wubwub

I love the logic diagram in the middle... yep, sounds like what those wacky theists believe

I've blogged a few times about gay marriage. I know it will eventually be the norm and no one will even blink an eye (and on that day, I would just love for some of the current opponents to apologize and admit they were wrong)

And here's a great study (warning PDF) showing why gay marriage not only will happen, but is inevitable.



The graph (and report) clearly shows that support for gay marriage among 18-29 year olds is over 50% in all but a small handful of states. More than 1/3 of 18-29 year olds who support gay rights is in Alabama (the most backward state).

With each new generation, the percentage of support only grows. So it is only a matter of time before a majority of the whole population realizes what is plainly obvious to so many of us: gay marriage has no impact on the world for most people.

I just hate that it will take so much longer for some people to realize and accept the truth. And I hate to think of how many more people will be subject to hatred and discrimination before that day comes.

These people can not possibly understand the meaning of irony

Meanwhile, a Taliban group also sent two letters to the Lahore Press Club - one on October 12 and the other on October 14 - warning that if the media “does not stop portraying us as terrorists ... we will blow up offices of journalists and media organisations”.

Just keep killing people until they stop calling you a terrorist... good plan...

Finally someone asks the wingnuts the right question:

A federal judge challenged the backers of California's voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

Most sane people know that gay marriage is not a problem. But wingnuts keep sticking their head into the debate with crazy claims that gay marriage will somehow destroy heterosexual marriage. But when challenged to explain how gay marriage will cause all this damage, wingnuts can't really explain

"What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?" [U.S. District Chief Judge] Walker asked.

"My answer is, I don't know. I don't know," Cooper [lawyer for the group that sponsored Proposition 8] answered.

Cooper didn't know because the only "evidence" wingnuts have is anecdotal and based on prejudice, fear and primitive superstitious nonsense not on any real facts or rational explanations.
I readily admit that society has a valid interest in supporting the raising of children, and that marriage is a very good institution to raise children in. However, that interest is not in any way diminished by couples who do not raise children (or cannot raise children). Children are not a requirement of marriage, so the idea that "procreation" is the only reason for marriage is simply not valid.


I know it's a pipe dream, but I hope that one day some of these wingnuts will have the guts to come forward and admit they were wrong...


also via the AP and here

I know there is still prejudice in the world, but I keep hoping we are over the worst of it when some redneck wacko goes off and proves me wrong again.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

Of course its in the south, where ignorance is a virtue and stoopidity rewarded. But one would hope that state officials would at least show a modicum of decency or intelligence.

But you just have to love the take-away quote:

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

How very white of him!! He lets black people use his bathroom!!! How practically 1920 of him!

I think I'm going to be sick :-/

via Pharyngula

Interesting piece from Reason Weekly

Close to 1/2 of the people in America claim to go to church every week. The problem is, there aren't enough seats in all the churches in the country to seat even half that number:

Assuming that all are filled to capacity, that even the smallest of them can accommodate at least 400 people, and liberally adding 20,000,000 extra seats, the total number of available seats in churches across America is 59,045,600. That is just little over a half of what would be necessary to accommodate all the people who claim to go to church weekly.

So its interesting to see that not nearly as many people who claim to go to church actually do. And more interesting to see that so called church goers seem quite content to lie to pollsters.

I'm guessing most of these people lie because they feel they wont appear to be "good" unless they can show they go to church regularly. It will be a good day when people don't feel the pressure to lie to pollsters in order to seem like they are one of "the good guys".

In one simple article, the Onion nails wingnut's opposition to gay marriage:

If God Had Wanted Me To Be Accepting Of Gays, He Would Have Given Me The Warmth And Compassion To Do So

It is nearly impossible for me to pick a choice quote from the article. Every line is absolutely perfect.

...I know that if it were part of God's plan for me to stop viciously condemning others based solely on their sexual preference, He would have seen fit - in His infinite wisdom and all - to have given me the tiniest bit of human empathy necessary to do so.

and

Compassion, tolerance, understanding, basic decency, the ability to put myself in another person's position: God could have endowed me with any of those traits and yet - here is the crucial part - He didn't. Why? Because the Creator of the Universe wants me to demonize homosexuals in an effort to strip them of their fundamental human rights.

Just briliant...

Scarlet 'A' for a Day

Interesting letter from a Christian who infiltrated the recent CreoZerg where PZ Meyers and the Secular Student Aliance spent a day touring the amusing Creation Museum.

From his observation

it was obvious that there was a distinctive way that we were being treated because of the shared identification. There were hateful glances, exaggerated perceptions, waxing surveillance by security, and anxious but strong ‘amens’ accompanying a lecture on “The Ultimate Proof of Creation” by Dr. Jason Lisle.

Yep. Welcome to our world. This is the kind of thing atheists experience all the time from "loving Christians".

Short video: Imagine if All Atheists Left America



(note: some sources listed on the original YouTube page)

Poe's Law strikes again, but honestly I'm not surprised.

From the people who brought you the Birthers: Obama is probably the Anti-Christ... Apparently if you translate the English version of some obscure quote from the Bible into not just one, but two other languages, you end up with a sentence that just kind of sounds like the Barack Obama.

For more enjoyment, Google for instances of "obama is the antichrist". The wingnuts really can't stand that a black man is president over their (imaginary) white nation... not that they're racist or anything... no, not that...

Oh, and Snopes has a nice write-up on these loonies with some good cross referenced debunking.

Here's a case of good ol' Christian Love(tm).

Seems a girl's parents are disowning her for the vile crime of getting surgery rather than having someone ineffectively pray over her....

sick

(double checked this one, no hint of satire here)

I wanted to tinker a bit with Microsoft's new Bing so I decided to egosurf and lo-and-behold but one of the various links is a link to a Wikipedia Page (and I didn't create it even).

Cool! I've made it to Wikipedia :-)

Funny site that brings the goodness of the Bible to Children!

Bounce from the Atheist Revolution

I am confident that some do indeed feel threatened by gay marriage (or even the existence of GLBT individuals), but I suspect that most are motivated by a fear of tolerance and what it might do to the intolerant beliefs they have embraced.

Good general article about intolerance in the fundamentalist community.
enjoy.

We need to see and hear more of these stories

A Muslim member of the French Government has attacked the head-to-toe Islamic dress as a prison, applauding a court decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wore it.

She was denied citizenship because she "had failed to integrate".
Failed to integrate is an understatement:

She lives virtually as a recluse, disconnected from French society. She has no concept of laïcité [the principle of the secular State] nor the right to vote. She lives in total subservience to the men in her family

Good job France. If someone wants to become a citizen of a country, they should do more than just living there. Showing even a basic knowledge of the country they live in seems a good start.
Its also a good move to remind some groups (particularly whacky religious groups of any type) that they have to play well with everyone, not just their own group...

Reminds me of the old saying: If you don't like something, don't do it...

Because some Muslims at the International Conference don't like pork, no one at the International Conference gets to eat Pork.

I really hate hearing about ignorance like this. I feel like eating a batch of bacon now.

Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle

In answering a question on if Christians should read the Koran:

It won’t be wrong if somebody studies Islam, but they need guided study, because somebody needs to go along and point out the incredible inconsistencies in that book.

and this gem:

Many people who are Muslim don’t know what the Koran says. And when you begin to tell them, they say, “Well, I don’t believe that.” And you say, “Well, it’s in your sacred book. It’s supposed to be holy words.”

From reddit via Cynical-C Blog

Whenever I submit my email to a website, I tend to use a unique email so if I start to get spammed from them I can block just that email and be done with it.

So anyway, about a month ago, I started getting crap from the loonies at the AFA. At first I just ignored them. I had subscribed to a Republican list during the election and I figured they sold me out to all the right-wing wackos.

But today I got a message from AFA and actually looked at it and realized that they were sending it to the address I had given Hallmark!!! What the Fuck!!!!

I knew Hallmark was not exactly progressive, but I didn't know they associated with such radical hate groups as the AFA.

Feel free to complain here.

I have recently started getting email messages from the American Family Association using the email address I gave to you.

I would never have given your company my email address if I had any idea that you would pass it along, much less if I knew you would pass it along to such reprehensible groups as the AFA. And I know it was your company that gave it to them since I used a unique email when I registered.

If this is the kind of hate group your company chooses to associate with, that is your business.

I no longer plan shop at Hallmark or hallmark.com, and I will do what I can to tell others about the groups your company associates with. I will do what I can to ensure that no one I know does business with you.

Not much I can say about this story from Virginia Beach.

Apparently this guy was a major jesus freak (his myspace status read: "Jesus Freak in the mood for ice cream" (unfortunately myspace has deleted the accounts)) and he didn't want his son to lose his salvation.

Sad when religion drives people to be crazy, but I've said before that the logical extension of "eternal happiness" and loving someone is that you would want to kill them so they could never risk damnation and eternal torture. A truly loving parent would kill their child immediately after baptism to prevent devils from tempting their child and having their child not get salvation.

This is what dogma breeds. I suspect we just don't hear about how often this really happens.

A reply to Jerry Coyne's 'Seeing is Believing' (a generic theist rant) by several prominent atheists. Its long, but generally interesting, but my favorite take-away quote from the whole thing has to be by Sam Harris:

I now realize -- belatedly and to my great chagrin -- that I knew nothing of the pain that a pious Muslim man might feel at the sight of young women learning to read.