Via Friendly Atheist:
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) sponsored House Resolution 397 yesterday, titled “Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as “America’s Spiritual Heritage Week” for the appreciation of and education on America’s history of religious faith.”
Oh, you know it’s going to be good. Most of the quotes are either misinformed, scary, or just plain stupid (go to Friendly Atheist for examples), but let’s look at my favorite one in particular:
“Whereas in 1853, the United States Senate declared that the Founding Fathers ‘had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us an irreligious people . . . they did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy’”
…Wow, just wow. Can a congressman seriously not see the problem with this statement? Maybe if we reword it a bit he can take a hint:
“revolting spectacle of Jewish greed”
“revolting spectacle of Islamic violence”
“revolting spectacle of Christian intolerance”
“revolting spectacle of Hindu cow worship” (okay, I kind of got nothing here)
Since when is it okay to single out a group of American citizens and call them revolting with a stereotype? If any of these other groups had been mentioned, you can be sure as hell people would be all over his ass about it. This is why we need atheist activism – not because we’re on a crusade to convert people, but because we don’t want to be the punching bag for religious people.
EDIT: Ok, apparently I can’t read and I missed the fact that that awful phrase was written in 1853, not as a new part of the resolution. Still, it shows a lack of judgment to include it in the resolution, so I stand by my snarky comments.
I don’t know about cow worship, but according to the old testiment god has been known to get some sand in his crevace when people worship golden calves.
“no fear or jealousy”No, they just thought it was stupid:[In regard to the Trinity]; “Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses, and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies.(John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson)
Funny how they have time for stuff like this, yet they’ll turn around and tell LGBT people to stop whining about petty things like our rights because there’s, you know, an economic crisis and stuff going on.
If it was “atheist apathy” then I would be worried, but as there are no apathetic atheists (good domain name, BTW), I am not offended.But WTF is “atheistical apathy”? Apathy with the quality of being atheistic? I cannot quite get my brain around that idea.
Hey, if I recall correctly, the Hindi used to perform human sacrifices to their Gods. Plus there was that whole “Untouchables” class thing that was directly caused by Hindi theology.