Death Threats from Christians

Just one example

"Death threats aimed at American Atheists populated the Fox News Facebook page after Blair Scott, Communications Director for American Atheists, appeared on America Live with Megyn Kelly Thursday.

"Scott's appearance on Fox News was motivated by the recent complaint filed by American Atheists and others with the state of New York asking for fair and equal treatment by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

"American Atheists argue that inclusion of the 9/11 cross and the exclusion of representations suitable to non-Christians constitutes a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

"Apparently for many self identified Christians, the request by atheists for fair and equal treatment under the law was too much to handle. The explosion of hate coming off the Fox News Facebook page is alarming. As one might expect, freethinkers and atheists are deeply uncomfortable with the death threats.

"American Atheists report that moderators on the Fox News Facebook page had been trying diligently to delete the violent threats, but not before they were screen-captured by a diligent American Atheists member named Robert Posey.

("For screen shots of just a few of the death theats that have been preserved, please see the slide show.)


"Continue reading on Examiner.com Atheists face death threats on Fox Facebook page; re: 9/11 cross - National Humanist | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/humanist-in-national/atheists-face-death-threats-on-fox-facebook-page-re-9-11-cross#ixzz1TaMpiGPV  "

WWJD?

The Evolution of Satan

Everything can come from nothing

In his 2009 book Who Made God: Searching for a Theory of Everything, Christian chemist Edgar Andrews challenges many of the statements made in new atheist writings including my 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. I have placed a point-by-point rebuttal to Andrews' criticisms on the Internet. Here let me address just a few of his objections relating to proposals for how the universe came from nothing and how complexity arises naturally from simplicity. See also my earlier post "Did the Universe Come from Nothing?".
Andrews asks, "Doesn't Dr. Stenger's idea that simplicity begets complexity totally contradict Richard Dawkins' argument that God, having created an exceedingly complex universe, must be even more complex and thus highly improbable?"

Here's exactly what Dawkins said in his 2006 blockbuster The God Delusion:

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us escape. This argument . . . demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed (p. 109).

The point Dawkins was making is that if William Dembski, Michael Behe, and other proponents of intelligent design are correct in their claim that complexity can only arise from higher complexity, then God would be even more complex and an explanation would then have to be found for his complexity. But Dawkins does not believe for a moment that this is the case. No one has been more eloquent than Richard Dawkins in describing how complexity arises from simplicity in biology, so it is ludicrous to suggest he supports the ID view.

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Straining Credulity

Austrian driver's religious headgear strains credulity

Having received his driving licence, Niko Alm now wants to get pastafarianism officially recognised

An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear".

Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism...

Continue reading the main story

The Last Post

By Derek K. Millar, Vancouver, B.C.:

"Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.
That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who's 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It's become part of their lives, alas.

Airdrie

Of course it includes my wife Airdrie (née Hislop). Both born in Metro Vancouver, we graduated from different high schools in 1986 and studied Biology at UBC, where we met in '88. At a summer job working as park naturalists that year, I flipped the canoe Air and I were paddling and we had to push it to shore.
We shared some classes, then lost touch. But a few years later, in 1994, I was still working on campus. Airdrie spotted my name and wrote me a letter—yes! paper!—and eventually (I was trying to be a full-time musician, so chaos was about) I wrote her back. From such seeds a garden blooms: it was March '94, and by August '95 we were married. I have never had second thoughts, because we have always been good together, through worse and bad and good and great.
However, I didn't think our time together would be so short: 23 years from our first meeting (at Kanaka Creek Regional Park, I'm pretty sure) until I died? Not enough. Not nearly enough.

What was at the end

I haven't gone to a better place, or a worse one. I haven't gone anyplace, because Derek doesn't exist anymore. As soon as my body stopped functioning, and the neurons in my brain ceased firing, I made a remarkable transformation: from a living organism to a corpse, like a flower or a mouse that didn't make it through a particularly frosty night. The evidence is clear that once I died, it was over.
So I was unafraid of death—of the moment itself—and of what came afterwards, which was (and is) nothing. As I did all along, I remained somewhat afraid of the process of dying, of increasing weakness and fatigue, of pain, of becoming less and less of myself as I got there. I was lucky that my mental faculties were mostly unaffected over the months and years before the end, and there was no sign of cancer in my brain—as far as I or anyone else knew.
As a kid, when I first learned enough subtraction, I figured out how old I would be in the momentous year 2000. The answer was 31, which seemed pretty old. Indeed, by the time I was 31 I was married and had two daughters, and I was working as a technical writer and web guy in the computer industry. Pretty grown up, I guess.
Yet there was much more to come. I had yet to start this blog, which recently turned 10 years old. I wasn't yet back playing drums with my band, nor was I a podcaster (since there was no podcasting, nor an iPod for that matter). In techie land, Google was fresh and new, Apple remained "beleaguered," Microsoft was large and in charge, and Facebook and Twitter were several years from existing at all. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity were three years away from launch, while the Cassini-Huygens probe was not quite half-way to Saturn. The human genome hadn't quite been mapped yet.
The World Trade Center towers still stood in New York City. Jean Chrétien remained Prime Minister of Canada, Bill Clinton President of the U.S.A., and Tony Blair Prime Minister of the U.K.—while Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Kim Jong-Il, Ben Ali, and Moammar Qaddafi held power in Iraq, Egypt, North Korea, Tunisia, and Libya.
In my family in 2000, my cousin wouldn't have a baby for another four years. My other cousin was early in her relationship with the man who is now her husband. Sonia, with whom my mother had been lifelong friends (ever since they were both nine), was still alive. So was my Oma, my father's mom, who was then 90 years old. Neither my wife nor I had ever needed long-term hospitalization—not yet. Neither of our children was out of diapers, let alone taking photographs, writing stories, riding bikes and horses, posting on Facebook, or outgrowing her mother's shoe size. We didn't have a dog.
And I didn't have cancer. I had no idea I would get it, certainly not in the next decade, or that it would kill me.

Missing out

Why do I mention all this stuff? Because I've come to realize that, at any time, I can lament what I will never know, yet still not regret what got me where I am. I could have died in 2000 (at an "old" 31) and been happy with my life: my amazing wife, my great kids, a fun job, and hobbies I enjoyed. But I would have missed out on a lot of things.
And many things will now happen without me. As I wrote this, I hardly knew what most of them could even be. What will the world be like as soon as 2021, or as late as 2060, when I would have been 91, the age my Oma reached? What new will we know? How will countries and people have changed? How will we communicate and move around? Whom will we admire, or despise?
What will my wife Air be doing? My daughters Marina and Lolo? What will they have studied, how will they spend their time and earn a living? Will my kids have children of their own? Grandchildren? Will there be parts of their lives I'd find hard to comprehend right now?

What to know, now that I'm dead

There can't be answers today. While I was still alive writing this, I was sad to know I'll miss these things—not because I won't be able to witness them, but because Air, Marina, and Lauren won't have me there to support their efforts.
It turns out that no one can imagine what's really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can't expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won't. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That's neither bad nor good, but it is real.
I think and hope that's what my daughters can take from my disease and death. And that my wonderful, amazing wife Airdrie can see too. Not that they could die any day, but that they should pursue what they enjoy, and what stimulates their minds, as much as possible—so they can be ready for opportunities, as well as not disappointed when things go sideways, as they inevitably do.
I've also been lucky. I've never had to wonder where my next meal will come from. I've never feared that a foreign army will come in the night with machetes or machine guns to kill or injure my family. I've never had to run for my life (something I could never do now anyway). Sadly, these are things some people have to do every day right now.

A wondrous place

The world, indeed the whole universe, is a beautiful, astonishing, wondrous place. There is always more to find out. I don't look back and regret anything, and I hope my family can find a way to do the same.
What is true is that I loved them. Lauren and Marina, as you mature and become yourselves over the years, know that I loved you and did my best to be a good father.
Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don't know what we'd have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you."

I rarely post the full text.  I didn't want this one to disappear...

Why the United States not a Christian Nation

As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals -- that "All men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called "American Scripture."

But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words -- "a wall of separation between church and state" -- lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a "Christian Nation" and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July.

It is true these words do not appear in any early national document. What may be Jefferson's second most-quoted phrase is found instead in a letter he sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.

While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."

Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the "shining city on a hill" where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death.

As president, Jefferson was voicing an idea that was fundamental to his view of religion and government, expressed most significantly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777.

Revised by James Madison and passed by Virginia's legislature in January 1786, the bill stated: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened (sic) in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ..."

It was this simple -- government could not dictate how to pray, or that you cannot pray, or that you must pray.

Jefferson regarded this law so highly that he had his authorship of the statute made part of his epitaph, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (Being president wasn't worth a mention.)

Why do Jefferson's "other words" matter today?

First, because knowing history matters -- it can safeguard us from repeating our mistakes and help us value our rights, won at great cost. Yet we are sorely lacking in knowledge about our past, as shown by a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress.

But more to the point, we are witnessing an aggressively promoted version of our history and heritage in which America is called a "Christian Nation."

This "Sunday School" version of our past has gained currency among conservative television commentators, school boards that have rewritten state textbooks and several GOP presidential candidates, some of whom trekked to Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in early June 2011.

No one can argue, as "Christian Nation" proponents correctly state, that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ's divinity.

More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.

But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence -- the very war celebrated on the "Glorious Fourth" -- against a country in which church and state were essentially one.

They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.

And that is why the U.S. Constitution reads as it does.

The supreme law of the land, written in the summer of 1787, includes no references to religion -- including in the presidential oath of office -- until the conclusion of Article VI, after all that dull stuff about debts and treaties: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (There is a pro forma "Year of the Lord" reference in the date at the Constitution's conclusion.)

Original intent? "No religious Test" seems pretty clear cut.

The primacy of a secular state was solidified when the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. According to Purdue history professor Frank Lambert, that "introduced the radical notion that the state had no voice concerning matters of conscience."

Beyond that, the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, specifically rejected a Senate proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as an official religion. As Lambert concludes, "There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself as a Christian Republic."

The actions of the first presidents, founders of the first rank, confirmed this "original intent:"

-- In 1790, President George Washington wrote to America's first synagogue, in Rhode Island, that "all possess alike liberty of conscience" and that "toleration" was an "inherent national gift," not the government's to dole out or take away

-- In 1797, with President John Adams in office, the Senate unanimously approved one of America's earliest foreign treaties, which emphatically stated (Article 11): "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) ..."

-- In 1802, Jefferson added his famous "wall of separation," implicit in the Constitution until he so described it (and cited in several Supreme Court decisions since).

These are, to borrow an admittedly loaded phrase, "inconvenient truths" to those who proclaim that America is a "Christian Nation."

The Constitution and the views of these Founding Fathers trump all arguments about references to God in presidential speeches (permitted under the First Amendment), on money (not introduced until the Civil War), the Pledge of Allegiance ("under God" added in 1954) and in the national motto "In God We Trust" (adopted by law in 1956).

And those contentious monuments to the Ten Commandments found around the country and occasionally challenged in court? Many of them were installed as a publicity stunt for Cecile B. DeMille's 1956 Hollywood spectacle, "The Ten Commandments."

So who are you going to believe? Thomas Jefferson or Hollywood? On second thought: Don't answer.

Full article captured lest it disappear from the site.

Quebec Man Incites Suicide

A Quebec man who belongs to a religious sect that believes the world will end in 2012 is being investigated by France for allegedly inciting people over the internet to commit suicide.

The man, who has not been charged with a crime, is a member of a New Age religion that believes the world will end in 2012, according to French police.

A few months ago, a French internet user became worried after noticing exchanges between a Quebec man and a group of French followers on several sites discussing the sect.

The Quebec man invited what he called his "divine children" towards "ascension," according to the Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires (the Interministerial Mission for Monitoring and Combatting Cultic Deviances), a French government agency .

"In New Age language, that means ending your days on Earth to reach another universe," said the organization's secretary-general ...

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Why wait for the world to end?  Do it now and turn over your worldly possessions to the Church sooner!!

Jesus Dress-Up Dolls

Don't have too much fun.  My personal favorite is the Lady Gaga.... NOT!

http://www.jesusdressup.com/starwars

Irrational Numbers and the Bible

I had to read this several times to make sure it wasn't a spoof perpetrated by "The Onion."

God is great. His reasoning is beyond that of yours or mine, and all of His creation is without flaw. Everything He makes, He makes for a reason, and nothing He makes is lacking in order or clarity.
But we are living in dark days. Heathen scientists have invented their own language to talk to each other and work to dismantle our Christian nation. They speak in hushed tones of numbers that go on forever, ever-twisting and changing like so many serpents. Atheist math teachers call these “irrational numbers,” a perfect name for a foolish sinful concept that denies God and reason. Atheists will tell you these numbers are “everywhere.” They are nowhere but in sinful heathen scientist’s minds.
Public schools are dens of sin where gothemo girls will try to rub their milk sacs all over your son. But advances from titful harlots are not the only dangers–even the teachers in public schools try to force sin on the young. The fabricated devil science of “evolution” has long been recognized by Christians as Satanic, but irrational numbers are equally as unholy, and children have been forced to learn them as “fact” for years.
The most popular “irrational number” is pi, or the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. Atheists claim that pi is equal to 3.14159265… and on and on and never stopping even though your good Christian mind knows that it must stop at some point. But is this really the correct value for pi? Let’s consult the Bible, looking at a passage where Huram constructs a circular pool for King Solomon:

He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.
–1 Kings 7:23

Any child with a calculator or simple math skills can tell you that 30 cubits divided by 10 cubits–circumference divided by diameter–is 3. Pi is equal to 3. And yet atheist sin scientists continue to believe their made-up lies about devil-worshipping forever-numbers!
PI IS EQUAL TO THREE YOU HOMOPROMOTING DEVIL EVOLUTION SCIENTISTS!!!

To support their “theories,” math sinners have even come up with a host of other completely made-up irrational numbers, such as e and i, which are not numbers, they are letters. Moreover, they are two of the letters in the word “devil,” which is certainly not a coincidence. Neither is it a coincidence that the two letters in “pi,” “p” and “i,” are the two most important letters in “penis.” Homo math teachers want to touch your child’s penis and they are barely even being subtle about it.
The only solution to all of this math and science sin is to pull your child out of evil government school and teach him at home. Public school will teach your baby evolution lies and it will also teach them that God is not rational. Pi equals three and there is no argument to be made against it. Home school your children, and write your Senator to demand we stop funding the Chinese lies that are taught in our classrooms.

The Skeptics Annotated Bible

"Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak .... If they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home." 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

Do you really know your King James Bible?  What does it really say about slavery, violence, women,...