That is very true. With the exception of the extremist fundamentalist wackos, most people that I have encountered that call themselves "religious" are no more religious than I. They just haven't been able to shake that fear of hellfire and brimstone off of them. I have explained the fallacy of Pascal's Wager to quite a few of them and have actually had some good results. But the good results usually come from the ones that are already teetering on the fence and tired of the nonsense they have encountered in churches.

Oh no, she is advocating making religion legal and that no one religion can take over. How dare she?

She is not talking about American laws. She is the Secretary of State, she was talking about how Arab countries need to pass laws like our First Amendment. I agree with her. 

Ugh, I can't believe I just defended Hillary, excuse me while I go take a shower. 

It's been a thousand plus years because there's been a thousand plus years of occupancy. Europe only recently pulled its controlling forces out of Africa and the Middle East. In the decades since, nothing surprising has happened. Europe may have controlled these areas to a degree, but never brought the enlightenment age with them. All educational faculties were put to use in colonies and at home, indigenous peoples were not a concern to ruling parties. So instead of European secular involvement, you had christians going in and using their familiarity with European laws and history to destabilise any religion oriented belief system in favour of christianity. In Africa it worked wonders, because there was no credible opposition to the power of the church. In the Middle East it sparked race wars as there were already strong and capable religious groups that had little trouble not only resisting the christians, but using them to increase the power of the prevailing religions.

Kinsland wrote:-

I just find it extremely annoying that in our modern day and age that Politicians aren't just supporting their voters by 'saying' they are religious, BUT they are going a step BACKWARD and making NEW laws in the name of religion??

It's ludicrous in my honest opinion.

I just wanted to post this crazy 'modern' (huh!) new law here, and ask other members if they feel the same as me or not?

Who knows, maybe I'm taking this too dramatically. Do we still need religious laws?

Well, atheists and [what I shall call for now "rational theists"] share a common interest in building and maintaining secular societies. The tolerance for all beliefs, [provided it includes the freedom not to have a belief ] - is a vital first step. This is particularly true in countries that have a religious majority or significant religious influence in government.

Having a number of different faiths is a marvelous teaching tool for the atheist, because  by definition, a monotheist, is an atheist in all religions but one!

I think that atheism is on the rise, and with care, will become fixed in the population. The care bit is about not coming across as an intolerant asshole. Ok, some god-botherers will think that anyway, but that is no reason to alienate the rationale theists by giving evidence of intolerance.

As atheists we are a diverse bunch, but nevertheless have to work together in an effective way to make religion a thing of the past. Pick the battles that really matter.

I like the reference to Iraq. Hussein did protect all religions and women and never provoked such an admonition. Then Don Quixote rushed in to fix things.

Islam started with Mohamed. The Sunni/Shi'a conflict started immediately after his death. Lets just pass a law to fix it. And while we are at it just pass a law against Islam and rectify that too.

In Egypt the Copts and the Muslims have been at odds since the Muslims took over shortly after Mohamed's death. Certainly a law can rectify everything.

It took Europe both the 100 years war and the 30 years war to abjure conflict based upon religion but at Westphalia the requirement that the subjects must have the same religion as their subjects was the law.

The US was the first a-religion political union but the Catholics did not have an easy time while the LDS got the shaft. Even after it sort of died down a wave of immigrants brought it with them.

Laws cannot change human behavior unless the people subject to the laws agree with the laws. That is why it took Hussein to establish religious equality in Iraq and why the democratic government cannot.

The problem with that is there are orders of magnitude more religious websites than atheist websites. And as with this one and with Dawkins they turn out to be anti-Christian and anti-Muslim but pro-Judaism -- fake atheist websites.

This is hardly the place for gushing eulogies. His only claim to fame was bringing computer technology to people who could  not grasp it like artists. In the process his products were not only largely manufactured in the third world with child labor but his prices were more than double with the actual hardware and software was worth for the same performance benchmarks. And if you are sentimental about the original Apple, talk about the Woz not him. But even then, when I bought my first PC the Apple ][ was an option. I bought the Atari 800 because it had overall better performance for a bit over half the price.

Jobs had nothing to do with the internet.

Laws against crimes against religions which establish all religions as equal are not protecting religion. It is not atheist mobs attacking churches, it is synagogues attacking mosques and mosques against mosques. As I said, the Christian world reached an accomodation because of the bloodshed of two wars over 130 years.

It may take the non-creedal religions like Islam and Judaism their own century of bloodshed to learn to give it up as a bad idea. I have no interest in nor reason to stop them from learning the hard way. Unlike most Americans I eschew the role of Don Quixote to the world.

If you are implying in the US, our laws are quite sufficient and the "hate crimes" laws should be abolished immediately. A crime is a crime. Motivation does not lessen nor worsen the crime. Sentencing because of motivation should go back to judicial discretion. Only judges have enough experience in such cases to form good policy in the matter.

As they say, yes but ...

First off, despite the annoying prominence and political influence of religion these days it really does not take too much research to see how greatly things have improved over the years. The creationists are one horrible example today which is getting no where rather quickly other than as material for stand-up comics. Prohibition was a religious objective. The slowness in adopting real medical schools and researching disease was because diseases were a punishment for sin. 

Bottom line is science has destroyed the foundations upon which religion existed from prehistoric times. These days when some clown blames a disaster on sin he becomes a laughing stock. Barely two centuries again there was no other explanation and it was taken seriously by almost everyone. Today to be a believer one has to have some rather esoteric idea of what that god is. Two centuries ago every change in the weather was a clear and present demonstration of the power of that same god. Everything was such a demonstration.

Science is doing this. We can comfortably assume religion is as old as human beings and likely existed in pre Homo Sapien species. That god(s) have gone from everything to next to nothing in four centuries is incredibly rapid progress. As the rate of scientific advance increases the gods retreat into smaller and smaller gaps with those who say otherwise looking sillier and sillier. What Newton accomplied on gravity was trivial compared to proving the heavens were no different from the earth. The planets move for the same reason stones fall.

Satan used to use lighting to attack god's churches until Ben Franklin took god and satan out of the picture. Pasteur ended disease as divine punishment. Weather forecasting took storms away from the divine. Long before evolution geology ended creation in 4004BC.

Bottom line is, if we do nothing we continue to win. So other than inciting a riot being a major felony us lazy folks can sit back and just do and promote science knowing it is the proven successful path to eliminating the hold of religion on people.

The US is odd in the west. In most western countries people go to church three times in their lives and in two of them they are carried. The US is starting to come around to that. The more people know about how the world works (which does not require a degree in science) the less use they have for religion. In sickness people are more likely to pray the treatment works than the disease goes away. It is a matter of time before the connection between prayer and cure dissolves completely. People do things because they think it works and one success wipes out the memory of a thousand failures. Doctors give correct reasons why people die instead of retreating to "it was his time" or god's will. The connection is not being made any longer.

So what can an atheist do to help? Simply be secular. Take for example the issue of child sexual abuse in churches.

You tell me which is more productive. 1) Trying to figure out how to make a torch and marching on a church or 2) lobbying the US attorney general to declare the Catholic Church a criminal conspiracy under the RICO statutes. For many reasons 2) is not going to happen. Getting the AG to explain why it will not happen is priceless. (The case would take decades to make due to the legal issues which would be raised and ultimately the responsible person is a head of state with immunity and by the time the case could be made the real perps would also be dead popes.)

I spent many years learning the pre-scientific debating approaches against religion. As I came to realize most of them were overtaken by events in science it became clear to me all of them could be replaced by science. There was no need for any of the classical approaches. In fact engaging in them just gave believers a platform. I am a scientist btw, and an engineer and a computer scientist and a few other things and also retired. So while prejudiced for science I did give the old approaches a try.

Anyway since adopting simply promoting science and knowledge of it even in the simplest terms I find no reason to engage in debate. There is still a long way to go. We do not have a language for discussing evolution that does not imply intent and volition. We need to do better there. We do have a hugely better language for discussing life, death, natural disasters and all the rest. Yes, here the internet is incredibly valuable in that if a person is not looking to confirm some religious preconception then there are much better examples available. As to the search engines it is getting to the point where at least aregligious sites are on the first page and near the top.

Myself I get in hot water even here in concentrating on the science of archaeology to demolish the foundation of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Biblical Israel never existed in bibleland nor did anything remotely like it ever exist. That was quick although as it was a side project it took a few years. After completing that case I started looking at the surviving documents on the subject and discovered they all confirm it was never there. That took a bit longer and I am still in the process. I don't read the original languages and the translations are generally pedantic in their correctness rather than clarity translations. There is a KJV translation about "cast bread upon the waters" which is a clarity translation. The pedantic translation is about soggy bread. You can see the difficulty.

But all this is a specialty market of interest. When science replaces everything the the OT god was credited with and the true believers are even trying to make the miracles scientific you know its time is limited.

Despite an "atheist" attacking me for attacking jewish identity (can you believe it?) there should 26 to 30 million Jews in the world today based on their own numbers and considering holocausting claims. There are only 13 just as there were shortly after the war. The rest of the world and the religions have doubled in population. And of those 13 half are Reform or Conservative which the Orthodox do not consider to be Jews at all. So there are only 6-7 million by the original definition with the Reform differing from the Universal Unitarians as an ethical system with or without Moses.

All that has happened naturally without any atheist lifting a single finger. So why do we not band together an do more?

Also without any atheist effort that I have ever heard of atheism has become the fastest growing "religious" category in the US at something like 12%. 1 in 9 people are atheists. We don't know because Americans (except for Jews in my experience) do not consider religion a part of their personal identity that is worth mentioning. We don't discuss it. Next time you are at the store, 1 in 9 is atheist. How can you know we are winning unless we wear badges?

But can we call it winning when the main reason is religion has become almost completely irrelevant? That is the most likely reason. After churches installed lightning rods they dropped the prayers to save them from Satan's lightning. One less thing to pray for.

And I do not mean science as a science per se but in how it has made modern science. Take WWII. Certainly there were exhortations to pray for victory. There were huge government organized campaigns to buy war bonds for victory. There are only so many hours in a day. What do you think people attributed victory to? Prayer or war bonds that would pay dividends which prayer did not?

But even here science ruled the war. German wonder weapons against American scientific prowess were all the talk with prayer an afterthought at best. After the war the TV series' explaining victory never mentioned prayer. People may have remembered praying during the war but their knowledge was solidly in the strategy and tactics and concrete events.

Another major change is that churches out of self interest were loyal to their host governments. In time of war god was always on both sides. In Britain the news was controlled by the government agency the BBC. There is an infamous letter to the heads of churches in England to support the war by not talking about the rape and pillage of the Red Army as it advanced into eastern Europe. What most do not see is that the churches were part of the government public relations effort. Once there is a free media churches lose their political utility and governments lose interest in supporting them. Just last week the Irish government turned against the Catholic Church over child abuse. Maybe the local archbishop thinks Satan can work miracles.

What should atheists do? Look at what is happening all around us and try to imagine how to do more than is already happening on a grand scale while we do nothing but be ourselves. We are part of a future that started centuries ago with Galileo.

The best thing I can see would be for an atheist political party but in the US new parties are a waste of time. And besides organizing atheists is up there with getting libertarians to agree and cat herding as a waste of our precious bodily fluids.

As a political movement you say get religious people out of public office. First you have to amend the constitution to get rid of that pesky "no religious test" clause. If you think that is going to be easy consider the entire oath of office on a bible thing which is a matter of personal choice has to be eliminated to. A leader must have the confidence of those he leads. As long as using the bible increases rather than decreases confidence it staysuntil atheists are the majority. A government cannot rule contrary to the wishes of the majority. Granted democracy is a very imperfect way to express those wishes but absent a better method we use it.

I can only suggest your literacy needs to improve as that was a statement as to the major problem her idea would have. Any literate person can read that. If you have an issue address it to Kim(sland) who proposed the general idea. I only proposed the major problem with which you and I agree.

Tool city here.

Thanks A_Nony_Mouseespecially and also to Brian37 actually I see now why some 'religious laws' do exist.

Thus answering my first post as well on why ask for more overseas or here.

It may have seemed insane for arguing such a point originally, but quite obviously it is working in our favor in stopping the religious stronghold in our society.

By the way, I'm not actually in the US, but be very clear that the US is seen as a very religious country in Christianity, so although statistically 1 in 9 may be atheist (likely in real life much more, but people tend to tick the Christian box even though they may not practice religion whatsoever) Generally in the rest of the western world most people don't go to church on Sundays, and therefore since they are not praising the lord, they are religiously expected to go to Hell. Quite obviously its more like 80% or possibly 90% of people are not religious but just don't know it yet Lol.

Also note if someone took to the streets and was loud enough to have others stand beside them, holding up signs saying Religious Ridiculous and much more, I'd still be very proud. For as the saying goes if you can save one (from ignorance and barbaric beliefs) it would be all worth it. The concern is that its easy to be religious, it takes more effort (and common sense intelligence) to be an atheist. I say we were born that way! And society has made us lazy minded  (obviously again).

A worthy topic. Thanks.

You are on the right track. I've been into atheism for half a century, literally. Don't let anything I post discourage you. Take it for what it is worth to you and come up with something productive to do. Us old farts don't come up with the really new ideas. Our major value is, been there, done that, this is what happened. It is often difficult to recite the what happened part without appearing discouraging. That is never the intention.

I've had more than one person tell me I am an idiot in my life. I did not by Microsoft stock when it went public because I was convinced such a retarded operating system could never be successful. I have a lot more such stories. If I ever post anything discouraging think of me as the guy with cataracts and dentures.

What us old timers can do is talk about what we have learned. I am still constantly surprised to learn how deeply embedded religion was in our culture just a few years before I was born in 1945 as the replacement for WWII as a lover once said about by BBS style. When atheism first hit me after reading some Philip Wylie books at age 13 or so I thought it was hopeless also. The more I learned over the next few years about the world the less concerned I was. What I have come to realize is how rapidly it has been collapsing after WWII and just how bad it had been before I arrived to save the world from itself.

I haven't seen the point of the current bloom of social media and think it will fade away. That likely means it will become of permanent feature of society so I would look for opportunities there. We don't wear badges but atheist friends might help us to know just how common we are. There is a huge segment of the population which does not have the self-respect to exist without social support. Being able to friend atheists should drastically increase that one in nine. They would be the waffling agnostics afraid to be alone with no place to go.

And then, regardless of the feelings of friends and relatives, start using the correct semantics about religion. Screw giving them the benefit of the doubt and showing fake respect. Priests and preachers are parasites who can't earn an honest living. No matter how nice they come across they are still parasites. Say so. They survive sowing fear of the unknown by telling stories they know are lies.

In my research into ancient texts one thing I know for a fact is that by themselves they inspire atheism. Another thing I know is priests and preachers are taught these things and thus I know they do in fact knowingly lie and misrepresent solely to keep their jobs.

Never mince words, never be polite, inspire others to use at least some of the same words. Work to make correct descriptions common. Actually don't work. Just make friends and have fun but simply use the correct words. Spread the new sematics. That is what I have been doing with the Israel/Palestine issue. I test drove it here. I have started spreading it and I have detected some use of it already. Not nearly as blunt as mine but much better than the jewish narrative. It works. If you are more correct then people will start using it.

OK, you are not an American. No one is perfect. But your English is indistinguishable from American so there is no need to mention that again. People will assume you are. The US is the 300+ million population prize. 1 in 9 of 300 million when it only counts adults is a lot. A cascade effect is waiting to happen. By demographics of 18 years is an adult, 20% of 300M are not counted so it is 1 in 9 of 240M. A smaller total number but more like 1 in 7.5 adults. That is not only an avalanche waiting to happen but a voting demographic that will get religion out of politics.

Public demonstrations by atheists at the moment lacks a reason to be a group and a cause to be against. Politicians have religion. So what else is new? A lot actually. I my current project there are literally tens of millions of disloyal Americans who put the interests of a foreign country ahead of the interests of the US. Disloyal is the correct term despite the obvious ease of attacking its use. And despite all the rhetoric, politicians will turn on Israel and turn on religion on a dime if their handlers say it harms their election chances. Sounds cynical but do you want a politician with principles or one who effectively represents his electorate regardless of personal opinion? Of course we want both at the same time ...

Don't leave boards like this. You will need them no matter what you go on to do. Your interest in being active is refreshing and pleasant to hear. I am one perspective over 50 years. Five perspectives of 10 years each is much more valuable. It is a smorgasbord. Take what works, discard what does not. No blame. Success is its own reward. It is the only reward. Do what makes you feel good. None of us are going to be remembered after we are dead. The world does not have the memory space. While we are here we make the best of a totally indifferent world.

I also said do what makes you feel good. Opposing religious tyranny in occupied Palestine does that. I don't know why exactly and don't care. I know it supports US traditions of self-determination. I know US support of tyranny should be anathema.

You should know by now such an obvious ploy response won't get you anything but a platform for my further posts. Your boss? Or are you the same person posting?

You appear to be ignorant of the fact we are a predator species which enjoys mass murder. We have been trying to suppress that because the weapons of mass murder have become more effective than our instincts can deal with. We are trying to institute laws of civilized behavior to prevent future outbreaks of mass destruction.

Among them are self-determination and freedom from oppression even if it is jewish oppressoin.

Why do you object to such objectives and intentions other than your boss won't pay you if you deviate?

Don't forget what the Jews have done and are continuing to do to the Palestinians.

How do resources fit into the examples you gave?

I see the end of tyranny and liberation has humanitarian issues. It is your constant refusal to condemn the perps that amuses it.

You do not know much about the geopolitics of WWII either. They turned to Hitler to end the Depression in Germany which he did in two years. Also to get rid of the communists which he did in less than a year. Where do resources come into this?

The end of the Depression and getting rid of communists is hardly selling a utopia. He succeeded where no other country in the world did although Italy was a close second. Italian Americans were returning in droves during the Depression. The issues around WWII are much different than Winston/Orwell worked to portray them. But still resources do not fit in.

Why should criminals not be blamed for their crimes? Are you proposing we should abolish our criminal justice system too?

In the case of Palestine Jews clearly did start it. No one forced them to go to Palestine. Please do not require me to repeat my correction of the nonsense idea WWII had anything to do with it.

How does cooperating with criminals end their crimes? We know for a fact criminals have no interest in cooperating. We know for a fact violence is just about the only way to stop criminals from being criminals. Why does Israel think talking like this will make people forget their innumerable crimes?

Does one negotiate with a thief over how much he can keep? No. Does telling a woman to cooperate with her rapist stop rape? No. Why would you think Jews would cease their crimes if no one mentions their crimes as is done today? When they are called settlers you cover the fact they war criminal squatters. When you let the Jews refer to the military government of the West Bank instead of totalitarian military dictatorship people don't get react as they would to any other criminal dictatorship.

What do you think the city fathers of Carthage might say about that idea? What did Hitler think of the idea? What did Mussolini say about it before the bullet went through his head?

In this case one side is completely criminal and at fault and the other side are the victims in every respect. One side is in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the other side is in total compliance with the Geneva conventions.

Incorrect labels have been much of the problem. There is nothing redeeming about the jewish side of this equation.