We need a Freethought PAC -counter the spread of religious fundamentalism

[NAO]

I think what we need is a Freethought movement similar to what the US had around the turn of the 20th century. Robert Ingersoll was touring the country, lecturing on secularism and exposing the claims of revealed religion to be false.

Unless something breaks the stranglehold of religious fundamentalism in the US - and in the world - I think we are going to continue the slide into Theocracy and destruction.

Would TV stations even dare run ads that exposed the claims of Christianity to be falsehoods? Could Freethinkers form an 'anti-Gideons' and leave copies of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" and Robert Ingersoll's "Why I am Agnostic" in hotel rooms? Could Freethinkers produce tracts and pamphlets showing the contradictions in the Bible and exposing the rip-off of dozens of pagan beliefs and their incorporation into Christianity?

Could we have a Second Enlightenment, a Second Age of Reason? Could we re-secularize a world gone mad with religious superstition?

Robert Ingersoll's "Why I Am Agnostic"
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/why_i_am_agnostic.html

Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason"
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml

*****

From "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine

EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it. When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.

It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

[drm604]

1. I really like this.

People are already doing similar things informally, see this page for an example. Of course I do not recommend anyone doing what they discuss on that page. :evilgrin:

But publicly distributing interesting and well designed pamphlets, and putting pamphlets and other reading materials in the same drawer as the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms sound like excellent ideas.

What's needed for the hotel distribution is to mobilize a large group of secularists who, for business or other reasons, stay in US hotels often. Other people who travel only occasionally, maybe once a year for vacation, could also do it, but the regular travelers would be the mainstay of the effort.

I'm not sure how well a speaker like Ingersoll would do today. There's only a very small percentage of the population that would bother to go see any public speaker. What might be needed is someone who is also entertaining in other ways. One person comes to mind, although there may be others - Penn Gillette (of Penn and Teller). While I disagree with a lot of his politics, he is a staunch and outspoken secularist and he also puts on a very entertaining magic show. I once saw him, in the middle of a magic show, enthrall an audience with a lecture in which he said things like "most people accept the first explanation they hear for something and then never think about it again". He can definitely grab people's interest and attention. Of course, that's just an example and their may be better choices. An entertaining comedian, for example, might be very effective at mocking fundies while talking about the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in religious texts. Laughter might be effective at cutting through some people's willfull resistance to new ideas.

TV might actually be a possibility, at least on some cable channels. South Park, for example, regularly and openly mocks religion. They even did an episode that was basically a hostile expose on the history of Mormonism. The Comedy Channel in general tends to be quite irreverent in its programming.

It's possible that people might be more open to questioning then we realize. I think there are many many nominal Christians out there who go to church only on holidays and have accepted, with little thought or understanding, the overall teachings of their church (or at least what they think those teaching are). They've simply had very little exposure to the idea of asking questions and thinking through the things they've been taught.

[Tux]

2. Your liberal religious PAC

http://www.uua.org/uuawo/new/

[NAO]

3. I know of the UU; I was thinking of something with more teeth

Not something that would promote acceptance of anything, but rather an organization that would mount an active, public, highly visible attack on the claims of revealed religion.