50 Lose Sight Seeing Virgin Miracle

When I was a very young child in rural Texas, a strange annual event would happen each summer during the hottest time of the year. A large white tent would be set up in a park near my grandparent’s church, and lots of little metal chairs would be set up around a small raised platform with a microphone. For several nights in a row my grandparents would take me to this event they called a “tent revival” and we would listen to a rather portly sweaty man tell us colorful stories from the New Testament, and warn us in theatrical tones about the evil of brimstone and fire. (All Baptists are very familiar with this concept.) I would sit in my metal chair fanning myself against the humidity with a paper fan and watch as people around me swayed back and forth, moaning “amen” in time with the sweaty preacher’s vocal undulations. Inevitably, as the crescendo of preaching neared, someone would fall onto the sawdust covered floor and begin writhing around while speaking gibberish (Speaking in Tongues).

The first time this happened it scared me so awfully that my grandfather had to take me outside where he explained something very important. He told me I didn’t need to worry, because, he explained with disgust, some people just liked to make themselves the center of attention. The concept that those people writhing on the floor looking like they were having an epileptic fit were actually faking to get attention was a concept a small child could easily understand. The sad part, I learned later, was that they didn’t think they were faking, they really believed the “holy spirit” had entered their bodies and spoke through them. (Though why he didn’t speak English if he was God, after all, I never understood.)

People continually look for signs of a mythic God that doesn’t exist, and because they can’t find any, they must create the occasional miracle, sometimes with horrible consequence. When I was skipping around the various forum threads on www.Richard.Dawkins.net, I came across a topic discussing 50 people losing their vision after staring at the sun in Thiruvananthapuram, India trying to see a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary.

It all started, apparently, when a local hotelier claimed his statues of Mother Mary started “crying honey and bleeding oil and perfumes” (Daily News Analysis). Rumor ensued “that a solar image of the Virgin Mary appeared to the believers,” and the faithful swarmed like bees to honey. Now one might wonder what motivates a local hotelier to claim such a miracle taking place at his establishment, but we can hypotheses that he did it, as my grandfather once said, “To get attention.” Maybe he craved attention for himself, or his business or for his faith, in any event he got plenty.

According to Daily News and Analysis:
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1152984
“St Joseph’s ENT and Eye Hospital has recorded 48 cases of vision loss due to photochemical burns on the retina. “The patients show varying degrees of severity. They are mostly girls in 12-26 age groups. Our youngest patient is 12 and the oldest 60. Most of them were looking at the sun between 2 and 4 pm, when UV1 and UV2 rays are harshest,” Dr James Isaac said.

“The health department has now put up a signboard at the hotelier’s house near Erumeli, where the divine image is said to have appeared, warning people against exposing their eyes to sunlight. Even the churches in the vicinity disowned the miracle during Sunday mass after health officers and doctors approached the clergy. “

I know it is easy to laugh at this article or dismiss it as the antics of “those crazy cult of Mary worshippers”; it is worth noticing, however, that the majority of those injured are young females. Once again the martyrs of religion are the weakest members of society, who are trying to seek blessing from a God they have been trained to believe exists. While the Catholic Church has cooperated in this specific matter: it has shown little concern for the burden placed on female believers/martyrs in the past. Catholic women who must produce a multitude of children because their church prohibits the use of birth control, or must risk getting HIV or AIDS because they can’t use condoms, or are required to allow their husbands to abuse them because divorce is a sin. The list of burdens goes on and on.

If the church really wanted to help these women it would advice them to quit looking for a miracle where none exists, but at the very least it could teach them that the image of Saints can always be seen through sunglasses.

Danger of Religion

We hear many words to describe religion, but we rarely discuss the danger religion poses. To see the danger of religion one has only to read the daily news. Today, for instance, the AP news service reports that “Suicide bombers struck a Shiite pilgrimage in Baghdad and a Kurdish protest rally in northern Iraq on Monday, killing at least 57 people and wounding nearly 300….” We might make the mistake of attributing this violence to extremists of a certain religion or sect, but that ignores all the other violence perpetrated in the name of protestant and catholic religions in our own world.

In 1998 there were 25 violent attacks against abortion clinics or personnel, and while that number had decreased over the years, there is still an average of two violent attacks per each year. The majority of these attacks are attributed to religious zealots, not unlike the Muslim suicide bombers we hears so much about these days.

There are numerous attacks and murders of gay, lesbian and transgender people each year, many of which are based on ignorance bred by religious misinformation or suppression of sexuality. Poor young men like Mathew Shepard, killed in 1998 and Lawrence King in 2008 are the most recognizable, but only two out of the names that fill 50 pages of dead or assaulted on the Human Rights Commission List. (http://www.hrc.org/documents/A_Chronology_of_Hate_Crimes.pdf)

Religion is many things to many people, but to those of us who don’t participate in a religion and don’t believe in a God, religion can be dangerous or even deadly, and that is something we cannot afford to overlook in our discussions of religious relevance.

Logic Trumps Ideology, Finally

Last week the US congress finally managed to reverse a law prohibiting anyone with the AIDS/HIV virus from visiting or immigrating to the US. The Law was established in 1987 and codified into law in 1993, when conservative ideology labeled AIDS the "gay" plague despite scientific and medical information suggesting the illness was much more widely spread.
The illness was used in conservative pulpits in America to preach hate against gay men, but the Catholic Church responded to the illness with its usual sense of creativity, actually teaching the faithful that condoms cause AIDS. Christopher Hitchens reports in God is Not Great that Cardinal Alfonso Lopes de Trujillo, the acting president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, warned a group of the devout that all condoms are secretly made with microscopic holes, through which the AIDS virus can pass. He also cites an Archbishop in Nairobi who suggested that women should prefer to die of AIDS as martyrs than use condoms.(45-46)
Here in the US we have been cutting back on money to AIDS programs that provide condoms (presumably without those nasty holes) and providing pseudoscience to suggest that abstinence programs work just as well. No suggestions of martyrdom though, so far.

Faith Based Initiatives violate Separation of Church and State

Faith Based Initiatives for the Invisible Super friends


I read that Senator Obama wants to establish Faith Based funding initiatives. It makes me nervous when I start hearing elected officials in the government start talking about issues of faith for a number of reasons. As an atheist I feel uneasy contemplating the fact that a recent Pew poll (7/18/08) indicates 92% of my fellow Americans believe in an invisible being who watches over them, providing them with personal attention and guidance. If that isn’t enough to worry about now I have to worry about another President with an imaginary friend. It reminds me of a time when I was very young living in a college dorm and was puzzled after over hearing one of my roommates telling another that she had been praying whether she should get a phone installed in her room. She never got a phone, so presumably, her God never got back to her on that issue, but I remember thinking how awful it would be if I had to pray for guidance every time I needed to make a decision. How much can a President get done if he has to consult his invisible friend every time he has to make a decision?

It has never been easy being secular in America or really in any part of the world, and I believe that is probably because we are a fairly young species and have not outgrown many of the superstitions our ancestors created to deal with the dark and scary natural world in our not too distant past. I don’t know why some of us, like me, have no capacity for believing in those superstitions, while others, like my college roommate, can’t seem to function without them. I do know that the early settlers in America did not have it much easier.

After surviving years of tyrannical collusion between the ruling classes and the ruling Churches in Europe settlers to the “New World” were eager to escape the tightness of that yoke, so they brought their individual and unorthodox religions (from the view of the Official churches of Europe) with them to set up their own church states in America.. Back in 1779 when Thomas Jefferson, an early secular thinker, first proposed a Virginia state Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, the Episcopal Church, acting as the official “established” religion of the state quashed the act. The American colonies were at that time divided by their different ideologies both secular and religious. The Catholic Church, for instance, was the official Church of Maryland, and was so deeply entrenched that one could not hold office or even vote unless one proved allegiance to Mother Mary. Meanwhile other state required varying degrees of proof of ones affiliation with Lutherans, Methodists or Calvin Baptists. After the war for independence The Act for Establishing Religious Freedom was finally passed in Virginia in 1786 after James Madison wrote Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. In Memorial Madison wrote:

If Religion be not within the cognizance of Civil Government, how can its legal establish be said to be necessary to Civil Government? What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny: in no instance have they been seen the guardians of liberty of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it [liberty], needs them not.

These principles, first proposed by Jefferson and Madison in Virginia would become the bedrock for separation of church and state in the American Constitution. It has never been easy to be secular in America but our founders worked long and hard to make sure our government would remain a secular government free from the influence of any religious doctrine. We must, as American citizens, hold our elected officials to the standard our hard won constitution demands. We must oppose giving federal funding to faith-based organizations without holding them accountable for nondiscrimination and religious liberty protections dictated by the constitution.