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With such a deluge of stupidity and hate coming from fundamentalist groups and religious zealots, it’s easy to get caught up in all that and begin to generalize.  I just listened to a wonderful interview on Free Thought Radio with Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, concerning Bill Donohue and his reactionary group The Catholic League.

It was particularly insightful because O’Brien was very progressive and tremedously logical, reasonable, and smart.  His stance on religion and the protection of secular society was refreshing and thoughtful, and it reminded me that not all religious people are insane or stupid.  I’ve been so innundated with the barrage of fundamentalist idiocy that rules the airwaves and drives …read more »

I didn’t follow Jesse Helms much, probably because he was a bit before my time and already half-dead, but it appears he’s finally ready to take his dirt nap.  I’d like to reference a few of the more meaningful “advances” Helms made before he decided to call it a day.

• In 1950, Helms became an unofficial researcher for United States Senate candidate Willis Smith. Smith was a conservative Democratic lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. While working on the primary campaign against Frank Porter Graham, Helms helped create an ad that read, “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors

…read more »

Looks like James Dobson is the only one “qualified” to cherry pick the Bible for his own agenda…

This is one of the main reasons why I’m voting for Obama.  A return to a secular America at last…

Looks like it’s official; Obama will be going head to head with McCain for the White House. According to this article he’s picked up the Democratic nomination.

Obama will be crowned the Democratic nominee at the convention in August and will face McCain in November’s election to choose a successor to President George W. Bush.

“Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another,” Obama told a victory celebration in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the site of the Republican convention in September.

“Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” he told 17,000 cheering supporters. Another 15,000 gathered outside the arena.

I can’t say that I’m not just a little bit excited about this.

I was watching a particularly amusing video clip sent by a friend to me of Sean Hannity having his ass handed to him by Christoper Hitchens and Hannity, in true Fox News fashion, pulls out the same tired old list of atheist mass murderers in an attempt to vilify and dehumanize atheists across the world. O’Reilly does the same thing, as do a number of conservative ditto heads. He sites Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin in particular. He refers to atheists as “good atheist communists” which is almost juvenile in its intended misrepresentation and blatant misdirectional “slight of hand”. He’s pulling the same routine, attempting to imply that these people committed their heinous crimes because of their atheism, not because they were homicidal megalomaniacs.

The non-belief in a deity has little more to do with the motivation for these people’s crimes than their hair color or their favorite food. If someone is homicidal they’ll find a way to carry out their plans, regardless of religion. Religion can be twisted any which way; it’s not an impediment to immorality. It’s the same old tired argument, made time and time again to inextricably combine morality with religion. It’s a tactic fundamentalists have used for centuries and they’re still doing it today. It’s tired, it’s old, but, apparently, it’s effective.

Since Hannity has decided that all atheists are “good atheist communists” and are mass-murderers then I thought I’d present a list of other atheists to “watch out for”. You might be surprised by this list which includes the likes of Woody Allen, Lance Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, Berkeley Breathed, Warren Buffett, Rodney Dangerfield, Jodie Foster, Bill Gates, Katharine Hepburn, Penn Jillette, Billy Joel, Angelina Jolie, Diane Keaton, Bruce Lee, John Malkovich, Barry Manilow, Julianne Moore, Desmond Morris, Jack Nicholson, Ron Reagan Jr., Keanu Reeves, Gene Roddenberry, Andy Rooney, Salman Rushdie, Teller, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, William Shatner, and Linus Torvalds, just to name a few.

I guess Hannity didn’t want to mention the …read more »

Here’s an article from the Washington Post online that caught my attention today. Here is the most frightening and disturbing piece:

As recounted by former speechwriter Bill McGurn, who was at the meeting, Bush told Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun that “the church is the rock — it is the only thing that can withstand the wave of secularization, which says you can kill someone else to make your own life more convenient. He said the Catholic Church must never give in on this.”

This is an obvious attack on secularists with an implicit threat …read more »

So Traci was watching this show on Discovery Health about this hick family who were raising 16 kids, all of which they created and gestated by themselves. My first thought was that it was some crazy religious thing. My second thought was that these were really selfish people. How in the hell can two people raise 16 kids? They can’t and they don’t. These two have the older kids raising the younger kids. Apparently it’s okay to steal the childhood of the older children in order to keep the baby factory going. In order to answer the “weird religious thing” question for Traci I looked them up. Guess what? I was right. It is some crazy religious thing: …read more »

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Two car bombs tore through a packed shopping area of a mainly Shi’ite district of Baghdad on Sunday, killing 60 people in the worst attack since U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a crackdown in the city five days ago.

“Mission Accomplished!”