Theocracy Is UnAmerican: A Rally for Secular Government 2023

The red wave fizzled in the midterm elections across the country — everywhere except here. In Iowa, Christian Nationalists actually gained seats, achieving a supermajority in both legislative houses. They have the numbers to pass any bills they feel like and no reason to hold back. I expect this year to be so much worse than last year, and 2022 was a bad year for secular-minded Iowans.

Yeah, I know, I’ve said that every year since 2017. Unfortunately,  I’ve been proven right every single year. But there are some things atheists and humanists can do to push back against the theocratic agenda; to make our voices heard at the Capitol and express our frustration and disapproval.

One of those things is Theocracy Is UnAmerican: A Rally for Secular Government. 

Sponsored by Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers in the Capitol Rotunda, this event will take place 1:00 PM Thursday, March 23, 2023.

Our speakers will defend secular government, protect church/state separation, and push back against the Christian Nationalists who seek to tear down our democratic republic. 

I plan to give the opening remarks. Other speakers include our Press Officer Jason Bennell, Connie Ryan of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, and FFRF constitutional attorney Ryan Jayne. As we confirm more speakers I will update the list accordingly.

Prior to the rally, Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers and other like-minded groups will host outreach tables for legislators, staff, and visitors to the Capitol (set up at 9:00 AM).

Please attend if you can. There is power in numbers.  Ask for the day off now, put it in your calendar, and come to this rally. We need a crowd so large that Legislators and the Media cannot ignore us.

Christian Nationalists control the Iowa House and Senate but a third our our legislators still support secular government and our Constitutional rights. Let’s add our voices to theirs and inspire all the other secular citizens of Iowa to join us.

Reason On the Hill 2023

Reason on the Hill is back! Mark your calendars, folks: Monday Feb. 13 from 9:00 AM to about 3:00 PM in the Rotunda of the Iowa Capitol Building. Cosponsored by our friends  in Humanists of Linn County, Reason on the Hill is our secular lobby day. Please join us if you can to speak to your legislators, promote church/state separation, and encourage reason/science based public policy. 

We need your help with this. We need people to host our outreach table in the morning and then speak to legislators in the afternoon. If you can make it, please let us know. Clear your calendar and ask for the day off now. 

We will set up the outreach tables at 8:30 AM and spend the morning talking to legislators, staffers, lobbyists, and visitors to the Capitol Building. 

Okay, I have a confession. Feb. 13 is a Monday. Legislators spend Monday mornings driving back to the Capitol from their homes after the weekend so most won’t be there until later. They gavel in at 1:00 PM.  I am embarrassed to admit that when I reserved this time slot last Spring, I did not realize this. But there will still be a crowd of staffers, lobbyists, and probably a few early bird legislators there for us to talk to.

On the other hand, it was also the only unclaimed time left during the Session. There were no other options. 

We will tear down our outreach tables a little before Noon and go to lunch. 

After 1:00 PM, we will return to lobby our legislators in person.

In the midterm elections, Christian Nationalists gained seats in both chambers of the Iowa Legislature and the Executive Branch. They have the numbers to pass any bill they like. Our political climate is more polarized than ever. Because of that, theocrats have little reason to restrain themselves and every reason to keep their base riled up. 

Secular voices have to make themselves heard and Reason on the Hill is one of our most effective ways to do that.

We will partner with other like-minded groups to host outreach tables and meet with legislators. Reason on the Hill is open to any organization that supports our goals of science-based legislation, secular government, and the separation of church and state.

Find out more about Reason on the Hill at this link or on FaceBook.

You can reach me at Activism@Iowaatheists.org

Welcome Back!

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Heathen of the Corn, the official blog of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers — all shiny, polished, revamped, and rebooted. (Okay, really just that last adjective. You know what I mean. We are posting anew, starting over.) 

And this time around, it won’t be just me. We are reaching out to several other members of IAF to provide regular updates and fresh weekly content. If anyone out there wants to write a relevant guest post about atheism, freethought, humanism, human rights, secular government, philosophy, godless parenting, your personal journey out of religion etc. (it’s a long list, you get the idea), please contact me. We need to talk.

We will use this space to keep you informed about all things IAF: monthly meetings, social events, charitable activities, educational programs, and activist events. To start with, my own posts will mostly (but not entirely) concentrate on the 2023 Iowa Legislative Session. I expect a flood of horrible, theocratic bills to be filed — and signed into law.I will do my best to keep you informed as they all work their way through the House and Senate. I do this every year. It’s my weird hobby. 

Anyway, I hope you will check back here regularly. I will push these blog posts out to FaceBook and maybe some other social media. I am also seriously considering consolidating Heathen of the Corn posts in a biweekly email newsletter for those not interested in FaceBook or the IAF website.

Thank you for checking out the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers Blog, and thank you for your interest.

IAF Condemns Violence and Hate against the LGBTQ+ Community in Colorado

By: Chris Freeman, Director At Large

The weekend of November 19, 2022, brought an all too familiar scene back into the national spotlight. A man, and confirmed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, entered Club Q in Colorado Springs and repeatedly shot into the crowd, killing 5 people and wounding at least 19 others.

The shooting looks very much like a "bias-motivated" crime - a hate crime. Club Q was seen by the local LGBTQ+ community as one of the few places to express their identity without fear. In addition to the loss of the individual people who were murdered, that community is almost certainly grappling with the loss of something many of us take for granted - a sense of safety.

If you look through the hate crime statistics from the FBI (https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime), an uncomfortable trend is unavoidable. The top five most common types of bias offenses against LGBTQ+ people is overwhelmingly violence against their person. Bias offenses against various Christian groups are overwhelmingly property crimes. In this country, and probably the world over, the dominant group does not have much to fear from any of the oppressed groups no matter what their propaganda says.

The vast majority of anti-LGBTQ+ violence is a direct result of religious radicalization. And as Martin Niemöller claims in his poem "First They Came", we are in this together. The Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers group recognizes that we have a duty to show up whenever civil rights are attacked.

We mourn the loss of Daniel Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Green Paugh, Derrick Rump, and Raymond Green Vance. We did not know them, but our lives are enriched by people just like them. They are our sons and our daughters, our friends and our neighbors. Our hearts go out to their families, who are dealing with a loss most of us never have to even imagine.

But we don't stop at "thoughts and prayers". There are many ways to provide support, directly and indirectly.

Club Q has chosen Colorado Give 365 (https://www.coloradogives.org/donate/COHealingFund) as the official donation site.

Blood donation is another effective way to ensure emergency services are properly equipped.

Call your legislators to fight against laws which remove legal and social protections for vulnerable populations.

And in your daily life, take a stand against minor injustices.

Columbus Day, 2022

Every year, as October approaches, I anticipate the arrival of Columbus Day. And, I’m always

reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching his little sister do her report on

Columbus Day. Her idea was that the Queen said she would give Mr. Day three ships because

he was a very brave man. “Good luck,” says Charlie as he walks away.

Columbus Day is a holiday that atheists should observe. 530 years ago on October 12, 1492,

three ships landed on an Island in the Caribbean ocean. In early 1493, Columbus returned to

Spain to report to Isabella and Ferdinand that his prediction was correct — by sailing west, he

had reached the coast of India (Columbus went to his grave think that). Word of the voyage

spread quickly around Europe. Among those who heard the news was a young Polish student

(Nicholas Copernicus) who was attending University in Bologna. Already, while still a student,

Copernicus, along with some others including some of his professors, was questioning the

widely accepted Ptolemaic earth centered model of the universe. Copernicus spent the rest of

his life, using simple instruments that he made himself, developing his heliocentric (sun

centered) model. Literally, he spent the rest of his life on this problem. He died on May 24,

1543, the very day that his magnum opus De Revolutionibus orbium celestial was rolling off the

newly invented movable type press. See, Copernicus’ Secret, How the Scientific Revolution

Began, by Jack Repcheck.

That was was only the beginning of the story, however. Not everyone was convinced that

Copernicus got it right. One reason for that doubt was that no one could figure out why the

planets appeared to stop in their orbits and reverse course. It was one of those mysteries that

just baffled people. About a hundred years later a Danish nobleman by the name of Tycho

Brahe built an elaborate observatory on an Island off the coast of Denmark. He made

meticulous observations of the positions of the planets, particularly the planet Mars. Like any

good scientist, Brahe made detailed notes about his observations. In the end, Brahe came up

with a hypothesis in which the earth remained the center of the solar system. Everything else

revolved around the sun, and that system revolved around the earth.

The king of Denmark died and, to make a long story short, Brahe got cross ways with the new

king and had to flee for his life. He sought refuge in the city of Prague. The emperor, Rudolph,

if I remember correctly, received Brahe and gave him a palace known as Belvedere. There was

only one hitch, he had to share it with the court mathematician, Johanas Kepler. Shortly after

Brahe died (that’s another story in itself), Kepler managed to have a good look at Brahe’s

observations, and saw a pattern — the planets only appeared to stop and reverse course if you

assumed they traveled in a perfect circle. When Kepler adjusted the equations such that the

planets traveled in an elliptical rather than a circular orbit, suddenly everything fell into place

and the mystery was solved. Copernicus was was correct after all. It was also during the life

time of Johanas Kepler that Galileo was peering through a home made telescope and having

the first look at the moons of Jupiter. Kepler and Galileo never met face to face, but they did

correspond. See, Tycho and Kepler, the Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our

Understanding of the Heavens, by Kitty Ferguson.

About a hundred years later, Sir Isaac Newton developed calculus and the laws of motion that

are still valid today. In 1859, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, independently,

formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection. James Clerk Maxwell and Michael

Faraday learned how electromagnetism worked. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

it was discovered that our planet is part of a solar system on the edge of a galaxy which

contains billions of such systems (although it is only in the last few weeks that other planets

have actually been seen). Edwin Hubble discovered that the Milky Way is only one of billions of

other galaxies all speeding away from each other.

Using the equations of Einstein and other physicists, Georges Lemaître, S.J. discovered that

the galaxies are speeding away from each other because the fabric of spacetime is expanding

at faster and faster speeds. December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space telescope was

launched providing us with a view of the heavens that Columbus Day, Nicholas Copernicus,

Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Sir Issac, Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître, etc etc could

only dream about if they had any idea at all that such a thing might be possible.

And it all started in the 15th century when it occurred to Columbus that if the earth is round —

which no one doubted — then it was not necessary sail east to reach India. The fact that there

are two previously unknown continents in the way was completely unknown to the Europeans

of that time.

I don’t know that anyone has proposed a date on which the scientific revolution began, but in

my opinion October 12, 1492 is as good a date as any. Can you imagine what will be common

knowledge 530 years from now? In a few months Lawrence Krauss will publish a book which

discusses problems scientists are attempting to solve — those are questions to which we don’t

know the answers. I predict that the answers to those problems will lead to new questions. In

the meantime it is up to us to solve the problems of global warming and nuclear destruction —

two problems that, if they are not solved, will doom life on the planet earth unsustainable.

Columbus Day pushed open the doors of science, let’s resolve that they don’t slam shut.

Good luck, indeed.

Michael Messina, Education Chair