that contains one or two Jews? How do you ask a traditional Catholic soldier to say his confession to a female Episcopal priest?

And what about people who have no faith at all? The absence of faith is, of course, a faith position and these military personnel deserve some kind of support when it comes to stress and conflict over ultimate issues.


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Modern Girl Scouts for a modern age: What about God, country and great outdoors?

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The red numbers in a recent Associated Press report on the life and health of the Girl Scouts are pretty blunt. It's rare, these days, to see these kinds of crunch paragraphs right at the top of a report -- literally.

For the second straight year, youth and adult membership in the Girl Scouts has dropped sharply, intensifying pressure on the 102-year-old youth organization to find ways of reversing the trend.
According to figures provided to The Associated Press, the total of youth members and adult volunteers dropped by 6 percent over the past year -- from 2,994,844 to 2,813,997. Over two years, total membership is down 11.6 percent, and it has fallen 27 percent from a peak of more than 3.8million in 2003.
While the Girl Scouts of the USA have had an array of recent internal difficulties -- including rifts over programming and serious fiscal problems -- CEO Anna Maria Chavez attributed the membership drop primarily to broader societal factors that have affected many youth-serving organizations.

In other words, how do you keep them down on the farm (or at a campground) digging in the dirt (even when the goal is to earn environmental badges) after they have seen edgy fashion sites on their smart phones and tablet computers? 


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What kind of religious stuff provoked interest the past 22 months?

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What kind of religious stuff provoked interest the past 22 months?

This is the 100th “Religion Q and A” posting. So instead of answering the usual weekly question The Guy pauses to scan what sort of religious stuff provoked interest since December, 2012. That’s when this blog began posting non-sectarian answers to anonymously posted questions on “any old thing about any and all faith options,” after a strategic boost from Terry Mattingly of the estimable www.getreligion.org.

The Guy, as a journalist, naturally wants current topics in the mix, and thus recently dealt with: new movies, the career of Chick-fil-A’s pious founder Truett Cathy, the Supreme Court ruling on birth control under “Obamacare,” suicide and the Robin Williams tragedy, religious conflict in Ukraine, and the disputes about tax exemption, civic prayers, legalized marijuana, and same-sex marriage.

Yet check the handy archives on the blog’s home page and you’ll see less timely topics predominate. A prime principle in education is that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, and The Guy welcomes queries about basic information. Many others will have asked themselves the same thing. So The Guy examined Catholic intermarriage policy, whether military service is sinful, a deceptively simple query on “what is faith?” and this golden oldie: “When does life begin?” (the blog’s very first question).


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Guess who's making headlines in Detroit: Could it be SATAN!?

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This is the headline atop the latest Satanist feature in the Detroit Free Press:

It's Satanist vs. Satanist in Detroit's newest political tug-of-war

I don't know about you, but I'm clicking that link.

But after doing so, here's my question for the Free Press headline writer: Is this really a political story? As much we might like to condemn all politicians to hell (kidding, mostly), isn't this actually a religion story — or given the subject of the debate, a non-religion story?

Let's start at the top:

A new Satanic religious group that debuted in Detroit this month already has encountered outspoken opposition: other Satanists.
The Rev. Tom Erik Raspotnik, 49, of Oxford decries the Satanic Temple’s atheism and progressive ideals. He said his Temples of Satan honors the deity of Satan, and he and others with him are pro-life and believe in animal sacrifices.
“I would be like a tea party Satanist,” Raspotnik said, adding that he has participated in tea party events, but that people at the events might not have known he worships Satan.

Later, a Norwegian expert on Satanism quoted by the Free Press suggests that the Satanic Temple folks underplay the Satan aspect and focus on atheism and free speech/religion issues.


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Believe it or not, atheist churches on the rise deep in the heart of Texas

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Dog bites man? That's not news. Any journalist knows that.

Pastor goes to church? That's usually not news, either. Except, of course, if the pastor doesn't believe in God.

Newspapers seem to love breathless features about godless congregations (almost as much as bloggers like me enjoy contextless overgeneralizations). But seriously, see The New York Times, CNN's "Belief Blog" and The Tennessean for relatively recent stories on Bible Belt atheists going to church. I critiqued a similar Tulsa World story for GetReligion two years ago.

Enter The Dallas Morning News with a pretty good report headlined "Atheist churches provide a community for Dallas nonbelievers."

The Dallas story is written by an obviously talented young reporter whose LinkedIn page indicates she helped lead Bible studies for children in a previous gig. Any constructive criticism I offer in this post relates not to the aspiring journalist but to improvements I wish editors at the Morning News — a major metropolitan newspaper — had initiated.


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Was Marx right that religion equals 'opium'?

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Was Marx right that religion equals 'opium'?

ROD ASKS:

Was Marx right? Is religion the opiate of the masses?

THE RELIGION GUY ANSWERS:

This blog’s third item about atheism and atheists in seven weeks!  Rod cites the famous quote about religion from a 26-year-old Karl Marx in 1844, four years before he co-authored the momentous “Communist Manifesto.” Here’s the full context in his typically prolix prose, from the introduction to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness…” (Oxford University Press translation, 1970).

Before seeing how some analysts unpack those words let’s scan a bit of biography. 


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