In presidential politics, this ideal of secular government is routinely ignored. Presidential candidates go to outlandish lengths to prove their Christianity to voters, saying that they’ve received direct orders from the Christian god to make a run for the White House. Barack Obama attends extremist right wing religious events like the Prayer Breakfast, has preacher Rick Warren convert his inauguration into a religious ceremony, and talks about how the Bible dictates White House policies. One would think that these politicians are campaigning to become Preacher In Chief.

A short statement about religion made by presidential candidate Rocky Anderson therefore comes as a welcome surprise.

When Anderson was asked during an online discussion, “What religion are you a part of?”, he gave the following response:

“None. I decided when in college that I should carefully consider the best ethical course for my life, then follow those guideposts, without focusing on the theological issues that divert so many people from doing the work that needs to be done, particularly on behalf of those who are most vulnerable and who need the help. I respect those who have, and who live, religious beliefs and values and believe that we each have our own way of making a positive difference while on earth.”

Rocky Anderson’s declaration of no religion, combined with acceptance of other people’s different ideas about religion, is a startling reminder of the approach counseled by the founders of the USA. The Constitution supports freedom of religion through separation of religion and government. Under this arrangement, decisions about religion are private, and not relevant to political debates. Whether a person wants to be religious or not is their own business, not something that the power of government ought to influence either way.

It’s interesting to see what Rocky Anderson said, and what he didn’t say. He said that he’s not part of any religion. That could mean that Rocky Anderson is an atheist. It could mean that he has some individual religious beliefs, but is not a member of any religious organization. What’s important is that Anderson puts such questions in their proper context: Theological debates about religious identity are less important than what we do in the world to try to make it a better place.

What Rocky Anderson is willing to say, while Obama and the Republicans strike poses of conspicuous Christianity, is that a presidential candidate ought to be judged according to deeds, rather than religious creeds.

If you’re looking for an alternative, a presidential candidate who consistently supports the separation of church and state, consider Rocky Anderson, who is running as the Justice Party candidate for President. In a recent online discussion, Anderson explained his views on the relationship between religion and government as follows:

“Religion and government should be kept as separate as possible. Government interference or involvement in religion demeans faith. There are ample ways for people to exercise their religious beliefs without government involvement. We should all think in terms of the Golden Rule (or the equivalent in non-Christian denominations or humanitarian traditions) when Church-State issues arise. Let us ask ourselves if we didn’t believe in the religion being promoted by government, how would we feel? We should all value the diversity in religious (and non-religious) traditions and be tolerant and compassionate toward each other.”

O’Neal was quoting Psalm 109 from the Christian Bible, which is a prayer for divine revenge, including death and destruction for an enemy. Psalm 109 reads, “Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise, for the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me. They have spoken against me with a lying tongue. They compassed me about also with words of hatred, and fought against me without a cause. For my love they are my adversaries, but I give myself unto prayer, and they have rewarded me evil for good, hatred for my love. Set thou a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand. When he shall be judged, let him be condemned, and let his prayer become sin. Let his days be few, and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg. Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath, and let the strangers spoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: Neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off and in the generation following let their name be blotted out. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. Let them be before the Lord continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth. Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him. As he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones. Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually. Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the Lord, and of them that speak evil against my soul.”

It goes on, and on, with dreary verses of self-pity and vengefulness, in which the author moans in self pity that nobody loves him, and everybody hates him, and that he should be exalted, while the people he hates should be cursed. Anyone who says that the message of the Bible is a consistent message of love should remember this part of the text. In citing Psalm 109, Mike O’Neal is not just hoping that Barack Obama dies soon. O’Neal is praying that Obama’s daughters never have any children, and that wander the country homeless, without receiving pity from anyone of whom they ask help.

In an odd part of the protest against Mike O’Neal’s cursing prayer against Barack Obama, two Christian ministers from Kansas, Tobias Schlingensiepen and Jim McCollough, are saying that they condemn O’Neal’s prayer because they are Christians. They write in an open letter, “As people of faith, we believe that Scripture should never be used to justify praying for the death of anyone. Speaker O’Neal’s hateful abuse of Scripture is unacceptable and a disgrace to his office, and he should immediately resign.”

The thing is that Psalm 109 clearly does justify praying for the death of other people. The cursing prayer is right there in the Bible, so it’s difficult to see how being “people of faith” has anything to do with rejection of violent prayer. Right there in the Psalms, a person of faith prays for death and destruction with pity. Schlingensiepen and McCollough say that O’Neal is abusing the Bible, but actually, O’Neal was soft-pedalling the Bible by not citing Psalm 109′s most nasty bits.

Furthermore, Schlingensiepen and McCollough are themselves pursuing a nasty path of Christian theocracy as they state that it is unacceptable for anyone in public office to “abuse” the Bible, to cite their holy text in a way that they don’t approve of. That’s establishing a religious test for public office, which is specifically prohibited by the Constitution of the United States of America. Schlingensiepen and McCollough are preaching their own version of religion in government to condemn O’Neal’s version of religion in government. That’s a maneuver as morally inconsistent as that of the writer of the 109th Psalm, who curses his enemy for cursing.

As for O’Neal, he has made his prayer, and in doing so, he has offered a simple public test of the power of prayer. O’Neal has prayed to his god that Barack Obama should have few days left in office. If prayer really works, then Obama should indeed have few days remaining as President of the United States.

How many is a few? Three? Seven? Twenty?

Few is a vague term, but I think that most people would agree that few definitely refers to a number less than one hundred.

So, that’s a pretty fair standard for evaluating Mike O’Neal’s prayer, I think. If Barack Obama is no longer President 100 days from now, we won’t be able to know whether the prayer was responsible. However, if Obama is still President of the United States 100 days from now, O’Neal’s prayer will have proved to be ineffective. If Obama’s days as President are not few, O’Neal will have significant cause to question the validity of his religion.

In order to be safe places for people to put people’s money, current federal law requires credit unions to distribute their loans widely so that the failure of one recipient to repay the loan won’t topple the entire credit union. 12 USC Sec. 1757a reads:

Sec. 1757a. Limitation on member business loans

(a) In general
On and after August 7, 1998, no insured credit union may make any member business loan that would result in a total amount of such loans outstanding at that credit union at any one time equal to more than the lesser of –
(1) 1.75 times the actual net worth of the credit union; or
(2) 1.75 times the minimum net worth required under section 1790d(c)(1)(A) of this title for a credit union to be well capitalized.

To put it in vernacular terms, the idea is for the credit union not to put all of its eggs in one basket. But Rep. Corrine Brown, a relatively conservative Democrat from Florida, has introduced a new bill that would make an exception to credit unions’ careful lending practices: an exception for churches. Her bill, H.R. 3745, would insert the phrase “excluding loans made to nonprofit religious organizations” right after the text “total amount of such loans.” The effect: credit loans would be deregulated to allow a large portion of their capital to be loaned to churches.

Why, and to what kind of churches? Corrine Brown explains in her December 20 2011 remarks introducing the bill:

Mr. Speaker, today I introduced the Faith-Based Lending Protection Act of 2011. The bill modifies the Federal Credit Union Act to make it easier for credit unions to lend money to ministries. Specifically, the bill exempts loans to nonprofit religious organizations from the Credit Union Act’s caps on the volume of loans credit unions can make to businesses.

Mr. Speaker, many churches are in crises because they cannot get access to credit. In 2006, only two churches in the United States lost their buildings to foreclosure or short sale. Last year the number grew to 95.

Like many homeowners, they took out loans when times were good, but now their income has dropped and they need to refinance. Some have balloon payments that would be impossible to pay even in the best of times. The trouble is that many lenders do not want to do business with churches. Credit unions are in an excellent position to help. Credit unions get capital from their members and loan it to their members all of whom share a common bond. They know how to keep money in their communities and they want to do more. This bill will let them.

This non-partisan language has passed the House several times–sometimes on a voice vote. Now is the time to make it law. Churches cannot wait.

Rep. Brown wishes to draw a parallel between homeowners taking out loans and churches taking out loans. But unlike homes, churches are not residences; they’re not necessary for shelter. Churches are clubs, voluntary organizations that will have higher income if they have more members making donations to them, and that will have lower income if they have fewer members making donations. So what kind of churches does Corrine Brown want credit unions to do favors for? Unpopular churches.

What else characterizes the churches Corrine Brown wants to protect? They’re churches with bad credit, churches that banks don’t want to lend to because they can’t make their payments, partially because they aren’t getting the member donations they used to get and partially because they made the bad decision of taking out a loan with a balloon payment, letting the church pay small amounts at first and then have to pay a gigantic amount later. These churches can’t pay their current loans because they took out bigger loans than they could afford, and now want to take out more +loans. So what kind of churches does Corrine Brown want credit unions to do favors for by giving them especially big loans? The very churches that are unlikely to pay back the loans they get.

Remember that the law Rep. Brown wants to change is a law enacted to keep credit unions from collapsing from lending out big loans to bad creditors. This is in order to help unpopular churches that don’t have forward-looking leadership and that are more likely to default on those big loans. Rep. Brown’s bill therefore makes credit unions more likely to collapse, wrecking communities she says they’d be serving.

Turning credit unions suicidal to prop up poorly-run churches people don’t like? What makes that a good idea?

It’s in this context of continuing erosion of the separation of Church and State that the Reason Rally is taking place this spring. On March 24, what is being billed as “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history” is coming together on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

The Reason Rally isn’t the only national secular gathering taking place this spring, though. Up in Canada, over in British Columbia, the Imagine No Religion conference is scheduled for May 18-20.

Tony Perkins, of the Christian right wing Family Research Council has denounced the ability of characters in an online video game to enter into homosexual relationships. Characters in the game are not able to have actual sex, but are able to form same-sex romantic attachments.

The video game, Star Wars – The Old Republic, is set in a time thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader. That particular detail of the the video game got me wondering what the theological justification is for getting upset about the relationship status of fictional extraterrestrials in far away galaxies in the distant past.

There is no Christian Bible in the Star Wars world. The characters aren’t humans. They’re extraterrestrials. If Darth Vader lived “a long time ago”, and the video game is set thousands of years before Darth Vader, that means that the characters in the video game lived long before the book of Leviticus, which right wing Christians cite as the source of the ban on homosexuality, was written. So, how can Christians object to the idea that somewhere on another planet, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, members of another species had same-gender sexual bonding habits?

Jesus didn’t preach on the moon of Endor, as far as I know. There’s no way that the characters in the Star Wars video game could have read the book of Leviticus. Leviticus was never published anywhere in the galactic republic of the Star Wars world, so, even if the authority of the god of the ancient Israelites were supposed to extend all the way to this distant galaxy, the specific prohibition against homosexuality from Leviticus never seems to have been imposed there.

Besides that, Leviticus declares that “You shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind”. That’s men and women. It doesn’t say anything about what ewoks or wookies should do.

Finally, and yet most obviously, the Star Wars universe does not exist. It’s fictional. So, the characters there aren’t really in homosexual relationships, are they?

Many people would point out that the god of the Bible is fictional too – just a different kind of fiction from the fiction of the Star Wars universe. These two fictional settings are completely separate. To get upset with characters in the Star Wars universe about their lack of obedience to the rules made by the divine main character of the Bible is kind of like getting upset with Peter Pan for not helping Dorothy and her friends defeat the Wicked Witch of the West.

Maybe Tony Perkins and his friends at the Family Research Council believe that their deity is so powerful that its laws against homosexual relationships apply to absolutely everything – even fictional non-human species in distant galaxies in far away galaxies. If that’s the case, though, surely there would also be a ban against homosexual relationships among non-human species here on Earth. There are plenty of non-human creatures on Earth, however, who engage in homosexual relationships. If it’s wrong for non-human fictional creatures to have homosexual relationships, then it must be wrong for non-human creatures on Earth to have homosexual relationships too. So, why isn’t Tony Perkins preaching to these creatures to change their ways?

…except that Siddhartha Gautama didn’t sit under a tree for weeks on end, and preached the concept of the middle path, which was neither excessive indulgence nor excessive asceticism. Ram Bomjon was practicing the sort of extremism that the Buddha said could not work, because it was like as inflexible as an overtightened string on a sitar.

Also, whereas Siddhartha Guatama cultivated such remarkable powers of meditation that girls engaged in erotic dancing and armies threatening him with violent death could not break his concentration, devotees of Ram Bomjon complained that their guru’s meditation would be disturbed if anyone got within 15 feet of the boy, or if a medical doctor was allowed to examine Bomjon to determine that he was, in fact, not secretly taking in food or water.

When Siddhartha Gautama was attacked by the demon Mara, all Gautama did was to touch the earth with his finger to hold the Earth as his witness. When Ram Bomjon was teased by a passing villagers, Bomjon stood up, gathered his friends, and beat the villagers with sticks until they were bloody.

Ram Bomjon’s supporters said that no one could watch him at night, and so no outsiders could know what the so-called Buddha Boy was doing after dark. Such efforts to prevent anyone from confirming the truth about the claims of Ram Bomjon’s magical powers led the government of Nepal to accuse Bomjon and his cadre of teenage followers of fraud. Just as the government was about to begin its investigation, Ram Bomjon got up from his daytime meditation pose, and declared that he would travel to a secret location in the forest, to continue his enlightenment efforts there.

Since that time, Ram Bahadur Bomjon has reappeared, now calling himself a bodhisatva, Palden Dorje, giving speeches about the realizations he has had as a result of his deep meditation. The odd thing is that these supposed realizations are the same old bits of Buddhist doctrine that have been preached for thousands of years, which Bomjon was taught as a child.

Now, admirers of Bomjon are reporting that, “the so-called ‘Buddha Boy’ has been sitting under a pipal tree in uninterrupted meditation since May of 2005. According to the set of people who surround and control access to Ram Bomjon, he asserted just before sitting down that he was entering into a six-year meditative state in order to attain enlightenment, a la the original Buddha Siddhartha Gautama”.

Anyone who has been following the facts of the Ram Bomjon case know that Bomjon has certainly not been engaged in uninterrupted meditation for six years straight. Ram Bomjon has been walking around, eating, preaching, and getting into fights.

These documented facts don’t seem to matter to people who believe in the magical powers of Ram Bomjon. They are so eager to have a mystical leader to place their trust in that they ignore reality and concoct increasingly absurd legends.

Some people have said that new mythology cannot be created in our time, because there’s too much documentation of facts to interfere with belief in mystical absurdities. Others, true believers, have pointed to the old magical legends of their beloved ancient religious leaders as if the legends are evidence of real supernatural events, claiming that no one could have made up such stories.

The case of Ram Bomjon proves both ideas to be plainly wrong. The invention of incredible religious legends that have no reasonable basis in historical facts is a remarkably easy task. In fact, there seems to have always been a certain sort of person who eagerly awaits such legends, requiring no proof for even the most absurd claims of miracles. Logical arguments can never dissuade such people from their beliefs, because these true believers simply ignore everything that prevents them from feeling the sense of religious rapture that they seek.

Looking around on Occupii, I’m finding a huge amount of useful information about protest efforts and organizations. Among those is the Magicians Alliance, a group of Occupy movement supporters seeking to discuss “esoteric/occult” ways to support the Occupy movement.

I’m no Wiccan. I don’t believe in Magick, and I’m skeptical of religious methods of activism. I think that when people hold prayer vigils to try to confront injustice, for instance, the approach is worse than ineffective, because the prayer doesn’t change reality and because the prayer meetings take activists off the street, where they might be engaged in more practical efforts.

That said, I understand the need of many activists to be motivated by symbolic systems of meaning. So, if practitioners of Magick, or of any other religious path, want to get together to have rituals or talk about how their beliefs inform their activism, that’s okay with me, just so long as these religious groups don’t try to push their beliefs and rituals on other activists, and as long as the rituals and talk aren’t all that takes place.

I still was somewhat disturbed by one element of the Magicians Alliance on Occupii. The moderator warned members that “RIGHT paths and CENTER paths are welcome, LEFT paths will be asked to use a different website – and banned should they refuse to take their craft elsewhere.”

What was this? Although it has a minority of libertarian participants, I look upon the Occupy protests as a primarily leftist movement. So, was the Magicians Alliance attempting some sort of right wing spellbinding coup within the Occupy movement? Are Wiccans and their ilk anti-liberal? Why couldn’t a left path participate?

I found it difficult to believe that any group within the Occupy movement would exclude a liberal perspective, so I did a bit of additional research. What I discovered is that, in fact, within the arena of Magick, the terms Left and Right have quite different meanings than they do within the political realm.

For practitioners of Magick, the Right Hand path is understood to represent morally-focused approaches, whereas the Left Hand path is amoral, and aims to transcend ethical boundaries. Some Magickal folk interpret this division as one of good versus evil, or light versus dark, or higher versus lower. Others, however, merely regard the distinction as one of philosophical outlook, and say that the rejection of the Left Hand path is merely a residual influence of Christian ideology.

Looking at this context, it seems that the moderator of the Magicians Alliance on Occupii is among those practitioners who hold to the model of moral dualism. The rejection of the Left is not a refusal to admit liberals, but an admonition for those who intend to apply the esoteric arts for the benefit of the Occupy movement to do so with an ethical framework in place.

Also reported to the Federal Election Commission yesterday was a sudden surge of spending to promote the presidential campaign of Rick Santorum.

The Leaders for Families Super PAC dumped $92,535 in a single media binge, purchasing television advertisements to support Santorum 2012. Yet, when I went to the Federal Election Commission reference page for Leaders for Families, the information there told me that Leaders for Families had received no donations. How can this Super PAC have spent so much money if it hasn’t taken in any money yet?

The answer is that the Leaders for Families Super PAC has taken in a lot of money, and very quickly. The PAC simply hasn’t disclosed to the FEC where it’s getting the money from.

It’s a very odd arrangement for those of us Americans who make a living by working for our money. We work, and then we wait at least two weeks for a paycheck, then wait another week for the money to clear. Three weeks at the minimum after we’ve done our work, we have the money to show for it.

The Leaders for Families Super PAC moved much more quickly than that. The organization didn’t even exist before just 10 days ago. Just one day after it was created, the Super PAC had loads of money, from an unknown source, and was spending that money to create and place commercials on the radio for Rick Santorum.

That money could have come from Russian oil oligarchs, for all we know.

Though we don’t know much about the source of the money used by Leaders for Families Super PAC, we do know something about the group’s treasurer. His name is Charles Hurley – though he likes to be called Chuck.

Chuck Hurley uses the email address hurley4god@gmail.com. Yes, Chuck is hurley for God.

Hurley is the President of the Iowa Family Policy Center, an organization that works toward “reversing the breakdown of a productive, ordered society caused by the failure of families to produce God-fearing church, civic, social, and family leaders.” Specifically, Hurley and his organization work with people inside churches to promote a strict right wing version of Christianity, while also working in the more open public realm to promote extreme right wing social ideas.

The Iowa Family Policy Center is a tax exempt non-profit organization, filed under 501(c)3. The Iowa Family Policy Center describes itself as a “division” of an organization called The Family Leader, which is run by Bob Vander Plaats. That’s where the name of the Leaders For Families Super PAC comes from.

The Family Leader in turn describes itself as “associated with Focus On The Family”. Focus on the Family is a tax exempt organization. So, what we’ve got with The Family Leader is a political organization that’s sandwiched between two tax exempt organizations – a very curious arrangement. With Chuck Hurley serving as Treasurer of a Super PAC that’s purchasing huge political advertisements to promote the Rick Santorum for President campaign, that arrangement deserves some special scrutiny.

Some scrutiny of that sort has been exercised by a writer going under the pen name Akopsa. Akopsa found that Chuck Hurley’s organization, the Iowa Family Policy Center, has received over three million dollars in federal grants, facilitated by the White House Office of Faith Based Intiatives, since 2004.

I’d like to know whether any of that money from the federal government has gone to Iowa Family Policy Center resources that Chuck Hurley may be using to operate the Leaders For Families Super PAC. The Super PAC has been created in such a way, however, that makes it impossible to track that money down.

The Family Leader calls the separation of church and state an “ongoing cultural lie”, though, so maybe they think it’s all right to take government money and funnel it into political campaigns. If only Hurley and his friends would stop hiding the identity of the big money donors behind the Leaders For Families Super PAC, we could discover the truth of the matter.

• Stephen Bennett
• Harold Camping
• Graham Dow
• John Hagee
• Yehuda Levin
• John Piper
• Pat Robertson

… have repeatedly insisted that God uses the weather as an instrument of punishing judgment when gay and lesbian people in a community step out of hiding and engage in the sort of acts public affection that straight people take for granted. Holding hands. Getting married. Kissing. That sort of thing, according to the religious leaders listed above, will lead to killer tornadoes, floods and hurricanes.

A perfect test for this notion arose on December 22 of 2011 when two women in the Navy were granted the public honor of the “first kiss” after arriving in port in San Diego, California. Navy-sanctioned photos of the two women kissing each other, and of sailors applauding, spread around the world. It’s the sort of thing that’s happened for straight military couples for over a hundred years, but this was the first same-sex “first kiss.”

So what hit San Diego for the offense of hosting this public display of sapphic love? Was it a hurricane? A tsunami? An earthquake? A volcano?

Nope. The day of the kiss, San Diego was cursed with warm air and sunshine. The next day, too.

What’s next? Will Yahweh send accursed same-sex couples to the comfy chair?