A Lengthy Testimony for “Ask an Atheist” Day

April 18 has been designated “Ask an Atheist” day by the Secular Student Alliance.  In honor of this fact I posted my willingness to answer questions via my Facebook page.  And so the question came:  when and why did I become an atheist?  A good (and relevant) question, one that I have intended to write about for years but never got around to.  So I’m taking the opportunity to finally put it down in text.

I was raised in an Italian Roman Catholic household in Connecticut, which meant baptism as an infant, church (almost) every Sunday, and catechism class (taught by a friend’s mom).  I didn’t have a negative experience associated with my involvement in the local church; on the contrary, the priests – all middle aged or older men – were really very nice, easy to talk to, and seemed to take their job of being spiritual teachers and counselors pretty seriously.  As an elementary school-age kid, I was pretty heavy into faith, as far as a kid might be.  I dutifully said my prayers every night, I felt the required level of guilt for thoughts or behaviors that contravened church teaching, and if anyone asked me who my hero was I immediately replied “Jesus!”  I even entertained the idea of one day becoming a priest myself. 

I date the earliest stirring of free thinking to a report I wrote in the fourth grade.  We had to choose as our subject a “real life” hero, and I chose Abraham Lincoln.  I remember that the more I read about Lincoln the less impressed I was with the exploits of Jesus.  Even then, as a child, I thought:  Lincoln was a real guy who did real things in the real world, great and difficult things, for which in the end he lost his life.  Jesus, too, (reputedly) did great and difficult things, for which in the end he lost his life, but those things were… what?  Miracles?  That’s like magic, right?  And even a ten year old knows there’s no such thing as magic, I mean, not real magic.  After all, I’d never seen a miracle.  I didn’t know anyone else who had ever seen a miracle.

And so I started reading.  And of course I continued to learn, through school, about science and the scientific method and the philosophy of science, and history and biology and geology and anatomy and astronomy; and very soon I didn’t want to be a priest at all, but rather a scientist, someone who discovered things about the natural world and who advanced human understanding.  Church made less and less sense to me, and the more I read and learned, the less it seemed relevant to my life.  Sure, the message was usually positive (as I recall my church was among the more liberal of Catholic churches), but it was based in a flawed – actually, false – premise.  If humans aren’t inherently evil, and goodness does not come from god, then we don’t need saving, which makes the Jesus story nonsensical.

Cosmology taught me that god didn’t need to create the universe.  History taught me that the Bible is more wrong than right as a chronicle of events.  Evolutionary biology taught me that man was not specially created.  Geology taught me that there was no world-wide flood, and that the Earth is older than Bishop Ussher’s 6,000+ year chronology.  The great skeptics taught me to value evidence above faith.  I started by discarding my belief in the supernatural – ghosts, ESP, witchcraft – and then just continued on until I realized that the modern gods were as real – rather, as unreal – as the ancient gods I read about in books of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology.  I didn’t come to my atheism all at once, through some sort of skeptical revelation.  Rather I evolved – albeit quickly – to losing my faith in the unseen.  The process was pretty much complete by the time I reached high school, although I didn’t truly embrace the word “atheist” to identify myself until many years later.

And I haven’t looked back since.

As Usual, It Entails A Process of Maturation

Amongst the arguments made against the passage of stricter gun control laws is this one, put forward by both the gun fetishists and the supposedly more responsible and reasonable “self-defense” faction:  American culture is uniquely violent; American history is a crimson tapestry of gunfights and warfare; we are innocents in the midst of a horde of hoodied criminals whose depredations would be unfathomably worse if we prevented five-foot-one-inch tall, virtuous, child-rearing, physically weak young women from easily obtaining a weapon whose large clip and ability to discharge rapidly (ooh baby!) would make a Somali warlord drool with envy.

Whether the admonition comes from the sensible-sounding pragmatists or the lunatic fringe survivalists, it’s the same:  we live in a violent society and the only practical response is to defend oneself with violence, because we can’t change our culture.  And we’re supposed to nod our heads in agreement and admire the sagacity of Pistol Pete because, after all, he’s one of the good guys (I know because he says so).

What a load of defeatist, lazy bullshit.  Cultures can, and do, change.  They can unintentionally evolve, if Susan Blackmore is right, through the spread of memes.  They can also intentionally transform themselves out of necessity to adapt to a change in their reality, responding to shifts in climate, politics, economics, and so on.  If we are wise, we make those changes out of foresight and our own sense of what’s the “right thing to do” (for example, the radical change in the way Americans view the subject of gay marriage in just the last ten years).  If we are not wise, we make those changes only after a prolonged struggle to hold on to the failed ways of the past (institutionalized racism, for instance – or, in the most extreme examples, Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia or the militarist-nationalist Nazi German and Japanese societies of the first half of the 20th century).  History is littered with ideas that once seemed desirable or practical but, through changes in the environment or in the attitudes of the people, have been discarded and forgotten.

We can change our gun-toting, violence-loving culture.  There is precedent for such change (again, Germany and Japan, not to mention most of the industrialized world in general).  Hell, we just celebrated the birth of a man who, through the use of persistent non-violence and a stubborn refusal to meekly accept “things as they are”, forced American culture to confront and defeat overt, government-sanctioned racism, and push us down the path where private racism became less acceptable, too.  It is possible for the citizens of the United States to reject our childish devotion to our violent culture.  We just have to be willing to grow up a little bit more.

The Loony Party Doesn’t Get My Vote

Election day looms large, the final day of what has been an interminable process whereby we Americans get to choose between Corporate Candidate Heavy or Corporate Candidate Lite.  I’ll be voting for the Lite version of Corporate Man (less filling but doesn’t taste as great), but even though I’ll be pulling that lever for the incumbent it doesn’t mean I do so with a great deal of zeal or giddy happiness or rainbow hopes.  More like a grim sense of responsibility.

I know several people who aren’t voting, and for the life of me I can’t really fathom why they don’t.  No, there really isn’t much of a choice, as I stated above – as far as economic policy is concerned, both Obama and Romney are wedded to the capitalist system and that’s not going to change.  We’re not likely to see another FDR run any time soon – he’s far to the left of what the mainstream can stomach these days – so what we’re left to work with when we make a decision between the two is their priorities.  Spending on social welfare programs, cuts to discretionary spending, money for the military, the role of America on the world stage, their views regarding regulation and the environment and global climate change, if they believe in the separation of church and state, drilling for oil in federal lands, and so on and so forth.  In these areas there are very definite differences, and in every one I agree far more with Obama than with Romney.

Actually there isn’t a stance taken by the Republican Party as a whole that appeals to me.  That wasn’t always true; once upon a time the GOP, though still a tool of the corporate class and the upper crust, would occasionally make sense and was even willing to compromise with the Democratic Party on legislation.  But once Ronald Reagan made his Devil’s Bargain with the fundamentalist conservative Christians to include them in the Big Tent in the late 70s the Republican Party has moved increasingly toward the Insane Theocrat end of the political spectrum.  People who won’t be voting on Tuesday claim they are tired of the same old two party system, but in reality (that place where many Republicans no longer reside) there is only one sensible party.  The GOP has gone off into la-la land, over the map where someone in a rush born of fear scrawled “Here there be monsters”.

So I’ll cast my vote for the current President, with all his faults and limitations, because the alternative – a Romney administration, with its ability to enact the mad schemes of the rabid House Republicans and to push the Supreme Court decidedly rightward for the next quarter century – is simply unthinkable.

Well, OUR Invisible Sky God is REAL

What are we to make of what appears to be a rising wave of protests at American embassies in the Muslim world?

(a)  I've seen the trailer that has supposedly pissed these people off.  The video, if I recall correctly, was produced by a delightful tandem of a fundamentalist Christian organization and a right-wing Israeli-American businessman.  (Correct me if I'm wrong.)  So there's a whole lot of stupid going on there, in addition to the fact that the video had the production values and dialog one would expect of a basement-dwelling 14-year old recluse who hates the world in general and Arabs (not necessarily Islam) in particular.  There’s no reason for us to apologize for freedom of speech, of course; but it also wouldn’t hurt if we denounced this piece of poorly-made, ill-considered trash, and the idiots who made it, for the sake of good taste, if nothing else.

(b)  There’s a not-insignificant number of Muslims who take any perceived insult to their (possibly mythical*) founding prophet as a reason to commit atrocities.  In truth, they could find any reason to go off on a rampage, some of them more justifiable than others.  Murder and wanton destruction in the cause of religious belief is, however, never justified. 

(c)  The year in America and the west, 2012, is the year 1433 in the Islamic calendar.  Here’s where Western Civilization was in the 1400s:

• The English (Catholic) government is burning Lollards for their different interpretation of Christian doctrine.
• Jews throughout Christendom are imprisoned, tortured, and ordered to convert to Christianity or face expulsion.
• The Hundred Years War is in full swing and Joan of Arc is burnt at the stake as a witch.
• The trans-Atlantic African slave trade begins, initially justified to the Pope with the claim that the slavers had a “Christianizing” mission.
• The Christian Genoese transport tens of thousands of slaves from the Caucasus to the new Muslim Sultan of Egypt.
• The Spanish Inquisition begins.
• Pope Innocent VIII declares that not only witches in Germany but also their cats should be burned at the stake.
• Christopher Columbus and his compatriots enslave thousands of natives in the “New World”; 400 years later fewer than 5% of the Western Hemisphere’s pre-Columbian native population remains alive.

Christianity hadn’t yet gone through the Reformation or the Enlightenment after 1400 years.  Neither has Islam to this point.  Of course, that’s precisely what Islam needs – an Enlightenment.  Secular ideas of the dignity of the individual and freedom of speech have yet to spread throughout the Muslim world.  I don’t doubt that they will; it’s just that the concentration of liberal secular thinking hasn’t hit the saturation point yet.  Which leads me to say that…

(d)  …there are lot of legitimate reasons to criticize the state of Islam today.  None of them are reflected in that video.  Pointing out the hypocrisy endemic to Islam, as I’ve said before, is an exercise best left to people who don’t live in glass houses – and Christians and Jews (the makers of this “film”) are definitely dwelling in domiciles of the transparent, fused sand variety.

__________________________________________________________

*Why didn’t I know until now that there aren’t a whole lot of contemporary, non-Koranic accounts of Mohammed’s life?  “Jesus and Mo” may actually be a meeting of non-entities after all.

Lessons from the Wisconsin Recall Election

1.  The recall effort never really caught on with the general electorate.  Polls consistently showed support for Scott Walker at 48-54% during the entire campaign.  Unless there was some new and damaging information about Walker – or there was a serious effort to expose Walker for the corporate stooge he is - there was no way Walker was losing.

2.  When Democrats talk about how the election depends on “the ground game” – that is, getting as many voters to the ballot box as possible – they are conceding the fact that they are likely to lose.  If your message doesn’t resonate with a clear majority of voters, then the problem is with (a) the message, (b) the messenger(s), (c) the voters, and/or (d) the system.  In Wisconsin’s case there was a perfect storm of all four.  More on this below.

3.  Despite the efforts of the national media to declare the Wisconsin recall election a bellwether  for November, that’s just wishful thinking on their part.  Polls showed that Obama is still the favorite among Wisconsin voters; the state may be in play, but Obama is still far more likely to win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes than Romney.

Now, to elaborate on my number two above:

The Message:  If the message catches on with enough people you will usually win.  But from the beginning the average Wisconsin voter, who does not work for the state and is not a member of a union, simply could not be roused to anger by Walker’s opponents.  This is partly the fault of the continued inability of liberals to go for the gut – a skill the Republican Party and its supporters have perfected over the last three decades.  Reasoned arguments only sway the reasonable.  Rather than aim for the head the anti-Walker forces would have been better served to aim for the genitals.  They should have made a commercial that shows the most extreme consequences of conservative philosophy regarding labor:  people living in miserable hovels, eating rotten food, drinking filthy water, breathing smog instead of air, their pre-teen children coming home from their 12-hour work shifts, some of them clutching the fingers they lost to the machines of industry where mom still works but dad doesn’t, because he was killed by private security guards while picketing for a shorter work week and a wage over $3.50 an hour.  (If that sounds far-fetched, then you haven’t read your labor history.)  The average person needs a good swift kick in the sensitive area to be awakened to action.

The Messenger(s):  The fact that liberals chose to run the same candidate against Walker, Tom Barrett, who lost to Walker in the previous election shows an appalling lack of understanding of what energizes people.  Barrett is an establishment man, an insider of the party, and if there’s anything that grass-roots insurgencies despise it’s the Bland Bureaucrat in the Gray Suit.  Barrett’s candidacy had all the passion and fire of a meeting with a narcoleptic insurance agent.  I’m not familiar enough with the political scene in Wisconsin to be able to suggest an appropriate replacement, but there must have been someone with at least a smidgeon of charisma to have carried the banner of liberalism and labor.

The Voters:  There were arguably good reasons to vote in favor of the sitting governor – after all, he was elected by a clear majority two years ago, and polls showed support for the recall at 48% or lower throughout the campaign.  More than a few voters were probably put off by what they believed to be a waste of money and time in trying to delegitimize the election of 2010.  Of course, for every good reason to support Walker, there are more than enough bad reasons, and this is where the progressive movement fell short in blasting their opponents for their mendacity and short-sightedness.  Rather than call the pro-Walker types out for what they are – dupes of Big Business, enemies of the only counter-balance to corporate abuses (that is, the unions), and generally selfish bastards – the anti-Walker movement took the high road.  That was a mistake.  Let’s take the 1968 American presidential election:  if you voted for George Wallace, you are a bigot.  Not an American with a different point of view, not a Dixiecrat, not a conservative – you are a bigot.  Sure, you may apply any other label to yourself, but for the purpose of identifying the primary reason for your vote, you are a racist.  Likewise, the supporters of Walker should have been called what they are:  enablers of a union-busting Koch-sucking stooge who puts profit ahead of people.  Sadly there are an awful lot of voters who have been duped into believing that they agree with the Walkers of the world – even when it goes against their own interests.

The System:  The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of politics under the Citizens United rules.  The result?  Most of the $30 million spent to support Walker came from out of state – large contributors like the infamous Koch brothers – while Barrett, who did not get much support from the national Democratic machine and had to depend on the unions and small contributions from Wisconsin citizens, had all of about $4 million to spend.  The system, which has always been subtly weighted in favor of the wealthy and the connected, is now unashamedly open about its acceptance of big money coming from powerful interests in order to manipulate public opinion.  Unless this state of affairs is reversed, the Wisconsin recall election will be remembered as the harbinger of the death of popular democracy and the beginning of a true plutocracy.

These are the lessons we should take from the Wisconsin debacle.  It’s not the end of unions or of democratic government – but it’s another mile-marker on the road that leads to the United States of America, Inc.

Hey! You Got Your Bible In My Government!

On Tuesday May 8 the voters of North Carolina went to the polls to vote on, among other things, amending the state constitution to include the following:

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

The amendment passed, garnering 61% of the vote (although, as the Rude Pundit points out, only 21% of the registered electorate voted in favor of the amendment, due to the relatively low voter turnout of only 34% overall).   And once again we are given evidence as to why the rights of a minority should generally not be subject to the whims of the majority.

I have no desire to discuss the unintended consequences of this amendment for straight couples, nor do I wish to address the obvious drawbacks to corporations seeking to employ talented people from out-of-state who happen to be in a committed homosexual relationship.  Often these peripheral arguments are made to convince people whose bigotry isn’t necessarily grounded in uncompromising absolutism that they should wait to vote for discrimination when it’s more narrowly focused – you know, so that only the gays lose out.  I don’t like to give people those easy outs.  You’re either on the right side or the wrong side of the issue.

So don’t tell me that “people of good faith can disagree” on such fundamental matters as human rights.  (“Faith” is a big part of the problem, but more on that soon.)  I don’t give a damn for “good faith”, because it is a useless cop-out in this context for refusing to confront evil.  What matters is if you are a good person who would not deny equal rights to other good people. 

What we witnessed on May 8th was the triumph of religious intrusion into civic government, the injection – once again – of private piety into public policy, something that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution categorically rejects.  Because while you as an individual may have chosen to bear the yoke of your faith you don’t have the right to place the shackles of irrational bigotry on anyone else.

If you make the claim that God, through the Bible, has declared homosexuality sinful, you make me sad, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to go forth and, uhm, not be homosexual (I guess).  And yes, you can point to passages in the Bible that do, indeed, illustrate God’s antipathy toward homosexual sex:

If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. (Leviticus 20:13)

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion. ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. (Leviticus 18:22-24)

(Of course, the hypocrisy of the people who quote these passages, yet continue to do things like eat shellfish and wear clothing made of different fabrics, among other laws listed in Leviticus, has been pointed out many times, and doesn’t bear repeating here.)

But here’s the problem that you should have:  We both live in a (supposedly) secular democratic republic – one that allows you to impose faith-based limits on your own behavior but that prevents you from placing those same faith-based limits on the behavior of those who do not share your belief system.  Furthermore, you would be wrong to vote your faith and turn your sectarian belief into the law of the land – thereby forcing the government to “respect an establishment of religion” (as I and many others would interpret that line).  Unfortunately we’re becoming less and less concerned about shoring up the wall between church and state in these Culture War times.  In my dream of a rational American polity, any appeal to God’s word as a factor in public policy should immediately disqualify the speaker from being considered a serious participant in a debate – and should cause that person to be laughed out of the meeting hall.

An argument based on God’s word is one that is inflexible and not subject to compromise, because, well, it’s God’s word, and God is infallible and perfect and all that.  And here’s where liberal Christians run into a problem, because both they and conservative Christians use different, often contradictory, passages from the same Bible to support their opinions.  It’s a weakness that an atheist doesn’t share.  God often spoke out of both sides of his mouth on any number of topics, and so the liberal Christian and the conservative Christian are equally right and wrong.  The secularist doesn’t have this chink in his rhetorical armor.  To the rationalist, the atheist, and the secularist, in matters of public policy what God has to say about homosexuality or shellfish or clothing is irrelevant.

It is important to keep the First Amendment in mind precisely because religion has been afforded a pass from honest scrutiny in this country for far too long, to the detriment of advancing civil rights.  For while the proponents of Amendment 1 may be more or less hostile to equal rights for homosexuals or to homosexual persons themselves, the vast majority of them – liberal and conservative – are allowed to express their bigotry in the language of religion.  Which is why this:

I hate fags because they’re filthy unnatural people, so they shouldn’t be allowed to marry

is not acceptable, while this:

Homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God so homosexuals don’t deserve the right to marry

is spoken and essentially unchallenged.  Worse still is the fact that the speaker can vote and enforce his will over others who do not share his narrow sectarian views.  The iron fist of bigotry, whether bare or covered in the velvet glove of religious language, strikes equally as hard. 

Please, do not speak to me of “people of good faith”.  Because “good faith” without “good work” is truly, truly dead – and voting against equal rights for gay couples is bad, bad work indeed.

Gutenberg Is The Bibliophiliac’s Pimp, You Know

I’ve entered the electronic book age, albeit on the cheap:  I don’t have a Kindle or similar device, but Amazon has a free application that functions similar to the Kindle.  I downloaded the application and made my first purchase of an e-book (Paris 1919:  Six Months That Changed the World) soon thereafter.

There are some things I like about the e-book phenomenon.  For one thing, I find that I am reading more; considering how much time I spend staring at my computer screen, it feels good to actually put that time to good use.  And speaking of time, it took literally seconds for me to download a book of around 450 pages, immediately after I purchased it – I didn’t have to pay for shipping, or wait a week for delivery.  Because I can browse for titles on line, I can also read the reviews posted by people who had already purchased the books, giving me a little insight into whether or not a book is worth my time (and money).  Eventually I imagine I’ll have a little travelling electronic library – which is another advantage of this medium:  I have a small house, without a lot of room for bookshelves, and there is no way for me to fit in all the books I’d like to in the available shelf space.

So those are the positives.  But there’s a major negative that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to overlook, and I wager my complaint is a common one among book lovers.

“Book lover” – a wonderful term, because in essence, that’s what a book becomes:  our constant companion, for an undetermined length of time, one with whom we share stolen moments when we are otherwise alone, in a private place, where we can submerge ourselves into the embrace of those alluring printed pages.  To hold and read a book is to experience a very special intellectual intimacy, but there is a smidgen of the physical as well; nothing quite matches the feel and smell of a book.

E-books are practical, and convenient, and they are undoubtedly the wave of the future as regards the mass-marketing of text.  But they’ll never engender the romance and excitement one gets from holding a real, printed book. 

Racism, Classism, Misogyny: An American Tale

The state of North Carolina is picking at a still-open wound that for years has been ignored:  the involuntary sterilization of those deemed racially undesirable and unfit to reproduce.

The practice of forced sterilization was an outgrowth of the politics of race in late 19^th and early 20^th century America, the child of eugenics, the grandchild of social Darwinism.  Twenty-seven states instituted some type of forced sterilization programs, usually targeting criminals or the mentally ill or disabled.  North Carolina was one of only a few states to include race and class in its formulation to determine who would be subject to the government’s scalpel.  Young women on public assistance – the vast majority of them African-American – were threatened with being cut off from the pittance they were allotted by the state unless they accepted being surgically sterilized.

One such victim is Elaine Riddick, who, at the age of fourteen, was raped, became pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Tony, in 1968.  Unbeknownst to Elaine, her illiterate grandmother was somehow convinced to authorize the state to sterilize the teenager (she marked an “X” on the consent form).  Elaine gave birth via a C-section, and at the same time the physicians sterilized her – a fact she didn’t know until five years later, at which point she was newly married and ready to bear children with her husband.  But of course, she couldn’t – because the state had, without her knowledge and certainly against her will, made the decision that she should never again conceive a child.

Why had the state done this?  Because the state believed she was “promiscuous and didn’t get along well with others.”

Riddick later said “I didn’t get along well with others because I was hungry.  I was cold.  I was a victim of rape.”

The charge of promiscuity is what stands out for me, because it reveals so much about the way in which our male-dominated society has historically viewed the crime of rape.  Elaine was brutally attacked and impregnated by a man – and yet she was branded “promiscuous”.  Was this the state’s way of saying “she was asking for it”?  Was 1968 too early for North Carolina’s law enforcement agencies to recognize rape as a crime of violence, rather than of sex?

Elaine Riddick was a victim many times over.  She was  not only victimized by the man who raped and impregnated her.  She was additionally victimized by a culture that saw her rape not as a crime committed by a stronger man against a weaker girl, but as the result of her own “promiscuity”, making her at least partly responsible for her own rape.  She was victimized by a state which saw her as less human thanks to her race and her class.  And she was victimized by a society that still tries to divide people in order to keep them subservient to the desires of the powerful.

North Carolina’s current government is grappling with how much to compensate the victims of its eugenics program.  No matter how much money the state eventually gives in recompense, it will never be enough to erase the stain of genocidal intent.

The Closeted Atheist

A friend of mine recently admitted that he didn’t use the term “atheist” to refer to himself.  Not because it wasn’t accurate – he holds the same non-belief in gods and the supernatural as I do – but because of the negative traits people in general, and religious believers in particular, associate with the term.  He said he didn’t like how people believe atheists are immoral, certainly less moral than god-fearing folk.

This is one way in which the religious have defined, to their advantage, the difference between those who subscribe to a faith tradition and those who do not.  The definition is one that has become an accepted meme in our culture, and is a major reason why more non-believers are reluctant to publicly identify themselves as such.  Or if they do, they often choose the less-threatening term agnostic because the word atheist carries so much negative social baggage.

I could not argue against my friend’s decision, because keeping his atheism hidden is still the best choice for those of us who live in a country where an African-American man can finally be elected President, but an atheist hasn’t got a chance in hell.

For myself, I am openly out of the non-believer’s closet.  I am not shy about declaring my atheism.  But I am very much aware of the isolation and mistrust that such a declaration can engender – and I am sad for my friend who has to hide his honest opinions for fear of making himself a pariah.

Evil Causes And The People Who Fight For Them

A response to blogger Christopher Knight regarding the statue of the Confederate soldier, recently toppled by a wayward vehicle, in Reidsville:

Mr. Knight, your post at "The Knight Shift" reveals an all-too-common lack of historical knowledge. Even a casual open-minded study of history would have led you to different conclusions; however, as you found it necessary to defend what, in the 21st century, should be obviously indefensible, I find it equally necessary to provide a counter-point to your paean to the Confederate soldier statue.

You write:

Here's to hoping them to do the right thing, however. The Confederate Soldiers Monument... contrary to what some speakers at today's meeting asserted, is not a monument to a lost cause. It is not a monument to a slavery. It is absolutely NOT a monument to racism!

I suggest you read James Loewen's "Lies Across America", specifically the many entries examining the origin and actual purpose of statues erected by such organizations as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. These statues - including the one in Reidsville - are nothing if not steeped in an attempt to glorify that "lost cause", which itself had everything to do with defending racism and slavery. They were erected at the turn of the 20^th century at the height of the Jim Crow era to remind African Americans that they were still subservient to whites, and that they should keep to their place. Yet for white people these statues were built in towns across the south as a way of controlling the narrative - that is, to distort history and to gloss over the realities of southern racist culture. As Loewen writes:

When proponents of change do their homework, so they can show that a person or event was controversial in the past and has been idealized in the teeth of damning evidence ever since, opponents of landscape revision cannot claim that correcting markers or removing monuments does violence to our history. Instead they usually argue that the proposed revision does violence to "our heritage." "The heritage syndrome," as historian Michael Kammen calls it, is "an impulse to remember what is attractive or flattering and to ignore all the rest."

The conflict between history and "heritage" goes still deeper. Too often, events that reek of dishonor and shame get abracadabraed into a noble heritage...

The point to neo-Confederates is not to put the Confederacy into its proper historical context, but to maintain its symbols as sites for homage in the present.*

You write:

It is a monument to nearly two thousand men of Rockingham County - more than most other counties in the state which sent the most soldiers to serve in the Confederate army - who arose to the task of defending their families and their communities in a conflict that certainly not one of them had wanted to see in their lifetime or the lifetime of their children.

The personal motivations of the soldiers are irrelevant. The simple fact remains that the reason these people took up arms was to defend an illegal and immoral rebellion, based upon opposition to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, out of nothing else than fear that slavery would be abolished. If you think otherwise, you would be proven wrong by the very declarations of secession of Georgia, which stated that a reason for the state's leaving the Union was:

The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders [the Republican Party] and applauded by its followers.

or of Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.

or of South Carolina, here regarding the Northern states:

Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

or of Texas:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

These declarations provide proof positive that the basis for the establishment of the Confederacy was nothing other than the protection of slavery and continuation of racism. Yet you, Mr. Knight, write:

It is a monument to men who went to fight in a war that was clearly unfortunate... but only the most ignorant or the most foolish would call it a war with any side that was clearly evil.

Even at the time, most of the western world outside of the American south recognized slavery as a moral evil. Some one hundred and fifty years later, there should be absolutely no question in a modern mind about the inhuman institution the Confederacy was created to defend - nor of the misguided sense of duty of those who took up arms to maintain that inhuman institution in the Confederacy's name.

It is a monument to men who were only doing what they knew best to do in this fallen world, not out of hate but out of love.

Sadly, their love did not extend beyond their own narrow-minded, culturally conservative racism. For this they should, at best, be pitied - not glorified.

Who are we, who are any of us, to presume that we know better or that we would have done otherwise?

Millions of Americans - including in the southern states - knew what was right, and did the right thing. The people who fought in defense of slavery were wrong. This does not mean they were not brave, or honest - but brave and honest men can fight for evil reasons. Unless you think that every one of the millions of Germans who fought in Adolf Hitler's army were completely devoid of any redeeming human qualities, and that every single one of the millions of Americans who fought against his army were conversely devoid of any faults or moral failures.

Because as far as this writer is concerned, the men who went out from their farms in Rockingham County, were fighting as much for the freedom that we have today... including the freedom to never have to make the choices that they were forced to make... as they were fighting for their own families and friends and communities.

The irony fairly drips from this statement, for the soldiers of the Confederacy were not fighting for freedom, but for slavery. What they fought against was the progressive march of bringing freedom to all, rather than preserve it for a privileged few.

If none of that is worth remembering, honoring and even celebrating, then... I honestly don't know what would be.

You cannot divorce the individual soldier from the evil of his cause. Evil causes should be denigrated - not celebrated.

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*James W. Loewen, Lies Across America, pp. 41-42.