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Today's Today

American Indian Religious Freedom Act

Legislative history

• Introduced in the Senate as S.J.Res. 102 by James Abourezk (D-SD) on December 15, 1977
• Committee consideration by Senate Indian Affairs
• Passed the Senate on April 3, 1978
• Passed the House on July 18, 1978 (in lieu of H.J.Res. 738, 337–81) with amendment
• Senate agreed to House amendment on July 27, 1978
• Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on August 11, 1978

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, Public Law No. 95–341, 92 Stat. 469 (Aug. 11, 1978) (commonly abbreviated to AIRFA), codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1996, is a United States federal law, enacted by joint resolution of the Congress in 1978. Prior to the act, many aspects of Native American religions and sacred ceremonies had been prohibited by law.

The law was enacted to return basic civil liberties to American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Native Hawaiians, and to allow them to practice, protect and preserve their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise their traditional religious rites, spiritual and cultural practices. These rights include, but are not limited to, access to sacred sites, freedom to worship through traditional ceremonial rites, and the possession and use of objects traditionally considered sacred by their respective cultures.

The Act requires policies of all governmental agencies to eliminate interference with the free exercise of Native American religions, based upon the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and to accommodate access to, and use of, Native American religious sites to the extent that the use is practicable and is consistent with an agency's essential functions. It also acknowledges the prior violation of that right.

Passage

American Indian religious practices have often been prohibited by existing federal laws and government policies. There have been three general areas of conflict.

The passages of the Indian Removal Act (1830) and General Allotment Act (1887) resulted in the forced relocation and displacement of hundreds of tribes from their traditional homelands. Most of the people of the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeastern United States were forced into the Central Plains of the United States, and the forced assimilation of Native American families into agricultural settler societies and, later, urban communities left Native Americans without access to the sacred sites where they and their ancestors had traditionally held their religious ceremonies. Native American spiritual culture is tied to place, making some ceremonies difficult or impossible to practice when removed from their original context. At sites that are seen as particularly holy, only certain people are allowed to enter, and protocols are observed as to what behaviors must be observed, or prohibited, at these locations. These beliefs can conflict with the idea that American public lands now exist for the recreational use of all the American people.

The second conflict was the possession by tribal members of ceremonial items considered sacred and in their cultures and an integral part of their ceremonies that are nonetheless restricted under United States law. Eagle feathers or bones are considered necessary for certain ceremonies, yet the birds are protected as a threatened species. The importance of eagle feathers and bones for use in traditional religious ceremonies has been repeatedly cited in cases involving Indian claims on hunting and fishing rights, with petitions being made for exceptions to occasionally hunt for eagles. The Native American Church uses peyote as a sacrament. However, peyote is a legally restricted substance.

The third general area of conflict was an issue of government interference into the sphere of religion. Despite the American laws governing the separation of church and state, Native Americans were not being treated equally under the law, and their sacred ceremonies were often subject to interference from overzealous government officials or curious onlookers.

The act acknowledged prior federal infringement on the rights of American Indians to freedom of religion, and that their First Amendment right of "free exercise" of religion had been denied.

President Jimmy Carter said, in a statement about the AIRFA:

In the past, Government agencies and departments have on occasion denied Native Americans access to particular sites and interfered with religious practices and customs where such use conflicted with Federal regulations. In many instances, the Federal officials responsible for the enforcement of these regulations were unaware of the nature of traditional native religious practices and, consequently, of the degree to which their agencies interfered with such practices.

This legislation seeks to remedy this situation.

Yellow Shirt

Overheard

No, you're not obeying god.

You're just obeying the men

who invented your religion.

Choices

When your religion comes between you and your neighbor, it's time to shitcan that stupid fuckin' religion.

I'm Not A Bible Guy

... but I think I know bullshit when I hear it.

And, of course, I don't always.

Exegesis:

A critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works.

Eisegesis:

The process of interpreting text in such a way as to introduce one's own presuppositions, agendas or biases.

@ken.arrington Replying to @bethanderson A Lesson In How to Read the Bible That Many Church Leaders and Christians Need to Know - Why does the Bible seem to say opposite things depending on who’s preaching? One pastor silences women. Another uplifts them. Some justify war. Others call for peace. Same Bible. Well, it all comes down to how you read it. There are two main approaches: exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis means to draw out. You ask who wrote it, when, why, and to whom. You let the text speak from within its own world. Eisegesis means to read into. You bring your assumptions and twist Scripture to fit your view. You skip the history. You skip the context. You skip the culture. That’s how people turn the widow’s mite into a lesson on giving instead of a warning about religious exploitation. That’s how one verse gets used to silence women, when Paul was addressing a specific abuse of power in a specific city. Want to know how to read the Bible? Start with curiosity. Ask real questions. Honor the history and cultures it was written into. Stop making the Bible a mirror for your beliefs. Let it become a window into something bigger. #biblestudy #howtoreadthebible #church #howtoreadthebibleforbeginners #kenarrington #religiousdeconstruction ♬ original sound - Ken

So now I'm left to wonder about the courts - especially the "conservative" courts - and specifically the Supreme Court.

Are they doing the exegesis thing or the eisegesis thing? And what, if anything, can I infer from their language by applying this newfound knowledge of how some people operate?

It's a puzzlement.

On A Sunday - Overheard

Feel free to mock me

for being atheist.

It won't hurt my feelings,

it won't shake my "faith" in

sound practical reasoning,

and I won't kill you for it.

Time For Bible Study

And I Am Right

If Christians are right,

5.1 billion people will go to hell.

If Muslims are right,

5.5 billion people will go to hell.

If I'm right,

NOBODY'S GOING TO HELL

Today's Today

For all my nutty Christian friends - glad you're around,

and I'm gladder that you don't try to beat me over the head with it.

War Sucks

And "holy wars" suck the worst.

If you say atrocities committed in the name of religion can't be blamed on religion because it's an individual person committing the acts, then you can't credit religion as being the reason for a person's moral acts done in the name of religion.

“Ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.”

--Sam Harris 

Hamas gang raped and beheaded women at rave massacre, fresh testimony reveals

Almost two months after the attack, the international community is beginning to act on reports of Palestinian sexual violence

Survivors of the Supernova massacre witnessed women being gang raped and beheaded, new testimony has revealed.

Yoni Saadon, who escaped execution by hiding underneath a stage, said: “I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.

“She was screaming, ‘Stop it—already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head.

“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters. Or my sister—I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”

Speaking to The Sunday Times at Sitria, a support area set up for festival survivors southeast of Tel Aviv, Saadon said he also witnessed the brutal murder of women who resisted Hamas attackers.

“They had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her,” he said.

“They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too.”

Discussing another woman who was killed in front of him, Saadon added: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too.

“I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’.”

Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, which collects the remains of the dead, told The Sunday Times it was clear Hamas terrorists aimed to sexually assault women.

“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said.

“No one saw more than us. It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”

In one field, he said, he found the bodies of two girls with their legs apart who had both been shot in the head. One had her shorts ripped and had been shot in the vagina, the other had her jeans pulled down and bruises on her legs.

Architect Shari, who has volunteered at the Shura military base to help identify and prepare corpses for burial, said she was horrified at the scale of the violence inflicted upon women by Hamas.

“Opening the body bags was scary as we didn’t know what we would see,” she told The Sunday Times.

“They were all young women. Most in little clothing or shredded clothing and their bodies bloodied particularly round their underwear and some women shot many times in the face as if to mutilate them.

“Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in the crotch, in the breasts … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”

Israeli police investigating sexual violence committed on October 7 say they have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips documenting Hamas’s crimes.

Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the probe, said: “It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.

The fresh revelations come as mounting evidence of brutal atrocities committed against women on October 7 has spurred the international community to react.

57 days after the massacres, UN Women have issued a statement condemning the "brutal attacks" launched by Hamas against Israel.

The international body said: “We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”

Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, who spent 12 years as a committee member on the UN convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, told The Sunday Times: “This is the statement they should have issued two months ago. “It’s mindblowing.

“We were there for our sisters when terrible things happened across the ocean, when they took away abortion rights in US, the killing of women in Iran, the abduction of Yazidis … but with us they looked away and I can’t think of a reasonable answer.”

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has meanwhile spent the last two days in Israel meeting survivors and hostage families.

He says he will investigate crimes within his jurisdiction, which is expected to include sexual violence.

Today's Jesus Thing

The guys who wrote the Gospels (first-hand eye witness accounts that were written only a hundred or two hundred years after the fact) - those guys knew they were spinning some big-time yarns.

They knew what the Old Testament prophesies were - eg: the messiah will enter Jerusalem on a particular sabbath riding an ass - and they said so: "We're telling you this is what happened because it fulfills the prophesy."

But the kicker - what I'm please to have realized today - (paraphrasing) "The virgin birth was God encoding himself into humanity." And suddenly something seems pretty clear:

Bible bear a striking and undeniable resemblance to Greek mythology.

God encodes himself into humanity through the virgin birth - just like Zeus takes the form of a swan so he can fuck Leda.

Everything is derivative. Everything evolves from and into something else.

The Lion Man

About 40,000 years ago, somebody carved a figure - a fetish - from a piece of mammoth ivory.

The thinking is that of course it's a religious thing. Cuz people back then were stupid and gullible. They couldn't possibly be trying to make sense of their own identities and the place in nature they occupy - contemplating the beginnings of life itself by thinking logically. It just had to be religion, because - well, it just had to be religion.

Maybe - just maybe - they were thinking about evolution instead of some bullshit religious fantasy. And maybe one of the really smart ones came up with the idea of visual aids in an attempt to explain how one life form leads to another life form.

It's just a guess. It's just my own ego telling me that as stupidly as we behave sometimes, humans are really pretty smart, and if we can figure out how to side-step the religious mumbo jumbo and the political fog that always accompanies religion, then maybe we can move this thing along a little better that what we've done so far.

Just sayin'.

Overheard

Religion:

Why do they love me and hate you?

Atheism:

Because you're a comforting lie,

and I'm the painful truth.

Get Thee Behind Me, Bitch

Father Ed - Nova Scotia

If I'd had a guy like this guy back when I was a smart-ass mouthy teenager, maybe I'd've known more than I knew, and maybe it takes not quite so fucking long for me to get a few things figured out.

This Headline

About a month ago in Spanish News Today:

(the site doesn't allow for any of my copy-n-paste shenanigans)

Today's Reddit etc

A little something from a guy who's my kinda Christian.

And one from the Catholics:

Today's Message

We have to develop a relationship with ourselves as we grow up, but religion relies on self-infantilization - on instigating and reinforcing the deliberate insistence that we must refuse to be the adult in that relationship.

This is the first time I've ever heard a preacher articulate that.

The function of the Christ is not to rescue the sinners, but to empower you, and to call you to be more deeply and fully human than you've ever realized there was the potential within you to be.

Maybe salvation needs to be conveyed in terms of enhancing your humanity rather than rescuing you from it.

Thank God I'm An Atheist

If religion was actually perceived as helpful, it'd be goin' strong.

And it's not like some powerful new sloganeering campaign will fix what's wrong with it. 

The Hill:

The percentage of Americans who have membership in a house of worship has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in eight decades, according to a report released by Gallup on Monday.

U.S. church membership has steadily been declining for the past two decades. Before 2000, church membership had generally stayed around 70 percent from when Gallup began measuring it in the 1930s.

In 2020, membership reached an all-time low of 47 percent.

“The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference,” Gallup notes in its report. “Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1998-2000 to 13% in 2008-2010 and 21% over the past three years.”

A small portion of the drop in membership is due to a decline in Americans who said they have formal church membership. From 1998 to 2000, 73 percent of religious Americans said they belonged to a church. That number has since dropped to an average of 60 percent of religious Americans.

Church membership is also strongly linked to age, Gallup notes. Among people born before 1946, 66 percent belong to a church with the share of people dropping as the generations progress. 58 percent of baby boomers, 50 percent of Generation X and 36 percent of Millennials report belong to a church.

However, regardless of generation, the share of U.S. adults who do not have a religious affiliation or belong to a church has continued to grow. The trend was also observed across all subgroups including men, women, Hispanics, political parties and region of the U.S.

"The U.S. remains a religious nation, with more than seven in 10 affiliating with some type of organized religion," the Gallup report reads. "However, far fewer, now less than half, have a formal membership with a specific house of worship. While it is possible that part of the decline seen in 2020 was temporary and related to the coronavirus pandemic, continued decline in future decades seems inevitable, given the much lower levels of religiosity and church membership among younger versus older generations of adults."

Today's Quote

Archibald McLeish

Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves.

It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.

Overheard

The Vatican has announced that Easter is canceled for 2020.
The Pope said, "Jesus can stay dead this year - we'll catch him up next time."