[Quote:]

No, I am not talking abut the infamous episode where an atheist woman went to live with a Christian extremist family. That one has been dissected ad nauseum, and I’ve already posted about it here.

The episode I am focusing on here involved a Christian extremist moving in with two gay parents and their adopted children for 30 days. What made this one a particularly volatile set up from the beginning was that the extremist and her husband were also raising adopted children but believed strongly that gays and lesbians should have no legal or moral right to raise children. For the episode, she would not only move in with two gay dads and their four children but would have to immerse herself in the activities of various gay rights groups who were championing equality for the GLBT community when it came to same-sex marriage and parental rights.

It took our extremist woman almost no time at all to explicitly state that her beliefs were rooted in her religion (Mormonism). Throughout the episode, she appeared to wrestle with the many contradictions inherent in her belief system - but only up to a point. When she hit this threshold, she became hysterical and stormed out of whatever interaction she was involved in.

[..]

Every one of us should get a copy of this episode and use it whenever we are asked about what is wrong with religion.

You’ll find the episode here:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/24921/30-days-same-sex-parenting

or here:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1536352

[Quote:]

You might want to turn off your irony meters for this one: Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition says that if Muslims are allowed to claim the same kinds of religious exemptions that Christians do, it will lead to Sharia law being implemented in the US:

All over the United States, radical Muslims are pushing companies to bow to Islamic law known as Sharia. They are doing this under the guise of religious freedom, but the political and cultural ideology of Islam recognizes only Allah as the supreme ruler over the world.

Efforts are already underway here in America to introduce Sharia enclaves in some communities. In these enclaves, Constitutional concepts like one person/one vote would be replaced by Sharia concepts which values a woman’s vote at half that of a man. In many instances, Sharia law allocates rights based on gender and religion (Islam is the only legal religion) rather than individual rights. In the United Kingdom and France, such enclaves exist and have caused conflict between Islamists and the country’s civil law.

What Muslims are doing has been referred to as “creeping Sharia” - that is, getting companies, communities and states to change policies in order to force everyone to obey Sharia law, a totalitarian system of regulations that govern Islamic theocracies.

[..]

Hmmm….I seem to recall that Sheldon supports Christian pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and for doctors who refuse to perform medical procedures that violate their beliefs.

[..]

You see, when Christians make such claims that’s an important fight for religious freedom; when Muslims make such claims it’s just part of their evil agenda. Sheldon also supports the right of employers to refuse to hire gays and lesbians, of course. It’s all about whose ox is being gored.

[Quote:]

Two United States Senators implicated in extramarital sexual activity have named themselves as co-sponsors of S. J. RES. 43, dubbed the Marriage Protection Amendment. If ratified, the bill would amend the United States Constitution to state that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.”

Now here’s a good question for you: before you click the link above, make a guess which two Senators….

Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who was arrested June 11, 2007 on charges of lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport terminal, is co-sponsoring the amendment along with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA). In July of 2007, Vitter was identified as a client of a prostitution firm owned by the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey, commonly known as The DC Madam.

If you want their pictures, you’ll find them in the dictionary, next to the definition of “hypocrisy”.

[Quote:]

George Carlin is dead. Here’s how he thought about religion:

And the ten commandments:

So how do cartoonists respond to his death? Yep:

And here’s how they could had responded:

[Quote:]

Dear Professor Lenski,

Skepticism has been expressed on Conservapedia about your claims, and the significance of your claims, that E. Coli bacteria had an evolutionary beneficial mutation in your study.

The reply prof Lenski sends them is a great one!

[de site van de Christen Unie:]

Een gezonde en duurzame samenleving begint bij het gezin. Kinderen moeten normen en waarden meekrijgen. Thuis en op school. Te vaak gaat dat mis. Door werkdruk bij de ouders en gebroken relaties. Scholen en hulpverlening kunnen het gat niet vullen. En de hoge kosten voor opvoeding en onderwijs maken het er ook niet makkelijker op.

Ze spreken uit ervaring.

Yesterday was exactly 375 years ago that Galileo renounced his views before the inquisition.

Thank God that the Catholic church quickly realized their mistake and pardoned him in 1992.

[If only the stupidity would have decreased a bit:]

Gravity: Doesn’t exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that’s just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it’s not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn’t the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.

[Quote:]

A 16-year-old boy whose family relies on faith rather than medical treatment has died after suffering from stomach pain and shortness of breath, police said.

Gladstone, Ore., police said the boy’s relatives, members of the Followers of Christ Church, told police that he had refused medical treatment after becoming ill a week ago. Under state law, anyone over 14 has the right to refuse treatment.

If it weren’t so deeply sad, I’d say it’s evolution in action…

[Quote:]

Imagine yourself back in the third grade. It is recess, and you are with your classmates on the playground. There is a teacher in the vicinity, but the supervision is fairly minimal. Suddenly, a group of 6 or more children approach you and say something along the lines of, “Have you been saved?” You are not sure what to make of the question, so other questions about your religious beliefs and experiences follow. Without understanding the consequences, you tell them that you and your family are atheists, Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, non-fundamentalist Protestants, etc.

The children start calling you names and hurling insults at you. If you happen to be Jewish, you will hear things that would make neo-Nazi’s proud. You are a sinner. You are going to burn in a lake of fire. You will rot in hell. They form a circle around you, holding hands to make sure you can’t easily escape. They tell you that the only way you can save yourself is to accept Jee-zuhs. They begin praying around you loudly to “save your soul.”

The teacher, if he/she even notices what is happening shrugs it off. Maybe he or she cannot see that you are crying by now. It does not look like the children are touching you, so there seems little cause to disrupt the activity. Maybe the teacher even approves of what the children are doing. After all, he or she may have been raised in this culture of intolerance.

This, dear reader, is a prayer circle.

[Quote:]

What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination’s growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn’t make a bit of difference.

[..]

As the true picture of evangelicals’ problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what’s needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn’t getting to go to heaven.

Expect them to get way more batshitinsane…

[Quote:]

When discussing the many adverse effects of religion with a believer, one statement almost inevitably enters the conversation: “Most Christians are good people.” The believer will surely acknowledge that many people have committed awful acts in the name of religion. Perhaps they weren’t “real Christians.” Perhaps they were simply misguided in their actions. Regardless of the reason, they are the exception and certainly not the norm. You might expect that I, as an atheist, must disagree with this statement. However, I do not. Most Christians are good people.

[..]

Unfortunately, the Christian cannot agree that most atheists are good people without adding an important qualifier, at least implicitly. The qualifier is comparative in nature, placing Christians on a pedestal above non-believers and believers from other religious traditions. The atheist may be good, but he/she cannot possibly be as good as the Christian. The atheist or the person from a different religion may be good in some sense, but he/she is still going to hell to be punished for all eternity. The Christian bible is quite clear that persons who do not believe in the Christian god are not equivalent to those who do in many ways. Their fate in the afterlife will be very different.

This is what I mean when I say that religion is inherently divisive.

[Quote:]

The price of regular at a Shell gas station in Petworth gleamed defiantly in the midday sun: $3.91 a gallon.

But unlike the customers rolling up to the station’s pumps this week, resigned to the fact that their wallets were about to take a beating, Rocky Twyman and company had a plan to bring that number tumbling down.

They would ask God to do it.

[..]

It was the latest demonstration by Twyman’s movement, Pray at the Pump, which began in April. Since then, he has held group prayers at gas stations as far away as San Francisco, garnering international media attention and even claiming success in at least a couple of cases.

Some would say the proof of whether Twyman has the ear of the Almighty is in the result. On the first day of the movement, April 23, the national average price of a gallon of unleaded was $3.53, according to AAA. As of yesterday, it was $3.96.

[Quote:]

Remember Kieffe & Sons, the California Ford dealership that ran a radio ad saying that they were Christians, and non-believers could therefore “sit down and shut up” and stop demanding separation of church and state?

Remember how they apologized for saying this really dumb thing?

They take it back.

The owner of the dealership says that he was forced to issue the apology by Ford, and he doesn’t stand behind it, and he only issued it to appease “blog-lo-dites.”

“I don’t regret the sentiment at all,” said Kieffe, who bought the 48-year-old dealership from his father in 1974. “It’s what we believe.”

Kieffe & Sons has sites in Mojave and Rosamond.

The dealer’s Web site Thursday bore a statement about the ad that included an apology “to all who were offended.”

Kieffe said he’d been contacted by Ford Motor Co. after the manufacturer heard complaints from numerous “blog-lo-dites.”

Remember, this guy doesn’t actually attend church.

Link

See also:
Sit-down-and-shut-up “Christian” Ford dealership is run by a non-church attendee who is sorry about the ad
Ford dealership uses bigoted radio ads to sell cars

[Quote:]

Another example of careless jurisprudence this week: on Monday a new law came into force requiring fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, astrologers and mediums to stipulate explicitly that their services are for “entertainment only”.

Well, trades descriptions legislation is anciently established; but in the realms of the spirit, prophecy, invisible worlds, ghosts and human souls, it has generally been felt that the whole thing is too cloudy for law. By bringing access to other spiritual dimensions into line with access to (say) a British Airways club class lounge, and by deeming in law - for that is what this measure does - that claims about worlds undreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, are false, Parliament has taken a serious step in principle, even if the measure itself is trivial and most clairvoyants are only jokers anyway.

What, for instance, about the “faith” community? Perhaps it’s there in the legislative small print already. There will have to be an exception in law for “religions”. Whereupon clairvoyants will presumably rename themselves spiritualists. And spiritualists will presumably claim the status of a religion. Whereupon lawmakers will stipulate that a “religion” has to centre around a deity. Whereupon Buddhism will cease to be a “religion”; and…

…Well you see the philosophical marsh into which this new principle leads. Is Parliament aware of any harder evidence for the efficacy of faith-healing than for the reliability of clairvoyance? I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, let the collecting boxes in church display a sign “for entertainment purposes only” and let Catholics buy candles to light “for entertainment purposes only”; and let trips to Lourdes be sold “for entertainment purposes only”. And let the raiment of the priest administering the Sacrament be embroidered likewise.

[Quote:]

Spotted today at 8:28 a.m. on westbound Interstate 80 and the Bangerter Highway exit: A semi-trailer truck with the company name “Husky Transport” on the cab doors. Emblazoned in bright red, 2-foot-high letters on the sides and back of the trailer was this message:

JESUS CHRIST IS LORD
NOT A SWEAR WORD!

This is for the English standards. What kind of circus are we going to see in response to the upcoming science standards?

more

[Quote:]

If you’ve never visited the Answers in Genesis website, don’t worry. You’ve missed little.

But this little gem caught my eye. Apparently, a creation believer wrote in to their feedback asking a rational question: why is it whenever I repeat one of the “facts” I learn in creationist literature in internet forums do I get my ass handed to me.

Okay. I’m paraphrasing a bit. But the question is basically saying just that. The person writing in to AiG was specifically concerned with the creationist claim that mutations are not beneficial and do not add information to an organism. The person was also upset that his/her son wrote a paper for school, which was criticized by the son’s geology teacher as “full of inaccuracies.” And the answer provided by this creationist nut site is very telling.