Utterly Meaningless

I’m maybe the most rabid atheist who regularly posts here, Daryl, and all I can muster is a “meh.” Maybe I’m jaded. It just doesn’t seem to be news that a state entity would prostitute themselves for revenue.

Maybe we ought to instead pity the Christianist fanboys for being obvious marks for every opportunistic merchandiser who makes products related to their favorite superhero. Honestly, they remind me of comic book nerds with a mad pash for Batman stuff, or Spawn stuff, or Magneto stuff, or whatever. (Collect them all!… souls, that is.)

I absolutely stand behind the right of Christians to post, at their own expense, their symbols and beliefs on their license plates, just like I stand behind the right of everyone else to do the same. Granting special rights to one group simply opens the door for other special interest groups to sue for the same rights.

The government would get even more money if they allowed everyone to “design your own.” License plates through CafePress? Hmmm…..

The authors of that piece write for NPR. I thought NPR was part of the anti-Christian conspiracy?

I absolutely stand behind the right of Christians to post, at their own expense, their symbols and beliefs on their license plates, just like I stand behind the right of everyone else to do the same. Granting special rights to one group simply opens the door for other special interest groups to sue for the same rights.

Well, there’s the rub. If the state will allow other religious groups (and atheists) to have their own plates, I guess it’d be okay. I have my doubts that the SC legislature is going to approve any FSM plates, though.

Indiana has had an “in God we Trust” plate for the last year or so. I blogged about it here (with a pic) – getinh...-ends/ – I have trouble believing they can get away with it.

What about political activities based on religious belief? Florida has had a bright yellow “Choose Life” plate for years (after veto, then a lawsuit) that raises millions — collected by secular government that’s not supposed to be advancing religion, mind you — for agencies that intervene in crisis pregnancies not with full service but the opposite, a purposeful self-proclaimed political and religious slant:

Their goal was to provide funds to front line “life affirming” agencies to help them educate abortion vulnerable women about the benefits of adoption over abortion and assist those making this difficult, but mature and unselfish decision.

Soin practical terms it’s really a public education issue, at least two ways. The Choose Life plates deliver their inescapable message to us all on the public roads every day — and we know repetition of simple catch-phrases does affect our thinking, at the subconscious level — as well as “educating” pregnant women through a certain stained glass prism the government officially prefers.

My state has no corresponding plate that says, “Your Life, Your Choice” to fund only clinics that make women afraid of adoption — nor would I want it to. These political-religious messages are both wrong (for the same reasons) for my government to be sanctioning through what is indisputably our apolitical, a-theistic car registration system.

Also, such plates mean that secular, civil service type government employees become responsible to apply political and religious criteria in the qualification process for receiving such funds. That’s the camel’s nose in a real can of worms . . .

“If the state will allow other religious groups (and atheists) to have their own plates, I guess it’d be okay.”

Fine by me. Actually, I want the “wife 14” Utah one even though we haven’t had anything to do with polygamy for over 100 years.

Rob

Let me clarify my “okay” comment. In FL, the money goes to the religious groups. That surely would not be OK from a 1st Amendment POV. If the license plates are merely the equivalent of bumper stickers AND the state keeps all the money AND all religious and non-religious groups are treated equally, then and only then would I think this is “okay.”

My bet is that SC fails at least one and probably all of these tests.

I’m with Daryl thinking this “surely would not be okay” but courts here and in other states (six have “choose life” plates last I heard) and probably in SC too, seem to *BELIEVE* otherwise. . .and that’s what may ruin us all even in the courts, thinking overpowered by believing and us going along with it as Schlesinger warned us against, forsaking the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology and thereby losing our free capacity for self-correction.
I’m reading Susan Jacoby’s new book, described on its flyleaf as “the painful truth about what the flight from reason has cost us, as individuals and as a nation.”

Here’s what I read last night :

. . .In today’s America, [we] tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. . . America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anit-intellectualism. . .

It is possible that nothing will help. The nation’s memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best minds. . .

Btw Daryl,did you see the NYT front page today?
Report Assails Hiring in Justice Department: Officials illegally used “political or ideological” factors in elite recruiting programs, an internal report found.