Christian News Network
Florida Officials Reject Proposal to Place Atheist Monument Near Ten ...
Christian News Network
Officials in a Florida county have denied an application to erect an atheist monument near a Ten Commandments display at the county courthouse. The group Williston Atheists had submitted an application last month to Levy County officials to place the 1 ...
Florida atheist group's monument application rejected on a 'technicality'Raw Story
Atheists vow to fight monument rejection in Levy County, Fla.Washington Post

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Atheist group grows, expands vision
Longview News-Journal
After traveling for many months to Tyler to join with the East Texas Freethinkers group, Rumfield and a few others began meeting as the Longview Atheist Society in and around Longview. “I was going to East Texas Freethinkers any chance I got, and ...

Atheist congregation Sunday Assembly grows in Nashville
The Tennessean
Sunday Assembly atheist gathering grows in Nashvil...: London-based Sunday Assembly cofounder Sanderson Jones and Morgan Spurlock of CNN's “Inside Man” talk about the growth of Nashville's atheist congregation, launched in November. Spurlock, an ...

Atheist congregation Sunday Assembly grows in Nashville
The Tennessean
Sunday Assembly atheist gathering grows in Nashvil...: London-based Sunday Assembly cofounder Sanderson Jones and Morgan Spurlock of CNN's “Inside Man” talk about the growth of Nashville's atheist congregation, launched in November. Spurlock, an ...

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Some people actually do keep octopuses as pets; it’s not easy, and it’s heartbreaking when they die. They always die.

Atheist Monument In Florida Courthouse Rejected Again, But Secular Group 'Will ...
Huffington Post
(RNS) Local officials in Florida this week rejected an atheist monument proposed for a courthouse lawn, another example of the hurdles religious minorities will face as they continue to press for equal access to displays on public lands. Commissioners ...

Raw Story
Atheists vow to fight monument rejection in Levy County, Fla.
Religion News Service
(RNS) Local officials in Florida this week rejected an atheist monument proposed for a courthouse lawn, another example of the hurdles religious minorities will face as they continue to press for equal access to displays on public lands. Commissioners ...
Florida atheist group's monument application rejected on a 'technicality'Raw Story
Florida Officials Reject Proposal to Place Atheist Monument Near Ten ...Christian News Network
Monumentally stupid decisionChicago Tribune (blog)

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Raw Story
Atheists vow to fight monument rejection in Levy County, Fla.
Washington Post
Local officials in Florida this week rejected an atheist monument proposed for a courthouse lawn, another example of the hurdles religious minorities will face as they continue to press for equal access to displays on public lands. Commissioners in ...
Florida atheist group's monument application rejected on a 'technicality'Raw Story
Monumentally stupid decisionChicago Tribune (blog)

all 4 news articles »

It’s so mundane — a group of men assembling and shipping some heavy machinery, and then…death.

We put an awful lot of effort into making this look easy.

(via Boing Boing.)

Charisma News
After Church's Fervent Prayers, Ex-Atheist Feels Fire of God and Surrenders to ...
Charisma News
In November, a short-term OM Italy team met Giammarco Romagna, a 24-year-old Italian man whom God called to salvation through Jesus Christ two years ago. Prior to his conversion, he was a resolute atheist; however, he now passionately proclaims the ...
Woman rebukes joint Muslim Christian Service and gets thrown outThe Way

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The food science blog Biofortified is running a kickstarter to encuten genetically modified organisms with Frank N. Foode™ plushies. Give to help promote informed food choices and get soft fuzzy rewards!

One of the secondary inducements are mini-maize seeds, that allow you to grow tiny corn plants in your home. I am surrounded by kilometers of vast corn fields — corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans, everywhere. Not tempting at all. But maybe some of you more urban readers need a tiny reminder of where your High Fructose Corn Syrup and ethanol and popcorn and an awful lot of the carbohydrates in your diet come from.

They aren’t making the mini-maize seeds part of the rewards any more: you can get them for free!

Raw Story
Florida atheist group's monument application rejected on a 'technicality'
Raw Story
A Florida county has denied an atheist group's request to erect a public monument next to its courthouse's Ten Commandments monument. The Levy County Commission voted, unanimously, to deny the Williston Atheists's request to erect an atheist ...

Uh-oh. I hope these don’t become more popular. This one is in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on 29 March, and features Paul Nelson — a young earth creationist who will hide behind Intelligent Design the whole time.

Debates are a great way to seduce a creationist audience into showing up to listen, but they’re awful for presenting a good analysis: you are publicly pitting a scientist up against a proven, expert liar, and committing to allowing lies to be told for half the time of the event. Sometimes they’ll pay off and you’ll get good exposure of the nonsense; sometimes you’ll find the slick fraud on the creation side getting more attention than he deserves.

Just a hint, though. The title of this debate is “Creation vs. Evolution: A Debate on Origins and the Tree of Life,” which is hopelessly broad. Paul Nelson has carte blanche to babble on in a tuneless song of silliness trying to hit the one chord that will resonate with the audience, and that’s what you’re going to get, and it’s going to be really hard to pin him down on anything. Part of the art of doing these debates, I’ve learned, is to craft a decent structured framework for the discussion, so that you’ve got a clear question to answer and even an audience of biased Christian ninnies will notice when the creationist (or the evolutionist!) goes wandering off topic. I hope it’s not too late to refine the subject a bit.

The Olympics have always been political, always been tied to the nationalist aspirations of the host country. Always. Even when they are hosted in relatively benign countries, we should be wary of this attempt to hijack what ought to be simply an international athletic event into propaganda. (It’s not just the Olympics, either; what is it with people that they have to turn every sport into a municipal or regional battle, even when the athletes are basically mercenaries hired to represent Seattle or Detroit or Green Bay?)

But these Russian Olympics are something special. What if a country decided to show off by hosting an international event, and then all they managed to show off was incompetence, corruption, and hatred? Because, man, the Sochi Olympics are going to go down in the history books. Maybe they’ll pull out all the stops and get the hotels built in time; maybe they’ll be able to paper over the graft that’s used to get things done; but one thing they will not be able to hide, because they’re trying so hard to make it official policy, is their persecution of gay people.

Jeff Sharlet visited Russia, and came back with harrowing first-person accounts of assault and torture and abuse, as well as a description of how the apparatus of the state is being used to implement oppression.

The Russian closet has always been deep, but since last June, when the Duma began passing laws designed to shove Russia’s tiny out population back into it, the closet has been getting darker. The first law banned gay "propaganda," but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. It’s a mechanism of thought control, its target not so much gays as anybody the state declares gay; a virtual resurrection of Article 70 from the old Soviet system, forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Then, as now, nobody knew exactly what "propaganda" was. The new law explicitly forbids any suggestion that queer love is equal to that of heterosexuals, but what constitutes such a suggestion? One man was charged for holding up a sign that said being gay is ok. Pride parades are out of the question, a pink triangle enough to get you arrested, if not beaten. A couple holding hands could be accused of propaganda if they do so where a minor might see them; the law, as framed, is all about protecting the children. Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children’s Affairs and the author of the bill, says that it’s too late to save adult "homosexualists," as they’re called, but Russia still has a chance to raise a pure generation.

Meanwhile, something strange is happening in the US, that bastion of Cold War virtue. Our right wing, which used to hate all things Russian as a matter of reflex, has begun to warm to them: they’ve found common ground at last. I’d say it was kind of sweet, except that that common ground seems to be built on the desire to dig mass graves for gay people. Bryan Fischer, for instance, praises Russia for ahead of us on recognizing that it’s a moral evil to propagandize this lifestyle among teenagers..

We don’t get to stand and wag fingers at Russia, though, because they’re actually just holding up a mirror to us. As Sharlet continues, it’s American Christian Evangelicals who have been fanning the flames around the world.

Mizulina’s dream isn’t old-fashioned; it is, as one fascist supporter told me, "utopian." He meant that as praise. And the Russian dream is not alone. Liberal Americans imagine LGBT rights as slowly but surely marching forward. But queer rights don’t advance along a straight line. In Russia and throughout Eastern Europe—and in India and in Australia, in a belt across Central Africa—anti-gay crusaders are developing new laws and sharpening old ones. The ideas, meanwhile, are American: the rhetoric of "family values" churned out by right-wing American think tanks, bizarre statistics to prove that evil is a fact, its face a gay one. This hatred is old venom, but its weaponization by nations as a means with which to fight "globalization"—not the economic kind, the human-rights kind—is a new terror.

“Family values.” I think families are great, I think we don’t pay enough attention to values or ideals — these are the conceptual tools human beings used to set aspirations, and they’re important. But probably the most effective hijacking ever done in my lifetime was this cunning subordination of “family” to be a synonym for intolerance, hyper-masculinity, and sexual oppression of all kinds. It’s impressive how the right wing has taken a word so fundamental to healthy human living, “family”, and managed to poison it so thoroughly.

And here it is, exposed for all to see in Sochi. The country has been infiltrated by American “Family Values” warriors, and what we’re going to see in the Olympics (if you bother to watch them) is our right wing American utopia.

These pernicious strategies are personified by one man, Scott Lively (but let’s not make the mistake of thinking he’s the source — he’s just one eruption our of a whole pimply infection of swarms of conservative evangelicals). Lively’s mission in life has been to spread his homophobia world-wide. He’s been an inspiration for anti-gay legislation in both Africa and Eastern Europe, and he’s proud of it.

Andy Warner

He’s currently been targeted for criminal prosecution in the US under the Alien Tort Statute — it turns out that foreign victims of American abuse actually do have legal recourse here, and there are a lot of dead and maimed bodies that can be laid on Lively’s doorstep. We can only hope that justice is done.

Meanwhile, about that mirror reflecting America’s role in spreading hate…Scott Lively is running for governor of Massachusetts as a candidate who can clearly and unapologetically articulate Biblical values without fear or compromise. Remember that when you scorn Russia.

Crossmap
Atheist pilot mocked God, until he ran out of fuel in a snowstorm
Crossmap
Atheist pilot mocked God, until he ran out of fuel in a snowstorm. By Mark Ellis, Assist News Service On February 6, 2014. Text size: Small · Medium · Large. Email; Share; Print; Comment. Tweet · SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- Raised in the secular ...

Windsor Star (blog)
Atheists to bring former Westboro Baptist Church member to Windsor
Windsor Star (blog)
“He had a really interesting experience growing up in a cult,” Shawna Scott of the Windsor-Essex County Atheist Society, said Thursday. “We think that his story really highlights the dangers of religious indoctrination.” The society has arranged for ...

By Josh Rosenau. Reposted from NCSE’s Science League of America blog. A Crystal disco ball to celebrate the crystal anniversary of the Disco. ‘tute’s entry into the creationism business. Fifteen years ago yesterday, a mail clerk in Seattle was handed a document to copy. As the Seattle Weekly reported, the packet was labeled “TOP SECRET” and “NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION,” and the cover sported an Illuminati-esque triangular design and a copy of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” The... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.

Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread

Deseret News
Christian teen uses T-shirts to bite back at atheist group
Deseret News
Christian teen uses T-shirts to bite back at atheist group. Print; Font [+] [-]. Leave a comment ». Compiled by Herb Scribner, Deseret News National Edition. Published: Thursday, Feb. 6 2014 1:10 p.m. MST. Updated: 10 hours ago. Cameron Franks, a ...

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Christian teen uses T-shirts to bite back at atheist group
Deseret News
Christian teen uses T-shirts to bite back at atheist group. It started when a Texas high school teacher took down a poster. The poster — which featured a cross with the words “the power of God” among other Christian-themed text — was removed by the ...

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