A Secularist Takes The Truth Out of Addiction Treatment As A Condition of Parole

I've written about the alleged atheist alternatives to AA before and how they are largely a false front.  In this article posted on "Truthout" yesterday, a link to a familiar atheist "alternative" was posted.  It's one of the things I ran across during the desperate search for something that our brother would, possibly try since he rejected his last chance, AA on the basis of its alleged religiosity.   I looked and found there was still one "contact" listed, a name a half a state away from where he lived with no actual way to contact them.  

The articlem by Julie M. Rodriguez, was one of the many, many knock-off whines about an alleged wrong done to atheists by a majority religious society that are ubiquitous these days.  In this case it was a meth user who wanted to be paroled.

An atheist man from California is suing the state after he was jailed for failing to participate in a court-ordered 12-step drug addiction program in 2007. After serving time for methamphetamine possession, Barry A. Hazle, Jr., was told that he would have to attend a local, religiously-oriented organization as a condition of his parole.

Hazle, a lifelong atheist and member of several secular humanist groups, expressed his discomfort to his parole officer. But the answer wasn't what he was hoping for — he was told there were no alternative groups available. Despite his misgivings, Hazle attended the group as ordered. When he continued to raise objections about the nature of the program, he was arrested for violating his parole and sent back to state prison for another 100 days.

Unfortunately, this is an all too-familiar story for many who are struggling with addiction. If you've never been to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or a similar 12-step recovery program, you may not realize that these organizations are all, at their heart, deeply religious. While they don’t endorse any particular sect or denomination, 5 of the 12 steps explicitly require members to accept and acknowledge the existence of God.

I'm not certain that there is actually any right to parole.  There wouldn't seem to be but I'm no lawyer and I'd have to have one explain how, if it is a right, that so many people seem to be denied it on a regular basis. And I've never heard of anyone being paroled without making some kind of agreement to abide by conditions.  Oddly, the court case that she sites, doesn't mention parole but of prisoners who are ordered to attend religious meetings.  So I'd like to know how it applies to this case?  

I would assume Barry A. Hazle, Jr would have had to agree to the conditions of his parole, including the 12-step.  If he did agree to those terms, I can't see that he has a leg to stand on if reason is the basis.   He didn't like the program he agreed to.  Lots of addicts don't like rehabilitation, even the allegedly science based ones.  If the atheist alternatives were more than a false front operation, I'd bet you anything that there would be a large number of drop-outs, and non-compliance with its restrictions.  But, of course, those aren't available as even this biased article has to admit.

This wouldn't be a problem if secular alternatives to these programs were available for people struggling with addiction. That leads to another fact that may surprise you: by and large, few non-religious alternatives for drug and alcohol addiction exist. In many parts of the country, they’re not available at all.

Well, perhaps the self-appointed rationalist, considered the situation for a few minutes, she would realize there's a good reason for that,.   ATHEISTS AND OTHER "SECULARISTS" HAVEN'T STARTED AND MAINTAINED THOSE ALTERNATIVES.

There was no AA until it was begun by a couple of guys who, among other things, had a sense of religious obligation to do it.  It was originally influenced by a rather conservative religious movement but it quickly expanded its service to people of many different religious beliefs and, yes, even those who are non-religious. There are atheist members of AA who report it's worked for them.  There are even explicitly non-religious AA meetings.   There was a specifically secularist AA meeting a lot closer than the closest "alternative" in that list, two states away from where my brother lived. But, helpfully provided with just one more excuse to not stop, that "AA is religious,"  he wouldn't consider it. Most irresponsibly of all, Rodriguez repeats the popular atheist accusation - also popular among alcoholics who really don't need even more excuses to not stop -  that AA is a "cult".

The devotion some attendees display towards AA has even caused some to label the group a cult.

Well, if you want to talk about cults on that basis, most of the atheist membership organizations could be considered for inclusion on that list.   Look at how many people Madalyn Murray O'Hair suckered in to her own AA, American Atheists, with all of its sleaze and intrigue during her tenure as President For Life.  You could say the same about CSICOP during the Kurtz era.  Go look at the blog threads at the "Free Thought Blogs"  Especially the heavy hitters like PZ Myers, Ophilia Benson etc.  Not to mention the quite secular, if not actually atheist psychotheraputic cults.  My brother went to a psychiatrist for eight years, without it seeming to do him the least bit of good.  And that was on the basis of a medical referral.  If he had been "addicted" to the "cult" of AA instead of the very secular, very molecular-based ethyl alcohol molecule, if he hadn't given his life up to that higher power, he'd still be alive, with a job, a house, a car and a life.

I'm at a loss to understand the point of the article.   That atheists addicts get to have parole on their own terms? That the courts have to provide these atheist "alternative" groups that people they define as "religious" have provided on a private basis?  Or that it's just another excuse for whining and religion bashing?   What does Rodriguez imagine parole boards and courts are supposed to do with atheist addicts who want parole?   I know. I know.   I said I wasn't going to write anything this weekend but this one strikes too close to home to ignore it. I will be posting it to another blog that I began and then immediately let lapse.

It's Time To Call The New Atheists A Hate Group

Because that's exactly what they are. More on this theme soon.

Hands Off Those Who Are Mourning

They're still at it now that their good friends, the odious Phelps Cult, have decided to use the dead of Sandy Hook in their endless PR efforts.    Using the occasion to indiscriminately hate on all Christians -including those who are being deprived of their right to bury their dead in peace by the lazy fat-heads on the Roberts Court - the atheists are doing essentially the same thing.

I'm sure it's as great a comfort for them to be told they're superstitious and deluded by atheists as it is to have their places of worship and the sacred ground where they lay their loved ones used in the PR campaigns of other hate groups.

The right of people to bury their dead in the way which is meaningful to them is sacred, no one should presume to speak for them.   If the judges and "justices" and the ACLU are too stupid to be able to make the distinction between a "right" to spread hate, which can happen on any day of the year, in any place, and the ONLY occasion a family has to bury their dead, we need smarter judges and self-appointed champions of rights.    I'd point out that we need smarter atheists but if there are any they seem to be voluntarily restraining themselves from telling the loudmouthed morons among them to shut up.

No One With Any Decency Would Do It But Obviously Atheists Will

On the night that Dr. George Tiller was murdered, I was on Eschaton blog, where I used to hang out.   As soon as the news hit, the large number of assholish atheists who frequent that blog began to rage against Christians and religious folk in general, assigning responsibility for his murder to all religious people and Christians in particular.

Only if they'd bothered to read the news reports they'd have seen that Dr. Tiller was murdered WHILE HE WAS USHERING AT HIS REFORMED LUTHERAN CHURCH.   According to the congregated atheist assholes at that blog,  Dr. Tiller, as a member of a Christian church,  was responsible for his own murder, as were his friends and family and every other "Xian" in the world.   Having long since become fed up with atheist assholes, I pointed that out.  Needless to say, the correction wasn't appreciated.

When I went online today and saw that atheist assholes are using Adam Lanza in their rage against Christians and other religious people, I admit to being shocked.  Really, they have no shame, there is no lowest level to which they won't sink in their outrageous assholeish bigotry.    As many of the victims of that mass murder are prepared for funerals at churches and synagogues as many of their surviving victims will turn to their religious traditions to cope with an incomprehensible grief that any decent person would not interfere in or think of using, the asshole atheists are claiming the murdered children, teachers and others as their property, for their own use.

UPDATE: Looking around more, it's clear that a lot of gun nuts are trying to steal the bodies of the dead in Connecticut for their own purposes as well, leading to an often occurring alignments between the pseudo-Christian right and the materialist left.

The Public Forum Doesn't Belong to Atheists

If you cede public discourse to rude, obnoxious people in the hopes of discouraging incivility you're just ceding public discourse to people who like being rude and obnoxious.   Atheists who don't like to be rude and obnoxious seem to have ceded atheist discourse to them, I don't see any reason for religious people to let them have the rest of it.   

Atheists Believe they Own the Internet and the Left Just Like They Own Science

I don't know how many times, commenting on topic on a blog post or some other thing the atheists have hauled out the "you're a troll" mantra, one of those limited number of things they say instead of coming up with an argument or countering evidence.   If you're careful to be able to back up what you say when you argue with them, they'll always get back to that kind of stuff.

Hilariously, I've had many a clueless atheist mistake my far-left position as being evidence I'm a Republican.   Just this morning, in fact.   I'd never claim that most atheists were as Bright as so many of them believe themselves to be but, really, considering what most of what I say is quite far to the left of most of the blog atheists, it's kind of a hoot to be accused of really supporting the opposite of what I advocate.   It could lead someone to conclude they aren't very smart or that they're just basically dishonest.

Religious leftists have to assert themselves online and elsewhere or these dolts will remain the face of the left, turning away numbers many larger than they are.

On Hitler Supposedly Being a Christian

Blog atheists are notable for their habit of all saying a small number of limited things over and over again.  Usually they've gotten them from other atheists instead of directly from people who know what they're talking about.  One of those is the frequently repeated tape loop about Hitler and the Nazis being Christians.

In an argument on this point last week,  something occurred to me that I'd never considered before.  In the grim list of groups who were murdered by the Nazis there are Jews, Roma, disabled people, leftists, gay German men, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests, especially Polish and Czechoslovakian priests and any others who opposed the Nazis,  The protestant Confessing Church, etc.  But there is one group relevant to that frequently made atheist canard, that the Nazis were a Christian phenomenon,  missing from that horrible list.

Atheists were not targeted by the Nazis for extermination or even suppression.

The Nazis violated the teachings of Jesus in the most obvious and fundamental ways.

They did not love God with all of their heart, soul, strength and mind and their neighbor as themselves 

They didn't do unto others as they would have done unto them.

They did not turn the other cheek when attacked.

They did not love their enemies and pray for them.

They did not act as good Samaritans.

They did not give to the poor and the destitute, the downtrodden of the world, they did their best to crush them into dust.   That is what the Nazis did to the least among them.

They lived by the sword and died by it, their dying by the sword was about the only part of Jesus's words they fulfilled.   The Nazis tried to gain the world and they lost their souls, as so many who merely profess Christianity without fulfilling its requirements do, even outside of that indisputably anti-Christian group.

Nazism was entirely compatible with atheism and the most profoundly religion hating atheists, as Martin Bormann's position in the Nazi hierarchy proves.  And he was far from the only atheist who was an enthusiastic Nazi.  There is nothing in materialism, the faith of most modern atheists, that was violated by the Nazis, there is everything about the gospels that they violated.  Their actions and words were entirely incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, his closest disciples, the Jewish prophetic tradition they were a part of and most of the history of Christian theology.  Clearly, being a serious Christian was far less compatible with being a Nazi than being a serious materialist, being an atheist doesn't seem to have conflicted with it at all.

Materialism has no ban against murdering people, singly or as a total genocide, it is absolutely against the gospel of Jesus to commit one murder or to refuse to give aid to people living in misery.   A materialist, acting with complete integrity with his beliefs, can kill people and refuse to help the helpless, a good Christian cannot. Trying to live by those teachings of Jesus listed above could get you imprisoned and killed by the Nazis,  especially those teachings against killing other people and doing justice.  The pacifism of the Jehovah's Witnesses was one of the things that brought them some of the severest treatment of any group under the Nazis.  Following the teachings of Jesus is what also got other religious people murdered.

A Nazi could possibly be convinced that killing and oppressing people is wrong from the teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels, there is nothing in atheism or materialism that could convince them to give up Nazism.    That is real life proof that Christianity is better than materialism and atheism.  That difference isn't unimportant.  That difference is real, it is conclusive, it means everything.