americanatheists

Since recent activity in Iraq has fueled a major debate, I decided to put in a thread. Sure, not much of a link to American Atheists, but good for a weekend.So here it is. An open forum on Iraq. Have fun.BTW and IMO, I don’t really know what to do here. Sure, I think we need to be out, but it’s always easy to look back in time and make good decisions. In the present, in the real world, we made a mess, and we need to clean it up… or do we?

AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC.http://www.atheists.orghttp://www.americanatheist.orgFor more information, please contact:Ellen Johnson, President (973) 625-6900Dave Silverman, Communications Director (732) 648-9333HOUSE BILL TO CUT FIRST AMENDMENT LITIGATION FEESIS “GREEN LIGHT” FOR ABUSE SAYS ATHEIST GROUPA bill that would end compensation for attorneys challenging unconstitutional practices in respect to the separation of church and state invites widespread government abuse, an Atheist watchdog group charged today.H.R. 2679, the “Public Expression of Religion Act” (PERA) introduced by Rep. James Hostettler would amend a portion of the U.S. Code and disallow fees from attorneys who successfully represent individuals or groups litigating many First Amendment issues. The American Legion recently announced its support for this measure, claiming that lawyers were “profiteering” at the expense of the taxpayer, and that even the threat of litigation impinged on religious practice.Ellen Johnson, President of American Atheists, said that the bill is a “green light for local and state governments that often promote unconstitutional practices, everything from sectarian prayer at public meetings to putting up religious monuments on government property.”"The intent of this bill is to discourage concerned individuals and advocacy groups like American Atheists from using our courts to defend the First Amendment.”Dave Silverman, Communications Director for American Atheists, said that the Legion and others supporting PERA are misleading the public over the issue of costly litigation.”Too often, government officials have no problem using the public treasury to defend these unconstitutional practices in court, and the taxpayer has little or no say in the matter. If Rep. Hostettler and the Legion want to save us all a few bucks, they would not allow these violations in the first place.”More on the “Public Expression of Religious Act” can be found at http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/pera1.htmAMERICAN ATHEISTS is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for Atheists; works for the total separation of church and state; and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy.

NEW YORK (AP) – Isaac Hayes has quit “South Park,” where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.Hayes, who has played the ladies’ man/school cook in the animated Comedy Central satire since 1997, said in a statement Monday that he feels a line has been crossed.”There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins,” the 63-year-old soul singer and outspoken Scientologist said.”Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored,” he continued. “As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.”"South Park” co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, “This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology… He has no problem – and he’s cashed plenty of checks – with our show making fun of Christians.”

Awww! Didums not like people making fun of the FACT that Scientology is a SCAM? Does we get mad when the finger points at us?Gee… I remember a certain episode that jabbed at atheists, but nobody had a hissy fit.Mr. Hayes needs to remember that although we respect the RIGHT to believe, we don’t HAVE to respect the beliefs themselves. I, for instance, don’t respect barely-legal money-making scams disguised as religions.Blame the aliens.

OK Here’s a new idea — let’s see if it works.This thread is to ADVERTISE a product or service to Atheists. It’s free and experimental. No discussion here (unless you believe an ad is fake), just people posting businesses and perhaps a special discount to NGB members.Disclaimer: American Atheists does not necessarily endorse the businesses posted here.

March 11, 2006The Saturday ProfileFor Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats By JOHN M. BRODERLOS ANGELES, March 10 ? Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries. She said the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private. “I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings,” she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb. Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: “Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs.”Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, “The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.”She went on, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.” She concluded, “Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. “We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders,” said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.DR. SULTAN is “working on a book that ? if it is published ? it’s going to turn the Islamic world upside down.”"I have reached the point that doesn’t allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book.”The working title is, “The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster.”Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith’s strictures into adulthood.But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.”They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god.”She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County. After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan’s anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. “Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?” she asked. “In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched.”Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri. Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.”The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations,” Dr. Sultan said. “It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.”She said she no longer practiced Islam. “I am a secular human being,” she said.The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, “Are you a heretic?” He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail. One message said: “Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see.” She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, “If someone were to kill you, it would be me.”Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.”I have no fear,” she said. “I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles.”

http://wrightwing.net/2006/03/09/19/47/255

Is it starting to be time to consider Canadian Citizenship?Is there nothing in the Constitution this sock puppet will fail to molest?King George has issued a Royal Edict:Executive Order: Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community InitiativesBy the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to help the Federal Government coordinate a national effort to expand opportunities for faith-based and other community organizations and to strengthen their capacity to better meet America?s social and community needs, it is hereby ordered as follows:Section 1. Establishment of a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security.

Thanks Tom. I think.

Is it starting to be time to consider Canadian Citizenship?Is there nothing in the Constitution this sock puppet will fail to molest?King George has issued a Royal Edict:Executive Order: Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community InitiativesBy the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to help the Federal Government coordinate a national effort to expand opportunities for faith-based and other community organizations and to strengthen their capacity to better meet America?s social and community needs, it is hereby ordered as follows:Section 1. Establishment of a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security.

thanks Tom. I think.

http://articles.news.aol.com/business/article.adp?id=20060309145709990003&cid=1712″On eBay, Atheist Puts Own Soul on Auction BlockThe Winning Bidder Offers Unusual Deal: Visit Churches and Critique”Congrats to our 2006 Scholarship winner Hemant Mehta for this great idea. Building bridges and spreading the word — good stuff Hemant!

Three Students Arrested in Alabama Church FiresBy JAY REEVES, AP

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (March – Three college students were arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons that allegedly were set first as “a joke” and later as an attempt to divert a massive arson investigation.(snip)The three suspects were all white, and were either attending or had been enrolled at Birmingham-Southern, a liberal arts school affiliated with the Methodist church.Five of the burned churches were destroyed and four were damaged, including one in which congregants, alerted during the night that churches were afire, arrived just as the apparent arsonists were leaving. That fire, quickly put out, had been set in the sanctuary near the altar – a pattern in the other church arsons in Bibb County and West Alabama.Jim Parker, pastor of Ashby Baptist Church at Brierfield, a Bibb County church destroyed in the Feb. 3 arson, said the congregation has been apprehensive about whether the arsonists had some “political or religious agenda.”"I want to find out the motivation of these young men. Young folks get some crazy ideas,” he said.

If only we had some way to force the churches and private schools to teach Atheistic morals. These kids need more Atheism in their life! Maybe we should put disclaimers in their bibles…

And now it’s time for one of those posts that’s going to incite lots of responses. This should be fun. I understand that there are exceptions to the rules (that there are nonreligious people who oppose abortion, for example), but I really think I’m right here.South Dakota has outlawed abortion, in an attempt to overturn Roe V Wade at the national level. They may succeed. If they do, the pro-choice population will have no alternative but to try for a Constitutional Amendment.The problem I have with this whole thing is that most people have lost site of the real issue, the separation of church and state. The abortion issue is not about abortion, but rather about religious people forcing other people to obey the religious way of life. Gay rights, death with dignity, school prayer — all the same thing. Those who oppose all these issues are predominantly (exceptions noted) the same people, the same organizations, the same money. Most of the debates are not about the specific issues, but rather just cloaks around religious discussions.Their strength comes from our missing the point! When we fight these issues on an individual level, we are divided and therefore conquered! We should NOT be voting on abortion or gay rights — we should be voting ONLY on the issue of separation of church and state. When those in office agree that one religion should not rule the masses (like Iraq and Iran), these issues will go away by default.Our country is in imminent danger. We need to be united and vocal, and GOAL ORIENTED! Keep religion out of government and we keep freedom alive.