by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

SML90   

Crusader: 1. A member of any of the military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. 2. A militantly religious person, regarded by mainstream Christians to be heretical, aggressively perpetuating a holy war. 3. In modern America, a Dominionist.

Secular people are under attack by heretical crusaders, who have turned their attentions away from other religions to banish those with no religion from their midst. From my disadvantage point, it looks like they are lobbing rocks at us and then, after we duck to avoid injury, they start pointing their fingers and exclaiming, "Look! They're getting ready to attack!"

We like to call ourselves 'freethinkers' for only one set of reasons: We resist the herding instinct that drives the crusaders. We tend to think for ourselves, to find our own answers for life's various questions, and to designate our own rules to formulate our own lifestyles. We have seldom had a chance to do that, to live according to our own creeds, and to demonstrate the merits of them. While we may be individualists in the sense upon which America was founded, and made the effort to find our own answers, the most startling result of that may be that (despite all the constant bickering among us about minor points) the general principles we end up defending all pretty much agree.

But, they generally also disagree with the canned and prepackaged beliefs upheld by the crusaders. Our resistance to the human herding instinct is not without good reasons, but it tends to work against our chances of uniting into a common cause, and that makes us easy victims for the predators who like to perpetuate crusades by ganging up on minorities. Our resistance to the human herding instinct that leads people into becoming 'sheeple' is not the only trait that works against secular people, not by a long toss of a double-bladed cross.

An observable trait of the religious is a tendency to pretend something is true in spite of contrariness to facts, and then to pretend no one is pretending. What secular people diagnose as "they telling themselves lies to believe in", in spite of all our dismay, is nothing more than a feature of pretending and pretending to not pretend. It sounds horrendous and accusatory to say it, but that is the basic nature of religion in a nutcase.

A common trait among humans is the appreciation of fantasy. Stories about fantastic deeds and heroes sell far and wide to a large audience. People avoid watching the evening news when nothing spectacular is occurring in the world, and will turn the channels to watch a romance, comedy, or a movie because "the news has gotten too bland." Secular people's traits run contrary to that.

While exceptions abound, secular people reject fantasy. We call it "lies", "myths", and "the imaginings of distorted minds". We want tangible evidence that some event occurred before we'll ever feel interested in reading about it. Otherwise, in our minds, Jesus never lived, God is a delusion fostered by greedy, manipulative priests and politicians, and the Bible, Quran, and all the Vedas and such are only recorded myths handed down from generation to generation by ignorant tribal nomads in prehistory, or doctored versions of the same.

I presented all that to you so that you can see the relevancy of it to the current ongoing conflict. You and I, and other secular people, have of course read the written works of our founding fathers over the course of our years, and arrived at our own conclusions regarding them. While I still reveled in the throes of youth, not all that many decades ago, the written works of folks such as the Thomases Paine and Jefferson, the Madisons, the original President George W, and Abraham Lincoln were presented to us, as written, without interpretation. We regarded freedom as important to defend, and were taught that.

That has changed over the years. Thomas Jefferson warned about the inroads the clergy (and the Christians) strove to make into governmental prominence, and Madison warned about the necessity of keeping religion and government separated. The crusaders struggle to claim them, now, and to name the both of them and all the rest as "Christians" who "proclaimed God (specific god not mentioned) the Creator and Ruler of the Universe". The crusaders insist it was the God of the Christians and Jews. The Founding Fathers, and those with them at the time who wrote about them, all deny that.

The crusaders treat all of that the same way they treat their Bibles, and why not? They have precedence set by generations of their own forefathers. When something has been the common practice and it serves the cause, they don't question it. When something otherwise innocuous gets in the way and serves to thwart the cause, pretend it's evil and name it as such. It's easy, it's practical, and it's recognized by others of like mind as "right".

In George Lakoff's words, it fits the frame. That which gets adjudged "evil" does not fit the frame. If it fits the frame, then it's "right". If it fails to fit the frame, then it it has to be wrong, and don't ask a whole lot of questions about it. It's wrong, and so it's evil. If it's evil, it's the Devil's so don't mess with it or you'll get some on you. The Founding Fathers cannot be seen as evil by the crusaders; this has to be seen as a Christian Country from day one, or it's evil; if it's evil, then patriotism is wrong, and our soldiers are dying for evil causes; if we give up our best sons for evil causes, we are evil; if we are evil, we cannot be good Christians; therefore, our Founding Fathers HAVE to be Christians! The crusaders have no way to escape that.

So, our Founding Fathers have to be converted into Christians in order for the crusaders to remain the good citizens they deem themselves to be. The current war they have declared against us (which started from day one of our country's existence, as Benjamin Franklin warned us) results directly from that: Our Founding Fathers have become Christians so they must have founded a Christian nation, but we secular people have been thwarting their efforts to enforce their pretense upon us. We actually dare to challenge their claims! We claim the Founding Fathers were like us, secular people. It cannot be had both ways, they outnumber us, we refuse to pretend the same as them, and so we have to be lying.

So, now they are pretending we are lying, and that we also have no godly rules to live by, and so we are also immoral and perverts and queers (fags, if you prefer) who will hop from bed to bed and send our country down the road to Hell. Facts and statistics show otherwise, but that's beside the point. Facts and statistics disagree with the pretending in too many other ways, so how can the facts be right in this one instance? Facts are wrong, and therefore evil. Facts are what science uses to support their Darwinist Theory of Evolution. That proves facts are evil and not to be trusted, right there! See?

When everything a person bases his life upon result from pretense, and when secular people will ever learn to recognize that, and that, on top of it, the pretending not to be pretending will cause that to be denied by the crusaders, then it becomes obvious that some other method than the presentation of facts to them has to be discovered if secularity has any hope of returning to the predominance it enjoyed for the first few days of America's existence.

If secular people cannot deign to learn this one very important lesson, then I have other instructions to offer: "My secular friends, the first step is to find a large pile of sand. Spread it out to at least a foot in depth. Bend forward so your asses are higher in the air than your heads. Lean forward and plunge your heads into the sand. It's asses up, heads in the sand for the rest of your numbered days." Take my word for it, I am not pretending. If you can't understand what I'm talking about, read all you can about memes and frames, and go from there until you do. Otherwise, follow the instructions you've just read.

…is there any historical support for this…?

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Thinking about Thinking: AntiProcess

The crusaders' foundations: http://monotheism.us/holocaust_myth.html

the Resurrection: http://monotheism.us/the_risen_jesus.html

Theism and Idealism: http://www.atheistlaw.org/MaterialMatters.cfm

Biblical critique: http://www.non-religious.com/scriptures.html

Secular ethics: American Ethical Union

The rise of the crusaders: Theocracy Watch

Are Satanists really evil? To me, Satanism is a part of Christianity. Make up your own mind: http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/dvera/CoEvan/FAQ.html

How crusaders think: http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/fundy.html

Texas George and the Last Crusade: Fresh from texas

Family values begins with Marriage? http://www.atheistlaw.org/gospel.cfm

What is Word Framing All about? simple Framing >

< http://www.democracyforamerica.com/meetuphosts/framing.php >

< http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/15/2016/11711 >

< George Lakoff's diary >

< http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/ > The home for linguistics studies

And, what about honesty and trust? Did you know that the radical right has a man named Frank Luntz who writes instructions so they'll know the most effective ways to lie to you? Conservatively Speaking (ISBN 1886442118) represents his viewpoint.

For more on the Founding Fathers' beliefs: http://monotheism.us/ . One thing that's important about attributions ("Who said what and when") is to provide references, something people like Mister Robinson seldom do. It is easy to claim somebody said something. It is harder to provide proof by citing source materials. It is impossible to prove something if it's a lie to start with, and a lot of Christian Founding Fathers arguments and Intelligent Design arguments include quotes from sources long ago discredited.

Other reputable sources of Founding Fathers Quotes are:
< http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions10.html >
< http://www.non-religious.com/debate.html >
Do a Google search here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22jefferson+papers%22&btnG=Google+Search
 

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Read a book:

Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (Babinsky)

Richard Dawkins first posited memes as a likely candidate for the kind of pretending described in this essay. The Specific book about it was The Selfish Gene

QUESTION: What was the Nature of the superstition referred to in the Declaration of Independence?      "I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned …" -- Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA, letter to William Short, 1801 --

Let me tell you something: that quote has been discredited as questionable, and Christians use that as a reason to discredit all quotes secular people use in their own defense. This quote, however, is deemed valid:

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
--Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:223-- [source]

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —