Only the Congress makes our laws, and only the Court gets to determine their constitutionality

By Seth Richardson

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that, at the direction of President Obama, the United States Department of Justice will no longer perform it’s sworn duty to the Constitution of the United States, the duly-enacted laws of Congress, and the People.

President Obama has decided, all on his own, that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibits the federal government from recognizing gay marriages, is “unconstitutional,” and Attorney General Holder “concurs” in this “determination.”

In his statement, Holder trots out excuses for his dereliction of duty, the primary argument being that:

“…the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.  The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional.”

Holder goes on to state that he is directing the Justice Department not to defend the DOMA in court, which torpedoes several ongoing cases.

The problem is that Holder doesn’t work for or at the bidding of the President. According to the Attorney General’s own website, “The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested.”

In other words, Holder does not work for the President, as his personal attorney, he works for the People of the United States, and his duty is to represent the nation in legal matters, not pander to popular public opinion or kowtow to the demands of the President. President Obama is his manager, not his employer. We are, and Holder owes his allegiance and his duty to us.

Holder has a higher duty, as an officer of the Court, to vigorously and zealously defend the laws that Congress enacts, whether he likes them or not, and whether or not the President likes them. Likewise, the President is obliged to see that the laws duly enacted by Congress are faithfully executed.

The issue of a President refusing to enforce or defend laws duly enacted by Congress goes far back into our history. Although it never came to a direct confrontation over presidential non-enforcement, in objecting to a Supreme Court ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832 that invalidated the Indian Removal Act intended to eject the Cherokees from Georgia, President Andrew Jackson famously said, “John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can.”

The issue of a President flatly refusing to obey or enforce a law of Congress was squarely faced in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 for refusing to obey the Tenure in Office Act, which was passed over his veto as a part of the Reconstruction after the Civil War.

The Act prohibited the President from removing from office anyone who had been confirmed by the Senate. Johnson, over the objection of many in Congress, removed Edwin M. Stanton from his position as Secretary of War, replacing him with General Lorenzo Thomas. The House of Representatives promptly, within days, impeached Johnson. He survived removal from office by a single vote in the Senate. Stanton retired, and Thomas continued to serve for another year, retiring 10 days before Johnson left office.

This seminal event demonstrates the importance of the President’s obedience to his oath and his constitutional obligations and limitations. Since then, the academic debate has raged over the President’s duty to enforce laws that he feels are unconstitutional. But this aspect of executive authority did not gain much traction until the Progressive era began in about 1912, when Progressive Presidents began picking and choosing which laws they would obey and enforce in order to advance the Executive State vision of Woodrow Wilson.

The Progressive agenda set forth by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR marked the advance of both presidential intransigence to the acts of Congress, and liberal scholarly arguments attempting to justify presidential violations of Article II, Section 3, Clause 4 of the Constitution, which explicitly requires that “[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is not a discretionary matter, it is a mandatory directive and duty of the President.

The arguments over presidential non-enforcement of the law are arcane, highly academic, and convoluted, but they fall into two main camps.

The Progressive version includes those who take a “unitary executive” vision of the Separation of Powers Doctrine and hold that the President is “co-equal” to both the Congress and the Supreme Court in his authority to “interpret” the Constitution according to his best judgment.

There is, however, no express authority for the President to interpret the Constitution at all and decide what he will and will not enforce to be found in the document. The Progressive argument relies on inferences they draw about the tension between the Constitution and laws duly enacted by Congress, which have admittedly not infrequently been ruled to be unconstitutional. However, to make these arguments, a large amount of pettifoggery and obfuscation is required to weasel around the clear pronunciation of the Constitution on Presidential authority and the separation of powers.

Progressives argue that it is the President’s duty to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, or to defend his executive power, which authorizes him to ignore any law he deems is either unconstitutional or an encroachment on his legitimate executive authority merely because he believes it to be so. Thus, the Progressives argue, a President’s duty to uphold the Constitution outweighs his constitutionally-mandated duty that the laws be “faithfully executed.”

The core error in this argument is the presumption that the President has the authority to determine what laws are constitutional and what laws are not, based on his own judgment. While it is true that Presidents have refused to enforce laws that are manifestly unconstitutional in the past, such refusals still constitute a usurpation of legislative or judicial power, no matter how honorable the intent.

The strict constructionist version holds that the President’s authority to participate in legislation is expressly limited by the Constitution only to the power of the veto, and the power of the pardon, and that the President has a mandatory duty to uphold all duly-enacted laws of Congress, even if he believes them to be unconstitutional.

It is the strict construction version that holds the most legal weight, because Article 1, Section 1 says, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” This is an exceedingly clear explication of the situation. The President’s participation in the making of law is limited to his persuasive powers during congressional debates and his veto power, which may be overridden in turn by Congress. The Congressional override of a presidential veto is proof absolute that it is the Congress who is ultimately responsible for making the law, and that the President has no authority to effectively veto a law by refusing to enforce it.

The Progressive notion that the President can exercise a defacto veto by refusing to enforce the law turns the whole structure of the Separation of Powers Doctrine on its head. It’s a usurpation of legislative authority and an act of despotism.

The proper course of action for a President presented with a law he believes to be unconstitutional or a usurpation of his executive authority  is for him to either challenge the law before the Court, or enforce the law and allow those who are wrongfully impacted by the law to do so as such violations occur.

Indeed, the latter is the customary way in which cases and controversies are resolved by the courts. Those with standing to sue because they have been, or will be harmed by the law, do so, and the case winds its way through the system until the Supreme Court rules on the matter with finality.

For the President to simply declare that a law is unconstitutional and then refuse to enforce it usurps not only the legislative authority of Congress, but also the judicial authority of the Court to make such determinations, and in some cases, actually makes it impossible for people who might be impacted by the law to challenge it in court.

Such usurpation of authority is a violation of the Constitution, and therefore is a “high crime or misdemeanor” for which President Obama, like President Johnson, can and should be impeached and removed from office. And it’s not just the sitting President who has committed this violation, former Presidents including Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. have done the same thing, and should have likewise been impeached.

As for Holder, and the defense of duly-enacted laws in court, he represents the United States, not the President, and his duty as an officer of the court require him to mount a vigorous defense of his client’s and his employer’s interests, who are the People, not the President, regardless of his personal opinions on the propriety or constitutionality of the law. For him to do otherwise is for him to violate the canons of professional ethics for lawyers, for which he should be disbarred.

The President is not the arbiter of law, that authority lies with the Supreme Court, nor is he a legislator, that authority lies with the Congress. He is the enforcer of all of the laws that we, the People direct and authorize our elected representatives to enact, for better or for worse.

His duty is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and remain obedient to the Constitution that he swore to “preserve, protect and defend.”

© 2011 Altnews

Colorado House of Representatives rule change may violate the Establishment Clause

By Seth Richardson

When it comes to the separation of church and state, moments have meaning. Time and location both are important considerations when deciding whether or not government is impermissibly dabbling in religion. The state House of Representatives just took action that unnecessarily disturbs the status quo and potentially violates the Establishment Clause.

Up until now, the morning prayers in the state House have been conducted prior to calling the legislative body to order. But a rule change approved by a 40 to 25 vote changes that. Now, the House will be called to order by the Speaker of the House, and then a Rabbi, priest or minister will deliver the morning prayer.

This rule change is significant because it is, or at least ought to be the difference between a free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and an impermissible governmental action that violates the Establishment Clause.

Just as the recent prayer luncheon at the Air Force Academy, and indeed the National Prayer Breakfast attended by the President are private expressions of religion by public officials, notwithstanding that they occur on government property, a prayer offered before the official business of the state House of Representatives is underway is outside the official functions of government, and is therefore a permissible exercise of religious freedom by those in the House who wish to pray together before getting down to business.

But once the House has been called to order, legislators are no longer completely free to worship as their conscience demands. The instant that the gavel drops and the roll call begins, representatives are “on the clock” for the people of Colorado, and their right to engage in religious activities while on the job is constrained.

Not eliminated, by any means, but merely constrained in ways that ensure that it cannot be argued that officials of the government are establishing religion by favoring religion over irreligion, or by favoring one religion over another.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents any member from praying silently or aloud at any time they choose to do so, provided that doing so does not disrupt the proceedings. But at the moment the gavel drops, the Speaker of the House, Frank McNulty, is no longer empowered to require any person to sit through a religious observance during the conduct of public business. His duty is to attend to public business, and only public business, from gavel to gavel.

According to the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Parliamentarian, the daily invocation in the House takes place after the gavel has fallen and the House has been called to order. Evidently this poses no concern to the Supreme Court, although perhaps it should.

Few would argue that stopping a legislative session in the middle of debating a bill to pray about it as a body would be constitutional. To say then that the Speaker of the House, either at the state or federal level may stop the proceedings of the House to pray in one instance is to suggest that he can do so whenever it pleases him to do so, which is clearly not what the First Amendment contemplates.

This suggests that there needs to be a bright line drawn between private religious observances and the official functions of government when it comes to legislative opening prayers. That bright line should be the dropping of the gavel and the calling of the public body to order.

The definitive case on legislative prayer so far is Marsh v. Chambers, from 1983, where the Court said:

“In light of the unambiguous and unbroken history of more than 200 years, there can be no doubt that the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has become part of the fabric of our society. To invoke Divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws is not, in these circumstances, an “establishment” of religion or a step toward establishment; it is simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.

…

We conclude that legislative prayer presents no more potential for establishment than the provision of school transportation , beneficial grants for higher education , or tax exemptions for religious organizations.”

The Court did not address the precise timing of the legislative prayers, but scrupulous attention to detail regarding the timing of such prayers would militate against post-gavel invocations.

In the footnotes of Marsh, the Court points out that during deliberations regarding paying for a Congressional Chaplain, “At one point, Benjamin Franklin suggested that ‘henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business.’”

The word “before” ought to be important to the Colorado General Assembly, even if it is not to the U.S. Congress, in order to reduce controversy and respect the rights of the religious and the irreligious alike.

Moving the morning prayer from the pre-session period during which no public business may be conducted, and which is therefore the private free time of the legislators that they may use in any way they like, to a time after which the business of government has gotten underway, certainly has the appearance of favoring religion. And unnecessarily so.

In another pre-Lemon case, Everson v. Board of Education, the Court made several sweeping statements of First Amendment interpretation that should always guide the General Assembly when it comes to legislative prayers:

“The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance.”

By moving the prayer to a time when legislators are compelled to be present to conduct the public’s business, both force and influence are used to compel participation in religious worship.

In Lee v. Weisman, the Court addressed a benediction given at a high school graduation, saying:

“What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.

…

The principle that government may accommodate the free exercise of religion does not supersede the fundamental limitations imposed by the Establishment Clause. It is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act in a way which “establishes a [state] religion or religious faith, or tends to do so.”

The Court also addressed invocations by students at extracurricular activities, in this case a football game, in Santa Fe Independent School District v Doe:

“These invocations are authorized by a government policy and take place on government property at government-sponsored school-related events…Even if we regard every high school student’s decision to attend a home football game as purely voluntary, we are nevertheless persuaded that the delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship.”

It’s important to note that while the latter cases are specifically aimed at school prayer, and the Court has ruled that schools, like the military, are special exceptions to the general provisions of both clauses of the First Amendment, this does not mean that it’s a constitutional free-for-all when it comes to adults, including legislators.

The controlling case law when it comes to government actions involving religion is is Lemon v. Kurtzman, which established what is known as the “Lemon Test.” This test has three prongs to it, and the failure of any one prong makes the governmental action a violation of the Establishment Clause:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;

Second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion;

Finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.

Whether having a legislative invocation or prayer is itself not repugnant to the Constitution, the rule change itself, as a legislative act, violates the first two prongs of the Lemon Test because there is no secular legislative purpose for changing the rule and also because the principle effect of the change explicitly advances religion.

That there is historical context for legislative prayers does not necessarily answer the charge that this rule change is unconstitutional, particularly when the new rule replaces long-established legislative practice that by it’s original timing neatly avoids the potential for violating the Establishment Clause and also avoids the appearance of impropriety.

The question must be asked, what was the need to change the established practice of carefully separating the practice of religion from the business of the public?

The question of the motivation for the rule change remains unanswered.

But those questions must be answered, and the rule should be returned to the status quo ante, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

© 2011 Altnews

Abuses of Colorado law by the sovereign Indian Nations deserve the full diplomatic treatment

By Seth Richardson

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers is on the warpath against abuses of Colorado’s payday lending law by companies claiming to be “protected” by the sovereign status of the Indian Nations. In a story in the Sunday, February 11, 2011 edition of the Denver Post, “Hiding behind a tribe,” reporter Alicia Caldwell describes how non-Indian out-of-state payday lenders are hiding behind two Indian tribes to evade Colorado’s new, and strict payday lending laws.

Members of the Santee Sioux and Oklahoma Miami Indian Nations are trying to give legal cover to several payday lending companies by claiming that the non-Indian businesses are “arms” of the “sovereign” Indian Nations.

This is not really anything new, casino gambling corporations have been camping out on Indian lands for decades now. But the payday lending scheme is different because the transactions don’t take place on Indian lands, they take place in cyberspace.

Suthers’ complaint has been wending its way through the courts, and the Colorado Supreme Court returned the matter to the trial court for more proceedings. Suthers is rightfully afraid that if loose associations with Indian tribes is sufficient to endow tribal sovereignty on any commercial business, the tribes will likely become “rent-a-tribes” allowing non-Indian businesses to escape state regulations. That cannot be permitted.

This is no idle threat. Federal law regarding the regulation of the Indian tribes is pretty exclusively vested in the Congress, although the states have won some ability to control Indian activities in places. Indian nations across the US use their state tax exempt status to sell everything from gasoline to cigarettes at prices far under what off-reservation commercial enterprises can.

Fair enough, if the transaction takes place on the reservation.

But the difference here is that the transaction does not take place “on the reservation,” it takes place, essentially, at the consumer’s home, on his computer. What the businesses, and the tribes want is to have their cake and eat it too. They want access to off-reservation markets and consumers without having to comply with off-reservation laws and regulations.

Sorry, not buying any today.

Because the transactions are not taking place solely on the reservation, they shouldn’t be subject to sovereign immunity…unless the Indians want FULL sovereign immunity.

And that would involve reservation border stations, immigration and customs inspection, trade and tariff agreements and other common international diplomatic and legal obstacles to unfettered trade.

It’s illegal, for example, for a payday lender in Mexico to solicit business in Colorado without complying with our laws, so why should Indian Nations be any different?

Short of making the Indian Nations fully sovereign, with all the diplomatic consequences thereof, there’s another way to quash this fraudulent scheme to evade our state laws.

The legislature should pass a law saying that no contract entered into with any Indian, Indian Nation, or company ostensibly owned by or protected by an Indian Nation’s sovereign status, can be legally enforced in any way outside of the boundaries of reservation property. Access to Colorado’s civil courts should be denied for contract disputes with Indian Nation-based businesses.

Colorado is under no obligation to enforce private contracts made with the Indian Tribes, particularly if the tribes are going to use their sovereign status to evade Colorado law.

If the Indian Nations want to enforce contracts they have entered into in violation of our laws, by claiming sovereign status, they will have to induce the parties to come to the reservation in order to serve them with legal process, and they will have to adjudicate the dispute on the reservation. If that means they can’t get a debtor to come to the reservation for trial, and they can’t get the Colorado courts to enforce a judgment, it’s just their tough luck. The same rules should be applied to gambling debts as well.

That’s what it really means to be a “sovereign nation.”

Payday borrowers should borrow whatever they can from tribally-protected payday lenders, and then stiff the lenders and the tribes, while making sure never to enter tribal reservations.

If the lender takes them to civil court anywhere outside the reservation, the borrower should simply claim the sovereign immunity of their status as a non-tribe-member citizen of the United States as justification for repudiating the debt.

If the payday lenders want sovereign tribal protection, they can get by with sovereign tribal enforcement, which should not be valid or enforceable anywhere but on their reservation.

© 2011 Altnews

Religion is what you do, not what you believe

By Seth Richardson

One of the most common canards heard from atheists is the claim “atheism isn’t a religion.” True enough, from the lexicological point of view, but the canard is not intended as a definition of atheism, it’s dragged out as a means of evading criticism of the ideological, and frequently religious actions of Atheists in the real world.

It’s supposed to be a debate-stopper in response to the common theistic canard “atheism is just another religion, so it’s no better than any other religion.”

The cognitive disconnect in both sides of this “is too, is not” byplay is that everybody seems unable to distinguish between religion and theism, particularly Atheists. It’s not really that they cannot distinguish, it’s more that they refuse to do so, and they refuse to acknowledge that in many instances, atheism is expressed as a religious belief every bit as much as belief in God is.

But Atheists hate to be lumped in with religion, in part because they consider themselves to be the intellectual superiors of anyone who holds theistic religious beliefs. It would be demeaning to their reputations, and harmful to their anti-religious rhetoric to be classified as “just another religion.”

Ignoring for the moment the hubris of claiming intellectual superiority over historical religious philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas, it may be observed that religion is as religion does.

Religion, in fact, is not what you believe (whether you believe in Jehova, Zeus or Thor is irrelevant), it’s how you practice your beliefs, whatever they may be.

How does PZ Myers enter into this discussion? Well, it seems that Myers has seen the light and is not just admitting to his religious anti-theistic, anti-religious beliefs, he’s proselytizing and exhorting his minions and acolytes that they too should acknowledge their status as religious believers.

In a blog entry at his website, “Pharyngula,” Myers writes,

“…nobody becomes an atheist because of an absence of values, and no one becomes an atheist because the dictionary tells them they are. I think we also do a disservice to the movement when we pretend it’s solely a mob of individuals who lack a belief, rather than an organization with positive goals and values.”

Good boy! You get a pat on the head for engaging your reasoning faculties.

Myers is exactly right. Nobody “becomes” an atheist without forming a set of beliefs and associated practices. The trick to understanding this is that there is a difference between “atheism” and “atheist.” Atheism is, in dictionary form, “a lack of belief in gods.” But atheists are more than dictionary definitions. They are, to murder a metaphor, what they eat.

Myers agrees with me and goes on to say,

“Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.” As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space with no connections to anything else; as if atheists are people who have attained a zen-like ideal, their minds a void, containing nothing but atheism, which itself is nothing. Dumbasses.”

Dumbasses indeed, and the world is chock full of them. Thanks for having the courage to point this out, PZ, it puts you head and shoulders above most other Atheist “philosophers.”

Of course, it’s likely that Myers cribbed this notion from me, since I’ve been expounding this sort of argument for several years now, including at the now-defunct Richard Dawkins discussion forum, and at the “lifeboat” replacement, Rational Skepticism. I wonder if the opprobrium heaped on Myers is anything like the truckloads heaped on me for having the temerity to challenge Atheist dogma. It’s pretty much like calling Mohammed a pederast, without the strap-on bombs.

But I digress.

In philosophy, there are several flavors or varieties of atheists or atheism, which is to say the practice of atheistic beliefs. The most convenient in this context is the distinction between “implict atheism” and “explicit atheism.” As described by Libertarian and atheist author George H. Smith in his book Atheism: The Case Against God,  “Implicit atheism is the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it”. Explicit atheism is the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it.”

Implict atheists are infants and children, the mentally defective, and the exceedingly rare person who has never been exposed in any way to theistic concepts. Explicit atheists are everyone else who have been exposed to theistic concepts and have evaluated those concepts and claims, and have made a decision to reject them as untrue.

Myers has more than a little contempt for those who claim implicit atheism when clearly they are explicitly atheistic,

“If I ask you to explain to me why you are an atheist, reciting the dictionary at me, you are saying nothing: asking why you are a person who does not believe in god is not answered when you reply, “Because I am a person who does not believe in god.” And if you protest when I say that there is more to the practice of atheism than that, insisting that there isn’t just makes you dogmatic and blind.”"

Right on PZ! Myers goes on to do the unthinkable in atheist dogma, he acknowledges that theists are not simply deluded boobs incapable of rational thought,

“You are an atheist — take pride in what you do believe, not what you deny. And also learn to appreciate that the opposition hasn’t arrived at their conclusions in a vacuum. There are actually deeper reasons that they so fervently endorse supernatural authorities, and they aren’t always accounted for by stupidity.

But here’s where Myers goes astray in his otherwise rational examination of the conceits of atheism.

“…there is more to my atheism than simple denial of one claim; it’s actually based on a scientific attitude that values evidence and reason, that rejects claims resting solely on authority, and that encourages deeper exploration of the world. My atheism is not solely a negative claim about gods, but is based on a whole set of positive values that I will emphasize when talking about atheism. That denial of god thing? It’s a consequence, not a cause.”

Here’s what makes Myers’ position an expression of religious belief; The only thing that science can say about the existence or non-existence of God is that there is insufficient critically robust scientific evidence in the record upon which to base any conclusions, pro or con.

This is true because while it is true that theists have not provided science with critically robust scientific evidence for the existence of God, that fact does not infer that God does not or cannot exist.

“The absence of evidence,” goes the aphorism, “is not evidence of absence.” In fact, it may merely be evidence of the primitive state of humanity’s understanding of the physical universe, much less our complete and utter ignorance about the nature of any other universes or dimensions that may exist.

Theoretical physics has many theories, which are actually nothing more than educated speculations, about the possibility of alternate universes and their configuration, from bubble universes to membrane universes, to the “multiverse” theory of ever-expanding forkings of this universe.

Because we have so little actual knowledge of our own universe—we cannot even explain how it came into being with any certainty—and we have less understanding of other universes, no one can say with any credibility that the physical properties of another universe, or even this universe (and it’s many postulated dimensions), preclude the existence of some intelligent entity that has the capacity to manipulate time, space, matter or energy in this universe that might reasonably be defined as “God” by human beings.

Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Or, if I may be so bold, indistinguishable from divine action.

And it is this evident scientific ignorance that makes Myers’ assertions about “scientific attitude(s) that value evidence and reason” and “positive values” into religious beliefs. Value evidence and engage in reason, by all means, St. Thomas Aquinas and a host of other philosophers have done so, so you’re in good company, PZ. But do not succumb to what I’ve coined the “Atheist’s Fallacy.”

This fallacy is a fallacy of circular reasoning in which one of the premises of an argument against the existence of God is drawn from one of many human-created theistic claims, which premise is presumed to be true in reaching the conclusion that God does not exist:

• Premise: Christians claim that God created the earth 6000 years ago.
• Premise: Science has proven that the earth is 4 billion years old.
• Conclusion: Because the first premise is false, God does not exist.

The error in reasoning should be obvious. The premise falsely presumes that the Christian claims about God’s actions are true. If the Christian’s claim is false, or erroneous, the conclusion fails because one cannot base a rational, logical conclusion on false premises.

The circular reasoning is seen in the “God doesn’t exist because what Christians say about God isn’t true.” Whether or not the claims of Christians are true has no effect on whether God actually exists, or doesn’t.

God, it must be recognized, if He exists, is not constrained or created by man’s observations or claims. God must be greater than our dim, fallible view of him, or He would not be God. To constrain God to the boundaries of human understanding or description is plain error.

But how is it that Myers and his ilk can be defined as being “religious” about their atheism merely because they hold “positive views” about theism and religion?

Religion has a number of accepted authoritative definitions, and naturally the primary definitions include references to theistic concepts, but that’s not the only definition of religion, and it is generally acknowledged that a number of “atheistic” religions exist, including Buddhism and Secular Humanism.

As I said before, theism is what you believe, religion is how you go about practicing your beliefs.

The relevant definitions that apply to Myers and innumerable other self-professed (and therefore explicit) atheists include:

“Something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience;”

“A specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects;”

” The body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices.”

Myers and his fellow-travelers indisputably hold beliefs about theism and science, and Myers in particular strongly believes in and devotedly follows his atheistic beliefs as a matter of ethics and conscience.

“I oppose religion because we can see its effects on even otherwise brilliant people: it short-circuits skepticism and leaves them open to dangerous and erroneous ideas.”

He’s so devoted to his beliefs that he’s made something of a pest of himself to legislators and theists, and he regularly proselytizes the faithful at his web site, Pharyngula.

And that’s why PZ Myers, and a whole bunch of other Atheists (and I use the capital “A” to denote those atheists who qualify as members of the Atheist religion deliberately) are in every relevant respect, persons of religion and members of a religious congregation. So are his acolytes, sycophants, minions and worshipers. So are hosts of other Atheists who hold similar beliefs and engage in similar religious practices.

So, next time you encounter an Atheist, go right ahead and tell them that their belief set is “just another religion,” because it’s true. They have no better hotline to the straight skinny on the existence, or non-existence of God than you do, or anybody else does. When they object, refer them to me, I’ll help set them straight about their apostasy and heresy.

© 2011 Altnews