americanatheists

Obama Quits His ChurchBy Jeff ZelenyWASHINGTON ? Senator Barack Obama is ending his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he has belonged to for about two decades and one that had become a lightning rod in his Democratic presidential bid.Mr. Obama informed his campaign advisers of his decision today, according to people familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the candidate. Mr. Obama is scheduled to explain his decision tonight in South Dakota.For Mr. Obama, this is the latest effort to distance himself from a church that had repeatedly drawn negative attention to his candidacy. And, in turn, Mr. Obama drew negative attention to the church on Chicago?s South Side, where he was married and his two daughters were baptized.Last month, Mr. Obama forcefully broke with his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., after a series of incendiary remarks he made about the United States government. This week, Mr. Obama found himself responding once again to a sermon delivered from the pulpit of Trinity, when a Catholic priest and a longtime friend of Mr. Obama was captured on video last Sunday mocking Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/obama-quits-his-church/?hpOK we can have fun with this one. We have a candidate who needed to get away from his big-mouth pastor and the church with which he associated. A good opportunity conveniently arose for him to do just that and still look like a good guy (”my church wasn’t tolerant enough”).This is, by the way, a great example of morals outside of religion. When your church is immoral in your own eyes (and you leave), it proves the church is not the source or the morality in the first place. Get it?OK so back to the game. We now have a presidential contender without an established church. Questions have been made about his faith, and many wrongly think he is a Moslem.Question 1: How long will it take for Obama to become tied to another church?Question 2: Will he change denomination, and to which one?Dave’s answers: He’s already picked a successor, he just hasn’t told us yet, and it’s a church that one of his family members attends, that Obama himself has attended several times, and that has a much more progressive tone. This will be announced within 1 month.

Yesterday I went with my family to the local mall, where I noticed that a Christian group had purchased one of those temporary tables to hock their mythology. OK. That’s allowed. They can do that. They have the right. The Moslems do it, the Breast Cancer people do it, the Atheists COULD do it (but we haven’t yet), so the Christians can do it too.Then I made a mistake. I stood near their booth and listened to their pitch while my daughter got food at a nearby pretzel stand. I listened silently as the preacher scared the crap out of two unaccompanied teenage girls. All the standard stuff. Born sinners, Jesus is coming, unbelievers go to hell, lets pray together, you should be thankful God brought you to this table today.And I thought of my daughter, now 11, who will soon (a few years) want to go to the mall alone with her friends, and be subjected to this crap. She’ll be fine, I’ve inoculated her.But if she were ever pulled into that chair, with the glazed look in her eyes, being brainwashed by a cult member, I would want someone to do what I did not — intervene.Should I have interrupted? Should I have jumped in and helped to save the girls from the attempt at brainwashing? What’s the ethical thing to do here?

Bart Meltzer has resigned from the Board Of Directors. He wrote a long letter of resignation, taking full blame for the snowball effect that led to Ellen’s departure, and stating that it was about power and control. He obviously feels terrible — I can only imagine what this has done to his relationship with Ellen.An exerpt follows:

This is my formal resignation from the board of directors of American Atheists, Inc. and United Secularists of America. I can no longer serve on the boards because of the events that have transpired leading to the departure of Ellen Johnson.Specifically, I was the instigator to Ellen?s departure and caused irreparable damage to the organization and pain and suffering to Ellen and her family. Because of my own self interests, I tried to stop Ellen from doing the Bill Moore walk. Yes, I was concerned for Ellen?s safety but initially I also refused to work with Ellen to try and make this walk as safe as I could. I just wanted Ellen not to do this walk and I refused to listen to her plea to help make this walk safe.That?s what Ellen asked me to do when we first discussed this on the morning of March 6th, 2008. ?Help me make this walk safe? was Ellen?s exact request. I replied that there was no way to make a two week walk safe. Maybe there was no way to eliminate all the risks, but making it a little safer is exactly what I wound up doing anyway. So I should have just done that from the start. The Bill Moore walk WAS a noble cause for Atheism and American Atheists, albeit a dangerous one. However, it did not turn out to be as dangerous as I thought it would.The other (not so minor) issue is that I tried to ?Control? Ellen. I incorrectly assumed that I had that privilege because of our relationship, I was on the board, and this was a safety issue. I tried to force Ellen not to do something she had already made plans to do. I don?t know that I did this intentionally to control Ellen but I did it just the same. Intentional or not, it was wrong.

I can’t say his departure is a surprise to me, and I can’t say it’s the wrong thing to do (it isn’t). However, I think it’s a bit of an overstatement to say this one incident (the Bill Moore March) caused the firing. There were a lot of problems here, and most of them still exist. The Moore March was the final straw. All in my opinion — just applying logic to a very emotional situation.

LOS ANGELES (May 29) – Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to “The Carol Burnett Show” and on the big screen in “Blazing Saddles,” died Thursday. He was 81.

Nothing whatsoever to do with Atheism. Funny guy tho.

I’m exhausted.I just got back from the gym, where my wife has been dragging me now for a few months. Yep, I’m getting in shape. Working out, building muscle, losing fat, toning up, the whole thing (or, as we say in Jersey, “da hole ting”). I’m getting stronger, and Hildy seems to really like the results.So here’s a thread on fitness. Do you work out, and does your atheism have anything to do with it? After all, longer life is better than a shorter one, right? Does fear of death motivate you to lead a healthier life?

Our Marines are trying to convert the Muhammadans in Fallujah by handing out this coin. One side asks: “Where will you spend eternity?” and the other provides John 3:16 as an answer. And this little act of religious zealotry is only costing us 500 billion dollars. So killing nearly a million Iraqis is just another one of the Bush Company’s Faith Based Initiatives. Can you say — NOT IN MY NAME.Peter Nuhn

Oh yah. Here’s big news. Bush lied to us. Wow. Now I’m really disenfranchised with the GOP. Before, I was happy with the current administration, but now I am not.Yah. Surprise. What’s next? Ties to Big Oil? Low intelligence? Drunk driving?I’ve not read the book, but from what I’ve seen from the reports I don’t see what’s news. Can someone please enlighten me?

PASADENA, Calif. (May 26) ? NASA’s newest outpost in the solar system is a polygon-cracked terrain in Mars’ northern polar region believed to hold a reservoir of ice beneath.Hours after the Phoenix Mars Lander softly landed Sunday in the Martian arctic plains, it dazzled scientists with the first-ever glimpse of the Red Planet’s high northern latitudes.A flood of images sent back by Phoenix revealed a landscape similar to what can be found in Earth’s permafrost regions ? geometric patterns in the soil likely related to the freezing and thawing of ground ice.”This is a scientist’s dream, right here on this landing site,” principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson said in a post-landing news conference.

AMERICAN ATHEISTS MEDIA ALERThttp://www.atheists.org BLAIR SCOTT ON AIR AMERICA SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2008 — listen online Blair Scott, the National Affiliate Outreach Director and Alabama State Director for American Atheists, will be the guest on “Atheist Talk” airing on Air America Minnesota AM 950 on Sunday, May 25 at 10 a.m. CST.The show starts at 10 a.m. CST and Blair Scott will be the guest for the second half hour beginning at 10:30 a.m. CST. Blair Scott, the Founder and Press Relations Director for Operation Foxhole Atheists, will be discussing foxhole atheism and Operation Foxhole Atheists (http://thenafa.org/ofa). The show will also cover the lawsuit filed by Specialist Hall and the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers (http://maaf.info).You can listen online at http://www.am950ktnf.com/listen but you have to enter 55303 as your zip code in order to listen. Or you can go to the Minnesota Atheists (http://mnatheists.org) home page and click on the ?Listen Now!? link to go directly to the show. WHO & WHAT: Blair Scott, National Affiliate Outreach Director on AIR AMERICAWHEN: Sunday, May 26, 2008 10 am CSTWHERE: Air America Minnesota AM 950 and http://www.am950ktnf.com/listen(American Atheists is a nationwide movement that defends civil rights for nonbelievers; advances the cause of Reason; and labors for the total separation of church and state.)

Although the article linked to in the title to this post is about a rabbi who left his religion, the following quote from the article was news to me. Assaf not only gave up his religion, but in doing so, now has to pay taxes.

It’s perhaps surprising that in the world’s only Jewish nation, so much friction exists between the Israeli majority who consider themselves secular and the 700,000 Haredi Jews, who follow the most theologically conservative form of Orthodox Judaism.The problem, as many secular Jews see it, is that being Haredi carries certain privileges, which include not having to pay tax or work or do three years’ military service.Haredi Jews receive government handouts to help support their families in the absence of a breadwinner. And with most Haredi Jews having large families, often with 10 or 11 children, their number is expected to double from about 10% of the population to 20% by 2020.

Would you give up religion if it meant you had to start paying taxes?Peter Nuhn