Humanist Association of Orange County - Newsletter for September 2005
Issue #94 ( HTML format )
Editor: Benito Franqui
Associate Editor: Dave Silva
Send submissions and membership renewals to:
HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
benfranq@earthlink.net
Articles submitted for publication in the newsletter
must be received no later than 10 days before the
next HAOC meeting.
The Humanist Association of Orange County ( HAOC) is a chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Please visit our website at http://www.ochumanists.org
HAOC Board
President: Pete Anderson
Vice President: Dave Silva
Treasurer:.Harry Becker
Secretary: Jerry Parks
Member at large: Carl Mariz
Member at large: Benito Franqui
HAOC MEETINGS
Sunday, September 18, 1:30 P.M.
Thomas Jefferson - Man from Monticello
We remember Thomas Jefferson today for a host of major achievements: Writer of the Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, purchaser of Louisiana Territory, proponent of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. But he was also gifted in the fields of Archeology, Architecture, Botany, Philosophy, Politics, and as a Gentleman Farmer, Violinist, Inventor, Husband, Father, Prolific Letter Writer and Slave Owner.
For over two decades, actor/historian Dale Reynolds has portrayed Thomas Jefferson in schools, colleges, corporations and senior citizen centers across the country. In character, authentically be-wigged and costumed, Reynolds delivers an ad-libbed show, continuously interacting with his audience using a vibrant question-and-answer format.
NOTICE: At this meeting, the election of HAOC board members will also take place.
===================================================
Sunday, October 16, 1:30 P.M.
Stephanie Campbell, chair of the new Orange County Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State
===================================================
Sunday, November 20, 1:30 P.M.
Dr. Lou Regal will talk about "A Humanistic Rational Philosophy in Psychiatry".
CFI-WEST ORANGE COUNTY OUTREACH MEETING
Sunday, October 9, 4:30 PM
Costa Mesa Neighborhood Community Center
1845 Park Ave., Costa Mesa
Motivated in part by the record attendance at its August 21 showing of the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, CFI-West has launched a new group to better serve the needs of the humanist/skeptic community in Orange County. This group will enjoy considerable autonomy in choosing the projects it wants to get involved with.
SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON
April 13th, 1743 to July 4th, 1826
Thomas (no middle name) Jefferson, the second child and oldest son, was born to Peter and Jane Randolph Jefferson on the old Gregorian calendar date of April 2nd, 1743. When still a teenager, the calendar was updated to the current one we use, thus giving him the birth-date we celebrate, April 13th.
Jefferson was born at Shadwell Plantation, just outside of the small township of Charlottesville in northern Virginia. When he was only 14, his father died of typhoid fever, leaving him in the charge of his mother, a woman who did not endear herself to her gawky, shy, timid eldest son.
He was raised in the Anglican/Episcopalian faith, but in college decided that he was a Deist (one who believes in a Supreme Being, but isn't altogether sure of the rest of religion, the forerunner of Agnosticism). This led him to support what he called "a wall of separation between Church and State," clearly leaving government out of religion and religion out of government. He was unfairly labeled an Atheist for this stance and other Freethinking ideas.
While he believed in smaller government, loosely labeled "States Rights," the experience of America during the time it was ruled by the Articles of Confederation (1784-89) taught him that a loose conglomeration of small states couldn't be as effective as a nation with a strong central government. He wrote that "The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best: that the States are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations."
He was a slaveholder, who knew that slavery was a pernicious evil. "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just," he wrote. Four times in his political life he tried to abolish slavery: in the Declaration of Independence, as Governor of Virginia, in the Articles of Confederation, and finally in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Each time, he was defeated. Finally, at age 50, he quit trying to change society's ideas surrounding slavery. He was unable, at the end, to free his slaves, because they had been mortgaged to pay for his late father-in-law's debts, as well as owing thousands of dollars for the construction and re-construction of his beloved Monticello.
He married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow of 25, on January 1st, 1772. The marriage lasted ten years, nine months, one week and one day, when she succumbed to complications of childbirth, aged 36, the #1 killer of young women in that day and age. He fell apart for three weeks after her death, raising fears in his eldest daughter -- also named Martha (or "Patsy") -- that he would die as well.
After his recovery, he was sent to France to replace Dr. Benjamin Franklin as Ambassador to the Court of Versailles. His five years there, watching how the 90% of poverty-ridden serfs struggled to live while the aristocracy lived high on their labors, made him a full devotee of the full concept of Freedom, something the French knew little about until they quoted Jefferson's Declaration of Independence during their Revolution of 1789.
When he returned to America in the winter of 1789-90, he was asked by the first president of the new country to join his cabinet as Secretary of State. It was there that he and the first Secretary of the Treasury, the brilliant but unstable Alexander Hamilton, clashed over many of the same issues that dominate current political thinking: a strong central government vs. a country dominated by thirteen quarreling states; central taxation vs. individual states' taxings; a standing army and navy during peacetime, etc.
He was an inventor, mostly to make his life easier, a botanist, an astronomer, and a statesman with approximately 20,000 letters in his handwriting still extant, a gentleman farmer and a slave-owner.
We remember him today as a staunch protector of the concept of Democracy and the practical applications of freedom.
MORE QUOTES FROM THE “AMERICAN TALIBAN”
by George Erickson
( from the August 2005 issue of the Humanist Association of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada newsletter )
Joseph Scheidler (Pro-Life Action League) "I would like to outlaw contraception.. ...contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure."
Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin “George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”
Fob James (Governor of Alabama) "Behind this judicial wall of separation there is a tyranny of lies that will fall... I say to you, my friends, let it fall!" "A good butt-whipping and then a prayer is a wonderful remedy."
James Kennedy (Center for Reclaiming America) "The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ."
Joseph McCarthy (former Republican Senator from Wisconsin) "Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity."
Joseph Morecraft (Chalcedon Presbyterian Church) "Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol."
Pat Buchanan (presidential Candidate) "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."
"There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism."
Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition) "The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers."
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."
"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."
"[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns."
Rick Santorum (Republican Senator–PA) "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [Gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything!"
John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute)
"The [Supreme] Court, by seeking to equate Christianity with other religions, merely assaults the one faith. The Court in essence is assailing the true God by democratizing the Christian religion."
Paul Cameron "I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it's really a Godsend."
"Homosexuality is a crime against humanity."
"Causes of homosexuality include: 'sex with animals'"*
"Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals."
( Paul Cameron was discharged from the American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association due to his unethical practices and biased research regarding Homosexuals. His "research" has since been discredited by the scientific community; however his work is still referenced by many fundamentalist organizations as credible. )
Rush Limbaugh (Radio Talk-show Host) "Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."
"There is only one way to get rid of nuclear weapons... use them"
Star Parker (Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education) "Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now."
Kay O’Connor (Kansas Senate Republican) "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote."
ON THE LIGHT SIDE
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory
( From The Onion, August 17, 2005 http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512 )
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."
Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.
The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."
"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.
Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.
"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.
"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."
"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"
Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.
"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."