Those mean child advocates! How dare they complain about a few (thousand) priests who rape children and receive little to no punishment for it. It’s just like those Jews that the Church has persecuted for two thousand years and counting. Yeah! Like that! Big meanies who have it in for the Church.

Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, one of the top officials in the Vatican gave a very public show of support to the Pope during the Easter Mass. Because it only makes sense that, at a time when the Church should be looking more closely at their attitudes toward pedophiles and child rapists within their ranks, any criticism would be taken as an attack on the Pope. Not that this particular Pope has done much to address the problem in any serious way.

My child will never go anywhere near a church if I can help it. Certainly not alone…

It shouldn’t be that important to let other people know that I’m not religious, right? I know I’m an atheist, my immediate family knows, some close friends know…that should be enough. Right?

Sort of. Coming out with one’s religious preference, or lack thereof, is much like coming out in other ways. It makes people who aren’t the norm less like demons to others, more human. It makes people realize that there are more of us than they had thought or been told. That would be for pretty much any subset of “us”. Three spring to mind for me, but there are probably less (or more) for you.

It also makes things easier on those who can’t reveal their atheism for safety concerns. In a lot of places, notably parts of the US, saying you are an atheist can lead to harassment, ostracism, disowning and worse. I realize that it’s also the case in other countries, but the US is where I’m from and the place I know best. Just knowing you’re not the only one can make a huge difference in somebody else’s life.

So yes, that big red A is there for a reason. If you click on it, it leads to the OUT Campaign. It’s sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and it’s…well, it does pretty much what it says.

I’m not very comfortable with placing labels on children that may change as they become older. Race, nationality, sexual orientation, gender (sometimes), biological vs. adopted (or placed/surrendered) – those are things that cannot change. Gender…well, maybe. But things like a religion, social class (and for the most part I’m talking about the US here) – those can and sometimes do change as a child grows up and becomes more independent.

We have always tried to expose School Girl to different religions as she’s been growing up. Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Wicca, Islam, and Christianity so far. Right now, we’re working on talking to her about her friends’ religions and that we aren’t religious at all; which is perfectly appropriate for a 7-year-old. Of course, her “God” is a giant elephant with a lollipop in his mouth…

I should say that I couldn’t see all the fuss about the “Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone” that was displayed not far from us last November and December. So perhaps I’m not as sensitive as some.

Stephen Fry is a kick-ass speaker. This is a part of the Intelligence Squared debate series in London; it was broadcast by BBC News on the weekend of 11-7-09. His part of the debate happens at the 2:40 mark. Unfortunately, the last few seconds of his speech were cut off and aren’t available (AFAIK) on the next YouTube excerpt. Mr. Fry is passionate, funny and thoughtful. I especially liked what he has to say about distinguishing between religious people and religion. Enjoy.

ETA: He also celebrated getting his millionth follower on Twitter with this video (NSFW or kids).

Take a look at the date on the article: That’s right – it’s from the TIME dated Dec. 7, 1970. Not exactly news.

It does make me wonder how much things have changed in the adoption world, if at all. When we were beginning our “adoption journey” 9 years ago, infant adoptions in our state were almost always handled by Christian agencies. Those agencies that weren’t specifically Christian did have an indefinable but definite preference for Christian adoptive parents.

For example, the “Dear Birthparent” letters that we were given as samples were all written by Christians. Not a difficult task to suss that out once you got beyond the first paragraph. One that I recall was specifically “pro-life”, praising the potential birthparents of their child for choosing adoption over abortion.

Another example was the adoptive parent questionnaire. Several questions related both to the prospective parents’ religious beliefs and what sort of “values” (religious values) they wanted to give their child. Evil Dad and I both wrote down “we are spiritual but not religious”. We also mentioned that we had planned to take our child to the Unitarian Universalist church nearby (we still are talking about that, as I feel that she’s old enough to get something out of comparative religious education now). We were fortunate in that School Girl’s birthfamily aren’t especially religious, although many of them are deists. Still, sometimes I wonder if our 2 year wait would have been less if I had outright lied about our religious inclinations.

Since then I’ve met 2 other adoptive families who identify as either atheist or agnostic, and 1 family who’s currently going through the infant adoption process. I wish we could be here longer, as I’d love to talk to them about how they dealt with that process and if there were difficulties along the way.