Radical Atheist

So much for rendering unto Caesar. A few Christian ministers feel they have the right to break the law and endorse McCain from the pulpit. At risk is their tax-exempt status.

These ministers obviously believe their desire to violate the separation clause and attempt to influence their parishioner’s choice of presidential candidate is more important than obedience of the law. They should then be willing to accept the punishment for that violation, the loss of their tax-exempt status. Since Christians enjoy feeling persecuted (in a country where the majority of the population calls themselves Christian) I should expect them to rejoice in this removal of their status. Every time their church has to pay taxes on income and property, they can beat their chests and cry about how put-upon they are. Time to break out the hairshirts, kids.

Thanks to the Atheist Media Blog for a link to the video.

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Here’s an example of religious “thinking” I came across recently:

A former Saudi diplomat-turned cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Munajid, has described Walt Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse as “one of Satan’s soldiers” who turns everything around it impure.  The cleric, who worked with the Saudi embassy in Washington D C, said that under Sharia, both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.  According to a translation prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an American press monitoring service, he said: “The mouse is one of Satan’s soldiers and is steered by him.  If a mouse falls into a pot of food – if the food is solid, you should chuck out the mouse and the food touching it, and if it is liquid – you should chuck out the whole thing, because the mouse is impure.”

http://cicentre.com/news/islamic_jihadism.html

In 1583 Jeremias convened a council in Constantinople (establishing the Orthodox Church). It decreed in part:

That whoever says that our Lord Jesus Christ at the Mystic Supper had unleavened bread (made without yeast), like that of the Jews, and not leavened bread, that is to say, bread raised with yeast, let him depart far away from us and let him be anathema as one having Jewish views and those of Apollinarios and bringing dogmas of the Armenians into the Church, on which account let him be doubly anathema.

So some theists want Mickey Mouse (has anyone informed them he’s a fictional character?) dead and others insist you have to say that Jesus ate yeast or you can’t join their club. And they wonder why we consider them illogical, perhaps even mentally challenged.

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BORN AGAIN is the story of Director Markie Hancock’s evangelical upbringing and her 20-year struggle to get out. Excerpts from Hancock’s journals, home movies and student films reveal the strong grip of fundamentalist religion.

As a child, she revels in the security that promises of eternal salvation bring to both her and her family. Hancock only slowly begins to question the narrow path she has fervently followed when she falls in love with a woman. It is in Berlin when she finally begins to free herself from religion and from the family she loves.

Ultimately, BORN AGAIN asks, at what price do we believe what we believe and how do we live with others who believe differently?

Visit SnagFilms for more thought-provoking independent films.

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Federal authorities conducting a child-porn investigation raided the headquarters Saturday of a ministry run by a convicted tax evader once labelled by prosecutors as a polygamist who preys on girls and women.

Social workers interviewed children who live at the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries complex, which critics call a cult, to find out whether they were abused. The two-year investigation involves a law that prohibits the transportation of children across state lines for criminal activity, said Tom Browne, who runs the FBI office in Little Rock.

“Children living at the facility may have been sexually and physically abused,” Mr. Browne said.

No one was arrested, but U.S. Attorney Bob Balfe said before the raid that he expected an arrest warrant for Mr. Alamo to be issued later. The federal investigation centred on the production of child pornography, while state police were looking into allegations of other child abuse, he said.

In a phone call to The Associated Press from a friend’s house in the Los Angeles area, Tony Alamo – who was also once accused of child abuse – denied involvement in pornography.

Tony could have easily deflected the charges by opening his buildings and computers for the feds to examine. Instead he takes a defensive posture, making the sort of defense we’ve come to expect from criminal theotards.

“We don’t go into pornography; nobody in the church is into that,” Mr. Alamo said. “Where do these allegations stem from? The anti-Christ government. The Catholics don’t like me because I have cut their congregation in half. They hate true Christianity.”

Damn those Catholics, breaking into Alamo’s compound and loading incriminating evidence on his computers. Or maybe it was the government’s secret agents.

Mr. Alamo told the AP on Saturday that he believed the raid was part of a push by the federal government to make same-sex marriage legal while outlawing polygamy.

Mr. Alamo said he thought polygamy was allowed in the Bible but said he did not practise it himself. He also said that “consent is puberty” when it comes to sex.

If that’s the best this roaring jackass can come up with as a defense he must think we’re all as stupid as those he’s hoodwinked into following him.

(Story source-globeandmail.com)

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It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving website. The Grand Ayatollah of Iraqi Shiites, Sayyid Ali Husaini al-Sistani, had his video replaced by one from Bill Maher’s show. Maher is exposing the weird advice Sistani hands out on the site. Now, if someone would only do something similar to the Vatican’s site and Scientology’s main page.

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Believers presume the existence of god. Atheists do not make that assumption. It is an unproven claim, a baseless supposition, an unrealistic perception of reality. Those reasons are all logical, reasonable and most importantly, substantiated with a massive amount of evidence. 

The majority of theists will agree that there’s no evidence for their beliefs. They consider that to be a reenforcement of their belief and call it “faith”. Others of us have a standard of evidence that religion cannot meet. It fails several philosophical tests. 

Denying god, hating god, loving god, knowing god; all presume that god exists, and usually the god of Abraham. Love him or hate him, god exists; that’s the assumption made by theists.

Atheists see no reason to make that assumption. It presumes a reality that has not yet been established as existing. It’s an assumption that skips over the fact that not everyone agrees with that interpretation of reality. First convince me your god exists, then we can talk about what I think about that.

I get email from Nigerians who promise me that I can become a millionaire if I’ll just share my bank account info with them. I delete them all without opening. Why? Because I know they’re bogus, attempts to convince me of a false reality. How do I know that? A hundred different ways. I’ve read about them, I’ve read them and it’s obvious to all but the most new of the newbies that they are scams. Plain and simple, they’re scams. And you know, I bet most of the theists reading this would agree.

So why should religion be considered in a different light? What exempts religion from skepticism, from doubt, from an honest request for substantiation? Why should religion be immune from dismissal? 

In my life, religion has been dismissed as a scam, an attempt to compromise my ability to think for myself. And thinking for myself saved me from falling for those phoney emails. That was a good thing.

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From, as should be obvious, The Onion:

Darwin stain

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

“I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits,” said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse. The building was also the location of the famed “Scopes Monkey Trial” and is widely considered one of Darwinism’s holiest sites. “Forgive me, O Charles, for ever doubting your Divine Evolution. After seeing this miracle of limestone pigmentation with my own eyes, my faith in empirical reasoning will never again be tested.”

Added Freiberg, “Behold the power and glory of the scientific method!”

Since witnesses first reported the unexplained marking—which appears to resemble a 19th-century male figure with a high forehead and large beard—this normally quiet town has become a hotbed of biological zealotry. Thousands of pilgrims from as far away as Berkeley’s paleoanthropology department have flocked to the site to lay wreaths of flowers, light devotional candles, read aloud from Darwin’s works, and otherwise pay homage to the mysterious blue-green stain.

Capitalizing on the influx of empirical believers, street vendors have sprung up across Dayton, selling evolutionary relics and artwork to the thousands of pilgrims waiting to catch a glimpse of the image. Available for sale are everything from small wooden shards alleged to be fragments of the “One True Beagle”—the research vessel on which Darwin made his legendary voyage to the Galapagos Islands—to lecture notes purportedly touched by English evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace.

“I have never felt closer to Darwin’s ideas,” said zoologist Fred Granger, who waited in line for 16 hours to view the stain. “May his name be praised and his theories on natural selection echo in all the halls of naturalistic observation forever.”

“It’s a stain on a wall, and nothing more,” said the Rev. Clement McCoy, a professor at Oral Roberts University and prominent opponent of evolutionary theory. “Anything else is the delusional fantasy of a fanatical evolutionist mindset that sees only what it wishes to see in the hopes of validating a baseless, illogical belief system. I only hope these heretics see the error of their ways before our Most Powerful God smites them all in His vengeance.”

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