Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Surprise! No, not really. Theists lie to Supreme Court.

Hello folks, sorry I’ve been quiet for a while. But it’s for the best reasons: I have a new job! In 8 days I shall be back in my alter ego as administrative assistant for a non-profit.   My sojourn in retail has been interesting and occasionally fun, but I am so happy to be out of it.

Not much on the atheist front at the moment, except for news from the FFRF (original story in Slate) that the folks in Greece NY who were part of the Supreme Court decision about public meeting prayers are intentional liars when they falsely claimed that anyone would be allowed to give an invocation. It shows that the SCOTUS conservative judges were wrong when they claimed that these prayers were “only” ceremonial, since now we have only theists being able to give such invocations.

Nope, now only people from “assemblies with an established presence in the town of Greece that regularly meet for the primary purpose of sharing a religious perspective” can give these invocations (and it does a lovely job of showing that my commenter self-proclaimed Bishop Robin was utterly wrong with his claims that no one is being forced to participate in religion at public meetings). No surprise there at all and we can see again that religion doesn’t make anyone a decent person but it sure does seem to guarantee that their supposed moral god-given laws will be broken when convenient. Thanks, you, certain theists in Greece, NY for showing again that there is no reason to trust people just because they claim to be religious and therefore supposedly moral.

And yes, their actions are quite stupid when one thinks that they could have simply said people from Greece, NY could be the only ones to give invocations, no matter what the type. Then, their lie of “With this policy in place, we can return to the business of the town.” Wouldn’t be a baseless excuse, and they wouldn’t be in contempt of the court. Of course, it would also mean that they wouldn’t be ignoring their bible again and again (Prov 6, 12, 19, 24; Exodus 20; Matthew 15; Leviticus 19; Romans 13; 1 Peter 2; etc).

I haven’t been able to find much about what happens if someone ignores the SCOTUS and what happens now that they’ve reneged on what they promised. Seems like this could be a basis for yet one more SCOTUS court case, and this one could be quite fun to watch. Let’s see how many theists want to put their religions to the vote: are they “real” religions or not?  Are Jews better than Christians? Are Muslims better than Sikhs?  Are Catholics better than Presbyterians?  Again, I am quite happy to offer to do the altar test with anyone who insists that their god is real.  Or perhaps another test, where a god will allow you to walk out of a burning furnace (some of my ancestors were named after one of the fellows in the story).  Plenty of ways to determine what, if any, gods are real.