Halloween is a fun tradition in the United States where kids can go around and get candy. Well, that means we need to get rid of it.
The open borders of Germany have consequences and no one wants to talk about it.
And the Washington Post tries to push the benefits of atheism. Did the article accomplish that goal. We’ll talk about it.
Dumbass of the Day
Happy Halloween!
According to Fox News:
A New Jersey school district canceled official school-wide Halloween celebrations, citing its diversity, equity and inclusion values and the purported potential for the festival to be offensive to people from various cultural and religious backgrounds.
Dr. Ronald G. Taylor, the superintendent of the South Orange & Maplewood School District (SOMSD), sent a letter to families on Oct. 6 explaining why any Halloween celebrations in the district will have to be held after school hours.
“As you know, SOMSD is committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion meaningfully – not just saying the words but also promoting an inclusive school… Our aim is to build a consistent approach across the District as to how our schools observe and celebrate holidays and special events,” Taylor wrote. “Each year, questions arise from families, students, and staff about what SOMSD schools will be doing regarding Halloween.”
Be prepared for more of this shit. I can’t wait until later on this week.
Why Was He There?
According to the Daily Wire:
German police officers decked out in heavy tactical gear executed a raid on an apartment building in Duisburg to arrest a man they allege was planning an Islamic terrorist attack on a Jewish event, according to multiple German publications and local police.
German newspaper Bild reported that authorities arrested 29-year-old Tarik S. (full last name not given) after a foreign intelligence service tipped off German officials about the plot, according to a translation of the report. The suspect was reportedly already known as being high-risk after fighting for ISIS in the past and writing in the past that he wanted to die as a martyr.
Intelligence sources told the newspaper that the suspect was planning to ram a truck into a pro-Israel rally in North Rhine-Westphalia to kill as many people as possible.
How Is That Working Out?
The Washington Post released an opinion piece called America does not need more God. It needs more Atheists. by a broad named Kate Cohen. It is all that is wrong with our culture in so many ways. Let’s go through some of that opinion piece.
I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.
I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.
I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.
I thought of him as a fiction.
Right off the bat, we have some problems.
First, she actually credits her kids with being an atheist. It did the kids become the font of all wisdom? I was raised to believe kids were stupid and that I needed to get educated before I would be able to understand the world. I wasn’t raising my parents, they were raising me.
It’s ironic too that, as our kids get stupider, we are suppose to put more weight into their opinions. Hell, half our kids can’t read and don’t know who Abraham Lincoln is but they should be listened to about economies and wars.
Next, she’s no Jew. She’s always been atheist. She admits it right smack dab in the beginning of the article.
Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:
- The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate. (Who made these guys religious scholars?)
- The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate. (Texts such as the Bible, Torah and Koran are not science books. They are about human nature and natural law.
- Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so. (This isn’t even an argument and this doesn’t change a thing. Most people who are religious still think death is scary.)
- Child rape. War. Etc.
And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.
So far, she ain’t making much of an argument. She’s, at best, non-religious and her arguments are from a Cracker Jack box that have been debunked 500 years.
Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.
And then there are the data. Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.
Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!
Um, what?
No one would care if you are an atheist. The problem in that atheists never shut up about being an atheist!
Some things they’ve done:
- Removed Bible from the classroom.
- Removed God from the oath.
- Remove God from money.
- Remove nativity scenes.
- Remove all religious symbols from public buildings including the Ten Commandments from court houses.
- Ban Christian reading groups in schools (including colleges).
- Remove God from Christian universities.
She even admits this in the section of the article.
Here’s the thing, human beings need religion to make sense of life (not just death). Atheism is a religion. The problem with atheism is it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t answer any questions. It’s a dead end.
But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.
Their first atheist lesson was completely impromptu. Noah was 5, Jesse was 3, and we were sitting on the couch before bed reading from “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a holdover from my childhood bookshelf. One of the boys asked what a “myth” was, and I told them it was a story about how the world works. People used to believe that these gods were in charge of what happened on Earth, and these stories helped explain things they didn’t understand, like winter or stars or thunder. “See” — I flipped ahead and found a picture — “Zeus has a thunderbolt.”
“They don’t believe them anymore?” No, I said. That’s why they call it “myth.” When people still believe it, they call it “religion.” Like the stories about God and Moses that we read at Passover or the ones about Jesus and Christmas.
The little pajama-clad bodies nodded, and on we read.
That was it — the big moment. It was probably also the easiest moment.
I would say that if this were her big moment in discovering that atheism is a life truth, she never really thought too much about it before.
A little something about Greek mythology, it isn’t the Bible (Greek gods were known to rape women). The Greeks were very secular. The Greeks were very amoral back then. It wasn’t until Aristotle wrote Ethics that there was a question over the existence of morality, be it natural or religious.
Before one son became preoccupied with death. Before the other son had to decide whether to be bar mitzvahed. Before my daughter looked up from her math homework one day to ask, “How do we know there’s no God?”
Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.
Actually, that’s not true. We’ve been debating the Bible for centuries. There are no straight answers in the Bible. Even straight statements like, “Thou shalt not kill” have been debated for centuries, including in front of the Supreme Court.
Jesus, in the New Testament of the Bible, spoke in parables and rarely gave meaningful answers to them. Some of His stories are way out there.
The Bible, the Torah, the Koran are philosophy books on human nature, the meaning of life, natural law and the afterlife. The answers are all there but we need to figure them out.
Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.
Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.
My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.
We need citizens like that.
This is an insane statement and in completely incorrect.
- Human beings need a moral base. Without it, there is anarchy.
- Neichze and Dostoyevsky, both living in secular societies, bemoaned the loss of religion and God.
- Children “living honestly” is not the goal of a parent. It is raising the child to become a civilized member of society.
- Finally, since when did happiness become the main goal of religion?
- It takes work to be happy. Religion teaches you that.
- Atheism is lazy. Happiness should just pop inside you one day. That doesn’t happen. That hasn’t happened.
- How can an atheist be happy when they live knowing that there is no purpose to life and then you die.
Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.
Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.
We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.
Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.
What? Atheists are tethered to facts?
Men can have periods and get pregnant is a fact? We are all going to die because its warm outside is a fact? Having a six year old wear a mask and not go to school will prevent a cold is a fact? A baby in the womb is not a baby in the womb is a fact? Are these the facts she’s talking about?
The truth is, yes. That’s exactly what she’s talking about. These “truths” ate the types of stuff religion fights against because it creates chaos, despair and death.
Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God,” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”
So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell”that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.
She doesn’t have an understanding of what religion. This is not what Christianity, Judaism and Islam are about. She says she’s Jewish, has she ever read the Torah?
Then she does what everyone does and she throws statistic out. What these statistics show is the United States is increasingly becoming atheistic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/03/kate-cohen-atheism/