American Heathen®

(The following commentary is from “Brutally Honest”, hosted by David 2, which airs every Saturday night at 7pm ET on ShockNet Radio.  The transcript is posted here with the author’s permission.)

“Don’t Tread On Me”

It’s a statement, a threat, and a warning.

Continental General Christopher Gadsden used that slogan for his flag during the American Revolution.  The first maritime flag of the US Navy had thirteen stripes, a snake, and the statement “Don’t Tread On Me”.

The people who use that statement are sending a simple message: Don’t cross us.  Leave us alone.  Don’t get us angry, because you won’t want us angry.  Like the snake imagery that often accompanies this statement, the warning is clear… this person is angry… this person is pissed… and this person is ready to strike if they feel the slightest bit threatened.

But underneath that statement is a second one that has manifested itself of late.  A little fine print that also serves as a threat and a warning.

Underneath “Don’t Tread On Me” is the codicil that says “Don’t Blame Me”.

“Don’t Blame Me” when things go bad.  “Don’t Blame Me” when tragedy happens.  “Don’t Blame Me” when people get hurt or when lives are lost.  “It’s not MY fault”, they are quick to proclaim, when their rhetoric leads to tragedy.

These are the groups that talk about revolution.  They talk about the fear of invasion, the fear of an all-powerful enemy LURKING in the shadows, creeping into our neighborhoods, taking over EVERYTHING in society and threatening to destroy EVERYTHING that we hold dear in this world.  They are the ones beating the WAR drums and using the WAR rhetoric.  “We are AT WAR” they proclaim, “and the enemy is all around us… and if you’re not WITH US, then you’re with THE ENEMY!  DON’T TREAD ON ME!”

So last week a little tragedy befell the country of Norway.  A government building was bombed in the middle of Oslo.  Ninety minutes later a gunman dressed as a policeman opened fire in a youth camp in the nearby island of Utøya.  Over seventy lives were lost, many of them teenagers.

And according to the police there, BOTH incidents were done by the same person.  The same TERRORIST by the name of Anders Breivik.

Only this TERRORIST wasn’t Muslim.  This TERRORIST was CHRISTIAN.  This TERRORIST was a CONSERVATIVE that BOASTED through his online postings that he was going to do this to spark a revolution, to start a war AGAINST Muslims, AGAINST liberals, AGAINST multiculturalism, AGAINST the things that he claimed were destroying Europe and destroying his country and destroying everything that he holds dear.  A church-going CHRISTIAN that proudly boasted about the righteousness of the Crusades and used the Knights Templar as his inspirations.

“Don’t Tread On Me!” he shouts, echoing the voices in this country.

And now those same voices that were screaming “Don’t Tread On Me” over here are saying “Don’t Blame Me” for this.

“Don’t blame us” say the conservative and neo-conservative voices in the United States.  The very people that have been opening their sewer holes and spewing an ENDLESS deluge of WAR rhetoric; the very people that have been quick to brand ALL MUSLIMS as INVADERS, TERRORISTS, JIHADISTS, MURDERERS; the very people that have been quick to brand all liberals and all moderates and anyone else who doesn’t agree with them as being TRAITORS, SYMPATHIZERS, ANARCHISTS, and a PLAGUE on society, a CANCER that MUST be excised from the societal body; the very people that talk endlessly about the THREAT of immigrants, the EVILS of multiculturalism, the SCOURGE of anything different; the very people that are quick to paint their adversaries and critics with the BROADEST of a blame brushes as possible, blaming them for EVERYTHING under the sun; those same people are now looking over at Norway and the tragedy that has befallen that nation and they are actually saying…

“Don’t blame us for this.  It’s not OUR fault that this happened.  WE didn’t tell people to blow things up.  WE don’t advocate terrorism or violence or bloodshed.  This guy was a loner.  He was a lone nutcase.  He’s crazy.  HE’S not a part of us, and WE OBJECT to ANYONE painting US with the same broad brush that we use on everyone else!”

“Don’t blame us,” they’re saying.  “Don’t blame us.”

Bullshit.

BULLSHIT!

No… No you conservatives and neo-conservatives DO NOT have the luxury of getting away with saying “Don’t Blame Me”.  Not now.  Not anymore!

For DECADES now, conservatives and neo-conservatives have been painting the world with a broad brush, pinning EVERY wrongdoing, no matter how slight, as being part of some creeping EVIL.  Every TV show or movie or book or magazine or song on the radio that doesn’t reflect THEIR ideals of how society SHOULD BE is branded as being part of some “liberal multicultural conspiracy to destroy society”.  Ann Coulter makes her fortune writing books and columns accusing liberals as being “traitors” and “godless”.  She puts those terms on the front cover of her books!  Conservative and neo-conservative talk show hosts like Michael Savage and Sean Hannity compare liberals and moderates and anyone NOT like them as being “cancers” and “diseases” and out-and-out THREATS to the security of the United States.  Fox News has continually talked about how we are in this “THIRD WAR”, or now it’s a “FOURTH WAR”, against Mexico because of illegal immigrants.  Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN and now on Fox Business, talked about how illegal immigrants supposedly tried to kill him for talking about them in a negative way.

THEY are the ones that have been chanting “With Us or Against Us!  WITH US or AGAINST US!”

Not only have they painted their opponents and critics with BROAD brushes, but they have actually CODIFIED that brush and they have turned it into a RECOGNIZED LEGAL DOCTRINE called “Negative Secondary Effects”, which allows them to blame ANYTHING THEY HATE with ANYTHING BAD that happens in society.  ANYTHING!

In the minds of a conservative or a neo-conservative, if a man gets drunk and crashes his car into a family of six, it’s supposedly the fault of a strip club in the area because it serves alcohol with skin.  If housing prices go down, it’s not because of the banks screwing over the American people, or because local officials aren’t keeping the roads paved or the streetlights working, it’s supposedly because of an adult book-and-video store that operates in the obscure corner of one of fifty strip malls five miles away.  And they actually WRITE LEGISLATION in cookie-cutter format based ON that assertion and are given the blessings of the judicial system.

Over the past few weeks, every freedom-hating so-called “pro-family” organization out there with a fax machine and a publicist have been waging an endless crusade to get rid of NBC’s upcoming fall show “The Playboy Club” because it celebrates the Playboy Clubs of the 1960’s.  Never mind that the actual Playboy Clubs were about as raucous as a church choir.  Oh, no, it’s because it’s PLAYBOY, and these groups want to blame PLAYBOY and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for EVERYTHING EVIL.  They want to blame Hefner and Playboy and all the fans of Playboy magazine for all of the child porn and all the sex slavery going on in the world, never mind that the most notorious abusers of children happen to belong to the Roman Catholic Church.

You cannot find a broader brush of blame than that, and that brush is being wielded loudly and proudly by conservatives and neo-conservatives in this country and by their counterparts around the world.

And yet when one of their own takes them up on their war rhetoric, when one of their own gets inspired by Timothy McVeigh and Jim David Adkisson to launch a new wave of violence by blowing up a government building and slaughtering teenagers in a hail of bullets, these same groups then say “Don’t Blame Us” for it.

When James Kopp murdered Doctor Barnett Slepian in 1998, he supposedly was a “lone nutcase”, even though he was linked to a group called the “Lambs of Christ”.

McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols, responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombing, were both supposedly “lone nutcases”, even though they were linked to militia groups.

When Adkisson went to the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church in 2008 and killed two people and wounded seven, supposedly following a hit-list based on Bernard Goldberg’s book “100 People that are Screwing Up America”, he was supposedly a “lone nutcase”.

When Eric Robert Rudolph set off a bomb in the middle of the 1996 Olympic Games and then planted bombs at women’s clinics and gay nightclubs, he was supposedly a “lone nutcase”, even though he was connected to a group called “Christian Identity”.

When Paul Hill murdered Doctor John Britton in 1994, he was considered a “lone nutcase”, even though he was connected to a group called the “Army of God”.

When Scott Roeder murdered Doctor George Tiller in 2009, he was considered a “lone nutcase”, even though there were continual calls by a certain Fox News media personality that “SOMETHING must be done” about Dr. Tiller.

Oh, and that SAME Fox News personality says “Don’t blame me for that”, and also he claims that the Norway terrorist can’t POSSIBLY be a Christian Terrorist, because according to him and his so-called “expert opinion”, there is no such thing as a “Christian Terrorist”.

All of those people, those TERRORISTS, and many more that I have listed on the air in previous shows, were all supposedly “lone nutcases”.

That’s a lot of nutcases.

But there ARE no “lone nutcases” when the terrorist is MUSLIM, are there?  There are no “lone nutcases” in the environmentalist movement.  There are no “lone nutcases” in the animal rights movement.  There are no “lone nutcases” in the feminist movement.  Every wrong move by a porn star or a centerfold model is declared to be part of the problem with the WHOLE business.  Every mistake or misstep committed by individuals that are NOT conservative or neo-conservative is declared a black mark on the WHOLE group.  EVERYTHING in THOSE groups are all declared parts of a MASTER CONSPIRACY of the WHOLE group and EVERYONE connected to that group and EVERYONE supporting that group and EVERYONE that speaks out in defense of that group.

Bullshit.

Let’s get brutally honest here… it is LONG since time that we hold these conservative and neo-conservative groups to the SAME STANDARDS that they impose on everyone else.  If there are no “lone nutcases” in Islam, then THERE ARE NO LONE NUTCASES IN CHRISTIANITY… PERIOD!

Yes, there ARE CHRISTIAN TERRORISTS.  There ARE people who firmly believe that THEIR interpretation of Christianity MUST be imposed onto the world by any means necessary.  They listen to the rhetoric from groups like the Seven Mountains Dominionists and Operation Rescue and Christian Identity and the people that proudly boast of being “Christ Warriors”.  They hear the diatribes from those Fox News media personalities about a so-called “War against Christians” and a “War against Christmas” and the continual talk about WAR and THREATS of WAR concerning their faith, and they decide to follow through on all that talk of WAR, because they are also being told by those same voices that they are LOSING that WAR.

You see… necessity is more than just the mother of invention.  Necessity is also the mother of terrorism, because every terrorist justifies their actions with necessity.

There are NO REAL DIFFERENCES between a Muslim terrorist and a Christian terrorist.  The SAME mindset motivates them, the SAME twisted logic justifies their actions, and the SAME delusions of validation and vindication and cosmic reward inspire them.  Virgins, grapes, pearls, golden crowns, golden scrolls; it really makes no difference.  The only differences between them are SEMANTICS and the DELUSIONS of those whose pompous self-righteous, self-serving ARROGANCE refuses to admit to the existence of the latter while whipping up conspiratorial fantasies of the former, and then blaming the world for not going along with their lies and misdirection.

When a dog is trained and goaded into attacking people, you don’t just blame the dog for being a menace to society, especially when they DO attack and maim and kill.  You blame the dog’s owner.  You put the responsibility on the people that trained that dog to attack, that told that dog to attack anyone it sees, and then rewards that dog for following through.

And while a human being is supposed to be more advanced than a dog and is supposed to know better, history has shown that the same kind of conditioning works for humans as well as dogs.  We make soldiers by the tens of thousands every year and BOAST that we can turn anyone into a killing machine.  All they need is motivation and a target; the two things that the Christian groups and Fox News have been providing in abundance for years.

So if you’re going to sit there with your “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirt, holding a Bible in one hand and the American flag in the other, and you talk about a “War” on Christians and the “encroaching invasion” of Islam and illegal immigrants, and the “threat” of multiculturalism, and the need for “revolution” and “Second Amendment remedies”, you don’t get to then claim innocence and ignorance when someone takes you up on that kind of message.  You have FOREFITED NOW AND FOREVERMORE the LUXURY of saying “Don’t blame me” when YOUR WAR RHETORIC leads to acts of bloodshed.

And I would also suggest that you put away that huge brush of blame that you like to wield about, lest someone like myself takes that brush away from you and then slaps you in the face repeatedly with it until the lies come out of your brain so the truth can finally sink in.

(Special Thanks goes out to Ronald Bruce Meyer for continuing to provide this valuable historical information)

Here’s your Week in Freethought History: This is more than just a calendar of events or mini-biographies – it’s an affirmation that we as freethinkers are neither unique nor alone in the world, no matter how isolated and alone we may feel at times.

1. Last Saturday, July 23 – It was on this date in 1995 that Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered by Alan Hale and, independently, by Thomas Bopp. Hale worked at The Space Center in Alamogordo, New Mexico, before founding the non-profit Southwest Institute for Space Research in 1993, two years before he observed the comet that bears his name. “Few sights in the nighttime sky can be more awe-inspiring than that of a bright comet,” Hale wrote in The Skeptical Inquirer (March 1997). But he warns that, contrary to the beliefs of our forbears, and to many modern religious believers, there is nothing supernatural or prophetic about comets, and it is useless to “invoke mythical beings for which there’s no evidence” on account of them. Comet Hale-Bopp stirred its own “comet madness,” recalled Hale. Hale-Bopp came nowhere near the earth at its closest (on 22 March 1997) – 122 million miles (197 million kilometers) from Earth. But the most dreadful effect of “comet madness” took place in Rancho Santa Fe, California: 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, each covered across the face and chest with a triangular shroud of purple cloth, committed suicide, “so that their ‘inner beings’ could rendezvous with another group of ‘beings’ on an alien spacecraft traveling alongside Comet Hale-Bopp.” Agreeing with science writer Carl Sagan, that science is the only useful candle in this dark, demon-haunted world, Hale asked, “How many more Rancho Santa Fes are we going to have before we finally say ‘Enough!’ to ignorance and superstition? How many more of these types of reports are we going to have to listen to before we finally decide that we are going to use the candle of science, and the reasoning skills that we have, to take back the darkness from the ignorance and superstition that is enveloping us?”

2. Last Sunday, July 24 – On this date in 1783, South American liberator and president Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar – Simón Bolívar – was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Bolívar inherited a fortune that assured him of a quality education, partly in Spain. He traveled Europe, and briefly in the United States. Bolívar found the writings of Rousseau particularly compelling, along with other writers of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. On his return to Venezuela, on fire with democratic and anti-clerical ideas learned in Europe, in 1810 Bolívar joined a group of revolutionists bent on overthrowing the Spanish throne and church. Eventually he won independence from Spain for Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In 1819 he became President of the Republic of Colombia. Four years later, at the age of 40, he was chosen Dictator of Peru, after its liberation. Upper Peru was organized into a separate Republic, called Bolivia in his honor. He became Bolivia’s first President and drew up its constitution. By 1825, Bolívar governed an area extending from the Caribbean to Argentina. Bolívar was aware of the weaknesses and limits of liberal democracy, which is why he insisted on the necessity of a strong, republican form of government, with emphasis on the common good over individual rights. Sadly, his vision of a United States of Latin America was not to be: Clericals, who resented his atheism, united with Republicans, who resented the sternness of his government. He resigned the presidency in 1828 and exiled himself. Simón Bolívar died from tuberculosis on 17 December 1830, poor and unpopular, in Santa Marta, Colombia.

3. Last Monday, July 25 – It was on this date in 1368 that the foremost surgeon of medieval Europe, Guy de Chauliac, died in Avignon, during the exile of the Papacy in that French city on the Rhône. He studied medicine in Toulouse, Montpellier, and Bologna, where he learned to eliminate astrology and mysticism from surgery. He was the most celebrated surgeon in the 14th century. At Avignon Chauliac was physician to Popes Clement VI, Innocent VI and Urban V. The underpinning of surgery is, of course, a knowledge of human anatomy. Yet it is this study that the Christian Churches stopped dead in its tracks for a thousand years – until the 16th century. Christianity, of course, absorbed the worst ideas from paganism, such as the Ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman aversion to dissection of cadavers, and incorporated them into a theology endorsed by Tertullian (who denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a butcher) and St. Augustine. The medieval argument against anatomical study, that “the Church abhors the shedding of blood,” would be laughable if the Churches themselves had not spilled oceans of blood from the bodies of other Christians to enforce orthodoxy. 16th century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who is claimed by the Catholic Encyclopedia, was in fact cruelly persecuted by the Church, and eventually driven to his death by the Inquisition, chiefly because he practiced human dissection. Vesalius lived one step ahead of the Inquisitors, especially when his dissections failed to find the “resurrection bone.” But for courageous surgeons like Chauliac and anatomists like Vesalius, medical science might still be called medieval.

4. Last Tuesday, July 26 – On this date in 1856, playwright George Bernard Shaw was born to Protestant parents in Dublin, Ireland. It is said the young Shaw attended a revival service by Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey in Dublin, and in one of his first critical notes wrote, “if this sort of thing is religion, then I am an atheist.” A vegetarian who neither smoked nor drank, Shaw saw human society as reformable. In 1884 he co-founded the Fabian Society, on the belief that capitalism had created an unjust and inefficient social order. He promoted Socialism instead. Shaw was a freethinker, but he equally despised Rationalism and religion. His idea of God was as another name for the cosmic Vital Principle, an idea he learned from Samuel Butler. He rejected the idea of immortality.

Shaw addressed many of his social causes in the prefaces to his 50-plus plays. The Preface to Androcles and the Lion (1912) runs over 36,000 words, and has its own Table of Contents. In it, Shaw thoroughly dissects Jesus and Christianity, saying, “The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” Shaw considered the purpose of the Eucharist laughable, the miracles of Jesus irrelevant to his mission, and thought Pilate was right for agreeing to his execution because Jesus was mentally unbalanced: “… It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society, it is belief.”

5. Last Wednesday, July 27 – It on this date in 1835 that Nobel-winning Italian poet Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci was born in Valdicastello, a small town in the Province of Lucca in the northwest corner of the region of Tuscany. He studied philosophy at the University of Pisa, was professor of literature at Bologna University, and became a leader of the realistic school of Italian letters. In 1865, Carducci published a notorious poem called “Hymn to Satan,” which won him derision as a “praiser of Satan.” But by co-opting what the corrupt clerical forces in Italy were going to call the reformers anyway, he shook up the anti-clerical movement which eventually won Italy back as a republic. Carducci was not only a poet but also a politician, winning election to the Italian Senate in 1890. Though somewhat nervous at rewarding an Agnostic, Carducci won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906 – the first Italian to receive such an honor. Anti-clerical to the end, Carducci said, “I know neither truth of God nor peace with the Vatican or any priests. They are the real and unaltering enemies of Italy.”

6. Last Thursday, July 28 – On this date in 1902, British philosopher Sir Karl Popper was born in Austria. He studied and taught in Vienna until the rise of the Nazis forced this son of Jewish parents to emigrate. He was sympathetic to the Vienna School of philosophy, though he was never a member. A professor of logic and the scientific method at the London School of Economics for 20 years, Popper insisted that since nothing can be absolutely proven true, the test should be whether a proposition is falsifiable. His chief works were political as well as philosophical: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies, The Poverty of Historicism and so on. In a 1969 interview, reprinted 29 years later in Skeptic magazine, Popper admits his agnosticism and the reasons for his disbelief. In discussing his attitudes toward Judaism and Christianity, he also admits a respect for the moral teachings of both religions. Popper was knighted in 1965. He died on 17 September 1994 at age 92.

It was also on this date in 1804 that the German philosopher Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was born in Landshut in Bavaria. As a young student of Hegel at Heidelberg, Feuerbach wrote to a friend, “Theology I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality.” At Berlin University he was a professor of Hegelian philosophy, but lost his position after publishing his 1830 book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, in which he followed Hegel in rejecting the idea of personal immortality. Undaunted, he went freelance and followed up his first book on philosophy and religion with The Essence of Christianity in 1841. This book, said anthropologist and ethnographer Robert H. Lowie, “won him a place amongst the foremost advanced thinkers of the day.” It also helped promote Rationalist ideas in Germany. Feuerbach died on 13 September 1872 at age 68.

7. Today, July 29 – It was on this date in 1644 that the pope who will be remembered throughout history as the persecutor of Galileo, Urban VIII, died at Rome. It had been 18 months since his victim had died in Florence, while under a house arrest, which Urban did nothing to mitigate. Born Maffeo Barberini in Galileo’s ancestral home of Florence, on a date uncertain in April 1568 (four years after Galileo’s birth), the future pope was reared among the wealthy and privileged. On the death of Gregory XV, Barberini was elected pope in 1623 at age 55. He took the name Urban VIII and immediately, while the Thirty Years’ War raged between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, canonized Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius, of course, founded the Jesuits, who incited the Thirty Years’ War. As for Urban and Galileo, the Catholic Encyclopedia can barely begrudge a mention of the savaging of the scientist, for which Urban is directly responsible. Where Galileo was accomplished, Urban was a dilettante in art and science – which everyone knew but were too polite to point out. Far from being a friend to Galileo, Urban directed his every punishment. This “haughtiest of pontiffs” took great offense at having his arguments against the Copernican system annihilated by Galileo (Dialog, 1632). The “imprudent” Galileo showed the world that those who agreed with Urban were clueless about astronomy and mathematics.

Urban ended his days in failure by pouring the papal treasury into his corrupt family’s coffers, rather than financing the Catholic powers in the Thirty Years War. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia has to admit that “Urban’s greatest fault was his excessive nepotism.”

We can look back, but the Golden Age of Freethought is now. You can find full versions of these pages in Freethought history at the links in the American Heathen blog, which take you to the blog by Ronald Bruce Meyer, FreethoughtAlmanac.com.