John 1:12 disagrees with that statement:
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
Posted on 09/19/2005 11:21:03 PM PDT by Crackingham
Americans who don't believe in God have decided it's time they had a lobbyist in the nation's capital. Their new advocate describes herself as a "soft, fuzzy atheist." Lori Lipman Brown starts Monday as executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. Her two goals: keep religion out of government and win respect for a stigmatized minority. The magnitude of those challenges is, well, biblical. Think Daniel entering the lion's den, or David taking on Goliath.
Christian conservatives wield enormous clout here through a network of advocacy groups and relationships with politicians from President Bush on down. Atheists, humanists and freethinkers, as Brown's constituents call themselves, are usually ignored. Is she scared? "Nah," says Brown, 47, an atheist with a Jewish background. "It feels good to be the first."
Brown likens atheists today to gays in the 1970s: people just coming out of the closet to fight for acceptance. "There's been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person," she says, that "it's been scary" for people to say they don't believe in God. She vows to "use the A-word and not cringe."
In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 11% said they do not believe in God but do believe in a "universal spirit" or "higher power"; 3% said they do not believe in God or a spirit or power. In a separate question, 1% said they are atheists (those who believe there is no God), 2% said they are agnostics (those unsure whether there is a God), and 11% said they have no religious preference. The no-preference category includes people "who may not be ready to declare themselves atheists or agnostics," Pew Director Andrew Kohut says.
Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, counts them as non--believers - part of "a 30-million-strong constituency that is informed about the issues and votes."
Brown plans to work for non-believers in three ways:
• As part of broad coalitions fighting policies rooted in religious beliefs, such as limits on stem cell research and access to emergency contraception.
• In alliances with groups opposed to policies they believe breach the wall between church and state, such as giving taxpayer money to "faith-based" service programs.
• On causes Brown concedes are hard for politicians and the public to swallow, such as eliminating references to God from the U.S. oath of citizenship. She plans to stay out of the Pledge of Allegiance controversy for now because "the courts are on our side." Last week, a federal judge reaffirmed an earlier ruling that teacher-led recitation of the Pledge's phrase "under God" in public schools is an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.
Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative and former presidential candidate who now lobbies against gay marriage and for conservative values, says atheists' timing couldn't be worse, given Hurricane Katrina. "We're right in the middle of a horrible event when people are turning to God," he says. "They're going to find it very hard to get people to vote for the sort of things they're in favor of."
Brown says she doesn't expect immediate success on tough issues but, as the only advocate for non--believers in Washington, it's her job to raise them.
"We want to get people thinking about what they do that excludes us," she says. "The things that ... perpetuate the idea that we are outsiders - that we can't be patriotic or that we can't be moral or ethical - when in reality our community is tremendously active in making the world a better place to live."
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
...such as eliminating references to God from the U.S. oath of citizenship. She plans to stay out of the Pledge of Allegiance controversy for now because "the courts are on our side."
She's already lost. I don't see a single idea or hint of why her way is better in what she and her group are aiming for. They just want things to change, but then what?
May I be one of the first to state that there is no such thing as a soft, fuzzy athiest.
They are, however, children of God and welcome to join all of the rest of mankind. As much as some might wish that the invitation would be forced, it will not. The invitation never expires. And there is no earthly penalty.
A jewish atheist.
Go figure.
"Depart, for I never knew ye.."
These poll questions don't define what people believe God is.
'A Theory of God'
http://www.neoperspectives.com/theoryofgod.htm
I ran into some of these type at the University of Minnesota.
Anti-Athiest Sarcasm Torpedo ARMED. FIRE!!
If they are really so concerned about fusion of church and state, why don't they go to Iran and tell the Mullahs the good news that there is no Allah?
Full Disclosure: Let's see the athiests prove their creed by martyrdom, if they are so superior.
"May I be one of the first to state that there is no such thing as a soft, fuzzy athiest. They are, however, children of God and welcome to join all of the rest of mankind."
I agree that the invitation to join the rest of mankind never expires. But they are not children of God. They were created by God, but that's not the same thing. See 1 Peter 1:3, or Romans 8:15-16, or Galatians 3:26. We are children of God only through faith in Christ.
Tomorrow pingout.
John 1:12 disagrees with that statement:
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
If you want a Google GMail account, FReepmail me.
They're going fast!
I concur regarding our faith in Christ. I question the condemnation of children, and those that have not heard the gospel.
They failed in their poll to state what percentage of the populace believes in God. Let this be another stone around the Democrats necks.
That's the first lie.
Humanism, and atheism, rule the day among the "enlightened" left.
After all, human reason being the pinnacle of enlightenment is what liberalism is all about.
On Sept. 19, former Nevada State Senator Lori Lipman Brown will begin her duties as director of the Secular Coalition for America (SCA). The SCA is a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization in Washington D.C. dedicated to advancing secularism at the federal level. As director, Brown will focus her energies on lobbying, coalition building and fundraising.
"Now that we have a lobbyist in Washington, Congress can no longer ignore the 30 million Americans who do not practice a religion. This is the first step in breaking the religious right's stronghold on cultural politics in our nation's capital," said Tim Gordinier, public policy director of the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS). The IHS is a founding member of the Secular Coalition for America. Gordinier served on the selection committee that hired Brown.
Lori Lipman Brown - politician, attorney, educator and activist - as its first director and lobbyist.
Brown served as Nevada State Senator from 1992 to 1994. Her legislative record in the arenas of public education, mental health care and the repeal of consensual sex crimes resulted in her being named Civil Libertarian of the Year by the Southern Nevada chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and Legislator of the Year by the Nevada chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.
******
Lori Lipman Brown imagines court by the people, for the people
By Newt Briggs
When asked about her chances of winning a seat on the Nevada Supreme Court, Lori Lipman Brown sounds like a typical politician .
"Oh, I don't know," says Lipman Brown, who will compete for the seat against three opponents. "About one in four."
It is a surprisingly stock answer from someone who freely describes herself as a "humanistic, Jewish, Unitarian universalist." But it may be the only thing conventional about this lawyer-turned-teacher-turned-state senator-turned-Supreme Court litigant, who currently teaches world literature and English as a second language at Rancho High School.
As even she admits, it is "a long and convoluted story," but it more or less begins in the early '80s at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. There, Lipman Brown, who says she "got into law for idealistic reasons," worked on immigration law for El Salvadoran and Haitian refugees. She also clerked for a federal magistrate who insisted they scour every habeas corpus petition that crossed his desk.
snip
Despite her accmplishments, when the 1994 election arrived, Lipman Brown ran afoul of some vicious, back-alley politicking. In short, she was falsely accused of refusing to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance during legislative sessions--a claim that her opponents glommed onto during the election campaign. And in the end, the smear campaign worked; Lipman Brown lost to Republican Kathy Augustine by 1,276 votes.
Rather than lay down for the underhanded politics, though, Lipman Brown and her father, Mel Lipman, also an attorney, took her opponents to the Nevada Supreme Court. And in a decision reminiscent of David's defeat of Goliath, father and daughter bested Augustine and her cohorts, forcing them to make written statements rescinding the slander against Lipman Brown. In the most telling, Augustine--now state controller--wrote that Lipman Brown had "never actually done anything...which showed anything but the utmost respect for our flag and for the veterans of our nation."
"It was phenomenal," Lipman Brown says. "They had a team of lawyers and all we had was my dad and I, and we still won."
And now Lipman Brown hopes to pull off the same kind of upset in her run for the state Supreme Court. Running against former state Republican Party chairman John Mason, District Judge Ron Parraguire and Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Douglas Smith (at least two of whom are expected to fill their campaign coffers with up to $1 million each), Lipman Brown says she will not accept campaign donations greater than $100.
"People should not be able to buy their way onto the Supreme Court," she says. "The public has the right to select a candidate that is not tied down to special interests."
snip
"I believe that I would be bringing an entirely different perspective to the court," she says, noting that she teaches Nevada and U.S. Constitution classes at the University of Phoenix.
"When I first thought about running, I thought it would just be to make a point about campaign finance," says Lipman Brown. "In other words, I didn't really think I had a chance to win. But as things have progressed, I'm realizing that there is a lot of support out there and that I could actually win the seat."
The longtime activist, former state senator and "humanistic Jewish Unitarian Universalist" is now director/lobbyist for the Secular Coalition for America, a team of humanist, atheist and other non-religious groups. She begins stalking the halls of Congress Sept. 19. Her mission: get God out of government.
"The amount of incursion of religion into government -- and the acceptance of it -- has become extremely scary, and not just for the non-religious people in our nation," says Lipman Brown, a Nevada resident for almost 30 years. "[The coalition] is not anti-religious. We simply don't want our constitutional democracy to become a theocracy." Her husband Paul Brown, Southern Nevada director for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, will join her in a few months.
How to bring a sane discussion of secular issues into a Republican-controlled Congress, during the reign of a president who's said Jesus is his favorite political philosopher? Very gently. "The first thing my coalition hopes I'll accomplish is to present the face of a warm, fuzzy atheist," she says. "There's so much rhetoric right now about how people without religion don't have any morals or ethics, which is untrue. There are a good many ethical, decent, moral people who do [the right thing] because of our belief we are completely responsible for the consequences of our actions just as there are people who do it out of love for God."
On her list of issues to watch when Congress reconvenes is the stem cell debate and tax breaks for politically active religious groups.
Lipman Brown's career in Las Vegas hasn't always been warm and fuzzy. She's perhaps best remembered for getting ousted from her state Senate seat in 1994 by Kathy Augustine, who, in an unusually sleazy campaign, depicted Lipman Brown as an unpatriotic heathen who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance (in fact, she had a beef with the Senate's opening prayer). Lipman Brown sued Augustine for defamation and, after endless court battles, got an apology. Lipman Brown says she'll bring the same cheerful tenacity to her new job. "I'm finding it really surprising so far. People are saying, 'I'm so glad you're doing this.' Because there's so much noise [from the people] that want to make our secular government a theocracy."
Lori Lipman Brown visits the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, hero to atheists for advocating separation of church and state.
snip
Her two goals: keep religion out of government and win respect for a stigmatized minority.
Christian conservatives wield enormous clout here through a network of advocacy groups and relationships with politicians from President Bush on down. Atheists, humanists and freethinkers, as Brown's constituents call themselves, are usually ignored.
Brown likens atheists today to gays in the 1970s: people just coming out of the closet to fight for acceptance. "There's been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person," she says, that "it's been scary" for people to say they don't believe in God. She vows to "use the A-word and not cringe."
snip
"We want to get people thinking about what they do that excludes us," she says. "The things that ... perpetuate the idea that we are outsiders — that we can't be patriotic or that we can't be moral or ethical — when in reality our community is tremendously active in making the world a better place to live."
A lawyer and teacher, Brown is used to controversy. As a Nevada state senator from 1992 to 1994, she fought for gun control, gay rights and abortion rights.
Five humanist and atheist groups formed the Secular Coalition for America after the Sept. 11 attacks, unsettled by talk linking God and patriotism. "That was a major impetus to try to raise our profile," said Duncan Crary, a spokesman for one coalition member, the Institute for Humanist Studies in Albany, N.Y.
"Politicians are now afraid to demonize Jews and African-Americans as they once used to do, and they have stopped demonizing gays," said Herb Silverman, president of the coalition and a self-described secular Jew who teaches mathematics at South Carolina's College of Charleston. "It seems like atheists and humanists are the last group that the politicians feel comfortable ignoring or demonizing."
The situation is so bad, he said, that many "nontheists feel the need to hide in the closet, just like gays used to and just like Jews several decades ago used to change their names to fit in."
The Secular Coalition for America was formed in 2002, but it has been active only recently as a national advocacy organization. It comprises the American Humanist Association — of which Mel Lipman, Brown's father, is president — the Atheist Alliance, the Institute for Humanist Studies, the Secular Web and the Secular Student Alliance.
Brown, the constitutional law professor from Las Vegas, who also is a secular Jew, first received national recognition when, as a Nevada state senator, she led the successful campaign to repeal the state's sodomy ban in 1993.
Brown, left the chambers to avoid participating in the daily prayer, which she argued was sectarian because it included references to Jesus Christ.
snip
Brown told the Forward that on arrival in Washington, she intends to seek alliances with Jewish groups, particularly in opposing government funding for religious institutions and in fighting for church-state separation.
"I'm sure there will be a lot of overlapping and a lot of cooperation" with Jewish activists, Brown said, adding that she hopes they will join her in opposing the widespread view that "only religious people can be moral and ethical." Such arguments, she said, easily can lead to using sectarianism of the kind she had experienced when she was the only Jew in the Nevada Senate.
That experience did not change her worldview, she said, but it did push her to seek a stronger bond with Jewish institutions. "I joined Valley Outreach Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation, in 1995 after being attacked, in part for being a Jew, during my 1994 re-election campaign," Brown said, adding that she also joined Women's American ORT and Hadassah. "That attack made me a better Jew, an atheist humanistic one."
Senator Brown is employed as a public school teacher by the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an elementary education teacher.
While serving as State Senator during the 1993 Legislative Session, Senator Brown was on unpaid leave of absence from her employment with the Clark County School District.
Senator Brown's pecuniary interest or her commitment to others in her private capacity as a public school teacher would have materially affected the independence of judgment of a reasonable person in her situation, which would require that she abstain from voting on state education funding measures under the provisions of NRS 281.501(2).
CONCLUSION
Lori Lipman Brown, while serving as a Nevada State Senator, did not violate the Code of Ethical Standards by discussing, advocating or voting on the state education budget.
DATED: February 11, 1994.
NEVADA COMMISSION ON ETHICS
Secular Coalition for America appoints public policy expert Ron Millar as legislative assistant
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Secular Coalition for America announced today the appointment of Ron Millar as legislative assistant.
Millar has held administrative positions at the National Research Council / The National Academies, the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University and the Virginia affiliate of the National Abortion Rights Action League. He has also worked in political campaigns, lobbied at state and national levels, and owned a publishing company specializing in legislative monthlies.
Millar is scheduled to complete his Ph.D. at the Virginia Tech Center for Public Administration and Policy later this fall. His research examines the involvement of interest groups in Supreme Court cases addressing the funding of sectarian schools.
******
Secular Coalition for America in the news
COMING SOON: The Congressional Quarterly, Fox News, Mother Jones
The appointment of director/lobbyist Lori Lipman Brown and legislative assistant Ron Millar are attracting media attention to the coalition, its mission, and the prospect of a specifically non-religious lobby in Washington.
A message to our friends and supporters from coalition president Herb Silverman
No gods will help us, so we hope you will! Please donate today
Dear coalition supporter,
The day has finally come that many of you have financially helped bring about. The Secular Coalition has hired a director/lobbyist AND a legislative assistant. But this is just the beginning. Now more than ever we need your generous support to meet our startup costs, attract even more media attention to our freethought issues, and advocate in the political arena for a broad base of nontheistic Americans.
Can we count on your help? Please donate today!
Gratefully,
Herb Silverman
President
******
July 11, 2003
Profile of Herb Silverman
Many atheists and freethinkers have heard of Herb Silverman. In 1990 he challenged South Carolina's constitutional requirement that all public office holders affirm the existence of a Supreme Being by running for governor. He lost that race, but later he applied to become a Notary Public. That application was denied because he was an atheist and, in 1997 the state Supreme Court agreed that Silverman's First Amendment rights were violated.
Now, Silverman is back teaching math. professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston.
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