Let me first say that racism wrapped up in a shiny bow that you call “love” is still racism, just like beating a child you love is still abuse and raping a woman you love is still rape.

Wonder and I have had these long conversations about our differing views on religion.I think this video, more than anything else confirms my disbelief. I cannot believe in a god who would create the entire world and then pit his creations against one another by allowing them to draw arbitrary borders around themselves. I cannot believe in a god who would chose sides between two waring religious armies while mothers and daughters are raped and families murdered to win the war.

I don’t believe that America is god’s chosen land. I think a lot of work went into our founding fathers’ decisions to make this a secular democracy for a reason. They came from England, a country that had almost 100 years of religious division between Catholics and Protestants and they understood how a simple change in leaders could turn a previously favored religion into a persecuted one. So they left god out of it on purpose.

I wonder how the people who think that this is a Christian nation would feel if the tide turned and we became a nation built on the beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It would be a country without Christmas or birthday celebrations. Organized sports would be canceled- no World Series, no Superbowl, no Nascar and no cheerleaders (athletes receive praise for their accomplishments that should be going to god and turn themselves into false idols and cheerleaders are worshiping false idols by giving glory to the sports players rather than to god).

If we allow ourselves to be a Christian nation, then we also allow for the possibility of those ideas being overturned by another religion. It is only through secularism that the beliefs of ALL religions are safe from harm. The founding fathers knew this.

We are not a Christian nation and Christians of all denominations should rejoice in that fact. You are free to worship or not worship however you see fit. You will not be punished for being Baptist when Catholics are in power and vice versa. You will not be killed or have your children taken from you for your beliefs. But with that freedom comes the restriction that you cannot harm another person for believing something different from you.

If you believe this is a Christian nation then I ask you to think about what happens when all the non-Christians are removed from society. The power struggles then happen between denominations. Maybe first everyone gangs up on Mormons, they’re not really Christian anyways. Then maybe all the Catholics get taken out by the various Protestant denominations. Then the Baptists start taking out the Methodists and Episcopalians. There is no end because there is no one true Christian faction.

For those of us who don’t believe, it doesn’t matter which religious faction is in charge once the secular line is broken. But for those of you who are Christians, you might want to fight with us non-believers to keep politics and religion separate. Without that secular line in place you do not know what kind of religion you will be forced to follow, even if your heart and beliefs tell you that it is wrong.

Dear well-intentioned christian male who thinks he’s not sexist:

You undoubtedly believe “misogynist” to be an unfair characterization of you, and it may be… probably is, if you define misogyny as an active hatred or disdain for women.

I think what Red is referring to is what appears to be an unwillingness to take seriously what we have to say. It may be unintentional on your part, but it’s there.

It’s there when Red says “kinda cute” in the context she referenced is insulting, and you try to “turn it around” and show how no it’s not *always* an insult.
(I don’t know if the post I linked is the exact one that prompted your discussion with her, but scenario # 2 is a pretty good example of the kind of phenomenon she’s talking about.

This is the rather common tactic wherein guys will undermine a girl’s self-image in order to get what they want (a date, sex, marriage, fidelity, silence, etc….)

its a means of controlling a person by way of making her feel bad about herself, without quite realizing why….

ex-fiance #1 used to call me a “sexy little twit” – same idea, just less subtle.

The Kid is making dinner (Spanish rice- very easy, out of a box) and lost (lost!) the grocery bag full of dinner fixins. He just spent almost 30 minutes searching the entire downstairs for the bag. Ha!

In the meantime, I have been reading the internet. All of it. My excuse is that I am supposed to be researching what the Grandmother hypothesis might tell us about modern teenage pregnancy (per my proff ” That kind of ties into my Malthusian ideas” I am not sure what the hell he means by that, but he is an old hippie and tends to babble). Instead I have found that I am not the only person that thinks that Milan Kundera is a hack.

I dated a guy once who thought that Kundera was the shiznit. Of course the guy was a middling middle class academic from Eastern Europe who liked to cheat on his wife and had no respect for women, so Kundera was a kindred spirit. He also liked John Irving novels (another middling, middle class academic who thinks adultery is the height of sexual expression).

Dear Literary Gods! Please can we get over the sex lives of middle class men. They are dull beyond all recognition. Seriously. They are the Harlequin Romance Novelists of the tweed jacket set. I’d much rather read Lisa Carver.

The more I realize that there really are only two belief systems in the world, and that the differences within those systems are negotiable, but differences between those systems are not.

You either believe in justice for everyone or you believe that justice is earned. The justice for everyone crowd believes that all humans deserve some basic rights and have some basic responsibilities (we may differ on what the rights and responsibilities are). The justice is earned crowd believes that the right to live your life as you wish is earned through power and money (it’s ok to have homosexual sex if your a politician while voting to keep homosexuals without power and influence from living their lives).

Neither of these viewpoints is particular to any religion or lack of religion. Actually, nearly every religion I know of has some version of justice for everyone in it. You can call it the golden rule, or just say “do unto others” and everybody will get what you mean. I am not religious, but I come to my view of justice through John Rawls’ veil of ignorance, meaning I try to look at the world as if I don’t know what my place in it would be, and by not knowing if I would be the lowest of the low or the most powerful person, I want to create a world that is just for both ends.

But why is the idea of justice so important? It is the core value from which all ideas of fairness and rights come from. When enough people feel that their society has become unjust, revolutions happen. When working hard is not enough to feed your family, when one half of society sees the other half as their property, when the mechanisms of everyday life become tools for creating greater disparity between those who receive justice and those who do not, society falls apart. That is why everyone deserves justice. That is why when person is treated unjustly, there is no justice for anyone. The rules of society must be applied universally or they are not only unjust, but they create the power inequities that will ruin the society eventually.