He hasn't been able to get his name in the media for a long time now and he wants his "15 minutes" back.
Posted on 12/30/2008 11:54:38 AM PST by nickcarraway
A well-known California atheist says he and 17 others, plus atheist and humanist organizations, will file suit Tuesday in D.C.'s District Court to strip all references to God and religion from President-elect Barack Obama's January inauguration ceremony. Michael Newdow, of Sacramento, Calif., says he wants to remove the phrase "so help me God" from the oath of office, plus axe the invocation prayer from Pastor Rick Warren, already under fire from the left for his opposition to gay marriage.
According to Newdow, any reference to God or religion violates the Constitution.
"Equality is important to me," Newdow told The Examiner. "We should show equal respects for all of our citizens, regardless of their race, gender or religion."
The draft of the lawsuit contends: "By placing 'so help me God' in its oaths and sponsoring prayers to God, government is lending its power to one side of perhaps the greatest religious controversy: God's existence or non-existence."
Newdow has tried this before: he sued to remove religion from the 2001 and 2005 presidential inaugurations, but lost both times.
In 2005, U.S. District Judge John Bates denied his effort to obtain a preliminary injunction to keep the president from uttering the words 'so help me God' as he takes the oath of office.
Nonetheless, Newdow thinks his odds are good.
"It depends on if they decide to uphold the principles of the constitution or not," Newdow told the Examiner. "If they do, they're 100 percent."
Prof. Ron Allen, a constitutional law expert at Northwestern University, disagrees.
"You can understand the impulse, it seems as though it's a governmental activity imbued with religious symbols and a certain sect of religious symbols, Christian obviously, in particular,"Allen said. "No one thinks the government is establishing a church by the president saying 'so help be God' at his own initiative when taking the oath. I don't think the courts will intervene."
Does he mean the One ?
Allah willing
Moron.
Obama’s response:
“OK by me. No Bible - No reference to God.
Now I can get out the Koran and swear to Allah.”
The USA was founded on certain premises. Newdow is trying to force HIS morality upon all the rest of us in opposition to those premises.
That career intolerancemonger needs prayer.
From everything that I have heard, read, seen of him, I can only conclude that Mr. Michael Newdow, of Sacramento, Calif., is a petty, sad, narcissistic little man who desperately craves attention and publicity.
Good luck.
so, how does that fit in to mr “porpoise driven strife”’s plans?
I hope God boots them!
The Atheists are wasting their money. They'd been better off contributing it to Bernie Madoff.
Wish I could see him tell that to Washington, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, etc.
Newdow is a psycho-Homo.
Bingo!
Hussain votes “Present”
I guess the minority wants to tell the overwhelming majority of people here that they can’t believe in God...
Michael Newdow, “There is no God!”
God, “There is no Michael Newdow!.....Now”...............
Mr. Newdow, here's a newsflash for you... You are NOT equal, you are inferior, a blight on humanity, a parasite on culture and civilization. Stop trying to force your religion on us. Public observation of religious tenets does not make a State Religion.
I expect to see maggots like Newdow suing in the future to block all religious buildings from public view because the mere sight of a steeple, cross, Star of David, etc. offends the tender sensibilities of the atheist.
This just gets creepier by the day.
So he's ignorant as well as annoying?
Mr.(?) Newdow, it’s “Freedom OF religion” not “freedom from religion”.
Why does this ass-wipe keep saying it “violates the Constitution”?
Does this mean we abolish the Declaration of Independence???
Or, the Constitution where it says “in the year of our Lord”???
How about the Constitution of all 50 states which all mention God???
Hey, Newdow...it's freedom OF religion. Not freedom FROM religion
Was this the dude who had filed that “under God” was violating his daughters rights in school or something. Then it turned out she didn’t even live with the guy and she was being raised as a Christian?
Been a while but it was something like that???
Since when does this group follow the Constitution anyway, as the Birth Certificate fiasco proves. Hmmm...concerned about the Constitution, so does he think Obama will jump to protect the Constitution in light of NEWDOW’S Lawsuit??? Hahahahahahha
“From everything that I have heard, read, seen of him, I can only conclude that Mr. Michael Newdow, of Sacramento, Calif., is a petty, sad, narcissistic little man who desperately craves attention and publicity.” ~ WayneS
You’re right. bttt
Never Make a God of Your Irreligion
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/10/never-make-god-of-your-irreligion.html
There is no getting around the fact that the “culture war” is at bottom a theological dispute between secular and traditionally religious forces. But it would be a great error to conclude that the war therefore involves atheistic vs. theistic camps, much less logic vs. faith.
Rather, it is a war of competing theisms, each rooted in faith and steeped in metaphysics. Radical secularists are rarely neutral about God—in fact, they are quite often burning with a passion about spiritual matters—for example, the sad and persecuted figure of Michael Newdow, who cannot sleep because of the chorus of chipmonk voices in his head constantly chanting the Pledge of Allegience—WITH GOD IN IT!!!
Speaking of Newdow, atheism—you know, the obnoxious, evangelizing, fundamentalist kind—is often a revolt against an immature notion of an unjust or unmerciful God, usually internalized in childhood. In this regard, it is no different than the child who is abused or mistreated by his parents, and then spends the rest of his life unreflectively trying to work through the resultant conflicts and deficits with parental substitutes.
In fact, someone wrote a book a few years ago, showing through various case studies that if you are an atheist who wishes to pass along his faith, the worst thing you can do is treat your child well, because the child will grow up much more likely to believe in a benign and loving deity.
Obligatory atheism represents an abiding disappointment in the omnipotent gods of the nursery known as mother and father. They do not believe because they cannot believe.
Human beings cannot help being religious. One of the benefits of religion—properly understood—is that it prevents the mind from regressing into the magical worldview that preceded its development. Sophisticated secularists believe they are making progress by leaving the “superstitions” of religion behind, but this is rarely the case. As—who was it? Chesterson? Muggeridge?—said, instead of believing “nothing,” they tend to believe in “anything,” which is where the pseudo-religion of contemporary liberalism—that is, leftism—comes in.
At the foundation of the secular leftist revolt against God is the attendant idea that there is no such thing as absolute truth, for God, among other things, is the ground and possibility of Truth. (I am not including our genial Randian objectivist friends, who deserve their own day in court). The equation works both ways; if, like Nietsche, you proclaim the death of God, this necessarily results in the death of absolute truth.
The central idea of Judeo-Christian epistemology and metaphysics is that the same transcendent logos that makes the world rational and intelligible is immanent in human beings, and makes us capable of knowing it.
This is the famous WORD of God. Even if—like people who don’t believe in inoculations—you don’t believe in this Word, you nevertheless benefit from it every day from the people who do (and, perhaps more importantly, did.) For this Word accounts for both science and the scientist, while the scientist can account for neither. That is, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, creation is a result of a Word that has been spoken and can be heard and understood by human beings.
This view requires no further explanation or justification, because it is self-evident.
It is the contrary view that is profoundly problematic and incoherent: why is the world so rational and lawful, and how is a mere primate capable of comprehending its deep (and beautiful!) mathematical structure in the form, say, of quantum mechanics?
But the death of God brings with it the death of this living Word, or logos. The official name of this death of the Word is “deconstruction,” although it is really more of a murder, with murderous consequences. For if truth is relative and perception is reality, then no one’s ideas about the world are any better than anyone else’s. Fact is reduced to opinion, and conformity to opinion is ultimately maintained by the group or institution that has the power to enforce its version of reality.
Ironically, this achieves the opposite effect intended by its liberal proponents. That is, if we cannot judge the merit of competing ideas by assessing their relative truth value, then either everyone will have their own private truth, or truth will be enforced by the state or some other powerful collectivity.
On college campuses, no one is unsophisticated enough to believe that truth exists; however, you’d better not utter the wrong truth, or you will come face to face with the Dark Power that has replaced the Luminous Word.
In one version of history, the “secular revolt” may be traced to the alienation and disenchantment caused by the scientific and industrial revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries. (Although “vertically” and metaphorically, I believe we may trace the trouble back to a certain charismatic and seductive serpent who whispered the false promise, “ye shall be as gods”). There was a deep sense that the organic unity of the world had been fractured—a widespread perception of a sort of breach with the natural order of things, and with it, a collective mourning over the loss of timeless and familiar ways and customs.
The romantic movement of the early 19th century was actually a reactionary and nostalgic yearning for an idyllic past, answering to the sense of loss of community and oneness with the rhythms of nature. This backward looking movement idealized the primitive, and sought to unleash the subjective and irrational passions (countering the rational and objective detachment of science).
(It is ironic that leftists call themselves “progressives,” since the movement is ultimately reactionary and regressive to the core, psychologically, ontologically, epistemologically, and spiritually.)
Up to this time, identity had been based on such objective standards as a clearly defined role withan an organic hierarchy, or merger with a large extended family. With modernity, this gave way to an uncertain identity that had to be forged for oneself in the world. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls this “an epistemological revolution with anthroplogical consequences,” as it led to a new kind of human being that had never before existed on a mass scale: the modern, self-defining subject in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning.
Virtually all modern ideologies, movements and philosophies are somehow aimed at addressing this problem of alienation, of recapturing the broken unity of the world. Communism, nazism, European fascism, the beat movement, the hippie movement, the free love movement, the enviornmental movement, the new age movement—all are futile attempts to turn back the clock and return to a mystical union with the “volk,” with nature, with the proletariat, with the instincts. Even psychoanalysis did not escape these trends in the 1960’s.
Psychoanalytic gurus such as N.O. Brown (who thoroughly misunderstood Freud) taught that we could achieve a sort of sexual nirvana by eliminating repression and freely expressing our primitive instincts, with the implicit message that our primitive aspects are more “real” than the civilized parts.
You can see this phenomena in today’s leftists, who clearly long for the “magical” 1960’s, which represented a high water mark for a resurgence of romantic merger with the group, free expression of the primitive, and idealized notions of recreating heaven on earth: “All you Need is Love,” “Give Peace a Chance,” “Sing a Simple Song of Freedom,” etc. As the scientist E.O. Wilson put it in another context: Beautiful theory. Wrong species.
Anyhoo, geting back to contemporary liberalism, we can see how it fits the bill as a bogus cure for modern alienation. For example, multiculturalism devalues the concept of the individual in favor of the ethnic group, while socialism in all its forms favors the large and powerful state that unites us all (and suppresses—for any time government does something FOR you, it does something TO you).
Leftists are uncomfortable with the painful idea of competition, but replace it with the notion of individual expressiveness. Everyone’s natural impulses are beautiful, and we must not judge them, much less try to elevate them.
Deconstruction throws all objective meaning into question, so no one has to have the disappointing experience of being wrong or denied tenure, no matter how stupid one’s ideas. The burden of personal responsibility is mitigated, because one’s being is determined by accidental factors such as race, class and gender, not one’s owns values, decisions and actions. Skillful knowledge acquired by intense effort (or just being born smarter) is replaced by an obnoxious, hypertrophied adolescent scepticism that knows only how to question but not to learn. It is grounded in a sort of bovine materialism that is not the realm of answers, but the graveyard of meaningful questions. The primitive is idealized, because it is within everyone’s reach—I remember Rudy Giuliani’s comment about an artist’s rendering of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung: “If I can do it, it isn’t art.” Of course, Giuliani was pilloried by the sophisticated N.Y art crowd, and with good reason. It is painful to have standards, because not everyone can attain them.
But most importantly, radical secularism fails as a religion because it has no God, only demons: George Bush, Christian fundamentalists, Israel, tax cuts for the rich, stolen election, Halliburton, Fox News, Abu Ghraib, Karl Rove, corporate profits, disparities in wealth, strict constructionists, parental notification, talk radio, guns, and so many more.
On the other hand, the sort of classical liberalism to which I ascribe—now embodied in the modern American conservative movement—recognizes that politics must aim at something that is not politics, something higher, not lower.
The alienation of the world can be healed, but not in the flat and horizontal line of secular history, or in the endlessly recurring cycle of primitive fusion with nature, but in the ascending, evolutionary spiral.
The secular world is a value-free flatland of nihilism and urgent nonsense, whereas the vertical world accessed by authentic spirituality is a world of hierarchical values to which we are perpetually drawn, like an attractor at the end of history. It is here where the frontier of psychohistorical evolution lies, for so long as there are free individuals endowed by their Creator with an orientation toward that transtemporal Word that pulls us into its vortex of Truth and Beauty, there will always be frontiers.” Gagdad Bob
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More:
Life Amidst the Postmodern Ruins
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/11/life-amidst-postmodern-ruins.html
“... I was very impressed with how Chesterton, although writing in 1907, had already diagnosed the pathologies of the left. In fact, his ideas mirror exactly what Polanyi wrote some 50 years later about the “moral inversion” of the left, i.e., the dangerous combination of radical skepticism and an unhinged, ruthless moral perfectionism unbound from tradition.
Chesteron writes of the socialist that although he may have a “large and generous heart,” it is “not a heart in the right place.” And only a human being can have a heart dangerously set in the wrong location. It generally occurs “when a religious scheme is shattered” as a result of their intense skepticism. When this happens, “it is not merely the vices that are let loose.” Rather, “the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.” Just because someone has a moral code, it hardly means that they are moral.
I have written a number of posts on the dynamics of this pathological process, which I thought that Polanyi had been the first to recognize. But Chesterton also writes of how “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”
Most every destructive policy put into place by the left can be traced to some Christian virtue gone mad i.e., feed the hungry, so steal from “the rich” and call it “giving,” or defending abortion on the basis of the sanctity of “liberty,” or encouraging every manner of deviancy under the guise of “tolerance.” [snip - continue reading at above link]
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Belief in Disbelief, or Inside the Postmodern Skeptic Tank
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/11/belief-in-disbelief-or-inside.html
“[T]he new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything.... And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in the way when he wants to denounce anything. For denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.... In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. ~ G.K. Chesterton [snip - continue reading at above link]
Ping!
It is a pretty simple answer. See Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983. “The question presented is whether the Nebraska Legislature’s practice of opening each legislative day with a prayer by a chaplain paid by the State violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”
To summarize the Court’s opinion, “no”.
He hasn't been able to get his name in the media for a long time now and he wants his "15 minutes" back.
It would be nice if he would just go home and have a nice, warm cup of "shut up!"
The atheist supremacists should acknowledge that the same restriction on an established State religion also prevents the prohibition on the free exercise thereof.
Atheism cannot be forced on the people as a State religious faith.
Newdow has been fomenting trouble for years.
I don’t know why he is still breathing.
I would say the same thing about Maddy Murray O’Hair.
And inspite of her efforts, her son STILL became a Christian.
The freedom of religion does not mean a freedom FROM religion.
If the principles of the Constitution were to be held up, then NObama would have had to show his birth certificate.
Easy answer: it's because he's never actually read the Constitution (and from the sound of it, he wouldn't be able to comprehend it if he did).
Newdow, Newdow. Why does that idiot’s name ring a bell?
Its time that People of Faith rise up and stop this insanity. Letting a handfull of extremist loons purge God from our Public Life is more than any patriotic American should have to tolerate.
Words from "the Father of the Constitution" himself. . .none other than James Madison.
As soon as I saw the headline, I knew it was Newdow. He is a pathetic little creature whose purpose in life seems to be to abolish all public displays of faith, as though the exercise of religious belief was antithetical to freedom, or at least, obscene. Will people soon need to carry their Bibles in plain brown paper wrappers for fear of retribution or of legal action?
They mean “activist-prick” atheists.
There are many more like me that don’t mind, don’t care, and don’t see anything wrong with everyone’s belief in God or the use of it in the public square....than there are activist-prick atheists.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
(emphasis added for idiots like Newdow)
That's all I needed to read. Not this Newdow idiot again.
Being in the news is all that's important to him. First he climbed on his daughter's shoulders to do it, now he's trying it on his own.
I can appreciate his frustration,
I want Freedom from Atheists
What part of “nor prohibit the free expression thereof” in the First Amendment does this fudgepacker Newdow not get?
And all these people who keep trying to get God out of their lives...what happens on the day they meet Him?
Moron indeed.
I agree with you. For someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of God, he sure spends alot of time worrying about God. He’s such an attention whore.
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