HHS Secretary Leavitt wants to save the poor doctors from being forced to provide abortions. The nut:
Today, HHS will file a rule in the Federal Register aimed at increasing compliance with existing federal laws protecting provider conscience. The proposed rule clarifies that non-discrimination rules apply to institutional health care providers as well as to individual employees working for recipients of certain funds from HHS.
Interpretation: he wants to create legislation that ensures any employee at any clinic that provides federally-funded medical care be able to not provide that care at will. Let me say this another way: a receptionist at a clinic should be able to bar access to healthcare to anybody if they like.
Remember pharmacists deciding not to issue birth control pills? This rule would establish a federal regulation endorsing that despicable behavior.
My response to his blog post (we’ll see if it posts):
This is not a matter of free speech. This is a matter of religion clouding judgment.
If my employer pays me to paint widgets and I refuse, nothing protects me from being fired, not even free speech. If I have a problem painting widgets, I should seek other employment.
If a person has a problem assisting women in getting abortions, perhaps they should seek employment in a field other than one that involves maintaining the health of women’s reproductive organs.
If you’re as outraged as I am about this, please send a quick email to consciencecomment@hhs.gov.
I think you can. A couple of days ago, an Illinois Representative berated a guy giving testimony before the State House because he’s an atheist:
“Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”
Reasonable people I know who are religious claim that people like this are on the fringe of their social forest. I’m not so sure about that. I think they’re more common than people think. The Council for Secular Humanism sent out a news release about it. Not included in the linked version is this link to the full audio, thanks to Richard Dawkins.net. If you’re a believer, how do you feel about her rant? Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
People who believe in ID, or any kind of an intelligent designer don’t have cats. They can’t. How do I know?
Hairballs.
There has been a pretty good spotlight on atheism these last two years, what with the publishing of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens and “Breaking The Spell” by Daniel Dennett, among many others. One of the main topics surrounding the release of these books is how antagonistic they are toward religion, not so much atheism itself. The authors (particularly Dawkins) have been called “fundamentalist atheists” and have been accused of following a “secular religion”. As an atheist, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is.
I haven’t always been a non-believer. I was raised as a Christian Scientist. I went to a boarding school for Christian Scientists. While there, I was steeped constantly in a Protestant worldview, and I would definitely describe myself at that time as an enthusiastic believer. But during that whole time, I never had an honest-to-god religious experience. I really wanted one, but it never happened. I formulated a framework of justifications for this lack of proof of faith, but that eventually fell away, leaving only the shabby Bible stories and hollow teenage dreams of healing and revelation. It took a long time for this to happen. I only really became comfortable with admitting my non-belief a couple of years ago after very nearly dying. Isn’t that an ironic twist?
So how to describe my atheism? It’s not bitter disappointment. It’s simply my realization that I haven’t seen any proof of a god. In fact, I haven’t seen any proof of anything other than that which can be observed and measured in a scientific way; that which would best be called “natural”. After wishing and hoping for proof for so many years, I simply realized that I was wanting something that didn’t exist. The closest thing I can compare to is when a child stops believing in Santa Claus.
Does comparing your religious faith to a child’s faith in Santa strike you as condescending? Is it offensive? Probably so. But how else can I treat this subject? A religious person believes, in spite of the evidence, that forces (and often intelligence) exist outside our observable universe. I don’t. So let me present you with my dilemma: how would you talk to someone who believed in Santa Claus? An adult, maybe even a friend, who in all other aspects is reasonable and intelligent. How do you talk to them about their belief in Santa? I only see a couple of ways to do it. You either respect their belief and start the conversation from there, or you immediately reject their faith and bring your view of the world into the conversation from the beginning. If you do the latter, how do you not appear condescending to the Santa believer?
I realized some time ago that there is a good reason why religion and politics are taboo conversation topics. We all formulate our worldviews early and then seek to confirm and bolster them over time. This “decide first and seek confirmation” approach is a scientific fact about how the human brain works. To do otherwise requires training and effort; it doesn’t come naturally. But if you imagine your worldview as having structures that support it, many of these structures are flimsy houses of cards that were designed and built very early in our lives, of materials provided by our parents, TV, etc. The problem is that these structures underpin our entire way of living. Examining them is hard and, if they disagree with things you know to be true (see Cognitive Dissonance), they are painful to examine. The stakes are high.
I have recently decided that the approach I should take in discussing faith and the supernatural depends entirely on context. In other words, what am I trying to do in discussing these things? If I am discussing cosmology or how the world works (as the books mentioned above do), it seems to me it would be dishonest to not present my worldview: to ignore the elephant in the room. You have the right to be offended, and I’m afraid there’s not much I can do about that. It’s not that I evangelize atheism, but if the conversation turns toward these existential questions, my lack of belief in the supernatural must come up.
What about you? How do you approach these things? How do you talk about your Christianity with a Muslim? Your atheism with a believer? I’d like to know.
