A Secularist Agenda for Maryland in 2016

By Mathew Goldstein

As the bills are published the ongoing conflict between secular (non-religious) versus non-secular (theistic or otherwise religious based) government in Maryland reveals itself.  Following is a summary of what we have as of the middle of February.  For more information about these bills, including links to the text of the bills and for sending email to the committees, please go to http://secularmaryland.org/lobbying-actions.

HB 16 proposed allowing discrimination by places of public accommodation that are religiously affiliated non-profits providing goods or services to weddings.  There have always been religious institutions seeking to exempt themselves from anti-discrimination laws under the banner of free exercise, and some religious institutions endorse anti-LGBT sentiment, so this bill is no surprise.  This bill was promptly rejected by the House committee and withdrawn.

HB 48 and 656 are government loans that fund membership organizations that discriminate against non-theists (deists, agnostics, atheists).  Atheists are not entitled to civic equality according to the recently deceased, and very Catholic, Justice Antonin Scalia.  Apparently, according to this "logic", when someone concludes there are no gods they also forfeit a claim to civic equality as implied somewhere in the original, unamended constitution in accordance with the Stare Decisis obligation to follow the prejudices prevalent in the 18th century because those prejudices define the founders original intent, except when those prejudices were anti-Catholic.  We oppose loans to all theist only membership organizations.

HB 52 requires that insurers provide coverage for in vitro fertilization procedures involving a surrogate mother when infertility prevents pregnancy.   When religious institutions tell people to lobby against a law because it is against divine will, we secularists tell lawmakers to disregard the complaints and instead favorably consider voting for the bill.  Infertile women of Maryland need this coverage, divine will is not a proper argument.

HB 169, 203, 513, 514, 515 chip away at Maryland blue laws by allowing more Sunday hunting.  Death to the blue laws should be our state motto.

HB 251 ensures privately schooled children can participate in public school programs.  Public school facilities and programs should be made accessible to privately schooled children to the fullest extent that is practical.

HB 404 gives the terminally ill an option to voluntarily hasten death with barbiturates.  Many religious institutions, citing the bible, Quran, Tanach, scriptures, etc., oppose this legislation.  They claim to know divine will and want our laws to abide by it.  Some religions reach the opposite conclusion while also citing divine will.  Some religions take no position, or say there is no one consensus among their believers, or say the decision should be made by individuals.  Secularists (many of whom are theists) want the law to provide this option for those of us who may one day become terminally ill and want to hasten our deaths, provided there are procedural safeguards that protect the civil rights of patients and doctors.  HB 416 provides citizens with a booklet that explains legal end of life options.

HB 568 is all too typical of freedom of conscience exemptions tailored to religious believers. It one-sidedly allows institutions to forbid, but not to mandate, the aforementioned end of life procedures.  Any such institutional level freedom of conscience necessarily overrides individual level freedom of conscience, which renders the concept dubious.  At the individual level a doctor has the option to either opt in or opt out.  At the institutional level the laws invariably provide an opt out without providing a corresponding opt in, thus betraying that these laws are about providing special privilege to religious dissenters from secular laws rather than institutional freedom of conscience.  Secularists want all laws to either pair institutional level opt outs with corresponding opt ins, or to drop the institutional level opt outs altogether.

HB 603 restricts abortion based on speculative, unsubstantiated assertions about fetuses experiencing pain that most experts reject.

HB 642 improves the wording of a law by replacing "church" with "house of worship".  Maryland laws still extraneously refer to "church", "gospel",  and "minister" instead of using more generic language.  It is long past time to eliminate this privileging of Christianity in legal language.

HB 719 is a special sales tax exemption privilege narrowly targeted for two particular youth organizations among the many youth competing youth organizations, one of which, Boy Scouts of America, officially restricts membership to theists.  Isn't our motto in God we trust?  Doesn't the pledge of allegiance say under God?  Who do we arrogant atheists think we are, regular citizens entitled to the same legal privileges and immunities as everyone else?  As long as BSA policy is to deny non-theists membership we will oppose all government laws privileging their Scouting program over competing programs. 

The law that HB 719 amends, Article – Tax – General Section 11-204, exempts all 501(c)(3) organizations (including religious nonprofit organizations) from paying sales tax when holding an auction for fundraising.  Unfortunately, this same law also completely exempts "a bona fide church or religious organization" from all sales taxes without any restrictions.  This is unfair.  Religious organizations should be granted no tax exemptions above and beyond the tax exemptions given to the other 501(c)(3) organizations.  Note the inappropriate, and in this case redundant, use of sectarian language.

HB 955 privileges student "non-sectarian" theistic prayer speech over all other speech at all school events, including mandatory in-school events that are otherwise not free speech contexts.  What is the definition of non-sectarian?  Is it non-sectarian if it covers 51% of the population?  67%?  Who decides what qualifies as non-sectarian?  If this is about protecting free speech or free exercise then why the non-sectarian restriction?  Is 20 seconds enough time for prayer?  Is 20 minutes too much?  The bill does not say.  Can atheists speak against theism during this exercise in "free speech"?  Someone needs to give this a little more thought.

HB 994 and 995 permits more Sunday alcohol sales.  While local bills like these that chip away at the blue laws at the county and city level should be enacted, it would be better to strike down the state blue laws, thereby eliminating the need for local exemptions.

HB 996 would replace the Monday after Easter Sunday as a mandated state wide school holiday with local decisions.  This is a better way for government institutions to manage the impact of religious holidays.   A school should close if, and only if, most  students or staff will be absent.  Ideally, a poll would be conducted to enable predicting non-attendance.  A reliance on pragmatic, evidence based decision making, as much as possible, is the way to go.  We would like for another bill to similarly replace the state wide Easter Friday and Christmas holidays with as-needed local closures.

HB 1028 asks voters to decide if alcohol will be sold on Sunday.  A majority vote is not an exercise of democracy when it is about deciding whether the laws should favor those citizens who follow a majority religion.  Do our law makers understand this?  Apparently sometimes not.  Business activity follows demand, citizens vote for, or against, Sunday commerce by buying, or not buying, on Sundays.

HB 1081 is a government loan to a place of worship.  In Maryland we must trust our law makers to disregard sectarian differences.  Don't you trust them?  Will they also give government loans to Hindu temples, ethical culture meeting rooms, idol worshipping congregations, etc.? If they don't then it must be because the loan applications were flawed or uncompetitive or some legitimate reason like that.  We secularists are not so naive, we will oppose all loans to places of worship.

HB 1310 revokes the licensing of Sunday alcohol sales.  Every now and then an alcohol or hunting bill regresses.  We oppose such regressions.

HB 1357 prohibits government funding of abortions or insurance that covers abortions.  Who backs this bill? Could it be people who claim to know the Truth and claim to speak for the divine will?  Secularists generally consider legal abortion to be a proper medical service.

Most of the Senate bills are cross filed with House bills.  One that is not (yet) cross filed is SB 948 that requires schools receiving government funds to not discriminate.  If this bill passes will our governor sign it?  Maybe not.  Hopefully the GA will what pass this bill anyway this year and again with a future governor if our current governor vetoes.

HJ 7 calls for overturning Roe v. Wade on the grounds that science has concluded life begins at conception.  Did you also know that geometry proves that circles begin at their northernmost point?  If you want our laws to conflate theology with science then who are you going to call?  Hint: A non-theist is the wrong answer.

James Ryerson's biased book reviews in the NY Times

By Mathew Goldstein

The New York Times published a book review article on February 9 by James Ryerson titled "The Twain Shall Meet".  Mr. Ryan states several conclusions derived from the three books he reviewed.  Those conclusions are flawed as will be explained below.

The first book reviewed is a criticism of atheism written by a priest who is a psychologist and professor of religion.  James Ryerson says this: ... "it’s that these crusaders [advocates for atheism] are convinced that science is the only arbiter of reality and truth. They may be right about that. But that is a philosophical claim, Jones reminds us, not a scientific one."  

My question to James Ryerson is this: Do you know of anyone who practices this alternative philosophy that the arbiter of reality and truth is to be found somewhere other than the empirical evidence while driving a car?  Would you prefer that your taxi driver be making his driving decisions based on what he claims is a source of knowledge that only he experiences?  Or that he claims is revealed to him through some dubious interpretation of an ambiguous and self-contradictory collection of old books that makes sustained extraordinary claims about reality and truth which blatantly contradict our scientific knowledge about how the universe functions?  Or based on the same empirical evidence that all passengers simultaneously share via the physical senses of vision, hearing, smelling, and touch?  Why is it that religious people, like everyone else, apply an empirical evidence standard when making "how the universe functions" decisions that matter to their own day to day physical welfare but then abandon that same standard when making decisions that do not matter to their own daily physical welfare?  For anyone who thinks there is a coherent, logical, philosophy that properly justifies this methodological dichotomy, I say you are either fooling yourself or knowingly trying to fool others.

Mr Ryerson then favorably reviews a book that claims history demonstrates harmony between religion and science.  He says this: "Nor did Copernicus or most other early modern advocates of the new astronomy think it was incompatible with Christianity."  Has it even occurred to Mr. Ryerson that 16th century scientists who wanted to escape the prejudices of their day would not publicly concede that their discoveries conflicted with church teachings even if they actually thought so?  Copernicus refused to published his findings regarding the relative positions of the earth and sun, sharing them with only a small number of fellow scientists whom he trusted, and he confided at the time that he did this out of fear of negative repercussions to himself due to widespread intolerance, an intolerance that clergy had no small part in fostering.  Nor is what the scientists considered compatible with Christianity a better indicator of compatibility than what the church officials thought.  After all, the experts on Christian doctrine are the Christian clergy, not the scientists.  

Here is the truth, facts that Mr. Ryerson conveniently ignores in his book review, presumably because it does not comport with his commitment to the viability of compatibility:  The Catholic Church's chief censor, Dominican Bartolomeo Spina, expressed a desire to stamp out the Copernican doctrine.  But with Spina's death in 1546, his cause fell to his friend,  the Dominican theologian Giovanni Maria Tolosani.  Copernicanism was absurd, according to Tolosani, because it was scientifically unproven and unfounded.  Tolosani declared that he had written against Copernicus "for the purpose of preserving the truth to the common advantage of the Holy Church."  Martin Luther, in his Commentary on Genesis, said that "We indeed are not ignorant that the circuit of the heavens is finite, and that the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the centre."  In March 1616 the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation of the Index issued a decree suspending De revolutionibus until it could be "corrected," on the grounds of ensuring that Copernicanism, which it described as a "false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to the Holy Scripture," would not "creep any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth.

Apologists for Christianity like James Ryerson, and maybe also the authors of the book he favorably reviews, go deep into denialism mode regarding the blatant, unequivocal, historical hostility of Christianity to science.  They do not, and frankly I think they will not, honestly confront the fundamental and profound difference between the failed methods of relying on authority, fixed revelation, personal interpretations of personal experience, and logic and reason from human intuition, versus a recognition that the only successful method of determining how the universe functions has over and over again proven itself to be the method of following the empirical evidence as closely as we can.  They fail to acknowledge the full extent of this difference and its implications because what they are engaging in is unbalanced propaganda in defense of Christianity and not an honest effort to inform and educate. The New York Times thinks such defense of revisionist history is worthy of publication.  Commercially it probably is and that is one reason why we need more atheist commentary.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DAY January 16, 2016, the 230th anniversar

Charles Sumner, a church-state separation activist in Tennessee wrote the following for posting on Blogs.

On the 230th anniversary of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, it is important for today's generations to understand the tremendous change this measure represented to world history. Until the American experiment, there had never been a complete separation between the institutions of religion and government. Passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, this statute is regarded by historians as the precursor of the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1776, Virginia took a step toward disestablishing the Anglican Church. The leading figure in that monumental change was an Anglican, George Mason. But Virginia did not stop collecting taxes for the support of the Anglican (soon to be Episcopal) Church at that time. An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in 1779 but not acted upon until 1785, when Jefferson was in France. At that time the great orator and patriot, Patrick Henry, introduced a general assessment bill that would continue the tax for religion but alter its distribution.

At the time of the American Revolution there were established religions in nine of the 13 colonies, following the European pattern. It meant that one religious denomination was favored. It often meant you were taxed for someone else's religion. That became apparent to Patrick Henry because the church that had received the money no longer was the predominant religion in Virginia. He proposed that the tax be altered to go to some other denominations as well.  He called it a tax for "teachers of the Christian religion."

Jefferson's desire was to have no tax for religion, but support for Henry's bill seemed strong. So James Madison and other supporters of Jefferson's plan managed to delay action while they let the citizens know of the situation. Madison, Mason and others circulated petitions.

Madison's argument was made in the now famous "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." This document stated, "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

The wide circulation of this among the citizenry had the desired effect; the tax for religion failed. And in 1786, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom passed. It was one of the three items Thomas Jefferson wanted memorialized on his tombstone. It might seem odd, but president of the United States was not one of the three.

"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry, whatever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of  religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities," the statute said.

It was Madison, author of the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," who was also the primary architect of the First Amendment and is regarded as the Father of the Constitution. That gives you a clue as to the true significance of the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

It might also let you know how Madison and Jefferson would regard a Tennessee bill that would take tax money from the public schools and channel it to private schools, most of which are religious schools.

Celebrate Religious Freedom Day by reading these documents and their history. Celebrate that in the United States, with its separation of church and state, we have vibrant religions existing not because they are supported by the state but because people believe in their religion's worth.


CHARLES SUMNER, President-Emeritus, Nashville Chapter
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
PO Box 210005, Nashville TN 37221
Sumner7540@bellsouth.net

BTW, 

Celebrate Religious Freedom with the Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason

Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason (FredCor) will host Professor Emile Lester on January 10, 2016 as the speaker for the Religious Freedom Celebration. 

• January 10 · 2:30 PM
• Central Rappahannock Regional Library

Shopping at Walmart is equivalent to drinking water from the Flint River

Edd Doer cites Courtland Milloy’s Jan 20 column in the Washington Post: 

“To get approval to build three stores in wealthier parts of the city, Walmart promised to build two in under-served neighborhoods. So they built the three they wanted. Then, last week, Walmart told city officials that it . . . decided not to build them. . . . To make room for the new, Walmart-anchored Skyland Town Center in SE Washington, the city had demolished a tattered but vital neighborhood economy. . .  Some apartments were also demolished, and residents were displaced.”

Walmart, probably the world’s largest retailer, is noted for underpaying its employees, many of whom need food stamps to survive, while exporting American jobs to foreign sweatshops. Walmart’s incredible profits feed the Walmart Family Foundation, which in turn pours tsunamis of tax-free money into massive efforts to undermine public education through vouchers  and charter schools not answerable to taxpayers. On Jan 13 Education Week reported that the Walton Family Foundation will now spend $1 billion on its efforts to sabotage public education.

So the Walton gang is giving the finger to Americans generally, the middle class (what’s left of it) and the poor (whose numbers are growing), and the public schools and teachers serving nearly 90% of American kids.

So shopping at Walmart is equivalent to drinking water from the Flint River or voting for Scott Walker.

 Happy New Year!

Muslim Reform Movement embraces secularism and universal human rights

Gabriel Glazer mentions an unusual and noteworthy event in which Muslims discuss the need for reform of Islam and are ready to act on this perception of the need to embrace secularism.

See http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/muslim-reform-movement-embraces-secularism-and-universal-human-rights which discusses a coalition of Muslim writers, activists and politicians has launched a "Muslim Reform Movement" rejecting violence and calling for a defence of secularism, democracy and liberty.

The reformers have issued a Declaration defending gender equality, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, stating that they are for "secular governance" and "against political movements in the name of religion."  

Religion and the rise and fall of Islamic science

By Mathew Goldstein

One of the questions people have been asking lately is the significance of the dominance of Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages and its subsequent decline.  Some people claim that they know the answer.  For example, Reza Aslan claims that religion is not to be blamed for the decline because it functions as nothing more than a Rorschach test, so that whatever people claim that they find in their religion to influence their behavior is actually instead a reflection of them and not of their religion.  Some people assert that it is an indisputable fact that any decline can be attributed entirely to rapacious non-Muslims invaders who militarily conquered and then destroyed Islamic civilization. This is a factual, and therefore potentially empirically resolvable, question. We should look to evidence to measure if there was a decline over time to answer this question.  Then we can align evidence of decline with contemporaneous events to see if we can uncover the most likely culprits via consistent chronological correlation.

The question now becomes one of how to measure the rise and fall of Islamic civilization using available historical data.  Eric Chaney, an Economist at Harvard University, figured that he may be able to measure the success of Islamic civilization by counting the number of scientific books published over time by authors with Muslim names.  Harvard University is famous for the size of its library which has many books from past centuries.

He identified 21,275 books written by 3,784 authors with Muslim names who died between the years 250 and 1799.  When there was no death date he substituted birth date plus 69 years or initial publication date of the author's final book if there was no birth or death date.  He grouped the statistic into century intervals.  During the two centuries from 900 to 1100 an average of 12% of the published books were on scientific subjects and 30% on religious subjects.  This was followed by a decline in the percentage of books on scientific subjects.  By 1300 7% of the books cover a science subject and by 1700 it is 2% while the percentage books on religious subjects rose to 40%.

To better pinpoint the correlation of this decline in scientific output with other historical events, Chaney divided the results geographically into three regions: East (Chaney refers to this region as "Iran"), Levant, and West.  The East region experienced the Mongol invasions, the Levant experienced the Crusader invasions, the West experienced the invasions of European colonialists. He found that the decline in publication of science subject books began in the East and spread from there to the Levant and subsequently to the West.  The scientific decline in the East began a century before the Mongol invasion.  The subsequent decline in the Levant and West similarly began centuries before the Crusader and European colonist conquests.  The Levant experienced an anomalous increase in publication of science books (as a percentage of overall book publications) during the Crusader invasions.

In his draft study titled Religion and the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science, Eric Chaney concludes that the role of Islamic civilization in world affairs correlates best with the relative dominance of the rationalist versus the traditionalist strains of Islam.  The Mu`tazila movement was one example of rationalist Islam. They believed that good and evil were not determined by revealed scripture or interpretation of scripture, but are rational categories that could be established through unaided reason.  These rationalist movements first emerged in the preceding Umayyad Era and reached their height in the Abbasid period.  During Islam's "Golden Age" the rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate forceably favored a rationalist Islam over the competing traditionalist Islam, they tortured traditionalists. The Abbasid Caliphate systematically translated every available science text into Arabic (their motive may have been to equip theologians with knowledge to win debates for the purpose of converting people to Islam).  After the 10th century the Islamic rationalist movement declined.

Why did the Islamic rationalist movement lose its influence?  One possible reason is that they had angered people by being extreme in their intolerance of Muslims with opposing beliefs and by linking themselves to the brutality of the rulers.  Another reason was a demographic change.  During the Abbasid period the population of large parts of the Caliphate were non-Muslim.  Muslims were initially a minority of citizens overall.  This changed as a result of conversions to Islam with Muslims becoming the majority first in what is now Iran and Iraq, later in the Levant, and then in the West.  By the start of the eleventh century the Abbasid Caliphate had switched sides, outlawing rationalist Islam as heresy and endorsing traditionalist Islam (by then the Caliphate was weak and had little temporal power).  The number of madrasas, which are schools of Islam, increased.  Traditionalist Islam, which emphasizes the importance of revelation and opposes rationalist Islam, became increasingly dominant.  The number of authors employed by government declined and the number employed by madrasas increased.  The relatively more secular state bureaucracy that pre-dated Islam was replaced by Islamic religious institutions.  

Although a partial dose of rationalism was advantageous for converting non-Muslims to Islam, a full dose was corrosive towards religious faith, promoting skepticism, agnosticism, deism, and atheism.  That is why it was abandoned.  Today rationalist Islam is often deemed heretical by scholars in mainstream Islamic theology.

Islam itself contained the anti-rationalist seeds that contributed to the diminished role of Islam in world affairs.  Contrary to what apologists for Islam say, there is good reason to think that the religion of Islam has been, and continues to be, its own worst enemy.  No foreign interventions caused this weakness.  The weakness resulted from rationalism being disfavored when the influence of Islam increased following a majority of citizens self-identifying as Muslim.  A diminishment of the negative influence of traditionalist Islam's anti-rationalism is the way forward.  That is also a good prescription for everyone, everywhere.  A good place to start is a willingness to abandon religion altogether.  We need fewer people who fear not being religious (secularophobia?), including fewer people who fear atheism (atheismophobia?).

We require evidence, mere argument fails

By Mathew Goldstein

Mr. Deity (Brian Keith Dalton) ably explains in this video (the first in what he promises will be a series of videos) why we should all reject efforts to determine the truth or falsity of existence claims, including the existence claims of theisms, that rely on argument (such as the Kalam argument) instead of evidence: We require evidence, mere argument fails. Some philosophy, and especially theology, has a tendency to rely far too much on the unsuccessful method of logical argument from human intuitions and asserted first principles (over reliance on first principle correlates with ideology which increases the probability of error) instead of the successful method of seeking the frequently non-intuitive best logical fit with the overall available evidence.

The 2015 Year in Secular Perspective Blogs

by Gary Berg-Cross

2015 was a diverse year with many issues, some ups and more seemingly downward trends.  In between, as they say there were some learning situations and perhaps some insights. On this Secular Perspective site we had range of topics posted which offers its own perspective.  In case you missed it here are some of the top ones from our volunteer posters. Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, provided the first 6 or so on some of his favorite issues.

10. Aborting Aristotle  Edd Doerr’s review of a book by  Dave Sterrett had over 200 readers.  He found it an “odd little opus” with an “ anti-abortion screed extruded by an evangelical publisher and concocted by a youngish Southern Evangelical Seminary grad who evidently dwells in a rickety Ivory Tower somewhere in the Twilight Zone beyond Cloud Nine.”

9. Edd Doerr  also had A brief comment on "Zombies of 2016"

Based on Paul Krugman’s column in the April 24 NY Times, that  choped up Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and other Repubs who would like to infest the White House.

8. Edd Doerr also provided a Review of Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

Freedom of speech, press, assembly and petition, like religious freedom  and church-state  separation, were/are intended to be protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. However, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights was adopted, the Federalist controlled Congress and President John Adams enacted the Sedition Act, which was immediately used to prosecute/persecute the slightest printed or spoken utterance that annoyed the Federalist establishment.

7. Edd published several on vouchers including, “The unpopularity of vouchers” which discussed the DC situation with the Congress and the Obama administration on the wrong side of the issue.   “Despite the council’s objections, Congress seems determined to continue D.C. school vouchers”

6. School Choice Works, Privatization Won't noted the importance of knowing  where the candidates stand on important issues like improving public education.

5. Edd’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? Had over 300 readings and give a 5 star rating to a book by Mercedes K. Schneideron the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system.  The “Core” was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute.

4. I authored the next three mostly popular starting with the seasonal Channeling  Robert Ingersoll for Thanksgiving which had over 300 views.  It excerpted Robert Ingersoll’s 1897 , “Thanksgiving Sermon.” Turning from the divine he instead asked who should be thanked.  He found real groups of people - scientists, artists, statesmen, mothers, fathers, poets in contrast to religious organizations and their operatives.. He found plenty of things to be thankful for starting with the long rise from savagery to civilization.  

  

3. The trouble with Hanukkah? Had over 600 views since it was posted in Dec. based on a fact finding article on the Jewish Holiday.  The blog’s title is based on Tom Flynn’s more famous take on that bigger winter holiday in The Trouble with Christmas.

2. Also seasonally popular (>800 views) was my Sustained Seasonal Symbolic Struggles noting various symbolic struggles over words and associated values.
 such as Italian parents who were reportedly furious when a school canceled the "Christmas" concert with a winter recital.

1.  By far our most popular blog was by Matt Goldstein whose recent Can leftism be saved from Jeff Sparrow?  Had over 1000 views since published on Dec. 6^th. Matt notes that the Guardian newspaper’s Jeff Sparrow has been on the attack against New Atheism for some time. Matt rebuts Jeff’s latest salvo We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists which begins with the question "Why are the New Atheists such jerks?". The provided explanation for the New Atheist's "dickishness" is "anti-Muslim bigotry" and "paranoid, racist shit". Matt sides with Chris Hitchens & Sam Harris’ idea that, "All religions are bad but some religions – especially those in the Middle East, by sheer coincidence! – are worse than others." 

Matt proposes that “What we really need is to save liberalism from bigoted regressive leftist dickish know-it-all jerks like Jeff Sparrow.”

Happy New year all, from one of the editors of Secular Perspectives.