Richard Dawkins and Sean Faircloth are recruiting college students to photograph the homes of ministers as the two well-known atheist work to make a documentary they say they hope leads to the abolishment of tax exemptions for religious leaders in America.
Faircloth, author of “Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All & What We Can Do About It,” encouraged hundreds of University of Colorado – Boulder students who attended his talk last week to photograph the homes of ministers and send them to him.
Saying ministers – especially ones who lead so-called “megachurches” – live in lavish homes and are motivated by greed, Faircloth told the crowd that filled the campus’ 2,000-seat Macky Auditorium that the “forces of fundamentalism” must be “vanquished.”
The event was co-hosted by a few of the university’s student groups, and the keynote address was given by Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion” and the more recently penned “The Magic of Reality.”
Dawkins told the audience, about half of whom were students, that modern science and statistical reasoning has essentially debunked the notion of miracles.
He said the term miracle “came out of religious” teachings and bemoaned that there are a “distressing number of people” who still believe water was turned into wine. Dawkins said the idea of miracles should be rejected, and joked it’s hard to fathom how people still believe a “wafer blessed by a priest turns into a first century Jew.”
Faircloth, whose speech preceded Dawkins, is director of strategy and policy at the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. He told the students that “the religious right organizes for intolerance,” so secularists have to take the offense against them.
To that end, Faircloth touted the foundation’s effort to expose what he refers to as the “religio-industrial complex,” in part by photographing ministers’ homes.
According to the foundation’s website, the documentary will focus on the “lifestyles of the rich and religious” which has “exploited a dramatic injustice in the tax code offering a tax exemption pertaining to even to the most extravagant homes – if and only if you are clergy.”
Faircloth advised the University of Colorado students to watch a YouTube video in which he espouses further on his probe.
In the video, taped in July at a Las Vegas hotel during the annual “The Amazing Meeting,” a gathering of science and skeptic fans, Faircloth notes that “it falls to us secular Americans to become activists.”
“There are usually multiple ministers in each megachurch, each one eligible for this parsonage exemption, it is a driving force in their motivation,” Faircloth said. “Have you researched the mega ministers’ McMansions in your area?”
Faircloth goes on to note that the Dawkins Foundation’s “innovating for a secular world” effort is a multi-pronged approach “for, well, taking over the United States.” He followed the comment with a chuckle echoed by the audience.
“Today I am announcing (we are) starting a project to expose the religio-industrial complex through a professional documentary that reviews both human injustices caused by the fundamentalism in law, but also the lifestyles of the rich and religious – and you can help with a little investigating from public records and Google maps,” Faircloth said. “You can in your state document what is happening and show this is a pervasive problem and not an anomaly. Don’t forget the homes of the children and siblings who are called by God to get a really sweet tax exemption.”
Dawkins’ and Faircloth’s next campus stop is set for Tuesday at the University of Michigan.
Fix contributor Aslinn Scott is a student at University of Colorado Boulder.
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