Coming out
March 15th, 2007 | 
Author: 
Apparently, last weekend Congressman Pete Stark (D-California), has come out as someone who does not believe in a supreme being. This makes him the first congressperson ever to admit such a thing.
He made this statement:
When the Secular Coalition asked me to complete a survey on my religious beliefs, I indicated I am a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being
To be perfectly clear:
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
That’s all. Nothing more. He didn’t confess that on ‘the floor’, he didn’t request special treatment and he certainly didn’t bash other people’s beliefs. He was just being honest (while he was the first one to ADMIT this, I’m sure there are more people in congress who share his disbelief).
And LOOK at the reactions!
For a long time I have believed that a very important basic ingredient for people’s tendency to be religious is fear. (To be a God-fearing person is considered a positive Christian trait, and you’d better fear hell too!).
I have seen the fear component manifest itself often and at various levels of consciousness, but seldom have I seen it so clearly as in this outburst from The Christian Seniors Association (CSA). See link.
Allow me a few quotes from that article and my comment on it:
… they want to establish a right for liberals to bash Christians and berate God around the clock …
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
It is time for religious members of Congress to push back. A simple declaration of a belief in God by members of Congress on the House floor will be greatly informative for the American people…
To “push back”? Note: Pete Stark did NOT announce his disbelief on the House floor.
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
We have long recognized that all of this hot air about ‘separation of church and state’ has been a veiled effort to intimidate and silence religious voices in public policy matters …
Isn’t it a bit ‘un-American’ to call your own country’s Bill Of Rights ‘hot air‘? And no, it was not to intimidate, and no it was most certainly not veiled. It is a very CLEAR meassure to, indeed, keep ‘religious voices out of public policy matters’. That’s why it’s called ‘separation of church and state’. But in any case, it’s not something that Mr. Stark even so much as mentioned.
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
If the liberal House leadership refuses to recognize lawmakers who want to affirm their belief in God …
Wait a minute now, NOBODY was refusing anyone anything …
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
But based on some of these remarks, I think it IS valid to state that it is the CSA who ‘refuses to recognize lawmakers who want to affirm their disbelief in a god‘.
Congressman Stark’s statement [ … ] could be the moment which defines the decline of our country …
You’ve GOT to be kidding me! This would define the decline of our country?
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
… the day that religious Americans stood-up to the liberal bullies who are so determined to use the power of government to silence prayer and every other religious expression of free speech.
Okay, NOW someone is REALLY going overboard here. NOBODY wants to deny religious people their right to pray and believe whatever they want. All that the non-religious people ask is to not have those beliefs FORCED upon them and that their tax money isn’t spent on some specific religions.
However, congressman Stark didn’t even mention that request.
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
While I agree there is some rather nasty bullying going on here, it is NOT Pete Stark who is the bully!
This is a fight which is destined to be fought in America and we think it should begin today.
This is a FIGHT?
ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL THAT HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN A SUPREME BEING.
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Posted in Emotions, In the news, Opinions, Politics, Religion
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The good news: the CSA member count amounts to only 0.04% of the US population. Surely there must be a lot more 50 “seniors” in the US, who hopefully think differently.
The bad news: if only 0.01% of those 120.000 members are real extremists, they could do a whole lot of damage to a society…
@Injun: The really bad news is, that the CSA is not alone in their warped perception of persecution of Christianity in the US.
I only used them as an example.
Fairly recent polls have indicated that the majority of the American people would rather vote for a homosexual president than for an atheist one.
The majority of the people will NEVER vote for an atheist president JUST BECAUSE of his atheism and without taking any other factors into account.
Of course there are still plenty of people who don’t care or would even prefer an atheist, as you can see in this article: link.
But you can also see read there the ‘rationality’ of the ‘never: no way’ types, some are REAL brainiacs, like #2, Julie Haas, for instance: If fear and irrrationality go hand in hand you get gibberish nonsense like that!
I thought you would appreciate this post:
http://deusexmalcontent.blogspot.com/2007/03/stark-contrast.html
@Deannie:
Thanks for that link, and although I clearly share some of the sentiments expressed there, I probably would have phrased certain remarks differently
😉
(At LEAST I would have spelled ‘atheist’ correctly. It’s probably second to ‘definitely’ (no ‘a’ in there!) in words that the majority of Americans can’t seem to get right. Receive (not recieve) and Israel (not Isreal) are in that list too, but I digress).
Anyway, I found a cartoon that relates nicely to recent polls finding that America is even more atheist-phobic than it is homophobic.
Do I get to tease you about incorrect use of the word ‘too’? 😉
@Deannie, absolutely!
Since I’m not a native English speaker I welcome, and even encourage, any corrections to my English.
It will help me to become a better English speaker and writer.
I think I found the offending ‘too’ and corrected it. To my, somewhat childish, defense I must say that that was not even a (human) typo! My (wireless) keyboard is broke(n?) and every now and then it spits out a whole line of repeated characters: I guess in the ‘too’ case this is what happened and I simply didn’t backspace far enough. But please, DO correct me on language issues: I appreciate that (but DO give me some time: I’m usually still correcting and revising a post or comment HOURS after I posted it).
I wasn’t even sure which was the more correct way of saying this:
“ALL HE DID WAS INDICATING ON A POLL..” or “ALL HE DID WAS INDICATE ON A POLL…” (STILL don’t know actually).
Paul, we have had a similar issue in Quebec. The leader of the PQ provincial party (for a long time, the number two party in Quebec), Andre Boisclair, has come out as gay, which by itself may have been enough to lose him the election, but also as a former cocaine user. My mother is sort of a weather vane for “popular political opinion” and she seems to think that either of those factors could have been the end of his campaign, and both together were simply too much.
S. Loisel
@sloisel: The initial consensus was indeed that this, no matter how brave, would be political suicide, but so far, by far most of the reactions he has received, were very positive. Even from people who don’t share his disbelief. Apparently there are still a lot of people who realize we live in a FREE country and that there IS a constitutional seperation of state and church, no matter how loudly a small group of zealots still yell that that seperation is a myth.