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Several outspoken atheists have identified themselves as anti-theist. Recently I have began to use this term for my position but on reflection I no longer think that is an accurate description. I am no more anti-theist than I am anti- leprechaun or anti-Batman. I am not against imaginary creatures, I don't care about things that exist only in peoples minds or works of fiction. What I am, is anti-oppression. By oppression I mean specifically, things that diminish the quality of someones life for reasons of malice or gain. The main targets of my vitriol will still be the usual suspects of religion and Republicans. If you are female, poor, gay, or if you are dark-skinned or worst of all, open-minded, you have been assailed by one or both of these banes on society. Cheer up, there are lots of people trying to stop these guardians of hatred, bigotry and ignorance. Feel free to join us.. .
Caution: The following rant contains truths about the Mormon church. If you wish to continue believing that the LDS organization is worth belonging to you may want to suspend rational thought before continuing.
The leadership of the LDS church today announced that although they were forced by financial imperatives to abandon their crusade of hatred against blacks, there is no such imperative at this point to keep them from spewing hatred of homosexuals from the pulpit and in the legislative arena. The First Presidency of the church verified this with a statement at the general conference assembly that "As long as gay people continue to have "icky" sex we will fight on every available front to keep them from being accepted as human beings." Although they did not state it explicitly, the general consensus is that the minute that it appears to effect cash flow there will be a "Revelation from God" that He has changed His mind once again and that the Church can begin the task of rewriting their history to pretend that there was never any bigotry involved in their decision to deny basic human rights to those that they didn't like. When asked about the amount of tithing money wasted on the illegal interference in the California prop. 8 debacle the response was "We don't consider the money to be wasted in the light of the amount of anti-gay propaganda that we were able to disseminate. We feel that the overall gains in bigotry and hatred, however temporary they may prove to be, were well worth the cost"
The preceding was paraphrased from actual statements and extrapolated historical occurrences of the LDS church
after the parties I was a bit bored over the weekend and there was not much going on at my usual hangouts so I ventured out into the wild. And by wild I mean internet sites I am not familiar with. I was amazed, shocked and mostly disappointed at what the world out there is still like. I tend to stick to sites where rational thought is the order of the day but I occasionally wander into a religious or if I am really in the mood for insanity, a creationist site. I know what to expect there and I am rarely disappointed. Last evening, I went by ABC News to see what kind of comments were being made about the article that inspired my little rant about the Mormon cult yesterday and what I found was disturbing. A few of the comments were supportive of gays, a few supported the LDS point of view, but most were thinly veiled hate speech using religion to justify their Bronze age attitudes. I answered a few of them and to be fair my comments were upvoted rather quickly. Then I made the mistake of disagreeing with one of the regular posters there and when he responded with gibberish I pointed out that he was misrepresenting what I said and that he was wrong. A few minutes later my post was removed and labeled offensive. On the sites where I post, hate is labeled offensive, critical thinking is required and unsupported claims will get you ridiculed and laughed at. At ABC News, pointing out that saying that your decisions are guided by the bible is another way of saying that you only take slaves from other tribes, or that if you say praise God and I reply with "Amen, Hail Zeus" because you forgot to specify which God, these things will get you banned. What doesn't get you banned? Loving statements like "These homosexuals have no right to marry and they need to die before Satan destroys our country because of homosexuals getting married." Every statement that I made was neutral (if maybe a tad sarcastic) or loudly decrying bigotry and preaching tolerance. To be fair I did call one guy a moron because he attempted to misrepresent what I said, and did it poorly. To sum it up, "fags need to die" is acceptable "you morons need to quit using your religion as a reason to hate innocent people" was banned. When I invited them to follow me back to a chatroom where logic is king and hate is not tolerated any more than nonsense my post was erased within seconds. I'm back to my usual haunts today, reading and posting where people are ridiculed loudly for the inability to display rational thought but where hate and intolerance are banned instead of sarcasm. Much the way I do things on my Facebook page. Deal with it.
Also mention that people can't have it both ways. If he is going to say that the evil things done in Gods name aren't really done because of God then you can't claim that the good things done in Gods name are because of God. If everything done in Gods name is just the actions of man acting on his own then a universe without God is indistinguishable from a universe with a God that has no influence on any of mans actions.
anyone familiar with the New Atheism movement will be familiar with the supposedly hilarious comparisons of the idea of a god to that of a ‘flying spaghetti monster’. In the same way that it is impossible to disprove the prospect of a god, it is also impossible to disprove the existence of a ‘flying spaghetti monster’. Ergo, the onus to prove the existence of an all-mighty supreme being lies with those proposing it. Observe any debate between the partisans of New Atheism and their religious opponents, and soon you will encounter this argument being wheeled out, with the usual self-satisfaction of Dawkinites. This rhetorical device, along with other roughly-correct-but-tired clichés, forms a central part of the lexicon of the New Atheism movement.
practically what im saying ther is no more proof that god exists than the flying spaghetti monster
The citizens of America are standing in the toilet and the Supreme Court just opened the bidding on the rights to pull the handle. Washington D.C. is already the most profitable location to open up a high-end business such as an exotic car dealership, a 4 star restaurant or a jewelry store. Now the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to allow billions more dollars to be placed under the control of our "representatives". This was supposed to be a government of our peers. The only way that our elected officials are your peers is if you drive a Ferrari, your wive drives a Porsche, your mistress has a Lamborghini and the most difficult decision you are facing is which of your houses you are going to spend the weekend in. We should remember that our vote for President is a vote for the person that will be appointing the next Supreme Court Justices. This decision might well have gone the other way except for the two justices placed on the court by George Bush.
I realize that not everyone has the time to study a lot of science and I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to return to school afte highschool. For those of you unfamiliar with the problems involved with climate change please take a few minutes to read this post. Global warming is shrinking the size of the polar ice caps rather dramatically. The ice caps are the engines that drive the aeration of the oceans. Oxygen rich surface water is cooled by the ice caps and sinks into the deeper water taking oxygen with it. If this process fails, as it will if the ice caps melt, the ocean water will stagnate and no longer support life. This happened once before, at the end of the Permian era. The result was the death and extinction of 95% of life on earth at that time. That time it was volcanic activity that started the process but we humans have pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution to put us well along the way to a similar disaster. I'm not saying that we need to save the planet. The planet will survive. It's the fact that it will no longer support human life that will affect our children and their children. Putting a "climate change denier" into the Senate committee in charge of environmental regulation is the worst case scenario of a fox guarding the hen house.
This is from a scientific report issued in 1831 by a prominent Christian geologist
"Bearing upon this difficult question, there is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established — that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period. It was indeed a most unwarranted conclusion, when we assumed the contemporaneity of all the superficial gravel on the earth."
Scientists have known for 183 years that there was never a world wide flood. Why has our educational system failed so badly that this is not common knowledge to everyone?
