I've been thinking a lot about my anger.
The anger that I feel toward Christian nationalists shoving their religion down my throat.
There's part of me that thinks, I really shouldn't. Allow them to make me angry.
I should just be peaceful in the face of everything that's going on.
The thing is, if I'm peaceful in the face of everything that's going on, well, that might feel better for me, maybe, but it's not gonna change anything.
Now, this is not to say that I want to be angry all the time.
People get upset about atheists being angry. Why are you so angry all the time? Often those people don't stop to ask what is making atheists angry. Rather, it's an accusation: Why are you so angry all the time? Like, why are you choosing to be angry? What's wrong with you and having your anger?
You know, I think there is a whole lot in the world right now that's going on that really should make people angry.
People are getting hurt.
And it's not just people specifically their bodies getting hurt getting taken off to prison, getting shot, getting bombed.
It's also entire ways of being that are being destroyed.
We have educational institutions being defunded, so that learning, basic learning is becoming more and more impossible.
We have media organizations that have been undermined or bought out or bribed or bullied into participating in fascism. So that we don't even have information anymore.
So there's a lot to be angry about.
But on the other hand, there is glorious tea.
I have this tea I want to tell you about, and I promise that I'm not getting off the topic here.
This tea is ginger turmeric tea, and my son's girlfriend brought this over about a month and a half ago, and I've been rationing it out to myself, cup by cup, when I really needed it, and I really needed it this morning, because I was just feeling really stressed out about some particular work I had to do.
It's the kind of thing I'm not really good at, but I need to get done, and that always makes me feel stressed out.
So I made this, this cup of tea, ginger and turmeric, there's something about the 2 of those things that come together, and it just feels like you're drinking a warm ray of sunlight.
You know, I mean, you taste it in your mouth, but you also feel that warmth coming down into your chest.
It just makes me feel so much better.
And it's not about the nutritional value of ginger and turmeric.
I could just chew on ginger and turmeric roots.
If I wanted to get that.
There's more to life than just getting your literal nutrition, your vitamins, your roughage.
There is something that religion for the people who believe in it is good at, which is getting them to feel things.
And we need to have the ability to have feelings that heal us, as well as feelings that motivate us to take care of the things that need to be taken care of.
So I get this great feeling from that ginger turmeric tea, and I've just ordered myself a new bag of it, loose leaf tea, so that I can make it the way I like it.
And um, that's great for me.
But, you know, you might think that that tea is disgusting.
Some people are really turned off by ginger or turmeric.
There's a kind of weirdness to the flavor of that, especially if it's raw, those roots, it can be off putting.
I mean, and some people just don't like things that I think are great.
Like mint for me, whether it's a tea or it's an ice cream.
The flavor.
I just chew on the leaf.
It's to me gorgeous.
And I appreciate it because this doesn't appear to be anything unhealthy about mint.
It lowers your blood pressure.
It helps your stomach.
It helps with headaches.
It gives you energy without making you jittery. Or keeping you up.
It can give you energy to get things done, but it also can help you go to sleep.
I mean, isn't that wonderful?
Yeah, but I've met people who tell me they think mint is absolutely disgusting and they don't want to have anything to do with it. They don't like the smell of it. They don't like the flavor of it.
And who's to say? Are they wrong?
What if we had a government that forced people to have mint?
And I think most people like mint.
You know, let's say maybe 80% of the people, 90% of Americans like mint.
Would it be right if we had a government that forced everybody, including the 10% of Americans who hate mint to drink mint tea, to eat mint ice cream, to chew on the leaf, to grow it in their backyards, to have it in their houses, strewn about as a kind of herb to get that lovely smell in there?
Well for them, that would be pretty damn disgusting. Wouldn't it?
And that's the thing.
I think when it comes to things like what we drink, what we eat, that is an individual thing, and there are people who get really judgmental about that.
And I don't like that.
The food shaming people who will look at what someone's eating and say, oh, that's that's just disgusting or that's wrong or why won't you try this thing? You really should try it.
They want some people to to have the kind of nutrition that they have.
They want people to have an attitude toward food that they have because they think it's right and moral and they're superior in some way about that.
It's the same way with music.
Some people really like Taylor Swift and other people don't.
And they all have their points of view on Taylor Swift, and I could see how some people might think that she's just commercial or, you know, a little bit kind of conventional in some ways, but other people might find her music to be absolutely stirring.
And that is a very intimate relationship you have with what makes you feel right, with what makes you feel good.
You know, if there's a beat in a pop tune, that makes you feel like you can have the energy to face the last couple hours of your afternoon.
I don't really think we ought to have a society where we judge each other for that.
You know, we get all sniffy about, oh, I've got my alternative band so much better than yours.
Things like food and music or a lot like religion in that way.
People get all into what's the right thing and what's the wrong thing and what's the best and what's not good and the time that we have in life is too short to argue about that stuff.
But once we have people trying to force that on us.
We had a government, uh, department of music, for example, that tried to push certain kinds of music on us.
Oh boy, then yeah, I think that's worth arguing about.
Because the thing that's really bugging me about that is that we are forcing it on each other.
And that's what's happening with religion.
Our U.S. Federal government is forcing Christianity on people and state governments are doing it too, down in Texas.
They are working on passing a new law that is going to make it mandatory for schools to teach the Christian Bible, and from elementary all the way through high school.
Students in public schools.
Government run schools are going to be forced to read stories from Christian religion.
Stories about magical beings and about Jesus and worshiping God, and about people having their lives destroyed, righteously by those spirits, and about the claims of Christianity to religious power, and to political power.
Because boy, that's a lot of what's in the Bible, is that religion claiming the right to have power over people's lives.
And it's, in a wy, a perfect embodiment of Christianity to have this new law in Texas imposing Bible stories on all children.
And by the way, Texas will not be including stories from other religions.
There will not be any mandatory Buddhist stories or Hindu stories or Zoroastrian stories, no stories from Shinto, no stories from Native American traditions, certainly.
None of that will be forced upon students statewide, only Christianity.
And so you may think if you're a Christian, well, that's fine for me because, hey, I'm a Christian, and I like that kind of thing.
But how long is it going to be until the Texas state government decides which kind of Christianity is going to be taught by the government, is going to be forced on your children, is going to be put into government acts of worship.
I mean, in a sense, it's already happening because there's going to be a government board that's going to choose which stories from the Bible get taught to children and which ones don't.
And that's teaching a certain perspective on Christianity, not just Christianity in general, and certainly not just religion in general.
It's teaching a very particular kind of Christian agenda.
And we saw another aspect of that.
In Washington, DC, around the Easter holiday, on Good Friday, in the Pentagon, in the Department of War.
They had a Good Friday, Christian religious ritual, and it was strongly, strongly suggested to top leadership that if they wanted to get in, Pete Hegseth's good favor that they would attend, but it was also announced that this would be a Protestant. Ritual.
This would be a Protestant Christian Good Friday ceremony, and that no, there would not be any Catholic Good Friday ceremony, that if Catholics wanted to participate, which they would have to do, to make Pete Hegseth see that they're in line, and Pete Hegseth wants everybody to tow the line at the Pentagon.
Disagreement is no longer welcome there.
Well you've got to do the Protestant thing.
You can't do the ceremony your way.
If there's one thing about Catholicism, I think everyone can agree on, it's that for Catholics, the way that you do a religious ritual is really important.
And they don't look at that as just some kind of arbitrary thing, oh, what's the difference?
You know, if we just, you know, get a guitar out and sing our way through or we start snake handling or whatever, different Christian ways of doing things that are not what the Catholic Church does.
No, the Catholics are pretty, I think it would be fair to say they're kind of uptight about that.
Kind of in the same way, like vegans are uptight about their diet.
And you could say, hey, well, we're gonna have a dinner, and it's for meat eaters only, and we're just not having a vegan dinner.
Well, you know, you could say, oh, come on, it's food.
What's the difference?
So what if I put a little bit of hamburger in your lasagna?
It's all food. It's all calories, right?
But you know it's not.
And you know that for vegans, it's like a really important thing that they don't eat meat. They have moral, ethical, philosophical, not to mention aesthetic and nutritional reasons for that.
You can agree or disagree with vegans about that, but they have reasons for what they do, and you just go throwing meat into their food.
That's nasty.
But that's what Pete Hegseth did with his Protestants only at the Department of War order.
See, that's how it always goes when Christianity takes control of a government.
I mean, back when Ferdinand and Isabella, they ran the Muslims out of Spain, right?
Saying that they'd been there a long, long time, but they called them foreigners and random out to purify Spain, but was that pure enough?
No, they then kicked out the Jews or forced them to convert to Christianity.
But was that good enough?
No, because then Ferdinand and Isabella, and their Christian nationalist monarchy decided that, oh, hey, what if those Jews are pretending to convert to Christianity, but they don't really believe it in the way that we think we that they ought to.
They began a little thing called the Spanish Inquisition.
It began by targeting the Jews to make sure that they were really, really meaning it when they said that they worshiped Jesus, torturing them, killing them, stealing from them.
But then it was Christian against Christian.
How Christian are you? Are you the right kind of Christian?
If there's one thing that Christians like to do, they love to accuse other kinds of Christians, of not being real Christians, of being fake Christians.
Pete Hegseth's bunch says that the pope isn't getting it right.
I mean, for that matter, JD Vance says the pope isn't getting Catholicism, right?
Then the Catholic pope says, well, no, you're not real Christians, and God doesn't listen to you, and then the other people come back and say, when I pray, God listens to me, but he doesn't listen to you, and it all sounds petty and small and just kind of stupid. Until they start sending soldiers out to enforce religion, until you have someone like Pete Hegseth, saying that he's bombing children in Iran for Jesus, and that it's a miracle.
What has been done with all the bombs and bullets and missiles, destroying people over there?
Which is not to say that the Iranians wouldn't do the same thing.
They're the government at least.
It's fundamentalist religion against fundamentalist religion.
That just gets me back to that sense of tea.
What do we want in society?
I know what I want. I want the chance to enjoy my tea, my way.
See, I don't think that there are any spirits or monsters.
There are no demons. There are no angels, there are no gods out there, making our lives worse or better.
You know who's doing that is, I think, ourselves.
And so we should have the power, people should have the power to choose what makes them feel good.
So long as it's not hurting other people.
I don't think when I'm drinking my tea, it makes anyone hurt because I'm drinking my tea.
I don't choose to be a Christian.
I do not believe that their religion is real in any literal sense, but I don't want to stop them from having the right to do it their way.
I recognize that for some people, believing in Jesus and praying and singing and doing whatever it is that they do, in their particular denomination, makes them feel kind of tingly, warm something, and they might call that the holy ghost or Holy Spirit, but it's really, you know, maybe it's kind of like how I feel when I drink my tea.
The thing is that different people get pleasure in life or solace, they get comfort in life, that helps them get through all the really hard stuff in their own individual ways.
And if we have a government that's starting to micromanage our lives, telling us how we have to seek pleasure and how we must not seek pleasure for ourselves.
You know, it's just kind of make a whole bunch of people feel awful.
It's not decent.
It's not kind.
It's not caring.
And I think we're seeing pretty clearly with the Christian nationalism that Donald Trump has imposed on this country and it's only going to get worse.
Over time, the longer he's there, it's not bringing peace.
It's not bringing joy.
It's not bringing prosperity.
It's bringing anger and division and destruction.
Not just here in the United States, but all around the world.
I want you to have your tea your way.
If you want to have religion have it your way.
Just don't impose that on me.
