AMERICAN ATHEISTS

Are you sick of those sweet, syrupy Christmas letters piously sent out by obviously miserable non-reality grounded people at this time of year?

Here is my version. Edwin.

Christmas Letter.

Dearest Beloved of Our Family in Christ,

There have been many changes this year for our family. Our beloved 17 year old daughter suffered blindness and paralysis after being struck by a drunk driver on her way home from Wednesday night church services. Aunt Polly died of liver cancer, following a long and painful illness. The family cat was smashed by a UPS truck. Mabel’s M.S. is getting worse and she can hardly do anything much anymore. Father had to have a triple bypass operation, and now uses a breathing tube. The house was burned down by sparks from the burning of Harry Potter books in our yard. Little Marvin got a chicken bone stuck in his throat at a church picnic and was rushed to the hospital where doctors had to remove his voice box, so he can never talk again, but God miraculously saved him. Miranda is now being home schooled after she left eighth grade to become a single mother. An abortion was out of the question, and we know God has given us a hydrocephalic grandchild for his own good and perfect reasons. Our oldest son had his left foot blown off in an ambush in Iraq while helping to bring Christ and Democracy to those poor heathens. We rejoice in the wisdom of our God, in His gifts, and in His plan for our lives. We bear grateful witness to all that our great and merciful God has done for us in the past year, and we praise the works of His hand. Oh, almost forgot. The dog died.

In His Holy Name,

The Fundangelical Family

© Edwin Kagin. December, 2006. Permission to reproduce without profit is given. If you make money on it, I want some of it. Edwin)

Remember, the new Internet call-in radio sensation “Answers in Atheism,” will again air live tomorrow at 7:00 pm Eastern Time. Tomorrow’s guest will be Dan Xenatro, the vice-coordinator of Connecticut Valley Atheists. Seems a local mayor or somesuch in their area, has decreed that only Christian kitsch can be displayed on their public building. Tune in, and call in, at www.answersinatheism.net . If you are misfortunate enough to miss this historic event, it will (should be) archived for later enjoyment.

Edwin.

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From reader Sharon:

Edwin,

I am pleased to announce that my letter to the editor re: the film The Golden Compass and the christians’ over the top reaction to it has been published today in the Press of Atlantic City:

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/opinion/letters/story/7523259p-7423781c.html

It’s the second letter on the page.

Chalk up another victory for our side!

Regards,

Sharon Hutchinson

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Her letter:

Egg Harbor Township

Religious fear

rational thinking?

I am glad to see such a ruckus being created over the film, “The Golden Compass.” If nothing else, it shows both the fear and prejudice directed toward atheists and other free thinkers in this country.

What exactly is the religious community afraid of? That their children might be exposed to the fact that there is such a thing as the existence of reason and logic? For too long, our young have been literally brainwashed from an extremely early age to believe that there is no alternative to the faith-based beliefs that seem to have taken over this country.

To label this film fantasy is the height of irony. Children need to be armed with the knowledge that there is an alternative way of thinking, one that does not require belief in mythology or fairy tales. Our greatest inventors have been agnostic at the very least. In this time of planetary peril, we need to raise a generation taught to think rationally and use scientific principles rather than depend on Dark Ages belief systems.

SHARON HUTCHINSON

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PRESS RELEASE. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC.

http://www.atheists.org

http://www.americanatheist.org

For more information, please contact:

Ellen Johnson, President (908)

Dave Silverman, Communications Director (732) 648-9333 Edwin Kagin, National Legal Director (859) 384-7000

ATHEIST GROUP CLAIMS VICTORY, COUNTY BOARD VOTES TO END SPECIAL SALARY TAX EXEMPTION FOR MINISTERS

Members of the clergy will now be paying salary taxes just like everyone following a vote last night by officials in Boone County, KY.

Two years ago, attorney Edwin Kagin — National Legal Director for American Atheists — filed suit to challenge a local practice which exempted ministers, priests, rabbis, mullah’s and other clerics from complying with state law, and being taxed the same 0.8 percent as everyone else who works for a living. Kagin cited the Kentucky State Constitution which forbids any direct or indirect public aid to religious sects, or the payment of salaries for the clergy.

“The tax exemption clearly favored religion over non-religion, and elevated members of the clergy to a special position where they didn’t have to shoulder their fair share of the tax burden,” said Kagin. “This levels the playing field and complies with both of our state and federal constitutions.”

One Boone County official court, Judge-executive Gary Moore, said he disagreed with the statute.

“I would not normally vote for this,” Moore told the Kentucky Enquirer, “as much as I disagree with it.” But he said he would comply with the state law. Moore added that he told a delegation of ministers about the change, and that “They seem to understand it, not happy about it.”

Mr. Kagin said that officials should have been abiding by the constitution two years ago, obviating any need for a lawsuit. “This is

what American Atheists does, though, as a First Amendment watchdog group. We find statutes like this being ignored in communities throughout the country. Officials comply only when you threaten to take them to court.”

“We’re pleased with the outcome, and that Boone County will be treating all citizens equally, and not waste taxpayer money defending an unconstitutional practice.”

AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.

American Atheists, Inc.

P. O. Box 5733

Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733

Tel.: (908) 276-7300

Fax: (908) 276-7402

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Here are the newspaper articles:

http://news.nky.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20071217/NEWS0103/712170361

The Kentucky Enquirer

December 17, 2007

Clergy tax break to end

Lawsuit, state law spark change

BY BRENNA R. KELLY | [email protected]

BURLINGTON – Ministers in Boone County have been exempt from paying the county’s payroll tax for seven years, but the clergy may soon lose that perk.

The county plans to remove the exemption Tuesday in response to a new state law, the state constitution and a lawsuit filed by an atheist who says the exemption is not fair.

Once the exemption is removed, ministers’ salaries would be subject to the 0.8 percent tax that all workers in the county must pay. Because the county stops taxing wages after someone makes $51,257 year, the most a minister could pay next year in taxes would be $410.06.

Boone County Treasurer Lisa Buerkley doesn’t expect the tax on ministers to generate much money.

“It not about the money, it’s about complying with law,” Buerkley said.

Boone County gave ministers the tax exemption in 2000 after a ruling in Kenton County Circuit Court that said the tax violated ministers’ First Amendment right to freedom of religion.

The ruling also said such an exemption did not violate the state constitution, said Jim Parsons, Boone County administrator at the time.

After the ruling, a Florence minister threatened to sue Boone County if it did not allow the exemption, Parsons said.

“It was a very minor impact on our revenues, so we decided to put it on,” Parsons said.

The county was sued anyway, not by the minister, but by Edwin Kagin, a Union resident and atheist.

Kagin, who is legal director of the American Atheists, said the exemption violates Section 5 of the Kentucky Constitution.

The section says religious groups cannot be given preference under the law. It goes on to say, “nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, to contribute to the erection or maintenance of any such place, or to the salary or support of any minister of religion.”

If everyone has to pay the tax except ministers, “you are contributing to their keep,” Kagin said.

In protest, Kagin said, he didn’t pay the tax for several years until the county threatened to have him prosecuted. Kagin’s lawsuit has been pending since 2005, but it will be dropped if the county removes the exemption, he said.

Kagin said he hasn’t been outspoken about the change because he didn’t want people to think that the proposed ordinance is pro-atheism.

“It’s really pro-constitution,” he said. “Everyone ought to be outraged that ministers are exempt from paying the taxes they have to.”

The question of the ministers’ exemption had been interpreted differently by attorneys.

But a law the legislature passed in 2006 appears to clear up any confusion, said Boone County Attorney Bob Neace.

That law, which took effect in July 2006, says that “Duly ordained, commissioned, or denominationally licensed ministers of religion shall be subject to the same license fees imposed on others in the county on salaries, wages, commissions, and other compensation earned for work done and services performed or rendered.”

The county must comply with the new state law, Neace said.

“If that statute doesn’t exist, do we then have an argument that we can have that exemption?” he said. “I think that’s open to interpretation.”

In Campbell County, ministers are still exempt from the county’s payroll tax of 1.05 percent, said Linda Eads, the county’s occupational tax manager.

Eads said the new law was discussed at the Kentucky Occupational License Association conference last year.

“I’m aware of it,” she said. “We discussed it at the KOLA conference and decided nobody is going to sue us to make us tax them.”

Kenton County did not return calls about its payroll tax.

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http://news.nky.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20071219/NEWS0103/712190409

The Kentucky Enquirer, December 19, 2007

Ministers lose exemption

State law forces collection of tax on their salaries

BY BRENNA R. KELLY | [email protected]

BOONE COUNTY – Ministers will have to pay the county’s payroll tax after Boone Fiscal Court voted to rescind an exemption the clergy enjoyed for the past seven years.

A change in state law forced the county to tax ministers’ salaries at the same 0.8 percent as everyone else who works there, said Judge-executive Gary Moore.

“I would not normally vote for this,” Moore said. But the county has to comply with state law, he said, “as much as I disagree with it.”

The county was embroiled for more than two years in a lawsuit by Union atheist Edwin Kagin over the exemption. Kagin claimed the break for ministers violated the Kentucky Constitution. The lawsuit will likely be dismissed.

Moore said he met with Boone County ministers to tell them about the change.

“They seem to understand it, not happy about it,” he said, “but understand it’s out of our control.”

Because the county stops taxing salaries at $51,257, the most a minister could pay is $410.06.

Also Tuesday, Fiscal Court delayed a vote on establishing a code enforcement board.

Commissioner Cathy Flaig said she wants to visit Florence’s and Covington’s boards first.

Flaig attended Kenton County’s board meeting and hopes to find another nearby county with a board.

Commissioner Charlie Kenner said he hoped to find one to visit in the counties surrounding Louisville. Those counties, such as Spencer and Oldham, have a mixture of rural and suburban areas like Boone, he said.

If the board is established, a five-person board instead of District Court would handle violations of the county’s property maintenance ordinance, such as high weeks or abandoned cars.

Violations of the ordinance are criminal misdemeanors. They would become civil cases.

The court could vote Jan. 8 or table the issue again.

“This is too important to try to push through or rush through,” Moore said.

Local governments legally have been allowed to have code enforcement boards since the mid-’90s. Florence has had a code enforcement board for three years. Kenton County established one this year.

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Fan mail:

From: Maui Grammy [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 5:01 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Ministers to pay tax

Dear Sir:

I sincerely hope you are satisfied that ministers do have to pay an occupational tax, You do have ALL MY PRAYERS to God the Father that you and your wife will truly be shown the Light of Salvation and be saved by the precious blood of the Lamb. I am also so thankful I have not needed an attorney. I do now realize should I need an attorney, I will check him out thoroughly.

A loyal Christian,

Joyce Steele

(It is unclear whether this dear heart favors the result of not. Edwin)

“Answers in Atheism,” the new Internet radio sensation, is honored to present, in a prerecorded program (Yes that means you cannot call in tonight. Sorry about that), Conrad Goeringer of American Atheists. He will be engaged in a lively conversation on the origins of Christmas in America, on Atheism, and other diverse matters. Joining us for this presentation are Ashley and Barbara from Columbus, Ohio.

CONRAD GOERINGER is Director of Public Policy for American Atheists and staff writer for the American Atheist Magazine. He is a former freelance reporter, and his writings have appeared in such diverse publications as The Humanist, Schism, New Times, and Sky & Telescope. His articles and talks to diverse Atheist, Freethought and other nonbeliever audiences frequently explore the intersection between popular culture, history, politics and religion. Mr. Goeringer has also been an antiquarian book dealer and collector, and he is presently working on a political biography of the late Hollywood actress and activist Frances Farmer.

WHERE: www.answersinatheim.net

WHEN: TONIGHT, Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 7:00 PM Eastern.

Should you be unfortunate enough to not hear this program tonight, it will be archived for you to listen to later.

Next week should be a call in program. Topic to be announced.

“Answers in Atheism” has a new server, and we should now be able to accommodate many more listeners.

See you on the radio!

Edwin.

ON CHRISTMAS, or

“NO, VIRGINIA, THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS”

If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on

his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried

with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!

Uncle Ebenezer Scrooge (not to be confused with Uncle Scrooge McDuck)

I can’t prove that no ungulate unit of reindeer persuasion can fly, any more than you can prove I don’t have two invisible unicorns that frolic in benign innocence at

Camp Quest. I can’t prove there are no living dinosaurs (as the arkonuts challenge the skeptical to do) anymore than the arkonuts can prove the English text of

Genesis they rely on is identical to the original version they hold was dictated, or inspired, by god. But if one says that all crows are black, there is no need to check

every crow to falsify that assertion. All that is needed is to find one white crow, or any crow of a different color. Similarly, Santa skepticism can be soundly silenced

by the production of one flying reindeer. Yet Christmasterians insist doubters disprove Santa, sleigh, and such, or keep silent, lest they destroy a child’s simple

(mindless) faith. This method of proof proves useful later, as children, programmed to believe fantasy is truth, grow to adultery and unquestioningly follow the

fantastic follies of faith of their fathers (and mothers–political correctness must not be permitted to fall down a personhole).

To be sure, Plato (not to be confused with Mickey Mouse’s dog) argued that, to conceive of something that is real, one must somehow get the perfect idea of that

something from the place it really exits, to wit, the world of forms–a place somewhere that no one has ever seen. Reality alone wouldn’t do. Thus, everyone but

philosophers know what a horse looks like, and kids know all about Santa without having to survive Philosophy 101.

Can we imagine, or even believe in, something that doesn’t exist? Sure we can. Just talk with those who have been abducted by aliens. If some unseen thing is

believed by many, e.g., angels, it is called faith. If a thing is believed by only one, and is wildly outside the gates of common sense and experience, then the belief,

e.g., suddenly realizing that one’s guardian angel is made of grape jelly and having him (there are no female angels–check your bible, you can win bets on this) on

toast, it is called psychosis. The problem is that the invisible and the non-existence look much the same. Christmas beliefs fall somewhere between the province of

priest and psychiatrist.

Christmas combines two contradictory images of godlike characters: Jesus, the Christ, who taught that to be saved one should sell all of their property and give it to

the poor (the church later declared belief in this teaching a heresy), and Claus, the Santa, to whom children are taught to write letters requesting property–believed

to be given by Santa, in one night, to those children of the world found worthy–in direct challenge to the counsel of the Christ. One should note, before teaching the

latter belief system, that an anagram of Santa is Satan.

The day itself, meaning Christ’s Mass, is the same day the Romans used to honor their sun god with gift giving and feasting. Christmas is quite pagan. Its secular

celebration involves rituals specifically forbidden by holy writ, like hewing down a tree, bringing it inside the house, decorating it, and praising it. This is as clear a

violation of divine decree as public prayer, or celebrating the Sabbath on the first day of the week instead of on the seventh day as ordered (Commandment IV). No

wonder we are in such trouble these days with crime, inflation, and teenage pregnancies.

Unfortunate cultural consequences flow from the forced frivolity and jejune joy Christmas creates and requires. People get depressed when they don’t feel happy as

they should, when they do not have their artificial expectations fulfilled, and when they cannot meet the unreasonable artificial sessional needs of others–like their

mercenary relatives, and their materialistic, greedy, spoiled children–and get even deeper in debt by trying to behave as expected. Thanks to Tom Flynn, and his

wonderful heresy The Trouble With Christmas, I chucked the whole thing a few years ago, and lived. Try it. You will feel better for it.

Should I be granted a Christmas wish, it would be that the holiday be canceled, and that the whole show appertaining to this business of Christmas not be done at all.

Please understand that I do not care if others celebrate Christmas if they wish, nor would I suggest that they be prevented from doing so. I just don’t want the

holiday to be compulsory for me or anyone else–any more than I want other people’s prayers, that they have an absolute right to pray, to be forced upon me by

public officials or upon children by public schools. One who would rather decline gets somewhat tired of listening to those who absolutely and uncritically assume all

good people celebrate Christmas, and that something is horribly wrong with anyone who ignores the invitation to attend their compulsory party. Failing the unlikely

event of Christmas being made optional, I would alternatively wish, in seasonal answer to Virginia’s famous question, that we might see something in the public press,

for innocent children, like:

Dear Virginia,

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. It is a myth that has been cruelly used to deceive children for the pleasure of adults who unwittingly destroy

children’s sense of basic trust by teaching them that the world is something other than it really is.

I know this news must be a shock to you, and I am truly sorry for your discomfort. But it is not my fault. The person who tells you the truth should never

be blamed for the hurt that comes from learning that others have lied.

You should not believe in Santa Claus any more than you should believe in fairies, or in demons waiting around to pull yo
u under the earth, or in angels

lurking about to transport you above it. People do not need to believe foolish things to have love and compassion and caring, any more than they need a

special season or holiday to be nice to one another.

If things believed prove false, does that mean peace, and sharing, and kindness must dissolve like mist along with the untrue things? Of course not! We

don’t need magic to have happiness, and wonder, and joy. Our beautiful world is full of these things, and they are very real, and our real world holds

more interesting and wonderful people and things than any fairyland anyone could ever even imagine.

Some adults are afraid of things they don’t understand, and they teach children to believe in magic. But the truth is really far more exciting. Wouldn’t you

rather learn what is on real planets, that are millions of miles away, than believe reindeer can fly? Have you ever seen the northern lights? I have, and I

can tell you they are more beautiful, more mysterious, and more wonderful than any pretend story anyone could ever invent about elves that have

workshops at the North Pole.

Is it okay to pretend and to believe things we know are not true? Of course it is! And it can be a lot of fun. Intelligent people love to play. Any time you

watch a movie or a play or go to a costume party you are playing and pretending something is so that is not.

We know those aren’t real people in the TV–only images of them–but we know we are pretending, and this is fun and much different from believing a

falsehood. Would it be wrong to tell a friend of yours, who firmly believed there were really small people inside the television set, that his or her belief was

not true? Would it be right for you to be condemned for destroying that friend’s childlike faith? What if several of your best friends thought they could fly,

and set off for a bridge over a 600 foot deep gorge to prove it? Would it be wrong for you to politely try to convince them that they just might be

mistaken, no matter how firmly they believe they are right? Would you be destroying their childhood or saving their future?

Follow the truth, no matter where it may take you. And don’t pay any attention to those who think comforting falsehoods are better than understanding

the world as it is. If you ever have children, teach them trust by telling them the truth. By the way, just in case you didn’t know, the stork didn’t bring you.

You are here because your parents had sex.

Keep questioning, Virginia, and don’t feel it is the least bit wrong to demand correct answers.

Asking questions is what makes us human.

Your friend,

Uncle Edwin

by Edwin Kagin

ATHEISM IS A CONCLUSION NOT A BELIEF

To Unidentified Recipients:

AMERICAN ATHEISTS MEDIA ALERT

http://www.atheists.org

DAVE SILVERMAN ON “ANSWERS IN ATHEISM”

INTERNET RADIO THURSDAY, NOV. 29

Atheism, Utah Crosses, The Golden Compass, Jewish Atheists &

Everything Else You Want to Talk About…

http://www.answersinatheism.net

DAVE SILVERMAN, Communications Director for American Atheists, will be the guest tomorrow night (Thursday, November 29, 2007) on the “Answers in Atheism” Internet radio show. Hosted by raconteur and curmudgeon Edwin Kagin (co-founder of Camp Quest), “Answers in Atheism” can be heard on the internet beginning at 7:00 PM ET. There program are archived for those who are unable to log on to the web site, which is frequently over-loaded with calls and listeners!

DAVE SILVERMAN serves as national Communications Director for American Atheists, and is a veteran of numerous news-talk and public affairs programs. He runs the NoGodBlog (http://www.nogodblog.com). You can call in to the show on a toll-free number, 877-814-9287 (local: 859-384-7000) or send your e-mail questions/comments to [email protected] .

WHO & WHAT: Dave Silverman, Communications Director for American Atheists on the “Answers in Atheism” program streaming live on the net.

WHEN: Tomorrow, Thursday November 29, 2007 beginning at 7:00 PM ET; show is archived after airing.

WHERE: http://www.answersinatheism.net . You can call in to the show on a toll-free number, 877-814-9287 (local: 859-384-7000) or send your e-mail questions/comments to [email protected] .

MORE INFO: http://www.answersinatheism.net

(AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.)

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Sent in by reader Fred

Camp Quest in Time Magazine:

Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007

Sunday School for Atheists

By Jeninne Lee-St. John / Palo Alto

Sunday morning at The Children’s Program at the Humanist Community of Palo Alto, California.

Kathrin Miller for TIME

On Sunday mornings, most parents who don’t believe in the Christian God, or any god at all, are probably making brunch or cheering at their kids’ soccer game, or running errands or, with luck, sleeping in. Without religion, there’s no need for church, right?

Maybe. But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. “When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.

An estimated 14% of Americans profess to have no religion, and among 18-to-25-year-olds, the proportion rises to 20%, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies. The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the U.S. “It’s important for kids not to look weird,” says Peter Bishop, who leads the preteen class at the Humanist center in Palo Alto. Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it’s O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.

The pioneering Palo Alto program began three years ago, and like-minded communities in Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., and Portland, Ore., plan to start similar classes next spring. The growing movement of institutions for kids in atheist families also includes Camp Quest, a group of sleep-away summer camps in five states plus Ontario, and the Carl Sagan Academy in Tampa, Fla., the country’s first Humanism-influenced public charter school, which opened with 55 kids in the fall of 2005. Bri Kneisley, who sent her son Damian, 10, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer, welcomes the sense of community these new choices offer him: “He’s a child of atheist parents, and he’s not the only one in the world.”

Kneisley, 26, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, says she realized Damian needed to learn about secularism after a neighbor showed him the Bible. “Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared,” says Kneisley. In most ways a traditional sleep-away camp–her son loved canoeing–Camp Quest also taught Damian critical thinking, world religions and tales of famous freethinkers (an umbrella term for atheists, agnostics and other rationalists) like the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The Palo Alto Sunday family program uses music, art and discussion to encourage personal expression, intellectual curiosity and collaboration. One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I’m Unique and Unrepeatable, set to the tune of Ten Little Indians, instead of traditional Sunday-school songs like Jesus Loves Me. Rather than listen to a Bible story, the class read Stone Soup, a secular parable of a traveler who feeds a village by making a stew using one ingredient from each home.

Down the hall in the kitchen, older kids engaged in a Socratic conversation with class leader Bishop about the role persuasion plays in decision-making. He tried to get them to see that people who are coerced into renouncing their beliefs might not actually change their minds but could be acting out of self-preservation–an important lesson for young atheists who may feel pressure to say they believe in God.

Atheist parents appreciate this nurturing environment. That’s why Kitty, a nonbeliever who didn’t want her last name used to protect her kids’ privacy, brings them to Bishop’s class each week. After Jonathan, 13, and Hana, 11, were born, Kitty says she felt socially isolated and even tried taking them to church. But they’re all much more comfortable having rational discussions at the Humanist center. “I’m a person that doesn’t believe in myths,” Hana says. “I’d rather stick to the evidence.”

• Find this article at:
• http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686828,00.html

Copyright � 2007 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1006memorials1006.html

Arizona removing roadside memorials

Families upset over state policy; officials point to safety concerns

Lindsey Collom
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 6, 2007 12:00 AM

Janie Hartmann thought someone was playing a “sick joke” when a collection of candles, flowers and mementos left by friends all but disappeared from the Glendale roadside where her son died late last year.

She recently replaced some of the items, and those, too, went missing.

It wasn’t until after the third try that Hartmann learned the identity of the perceived “vandals”: the Arizona Department of Transportation.

For friends and family, a roadside memorial often marks the last place where their loved one was alive. But to state transportation officials, the memorials are erected where they don’t belong.

ADOT has been quietly removing them as part of its policy to not have any memorials on their on-ramps or highways, even if they are off to the side, angering people who have lost loved ones on Arizona’s roads.

The roadside memorials, ADOT says, are too much of a safety hazard and can be too distracting for motorists.

Some states are reluctant to discourage memorials, while others are more aggressive about removing clutter and distractions from rights-of-way. However, ADOT officials acknowledge they’ve done a bad job of communicating their policy to the public and are reviewing how to best get out the message.

“It ‘s one of those things where (lawmakers) want to be sensitive,” said Anne Tiegen, a transportation-policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislators. “Unfortunately, tragedies happen, and the state has to balance being understanding to the families who have experienced tragedies while balancing visibility and safety concerns.”

Vigilant about safety

Nearly half of all states regulate roadside shrines. States such as California, Florida and Washington allow state-sanctioned markers for a fee when requested by an immediate family member. Others, including Oregon and Wisconsin, prohibit memorials altogether.

Only Alaska and West Virginia encourage families to express their grief by assembling personalized tributes.

Arizona law does not have a statute that specifically targets memorials, but there is a general provision that prohibits items from being placed along a freeway.

“It’s really an issue of safety,” said Julian Avila, community-relations project manager at ADOT.

Avila said workers remove memorials as part of routine freeway maintenance, which includes roadways, embankments, ramps and certain portions of access roads. The items are then stored until someone claims them.

A grieving family

An ADOT storage facility held tokens from the Matt Hartmann memorial until last week, when Avila delivered them to Janie Hartmann’s workplace.

Matt, 20, died in the early-morning hours of Dec. 10 after being thrown from his motorcycle on the Loop 101 access road near 59th Avenue, about a mile away from his Glendale home.

Almost immediately, friends congregated on the roadside to create a memorial that included a steel cross, trinkets, candles, flowers and a guest book inked with names and messages.

The memorial helped comfort Janie and her husband, Steve. Janie said she didn’t think she could drive that street again after Matt’s death, but “the memorial made it possible.”

“I would go up there every night and light candles,” Janie said. “I felt closer there than at his gravesite because that’s where he took his last breath. His body is at the gravesite, but his spirit left at that bush.”

The bush where Matt’s bo dy was found, and the memorial there remained untouched for months. It’s not clear when ADOT maintenance crews finally took notice.

ADOT’s approach

ADOT does attempt to contact families to reclaim removed items, although the process is “informal,” Avila said. That process includes scanning items only for contact information.

In all the roadside memorials ADOT has removed so far, it has yet to find telephone numbers or other information that could trace the items back to a particular person, Avila said.

But Janie says the family “became victims” all over again when the items were removed. She believes she never would have recovered Matt’s memorial if she hadn’t sought media attention.

She says ADOT crews removed a guest book that contained his name and prayer cards from his funeral.

After the memorial vanished Sept. 7, Janie made numerous calls to police, city officials, even ADOT, to find out what happened. Two days after her story ran in The Arizona Republic on Sept. 25, she received a call from Avila.

So now, Janie is trying to figure out how to rebuild the shrine outside ADOT’s jurisdiction but still near the spot where her son died.

She may not have resistance from Glendale officials, who last week issued a statement saying the city “will not intervene as long as the memorial does not create a safety hazard for traffic or pedestrians.”

Janie says her fight is not just about her son’s tribute but about all memorials.

“It’s not all about Matt,” Janie said. “It’s about all the memorials and why they’re there and why people should be a little more heartfelt, not mock them, not vandalize them. Certainly the state of Arizona should not be allowed to very coldly cut things down and put them in the back of the truck.

“They all have stories; they all were people who were loved.”

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Sent in by reader Z;

From the “there is no such thing as bad publicity” dept.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2957300.ece

From The Times

November 28, 2007

What all directors pray for

Catholics are boycotting The Golden Compass because it promotes atheism. What a wonderful gift of publicity

Melanie McDonagh

Christmas has come early for Chris Weitz, director of The Golden Compass, the film version of the first novel in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials. Roman Catholic groups in the US are calling for a boycott of the film. Bill Donoghue, the president of the Catholic League, has said that he fears the film may cause children to read the books, which “promote atheism for kids”.

And if Mr Weitz is really lucky, Santa may deliver what every director prays for, if pray they do: a condemnation from the Vatican. Elizabeth, the atrocious costume drama starring the luminous Cate Blanchett, could have sunk into deserved obscurity had it not been for an obliging Vatican official who described it as “an antipapal travesty”. As one seasoned hack observed, those are words you get on far too few actors’ blogs these days.

It must be tough being a Vatican frontman. On the one hand, you know that the movie version of Catholicism being peddled by most contemporary film-makers, from The Da Vinci Code to The Golden Compass, is almost certainly a lurid cocktail of old-style Protestant cliché and a very modern willingness to shock religious sensibilities – apart from Islamic ones, obviously. On the other, you are conscious that the epithet “controversial” is what every film distributor longs for.

Dorothy Parker identified the phenomenon back in the Thirties in a review of the supposedly risqué French play, Aphrodite. The Mayor of New York, she wrote, “did more for the box office receipts in a single day than the combined efforts of the most talented press agents could have accomplished in a year. The Mayor had but to say that he had heard a rumour that there were scandalous goings-on at the Century Theatre . . . and the house sold out for eight weeks in advance.”

So what’s the solution? Lofty disdain is one option. It’s hard though, given a really gross travesty of all you hold dear. I sat through a performance of Jerry Springer – The Opera, next to a couple of men who plainly thought they were being exquisitely daring by chuckling at the depiction of Christ as a nappy-wearing coprophiliac. By the end, they were applauding their own broadmindedness quite as much as the play. My reaction to their reaction was to want to poke them in the eye.

The really cool approach, I think, is that of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He took part in a dialogue with Pullman on the subject of his trilogy at the National Theatre in which he made it clear how much he enjoyed the novels. It was impossible to sustain the fiction that Christianity is a sinister conspiracy against liberty and reason in the face of Dr Williams’s genial desire for a civilised conversation. An imprimatur from the Archbishop of Canterbury for The Golden Compass, however, is precisely what its makers would want least.

AMERICAN ATHEISTS
http://www.atheists.org

ELLEN JOHNSON ON THE PETER HECK RADIO SHOW ~ WEDNESDAY, NOV. 28, 2007 4:15 ET
WIOU/KOKOMO, IN. ~ ATHEISM, UTAH CROSS
CASE, GOLDEN COMPASS & MORE…

ELLEN JOHNSON, President of American Atheists will be the guest on the Peter Heck Radio Show on WIOU coming out of Kokomo, Indiana tomorrow — Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2007 beginning at 4:15 ET. Check local listings. You’ll be able to hear the program on WIOU 1350AM if you live in the broadcast area. The complete show will then be archived and available on Peter Heck’s web site, http://www.peterheck.com .

Ms. Johnson will be discussing Atheism, the recent Utah Christian cross case, the flap over the “Golden Compass” and much more.

WHO & WHAT: Ellen Johnson, President of American Atheists interviewed on the Peter Heck Radio Show.

WHEN: Wednesday, November 28, 2006 beginning at 4:15 PM.

WHERE: WIOU radio, 1350AM out of Kokomo, Indiana, the Peter Heck Radio Show. The program will be archived immediately following the live broadcast at http://www.peterheck.com .

MORE INFO: http://www.peterheck.com

(AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.)

====================================================================================================

David Silverman, communications director for American Atheists, will be this week’s guest on the new Internet radio sensation, “Answers in Atheism.”

David will appear live on this call-in talk radio sensation, that can be heard at www.answersinatheism.net on Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 7:00 pm. Eastern Time.

Y’all tune in, y’hear.

Edwin.

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http://news.nky.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20071125/NEWS0103/711250381

Believers and not cometh
Creation Museum bigger draw than thought
BY BRENNA R. KELLY | [email protected]

PETERSBURG – Cars stream into the parking lot just after the 10 a.m. opening. License plates show some are from New York, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia.
All have found their way down the rural Boone County road to the Creation Museum.
Inside, visitors will walk through the Garden of Eden, see dinosaur bones, and watch the solar system unfold as “evidence of God’s creativity.”
All of it supporting the idea that God created Earth in six days, that the planet is just 6,000 years old and those dinosaurs traveled on Noah’s Ark to survive the Great Flood that created the Grand Canyon.
In the six months since the museum opened, more than 265,000 people have toured the facility built by Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit evangelical ministry. Answers had predicted it might draw 250,000 the first year.
The museum will double its parking lot by next summer.
“We’re starting to find that word of mouth is spreading across the nation,” said Ken Ham, president of the ministry. “We’re finding people will drive a whole day or two days to get here.
“We had secular skeptics who said people aren’t going to come to this; ‘Who’s interested in this topic?,’ but we knew all along people are very interested in this topic.”
Critics say the museum is just drawing people who are already sold on creationism and the ministry’s literal interpretation of the Bible.
“The people who believe are going there to have their beliefs reinforced,” said Edwin Kagin.
“The evidence is overwhelming from all areas of science that the Earth is billions of years old and dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years before humans appeared,” said Kagin, national legal director for the American Atheists, who lives in Union and has visited the museum three times. “It’s an extremely well-done display, there’s no doubt about that. However, because something is well-done does not make it true.”
No matter who is coming, they are spending money in Northern Kentucky, filling up their gas tanks, eating at restaurants and staying in hotels. That has led to an estimated $10 million influx into the local economy, according to the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitors Bureau.
NEVER A LULL MOMENT
Since the May 28 opening, crowds packed the museum, particularly on weekends. On the busiest Saturdays, visitors waited more than two hours to get in, said Mark Looy, museum spokesman. The museum still averages about 3,000 visitors on Saturdays. Ticket prices range from $9.95 for children to $19.95 for adults.
Museum staff say most visitors are from out of town, some from out of the country.
• See video, photos and more articles about the Creation Museum
Lori Lloyd, of Orlando, was one of about 800 people who toured the museum on a recent Monday. Lloyd and her husband brought their two teenage sons to learn about creationism.
The boys attend public high school. Daniel, 15, is in an honors biology class and his 17-year-old brother Michael studies marine science.
“I just felt like it would be good for them to get a different point of view,” said Lori Lloyd, who is a firm believer in creationism and learned about the museum from the Answers Web site.
“I’m not intending to shove it down their throat,” she said. “I’m not going to prevent them from knowing what their school’s benchmarks include, and yet I’m also going to expose them to what God’s word has to say about it.”
POPULAR WITH HOME SCHOOLERS
The museum tells the story of how Earth was created based on the book of Genesis. The ministry claims that science backs its views and uses fossils and dinosaurs it says are thousands – not millions – of years old.
“Genesis is written as what’s called a narrative history,” said Looy, who is also co-founder of the ministry. “It’s not like the poetry you would find in the book of Psalms, there are some parts of the Bible you don’t take literally because it’s poetic, but the book of Genesis is not a poem, it’s not an allegory, and the writer of Genesis wrote straightforward history.”
One of the museum’s biggest audiences is home-school families. The parents come to the museum to learn how to teach creation-based science classes.
Nancy Paul, of Indianapolis, came in part to find resources to help her teach a sixth-grade home school co-op science class. She and her husband brought their five daughters, who range in age up to 6.
“They are young enough that I just want them to enjoy science at this age,” she said. “They are too young to get into the debate about creation versus evolution.”
The museum has also become a haven for field trips for Christian schools. On Monday, students from Harvest Preparatory School, a Christian school of about 630 students in Canal Winchester, Ohio spent the day at the museum.
Lillian Watkins, head of the school’s science department, said she wanted her students to learn that “the biblical view of creation is the true one.”
For Watkins, who teaches chemistry, science and calculus, the trip was her second to the museum. She also donated to its building fund.
According to Ohio teaching standards, Watkins said she has to expose her students to evolution. But she does it in her own way.
“Of course we cover the fallacies of evolution,” she said, “but we teach God’s word.”
ADS, LOCATION DRIVE ATTENDANCE
In addition to school groups and home-school families, the museum is drawing people who hear about it at church. Answers in Genesis has eight full-time speakers who travel the country conducting about 250 “teaching events” each year, Looy said.
The ministry also advertised through billboards and commercials in six cities surrounding Cincinnati. But its best advertisement is word of mouth, Ham said.
“If you do something that’s professional and well-done, you’re not hitting people in the head, but making it very clear where you stand … what we predicted was that when Christians come they will go back and bring people that they know don’t agree with it,” he said. “That’s definitely what we see happening.”
Most important for the museum, it has a central location. Answers in Genesis chose Northern Kentucky because almost two-thirds of the U.S. population lives within 650 miles, Looy said.
While building the museum, consultants told the group that it could expect 300,000 to 400,000 visitors the first year, Ham said.
“It appears that prediction is going to be right,” he said.
To keep people coming back there will be new exhibits and shows. Next year the museum will add an indoor children’s play area and consider converting its warehouse into a multi-purpose room.
It has also added afternoon lectures and plans several children’s workshops. But the ministry doesn’t expect to expand the museum itself in the near future, Looy said. The ministry has talked about building a Noah’s Ark on the 49-acre site.
“We’ve talked about it, but nothing serious to the point to where we’re fundraising or have any designs or drawings or anything like that,” he said. “We want to see with this museum, how successful it is over a couple of years. Right now we’re doing extremely well, but the proof in the pudding might be a couple of years from now.”
Though the museum opened debt-free after it raised $27 million in private donations, it costs more than $7 million a year to operate, Looy said. As of November, the museum was making money, and if the attendance keeps up it could break even by its first anniversary.
That’s when the Convention and Visitors Bureau will have a better handle on the museum’s economic impact, said bureau president and CEO Tom Caradonio.
But anecdotal evidence shows that there has been an increase in stays at hotels and bed and breakfasts in the area, he said. The impact is hard to judge because a lot people who come to Northern Kentucky or Cincinnati aren’t coming just for the museum, he said.
Caradonio also warns that the museum may not be able to keep up the strong attendance.
“I’ll be surprised if they maintain this pace next year, because usually the way attractions work, the first year is the best year,” Caradonio said. “And then they keep trying to build back to that number.”
CRITICS UNHAPPY
While Answers in Genesis is reveling in its success, the museum’s critics are dismayed.
“They are doing remarkably well, which is a testament to the ignorance of the American public,” said Kagin.
Lawrence Krauss, another critic, said the museum benefited from free publicity around the world when it opened last summer. Krauss, professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, said he thinks once Answers in Genesis’ core believers have toured the museum, attendance could drop.
“My hope is that this is a little flash in the pan,” he said. “And then the rest of the country will ignore it as it’s supposed to be ignored.”
Krauss, who has toured the museum, doesn’t think that it will change anyone’s mind.
“It’s really meant to validate the beliefs of those people,” he said, “and make them feel comfortable in the lie that somehow science supports this.”
Krauss said the museum may confuse people, especially children who are too young to have learned science. He said anything that prevents people from learning about science is dangerous because the world will need science to solve problems including global warming, energy needs and even national security.
“It’s full of lies, the world isn’t 6,000 years old whether you want it to be or not,” he said. “And you shouldn’t have to lie about the world to believe in God.”
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Clearly, a must see movie. Edwin.
BBC News
Golden Compass author hits back
The author of the book on which the new film The Golden Compass is based has hit back at critics who accuse him of peddling “candy-coated atheism”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7115300.stm
Phillip Pullman dismissed as “absolute rubbish” accusations by the US-based Catholic League that the film promotes atheism and denigrates Christianity.
“I am a story teller,” he said. ” If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.”
The Golden Compass – which stars Nicole Kidman – premiers in London on Tuesday.
Epic battle
We knew from the beginning that the producers of this film intended to leave out the anti-religious references. We think this is a great shame
Terry Sanderson, National Secular Society
The film also stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig and is based on the first part of Mr Pullman’s best-selling His Dark Materials children’s trilogy.
In the book – set in an imaginary world – the heroine Lyra fights against the Magisterium, an evil organisation some have interpreted as based on the Catholic Church.
The three-part series culminates in an epic battle in which God dies – at the hand of a child.
Those who have seen the film – which cost £90m to make – say the explicit anti-religious message of the books has been muted. But the Catholic League, which bills itself as America’s largest Catholic civil rights organization, have nevertheless launched a nationwide boycott campaign.
The League says that parents might be taken in by the toned-down film – but will then fooled into buying the “overtly atheistic and anti-Christian” books.
League President Bill Donohue said: “Eighty-five per cent of the people in this country are Catholic or Protestant and I’d like them to stay at home, or go see some other movie.
“Pullman is using this film as a sort of stealth campaign. He likes to play the game that he’s really not atheistic and anti-Catholic. But yes he is and we have researched this.
“This movie is the bait for the books.”
Too many layers
But Mr Pullman – who is attending Tuesday’s premier in London’s Leicester Square – in dismissed the Catholic League as “a tiny, unrepresentative organisation.”
He told the BBC: “The only person Bill Donohue represents is himself.
“I don’t want to talk about these criticisms about atheism in my books. It’s too long an argument to have, and there are too many layers to the subject.”
A spokeswoman for the Catholic Church in Britain said she was unaware of a concerted UK campaign to boycott the film: “We have not seen the film yet, so we cannot comment on its message,” she said.
Christian journalist Peter Hitchens said that while he opposed a boycott, he wanted parents to be aware of Phillip Pullman’s themes.
He said: “If you buy this book for your child, don’t imagine for a moment that you are handing over a neutral story: this author has a purpose.
“Don’t forget, this is a writer who has previously gone on the record to say he is trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”
Anti-religious
Ironically, Mr Pullman has also come under fire from secularists – who say there’s isn’t enough anti-religious sentiment in the film.
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “We knew from the beginning that the producers of this film intended to leave out the anti-religious references.
“We think this is a great shame. The fight against the Magisterium (Pullman’s thinly-disguised version of the Catholic Church) is the whole point of the book. Take that away and the most original and interesting element of the story is lost.”
Whether the Catholic League’s campaign against the Golden Compass will succeed is open to question.
It previously spoke out against the Da Vinci Code – a fictional film that alleged Jesus married and had a child.
The film went on to become one of the highest-grossing movies of 2006.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk/7115300.stm

Published: 2007/11/27 16:54:21 GMT

© BBC MMVII
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From Reader Z:

With the evidence right before them, they will not see. Willful ignorance Department.

-Z

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25wwln-geologists-t.html?_r=3&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

November 25, 2007
Phenomenon
Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock
By HANNA ROSIN

On a muggy afternoon in July, a group of geologists from around the country put on some bug spray and fanned out along one of Ohio’s richest fossil beds. The rock walls were slippery and steep at points, and some people came in their dress shoes straight from the conference that brought them together. But no one seemed daunted; when let loose on the rocks they behaved like children with a piñata, filling their pockets with local specimens and cooing over their treasure. “Ahh, that’s a beautiful brachiopod!” or “A fine trilobite! Let me see that.”

A brightly painted sign in the state park explained that 450 million years ago these ancient creatures lived at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea during the Ordovician period. But none of these geologists believed it. As young-earth creationists, they think the earth is about 8,000 years old, give or take a few thousand years. That’s about the amount of time conventional geology says it can take to form one inch of limestone.

Creationist ideas about geology tend to appeal to overly zealous amateurs, but this was a gathering of elites, with an impressive wall of diplomas among them (Harvard, U.C.L.A., the Universities of Virginia, Washington and Rhode Island). They had spent years studying the geologic timetable, but they remained nevertheless deeply committed to a different version of history. John Whitmore, a geologist from nearby Cedarville University who organized the field trip, stood in the middle of the fossil bed and summarized it for his son.

“Dad, how’d these fossils get here?” asked Jess, 7, looking up from his own Ziploc bag full of specimens.

Whitmore, who was wearing a suede cowboy hat, answered in a cowboy manner — laconic but certain.

“From the flood,” he said.

What was remarkable about the afternoon was not so much the fossils (the bed is well picked over) but the gathering itself, part of the First Conference on Creation Geology, held on the Cedarville campus. Creationist geologists are now numerous enough to fill a large meeting room and well educated enough to know that in rejecting the geologic timeline they are also essentially taking on the central tenets of the field. Any “evidence” presented at the conference pointing to a young earth would be no more convincing than voodoo or alchemy to mainstream geologists, who have used various radiometric-dating methods to establish that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. But the participants in the conference insist that their approach is scientifically valid. “We’re past the point of being critical of evolutionists,” Whitmore told me. “We’re trying to go out and make new discoveries and actually do science.”

Creationist geologists are thriving, paradoxically, at a moment when evangelicals are becoming more educated, more prosperous and more open to scientific progress. And though they are a lonely few among Christian academics, they have an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. They have just opened a state-of-the-art $27 million museum in Kentucky, and they dominate the Christian publishing industry, serving as the credentialed experts for the nearly half of Americans who believe in some version of a young earth. In a sense, they represent the fundamentalist avant-garde; unlike previous generations of conservative Christians, they don’t see the need to choose between mainstream science and Biblical literalism.

This creationist approach to science is actually a relatively modern phenomenon, only about 50 years old. When the state of Tennessee put the biology teacher John Scopes on trial for teaching evolution in the 1920s, the creationists did not have a single credentialed supporter. Their main champions were an expert on penmanship, a dropout from homeopathic school and a Canadian surgeon who was billed on his travels as “the greatest scientist in all the world.” William Jennings Bryan, noted prosecutor in the Scopes trial, was not overly concerned with the age of the earth; he equated six-day creationism with the flat-earth theory.

Then in 1961, John Whitcomb, a theologian, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer from Texas, published “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Explanations.” The book revived a relatively obscure, century-old theory of Noah’s flood as the most violent catastrophe in earth history. The flood, they argued, warped the normal geological processes and caused rapid transformations. Water from the skies and from within the earth (“the floodgates of heaven”) slammed into the oceans, killing the sea creatures and covering the “high mountains,” as it says in Genesis. For months afterward, the planet convulsed with earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. After a brief ice age, the earth became the ecosystem we know today. Continents shifted; the water receded; the animals left the ark and spread over the earth.

Until then fundamentalists had mostly avoided any close study of geology, because a literal reading of the Bible was too difficult to reconcile with the accepted age of the earth. But “The Genesis Flood” served as their version of “The Feminine Mystique,” a generational manifesto that liberated them to explore. In the decades since, a small band of geologists, including Whitmore, have set to work improving on the Morris-Whitcomb model using the modern tools of their field: close examination of rocks and fossils combined with computer models.

Now the movement can count hundreds of scientists with master’s or Ph.D. degrees in the sciences from respectable universities. The change started in part when Christian colleges that used to resist mainstream science started premed programs, which meant they needed trained biologists and chemists. Eventually they added courses in physics, chemistry and geology. Most geologists teaching at Christian colleges in the United States today say they do not believe in a young earth; they typically argue that a “day” in Genesis does not necessarily mean a literal 24-hour day, or that there could have been long gaps between the days. But the young-earthers treat the words of Genesis as irrefutable fact.

Their ideas are being showcased in the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., opened in May by a creationist group called Answers in Genesis, whose headquarters are nearby. With its wide-open spaces and interactive exhibits, the place feels like a slick museum of natural history, updated for the Hollywood age. Many of the exhibits were designed by Patrick Marsh, who helped create the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida. Giant dinosaurs guard the courtyard entrance, promising fun and adventure. Inside, a replica of the ark leads you from seaboard to bottom deck, a rumbling theater replicates the flood, James Cameron-style. Lifelike models of Adam and Eve (who looks like the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen) frolic in a lush garden among the animals, including several dinosaurs.

The museum expected about 250,000 visitors in the first year. Instead, despite its $20 entry fee, it has had that many in six months, according to Michael Matthews, the museum’s content manager. Almost every day, minivans and buses from Christian schools fill the parking lot, sometimes after 10-hour road trips. The museum’s target group is the 45 percent of Americans who, for 25 years, have consistently agreed with the statement in a Gallup poll that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

The museum sends the message that belief in a young earth is the only way to salvation. The failure to understand Genesis is literally “undermining the entire word of God,” Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, says in a video. The collapse of Christianity believed to result from that failure is drawn out in a series of exhibits: school shootings, gay marriage, drugs, porn and pregnant teens. At the same time, it presents biblical literalism as perfectly defensible science. A fossil shows a perch eating a herring, evidence, they claim, of animals instantaneously trapped by catastrophic events after the flood. In a video, geologists use evidence from Mount St. Helens to show how a mud flow can cut a deep canyon in a single day. “This is what I see based on science,” said Andrew Snelling, one of the many creationist geologists at the conference in July who consulted with the museum.

At the conference, participants got together to tackle some difficult questions: How is radioisotope dating flawed? How was the Grand Canyon formed? If all those animals died in one cataclysmic event, why do their fossils appear in such distinct order? Their discussions recall a pre-Darwinian age, before science and faith became enemies. The old-earthers see their discipline as more pure than intelligent design; the intelligent-design people focus on a notion of a mystery “designer,” without specifying who that might be and what the mechanisms are. To the young-earth creationists, this is both unscientific and dubiously religious. “We don’t subscribe to this idea of the ‘God of gaps,’ meaning if you can’t explain something, then blame God,” Whitmore told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. “Instead, we think: ‘Here’s what the Bible says. Now let’s go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.’ ”

The heads of all the leading scientific creationist institutes from several countries showed up for the Cedarville event, along with the movement’s other stars: John Baumgardner, a geophysicist who worked for 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Kurt Wise, who got his Ph.D. in paleontology from Harvard in the ’80s as a student of Stephen Jay Gould, the nation’s most famous opponent of creationism; and Marcus Ross, 31, the latest inductee into the movement, who got his Ph.D. in environmental science from the University of Rhode Island last summer.

Like any group of elites, they were snobs about their superior degrees. During lunch breaks or car rides, they traded jokes about the “vulgar creationists” and the “uneducated masses,” and, in their least Christian moments, the “idiots on the Web.” One leader of a creationist institute complained about all the cranks who call on the phone claiming to have seen dinosaurs or to have had a vision of Noah’s ark. (How Noah fit the entire animal kingdom onto the ark is a perennial obsession.)

Because they have been exposed to so much standard science, the educated creationists like Kurt Wise try not to allow themselves the blind spots of their less sophisticated relations. Some years ago, for instance, fellow creationists claimed to have found fossils of human bones in Pennsylvania coal deposits, which scientists date to millions of years before humans appeared. After examining them, Wise concluded that they were “not fossil material at all” but “inorganically precipitated iron siderite nodules.” Wise later pushed to get himself appointed as scientific adviser to the new creationist museum so he could “keep out the scientific garbage.”

In a presentation at the conference, Wise showed a slide of a fossil sequence that moved from reptile to mammal, with some transitional fossils in between. He veered suddenly from his usual hyperactive mode to contemplative. “It’s a pain in the neck,” he said. “It fits the evolutionary prediction quite well.” Wise and others have come up with various theories explaining how the flood could have produced such perfect order. Wise is refining a theory, for example, that the order reflects how far the animals lived from the shore, so those living farthest from the water show up last in the record. But they haven’t settled on anything yet.

“We have nothing to fear from data,” Ross told me. “If we’re afraid, it means we don’t trust God’s word.” The older generation of creationists “would come up with an explanation or a model and say, ‘This solves it!’ I’m a bit more cautious and at the same time more rigorous. We have lines of possibility that we continue to advance but at the same time we recognize that this is science, so the explanations are subject to change with new discoveries.”

As the latest recruit into a small elite, and with his clipped dark hair and goatee, Ross was the novelty at the conference. He grew up in Rhode Island, was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and got his Ph.D. under David Fastovsky, a well-known expert in dinosaur extinction at the University of Rhode Island. Fastovsky knew Ross was a young-earth creationist; they’d talked about it after his application came in. “I guess I thought of it as a little bit like Jews playing Wagner,” Fastovsky told me. “The science stands or falls, just like the music, regardless of the disposition of the scientist.” Ross subsequently wrote a 197-page dissertation about a marine reptile called a mosasaur, whose disappearance he tracked through the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. Fastovsky described the paper as “utterly sound,” and the committee recommended very minimal edits.

At the conference I asked Ross whether he still believes what he wrote in his graduate thesis. His answer confirmed him as the product of the postmodern university, where truth is dependent on the framework: “Within the context of old age and evolutionary theory, yes. But if the parameter is different, portions of it could be completely in error.”

Outside school, Ross studied what he considered great breakthroughs in creation geology. In 1999, Ross came across John Baumgardner’s theory of catastrophic plate tectonics, which was proposed a few years earlier. The theory is the first attempt to describe the mechanism of the flood. It involves a fantastic “runaway” situation in which the ocean floor slides into the earth’s mantle in a matter of weeks and then hot rocks come to the surface of the ocean floor, causing ocean water to vaporize and rush out like a geyser (“the fountains of the great deep” described in Genesis). A computer model refining the theory purports to show an earth wobbling crazily on its axis as land masses come together and then break apart, forming the continents we have today.

“Until then, my options were pretty pathetic,” Ross said. Now he had something that “accounted for a large body of geological evidence,” proposed by a geophysicist trained at U.C.L.A. and supported by three other geology Ph.D.’s.

So which side did he choose?

“I have faith that the Bible is a true and accurate record of the earth,” he said. “I also entertain the possibility that I’m wrong. It would be cartoonish to say I don’t have doubts from time to time. Everybody has moments of doubt. But I can have those moments without my brain exploding.”

The new creationists are not likely to make much of a dent among secular scientists, who often just roll their eyes at the mention of flood geology. But they have become a burden to many geologists at Christian colleges around the country.

In recent years a number of Christian institutions have been undergoing what Alan Wolfe, a sociologist, calls “the opening of the evangelical mind.” Instead of teaching a fundamentalist world-view that is always at odds with secular academia, many evangelical colleges are easing their students into the mainstream.

The statement of faith for Wheaton College in Illinois, Billy Graham’s alma mater, for example, says that Scripture is “inerrant in the original writing” and that “God directly created Adam and Eve,” but when it comes to pinning down the age of the earth, the school balks. Wheaton has a strong geology department. Its professors argue that the Bible makes no specific mention of the age of the earth. They belong to groups like the Geological Society of America and wring their hands about the “geo-literacy” of the church. “Geology at Wheaton is presented and practiced much the same way as at secular universities,” the department chairman, Stephen Moshier, said in a recent talk. Other professors have issued long tracts comparing the various methods of radiometric dating and showing that they all agree: The earth is over four billion years old.

Most members of the American Scientific Affiliation, a collection of Christians with degrees in the sciences, qualify as old-earthers, according to Moshier. But the young-earthers have “a lot more influence,” he told me. They have “tremendous clout” with Christian publishers and are “very, very successful at getting their word out,” he said. “I know so many Christians who have tried to write books from a different perspective and been rejected.”

Marcus Ross, meanwhile, is thriving in his teaching job at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971. Like many Christian colleges, Liberty is expanding rapidly to keep up with growing demand; the school adds 800 students a year, and now has a total of 10,000 on campus and 18,000 more distance-learning students. Each semester, Ross teaches a huge, mandatory survey course called History of Life. Most kids in the class are creationists, but Ross finds gaps in their world-view. His aim is to make their creationist logic more consistent, and his surveys show that he succeeds. At the beginning of the class, only 54 percent of students say the age of the earth is less than 10,000 years. By the end, it’s 87 percent. The biggest shift? Did dinosaurs and man live at the same time? That one moves to 80 percent from 40.

These numbers make Moshier cringe. “It can get so frustrating,” he said. “Many of us at Christian colleges really grieve at what a problem this young-earth creationism makes for the Christian witness. It’s almost like they’re adding another thing you have to believe to become a Christian. It’s like saying, You have to believe the world is flat to be a Christian, and that’s absolutely unreasonable.”

Given the difficulty of their intellectual enterprise, the creationist geologists often have a story about the time they nearly gave it up. For Wise the crisis hit when he was a sophomore in high school. He was already an avid fossil collector who dreamed “an unattainable dream” of going to Harvard to study paleontology and then to teach at a big university. But as he told a friend, he couldn’t reconcile the geologic ages with what he read in his Bible. So he set about figuring this out: every night, for months, he cut out every verse of the Bible he’d have to reject to believe in evolution. “I dreaded the impending end,” he writes in a collection of essays called “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.” “All that I loved to do was involved with some aspect of science.”

When he was done, he tried to pick up what was left. But he found it impossible to do that without the Bible being “rent in two,” he writes. “Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.” In the end, he kept his Bible and achieved his unattainable dream. But it left him in a strange, vulnerable place. “If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.”

In “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, presents Wise as an Othello figure, destroyed by his own convictions. “The wound, to his career,” Dawkins writes, “and his life’s happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. All he had to do was toss out the Bible. Or interpret it symbolically, or allegorically, as the theologians do. Instead, he did the fundamentalist thing and tossed out science, evidence and reason, along with all his dreams and hopes.”

If Wise still has doubts, or unhappiness, he has learned to put them aside. When consulting for the Creation Museum, he considered his most important duty to be presenting a “coherent story line about the earth’s history,” he said. “Even if it’s wrong, it’s a starting point. We use coherence as a criteria. It ought to fit together not as a set of random processes but something coherent orchestrated by God. And not just coherent but spine-tingling. God is behind this story. I can know it as a single story, and the story can be understood, and the story can be spine tingling. There’s a Whoa! factor. And it’s there from the first verse: The Lord God is One.”

Hanna Rosin, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, is the author of “God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save the Nation.”

“The Golden Compass” is an outstanding work of literary fantasy. I have read it, just as I have read the Bible, and this gives me a sinfully unfair advantage over those who hold opinions on either work without having read them. “The Golden Compass” is objected to by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. Why object to a work of fantasy? Bill does know the difference between fact and fantasy. Doesn’t he? Ellen Johnson will discuss the matter with him this afternoon. Don’t miss this one.

A federal judge in Utah has ruled that the Christian cross is not a religious symbol. How about that? One wonders if this ruling covers crosses with a dead Jesus on them or only those crosses without a dead Jesus on them. How about Natty’s cross with a Santa tacked to it?

To those very few readers who have opined that this newsletter spends too much time “bashing” religion, we say quit reading it or start your own newsletter. After all, it is written that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Sometimes it is possible to do both.

Edwin.

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AMERICAN ATHEISTS

http://www.atheists.org

ELLEN JOHNSON TAKES ON BILL DONOHUE,

CATHOLIC LEAGUE ~ GOLDEN COMPASS

CNN, FRIDAY NOV. 23

ELLEN JOHNSON, President of American Atheists, will be a guest on CNN Headline News this Friday, November 23, 2007, in an exchange with Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. The topic is the soon-to-be-released movie, THE GOLDEN COMPASS based on the book of the same title by Atheist writer Philip Pullman.

The Catholic League has condemned this critically-acclaimed book for promoting a “stealth Atheist agenda.” The movie is slated for release on December 4, and news reports have established that producers New Line Cinema have “toned down” portions of the film that religionists might find offensive. The Catholic League has called for a boycott of the movie. (See: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/critics/blog/2007/11/another_salvo_at_the_golden_co.html )

The segment with the Johnson/Donohue debate will air nationwide on the CNN Headline News channel sometime after 5:00 PM ET on Friday, Nov. 23. Check local listings. You can then join the conversation and post your comments on the NoGodBlog at http://www.nogodblog.com .

WHO & WHAT: American Atheists President Ellen Johnson takes on Bill Donohue, Catholic League over the forthcoming film “The Golden Compass”

WHEN: This Friday, Nov. 23, 2007 beginning at 5:00 PM ET, check local listings.

WHERE: CNN Headline News channel, http://www.cnn.com

MORE INFO: http://www.cnn.com

(AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.)

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http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695229682,00.html

The cross gets a reprieve

Deseret Morning News editorial

Published: November 23, 2007

To quote from Paul Simon, “The cross is in the ballpark.” U.S. District Judge David Sam has ruled that posting a cross to memorialize a fallen Highway Patrol trooper does not violate the U.S. Constitution.

His reasoning — that sometimes religious symbols become secular symbols — is sound and filled with common sense. One can imagine it applied in other areas. For a child to be hoisted by Santa Claus does not mean the child is being taught to rely on the intervention of St. Nicholas. Space and time have created a certain disconnect between the two things.

Still, the cross became a lightning rod in the Highway Patrol case for a reason. It was an excuse, in ways, for deeper concerns.

Some people see the United States as a Christian nation and Christian principles should be the norm. Many of them would likely like to see schoolchildren go back to eating fish on Fridays and let teachers make students memorize the Lord’s Prayer. The problem with that, of course, is that forcing Jewish or Muslim children to memorize Christian prayers is unfair on the face of it. Mutual respect and understanding should rule. And when religious issues arise, they should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

On the other side, it’s no secret that those fighting to have the crosses removed are not all high-minded constitutional purists. Many have an ax to grind when it comes to religion and, knowing that big issues — like getting the phrase “In God We Trust” chipped off the money — are too much of a challenge, they choose to fight skirmishes and firefights on the edges, hoping a victory here and there will weaken the role of religion in America. They are crusaders as much as the early Christians, with all the ugly short-sightedness and prejudice as their Christian counterparts centuries ago.

In the end, Judge Sam was right. Christian symbols do morph into cultural symbols at times. But that doesn’t mean Christians should crow and the non-religious should pout. It means Americans must be careful when such cases arise to treat each one with seriousness and common sense, just as Judge Sam has done with the troopers and the cross.

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American Atheists California

RALLY FOR REMOVAL OF RELIGIOUS REFERENCES IN THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
AND ON NATIONAL CURRENCY
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Building

American Atheists California, in conjunction with Bay Area Atheist and Humanist groups, will rally in front of the San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals building on Tuesday, December 4, to support the idea of removing religious references and slogans in the Pledge of Allegiance and on national currency.

In 2004, when Michael Newdow argued before the Supreme Court for removal of _under god_ in the Pledge of Allegiance, California Atheists showed their support by rallying at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court dismissed that suit due to lack of standing and never addressed the real issues. Undaunted, Newdow found parents with solid standing and is now representing them in a new suit.

In addition, the prolific Dr. Newdow has another suit that challenges placement of the religious slogan _In God We Trust_ on our nation_s currency. Both suits are now before the Ninth Circuit. Oral arguments have been set for December 4 in San Francisco.

The rally is a celebration of unity among god-free Californians intended to not only support Dr. Newdow, but also encourage the Ninth Circuit to adhere to its landmark 2002 decision.

The rally will begin at 7:30 a.m. and include a program of speakers. Signs will be provided. Both cases are scheduled for the morning session, and participants are welcome to attend court proceedings after the rally (seating on a first-come, first-served basis).

The Richard Dawkins website (richarddawkins.net) is planning to tape the event for broadcast. Help us make a good showing in support of First Amendment rights.

WHAT: Rally at the San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals building (Seventh and Mission) for removing religious references and slogans in the Pledge of Allegiance and on national currency

WHEN: Tuesday, December 4, 7:30 to 8:30 a.m.

MORE INFO: www.sanfranciscoatheists.com, (415) 771-9872, [email protected].

CONTACT: Dave Kong, California State Director for American Atheists
[email protected], http://www.atheists.org/ca

(AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.)

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http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695229477,00.html

Supreme Court asked to hear Utah commandments case

By Geoffrey Fattah
Deseret Morning News

Published: November 21, 2007

A legal group based in Washington, D.C., announced Tuesday that it has filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decision allowing a Utah religious group to erect its own monuments next to two displays of the Ten Commandments in Pleasant Grove and Duchesne cities.

“Today we are asking the Supreme Court of the United States to review and overturn a lower court decision that would force local governments across the country either to dismantle a host of monuments, memorials and other displays, including long-standing patriotic and historical displays, or else let all comers install privately owned monuments or displays, regardless of content,” stated a release by the American Center for Law and Justice, which is legally representing Pleasant Grove and Duchesne.

The statement said the petition will give the Supreme Court a chance to “rectify a lower court’s very twisted interpretation of the First Amendment.”

The move comes after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last April ruled that the group Summum had a right under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to erect a display of its “Seven Aphorisms” next to displays of the Ten Commandments. The decision upheld a Utah federal judge’s ruling.

ACLJ chief counsel Jay Sekulow has argued that the 10th Circuit has confused public speech with private speech, and that such monuments should reflect the standards and values of the community.

Sekulow also argues that the 10th Circuit decision conflicts with other circuits, requiring the Supreme Court to review the case.

Summum attorney Brian Barnard says he doubts the Supreme Court will hear the case. The 10th Circuit decision is similar to one it issued in 2002 against Ogden, which forced city officials to remove its Ten Commandments display from city property and relocate it onto private property nearby.

“It does not require a constitutional scholar to understand simple fairness. If a government entity allows one group to erect a permanent monument in a public park expressing religious beliefs dear to that group, other groups should be allowed to display similar tenets of faith,” Barnard said. “Pleasant Grove seeks to perpetuate a misguided policy that allows it to support and display one set of religious beliefs to the exclusion of others.”

All three displays were donations from the Fraternal Order of Eagles many years ago.

If the Supreme Court declines to hear the case, the 10th Circuit decision will stand.

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Utah Foots the Bill for Ailing Cops’ Controversial Scientology-Based Detox Treatment

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

By Sara Bonisteel

MyFOXUtah.com

Nov. 7: Ailing meth cops sweat it out at an Orem, Utah, clinic.

A controversial Church of Scientology treatment used on World Trade Center emergency responders is being used in Utah to “detoxify” cops who raided methamphetamine labs in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Utah Meth Cops Project is treating around a dozen former and current police officers at taxpayers’ expense, using a regime devised by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard at a Bio-Cleansing Centers of America facility in Orem, Utah.

State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff brought the project west after seeing it used to treat emergency workers in New York who were injured working at Ground Zero following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

More than 800 rescue and recovery workers who had complained of respiratory ailments have been treated at the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project in Manhattan, using funds raised by Scientologists including actor Tom Cruise.

The Hubbard protocol has its critics, despite anecdotal evidence from responders who said the treatment has made them feel better.

“There is no demonstrated efficacy or effectiveness for that protocol,” said Raymond Harbison, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of South Florida’s School of Public Health. “That is, there’s no demonstration that that protocol speeds the release of substances associated with meth labs from one’s body.”

The Utah program — funded with an initial $50,000 grant from the state — is being run in conjunction with a $500,000 study into the causal link between chemicals in meth labs and respiratory ailments suffered by around 110 ailing meth cops in the state.

“Anecdotal stories, to me, is enough, I mean cops who say they couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without stopping to breathe now can,” Shurtleff said. “That’s pretty good evidence, but we want more scientific evidence, mostly to assist the study in Utah that there is a causal connection.”

Dr. Gerald H. Ross, the director of the program, said the use of this treatment on meth cops is a first.

“To most people and to a lot of physicians, [it] sounds like a lot of hokum, but believe me it’s not,” Ross said. “There’s really quite an accumulation of scientific publications that show the reduction of chemical residue in people who have this kind of therapy.”

At the Orem clinic, the men take a vitamin cocktail that includes B-3 or niacin and spend 20 to 25 minutes stretching in a 160-degree sauna for a nearly four-hour period to help the body release toxins that may be stored in the body, Ross said.

The program, which has been up and running for a little over a month, is designed for about 30 days of treatment, seven days a week, but it can be modified depending on the patient, Ross said.

“The saying is out there: ‘You don’t see any old meth cooks’ because they’re all dead,” said Kelly Call, 53, a retired officer with the Utah Department of Public Safety who is participating in the Utah Meth Cops Project. “They don’t live; there’s got to be a reason for that.”

Call said that 27 days of treatment at the Utah Meth Cops Project have curbed his constant headaches, short-term memory loss, tinnitus and Barrett’s esophagus, a disorder caused by acid reflux. He blames all his ailments on the meth raids.

“I started back in the mid-’80s, when we didn’t even have rubber gloves,” Call said. “We went into those with our teeny runners, our cutoffs and our tank tops.”

Lt. Al Acosta of the Utah Department of Public Safety blames his muscle tremors, headaches, chest pains and difficulty breathing on the more than 300 labs he’s raided in his nearly 20-year career.

He said one whiff of his sweat — with bouquets of ammonia or cat urine, depending on the day — is enough to tell him he’s expelling those chemicals.

“Whoever the skeptical people are [should] come here and just take a whiff of the odors that we’re putting off,” Acosta said. “I don’t think we normally smell this way.”

But Harbison said it’s unlikely the men are sweating out chemicals they were exposed to days, months and even years ago in the meth lab.

“You would not expect the chemicals that are associated with meth labs to stay in your body for that long of a period of time,” he said.

Shurtleff said that before he brought the program to Utah, he needed assurances that the officers wouldn’t be proselytized by Scientologists. The only Scientologists involved, he added, are fundraisers.

“It’s a completely secular program,” Ross said.

Scientology only comes up in social banter, Acosta said.

“We make jokes about Tom Cruise coming to visit us,” he said.

Shurtleff shirks off any taxpayer worry about the cost of the program. He plans to appropriate an additional $140,000 to complete the treatment for 20 of the worst cases and hopes to raise private money to finance the rest of the treatments for the others.

“Hopefully it will ultimately result in worker’s compensation to be authorized for these officers and their families.”

American Atheists

http://www.atheists.org

AA Media Alert

KAGIN TONIGHT NATIONWIDE ON

AL RANTEL SHOW — SENATE PROBE OF

TELEVANGELISTS’ GREED

EDWIN KAGIN, National Legal Director for American Atheists will be the guest TONIGHT (Wednesday, November 7, 2007) on the nationally syndicated Al Rantel Show.

Mr. Kagin, co-founder of Camp Quest and constitutional attorney, will be discussing the new U.S. Senate probe into the finances of major televangelists in the U.S. following charges of fiscal impropriety and high-roller living in the name of “god.” (Story below). The program airs nationwide — check out http://www.alrantel.com — and is streamed live on the internet. Call in to 1-800-222-KABC. This evening’s show starts at 11:00 PM ET, so check your local listings.

WHO & WHAT: Edwin Kagin, National Legal Director for American Atheists on the Al Rantel Show to discuss probe of evangelical greed and corruption.

WHERE: The Al Rantel Show airing nationwide, and streaming on the internet through http://www.alrantel.com.

WHEN: TONIGHT, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 beginning at 11:00 PM ET, check local listings!

MORE INFO: http://www.alrantel.com

(AMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists, Freethinkers and other nonbelievers; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.)

Senate Probes Televangelists’ Finances
By Laura Strickler,
CBS News
Posted: 2007-11-06 11:29:26
Filed Under: Nation News, Politics News
(Nov. 6) – CBS News has learned Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is investigating six prominent televangelist ministries for possible financial misconduct.

Photo Gallery: Ministries Under Scrutiny

Eddie Long, left, and Benny Hinn are among six televangelists whose ministries are being investigated by a Senate panel. The other four are led by Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland.

Letters were sent Monday to the ministries demanding that financial statements and records be turned over to the committee by Dec. 6.

According to Grassley’s office, the Iowa Republican is trying to determine whether or not these ministries are improperly using their tax-exempt status as churches to shield lavish lifestyles.

The six ministries identified as being under investigation by the committee are led by: Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn. Three of the six – Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar – also sit on the Board of Regents for the Oral Roberts University.

A spokesperson for Joyce Meyer Ministries provided CBS News with an IRS letter to the ministry dated October 10, 2007, that stated: “We determined that you continue to qualify as an organization exempt from Federal income tax.” The letter could not be independently verified in time for this story. The ministry also pointed to audited financial statements for the last three years that are posted on the organization’s website.

In a statement, Benny Hinn’s spokesperson, Ronn Torossian, said the ministry was in the process of determining the best course of action in response to the Senate investigation. “World Healing Center Church complies with the laws that govern church and non-profit organizations and will continue to do so,” Torossian wrote.

“Answers in Atheism,” the Northern Kentucky based Internet radio call-in talk show, is pleased and honored to have attorney Mikey Weinstein, Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, as our guest this Thursday, November 1, 2007, at 7:00 pm. Eastern Time.

Here is some information on attorney Weinstein:

http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/press-releases/jeremy_hall_harassed.html

Michael L. “Mikey” Weinstein is Founder and President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org). He is an attorney and businessman who spent over three years as a White House counsel in the Reagan White House. He was formerly General Counsel for H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corporation. An Honor Graduate from the USAF Academy, he served on active duty in the USAF as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) for ten years. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is also author of the book With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military with Davin Seay.”

Here is some information on the very high level activism being undertaken by Mikey and his organization:

http://militaryreligiousfreedom.org/urgent_issues.html

“Answers in Atheism” can be heard live on the Internet every Thursday from www.answersinathism.net at 7:00 pm. Eastern Time.

Earlier shows are archived.

Our toll free call-in number is: 877.814.9287

See you on the radio.

Edwin.