The Most Hated People In America?

By Jenn Thoman
According to a recent Gallup poll, there is one deviant behavior that Americans are still definitely not on board with. When asked about a list of minority groups, and whether Americans would elect them into public office, who do you think ranked last?

Far below women, African Americans, recent immigrants, Muslims, and homosexuals ranked atheists. Apparently, the American public does not trust non-theists. This lack of trust doesn't just apply to holding office, either. When survey participants were asked who most "shares [your] view of American society", Atheists ranked dead last. When those same people were asked who they would most want their children to marry, atheists ranked last again!

Sociologists define deviance as any behavior or identity that violates commonly held social norms. This country has a long history of religious belief, so the idea that someone can live here and be a productive member of society without religion is foreign. It is often asked of atheists, "Where do you get your sense of right and wrong, if not from a higher power?" There are no statistics that say atheists are more likely to commit crimes, so where does that idea come from?

Our country was founded on the basis of religious freedom. Now that so many behaviors that were considered deviant even twenty years ago are beginning to be accepted (like tattoos in the workplace, or openly LGBT relationships), maybe it's time to accept the idea of freedom from religion as well. 

Is nothing true or is everything true?

Submitted by Yuko Nishizawa

There are countless books about great philosophies, religions, ways of improving oneself and relationships in the societies. All of them are designed to make us feel better and enlightened. Despite all the available guidance, it's still not easy to find values that suit us perfectly or that make a sense in all cultures. In fact, we learned recently in SOC-101 that we must be mindful because those sources are biased on some levels. At the same time, we must rely on information created and filtered by others. So how do we know what information is true and trustworthy?

The attached image from the magazine AZURE, July/Aug,2003 issue, caught my eye. It's a mini coliseum made with books on religion and philosophy as construction material, like piled up bricks. The spines of books have fancy titles like "Dialog with Socrates", "Joyous Freedom with God", "Buddha's Wisdom",etc. Each book presents perspectives of things that are supposed to be good for people and society. We see all different colors and thickness in the exterior, but the interior becomes a wall of white paper. To me, this illustrates that inside, we are all the same. We are all human, want to be at peace and pure, like those white pages. The book coliseum was installed and exhibited at the 2001 International Contemporary Art Bienniale in Florence by architect team from Finland.

The book coliseum represents the relation between outer and inner worlds.

The various concepts exit in cultures, the outer world, but the ultimate goal is to have a peace in ourselves, the inner world. The worlds are not separate, they co-exist. We seek peace and happiness in the all culture no matter who we are, where we come form or what we believe. 

             It isn't hard to do

             Nothing to kill or die for

             And no religion too

             Imagine all the people  

             Living life in peace

            ("Imagine" by John Lenon, 1971)

There is a sad coda to this coliseum installation. It was destroyed within a day when every book was stolen by local thieves. Photographs of the thefts showed that the majority of the pilferers were largely average local citizens.

Was American slavery ever justified?

Jerrin R

I am going to focus on the idea of racism and how it started and how it was justified by the American mainstream through the use of resources like religion.
Societies in particular Western Society has always relied on a book called the Bible to justify slavery. When slavery was abolished they used science to justify inferiority of minorities. When science failed they use economics and ignorance to continue to propagate the ideas of covert racism.
Race was a human construct which helps classify people into different groups based on geographical origins of their ancestors. It helps to use race as a way to exploit individuals from minorities for economic purposes. Racism was a social construction that allowed white slaveholders to pass on human capital to their descendants and to ensure that they would have an advantage with the competition in the macroeconomic scale by providing themselves with unlimited capital, specifically with an unlimited source of human labor capital.
Racism was supposedly destroyed by the civil rights actions but they still persist in actions that are done to minorities. An example of this would be the segregation of housing which could happen because , "black people devalue the neighborhood". Often people use examples and statistics to show how black people are inferior to other people but they fail to mention how black people became that way.
How do you take people that used to be part of some of the most ancient cultures with highly developed social structures and use them as labor capital. You cannot take that person and use him/her as a slave unless you modify that individual.

The loss of family connections and continued loss of family members can over time tell a population to stop investing their best in their significant other and their offspring. This is something that was learned by former slaves from their previous environments and which they continue to follow.
Without a family a child lacks financial support, educational support, moral support, love, security and many other basic needs with most of us take for granted.
Without education the only jobs available are dead end jobs or else to turn to crime. Crime leads to loss of resources of a society which can lead to even further lack of investment in that area. When the media needs to sell papers it has to use interesting topics. Thus is pays attention to crimes committed by black people which is then attributed to the character of all black people. This leads to even more problems because even with education you do not have the same respect or pay because you are supposedly criminal by nature.
Thus racism is continually fed to us from when we are little children and we are born and socialized into a world of racists practices.
These videos show how the Bible was misused, misinterpreted, and capitalized on in order to use it as a method of controlling slaves. This can actually back fire when slaves / their descendants read the bible as can be seen in these videos.