More On The Madness Of Muslims: Death To Infidels.

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

Allah says: “Let there be no compulsion in religion.  [Sûrah al-Baqarah: 256]

It’s sometimes unbelievable how much evidence there is to show that religious people are just the same as anyone else: they play favorites, they indulge in hypocrisy, they demand the world be remade in the image of their specific delusion.

Case in point (Hat tip to the Atheist Republic).

IHEU Study Finds Atheists Face Death Penalty In 13 Nations - All Muslim

“The Freethought Report 2013,” commissioned by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) to study the condition of human rights and protection for atheists in all 192 countries has found that a global majority of nations do not protect the rights of atheists, agnostics, skeptics and freethinkers, including 13 countries where it is punishable by death in law. Many of these countries are signatories to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and other global treaties guaranteeing the freedom and equality of citizens. The report was released on December 10th, which is the U.N. Human Rights Day. The study document was presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council the day before.

To be an atheist or religious skeptic, or to change your religion is to face the death penalty in Pakistan, Maldives, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Iran, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates – all having Islam as their official state religion (In Nigeria, the Muslim-dominated autonomous states of the north have implemented Sharia law).

However, official and unofficial discrimination against atheists is prevalent even in democratic nations across Asia, Africa and the West. According to the report, "there are laws that deny atheists' right to exist, revoke their citizenship, restrict their right to marry, obstruct their access to public education, prevent them working for the state...."

The president of the IHEU, Sonja Eggerickx stated: "This report shows that the overwhelming majority of countries fail to respect the rights of atheists and freethinkers although they have signed U.N agreements to treat all citizens equally.”

Religion of peace my homesick ass.

Till the next post, then.

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Republicans Gone Mental: Palin Slinging Imaginary Poo

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis
So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. As if it’s not enough that Christians want special dispensations (gee – whadda surprise!), they also want to imagine some sort of war on their societally approved madness.

Case in point:

Sarah Palin: ‘Angry atheists’ are trying to ‘abort Christ from Christmas’

If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, Sarah Palin said, he would probably go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas.

The former half-term governor of Alaska and failed vice presidential candidate appeared Thursday at Liberty University to promote her new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.

She told the audience of students that the U.S. Constitution was written by and for moral and religious people, and that nonreligious people probably were incapable of appreciating its principles.

“If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on, so those revisionists, those in the lamestream media, especially, who would want to ignore what our founders actually thought, felt and wrote about in our charters of liberty – well, that’s why I call them the lamestream media,” Palin said.

She seemed to imply that Jefferson, who spent his summers at a home not far from the present-day site of Liberty University, may have been inspired by the religious college founded in 1971 by televangelist Jerry Falwell.

“Thomas Jefferson and his thinking, I believe that much of it fundamentally came from this area, having spent his summers here, having spent influential years here, two miles away from Liberty University,” Palin said. “Man, there’s something in the water, perhaps, around here – again you are fortunate you get to taste it.”

Palin said Jefferson would likely agree that secularists had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.

“He would recognize those who would want to try to ignore that Jesus is the reason for the season, those who would want to try to abort Christ from Christmas,” she said. “He would recognize that, for the most part, these are angry atheists armed with an attorney. They are not the majority of Americans.”

Palin said there was a double standard that protected atheists at the expense of the religious.

“Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn – a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is right?” she said. “Oh, they take such offense, though. They say that it physically even can hurt them and mentally it distresses them so they sue, right?”

“But heaven forbid we claim any type of offense when we say, ‘Wait, you’re stripping Jesus from the reason, as the reason for the season,’ but heaven forbid we claim any type of offense,” Palin said. “So that double standard, I think Thomas Jefferson would certainly recognize it and stand up and he wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down and shut up.”

I’m not sure where to begin with this chicanery. First up, Thomas Jefferson was a closet deist – apparently, like most Republicans, Palin doesn’t fact-check before she shoots her mouth off. Secondly, saying ‘the U.S. Constitution was written by and for moral and religious people, and that nonreligious people probably were incapable of appreciating its principles’ is like saying that anyone who doesn’t drive a stick shift doesn’t drive at all – it’s a bogus claim. The ‘immoral atheist’ meme has been debunked countless times. Thirdly, that Jefferson received ‘inspiration’ centuries ago from an institution built in the 20th century is just plain bugfuck nuts. Fourth, paraphrasing a dead person to support your own views is just plain bad form. Fifthly, I personally wish there was any ‘double-standard’ favoring atheists – that’s just plain bullshit. If anything, the ‘poor persecuted’ Christians have been running things and having everything their way for far too long…for millennia in fact. And now are weeping about their loss of special dispensations.

Furthermore, their mythical man-child jebus isn’t the ‘reason for the season’. As anyone with half an informed opinion can tell you, humanity has been celebrating solstices centuries long prior to the fictional Palestinian ministry.

After regurgitating half-truths and outright fabrications for years – gee whiz, why wouldn’t any atheist get angry? It’s similar to someone from another country who has never visited your country, never read anything about it, doesn’t even speak the language, and yet that someone sees fit to lecture you at length about your own country, culture, and citizenship as if you know nothing about it at all.

It’s a pisser.

Till the next post then.

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A Marriage Made In Bivalvia–More Scientologists Who Won’t Clam Up

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

"How do you steam clams? Make fun of their religion." – Johnny Carson

There is perhaps few crazier ideas than that of an evil alien imprisoning alien souls over 70+ million years ago. And yet, not only does this pernicious nonsense thrive, people give actual credence to this folderol.

Scientologist wins court battle to marry in creed's own church

UK supreme court judges have cleared the way for Scientology to be accepted as a religion and for its members to marry in their own church.

Louisa Hodkin, 25, a Scientologist from East Grinstead, Sussex, won a legal battle overturning a ruling by a high court judge who had said that services run by the Church of Scientology did not amount to acts of worship.

In a judgment published on Wednesday, the court ruled that a Scientology chapel in central London was a "place of meeting for religious worship" and that it would be "discriminatory and unjust" if followers were unable to marry using their own religious service.

Hodkin said afterwards: "I am really excited. I'm really glad we are finally being treated equally and can now get married in our church." She hoped to marry her fiancé, Allesandro Calcioli, within a few months, though they had not yet set a date. Calcioli said he was "ecstatic".

Hodkin's solicitor, Paul Hewitt, a partner at the law firm Withers, said the judgment was "a victory for the equal treatments of religions in the modern world".

He added: "It always felt wrong that Louisa was denied the simple right, afforded to members of other religions, to enjoy a legal marriage ceremony in her own church."

The ruling overturns a reading of the law from a 1970 court of appeal case, Segerdal, which upheld the refusal of the registrar general to register the Church of Scientology chapel in East Grinstead as a place of meeting for religious worship.

In that 1970s ruling, the judge, Lord Denning, said he did not find reverence or veneration of God or a supreme being in the creed of the church of Scientology, adding "there may be a belief in a spirit of man, but there is no belief in a spirit of God".

But Lord Toulson, in a written judgment on the latest case, heard by the supreme court in July and agreed by three other judges, suggested religion should not be confined to beliefs that recognized a supreme deity. Such a position would otherwise exclude Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Theosophy and part of Hinduism; and Jains, Thesophists and Buddhists, among others, had got registered places of worship in Britain.

The court had heard evidence that Scientologists did believe in a supreme being of a kind "but of an abstract and impersonal nature", said Toulson.

Ideas about the nature of god were "the stuff of theological debate", he said, but neither the registrar general nor the courts should become drawn into such territory when deciding whether premises qualified as a place of meeting for religious worship.

Toulson said: "I would describe religion in summary as a spiritual or non-secular belief system, held by a group of adherents, which claims to explain mankind's place in the universe and relationship with the infinite, and to teach its adherents how they are to live their lives in conformity with the spiritual understanding associated with the belief system.

"By spiritual or non-secular I mean a belief system which goes beyond that which can be perceived by the senses or ascertained by the application of science.

"Such a belief system may or may not involve belief in a supreme being, but it does involve a belief that there is more to be understood about mankind's nature and relationship to the universe than can be gained from the senses or from science. I emphasize that this is intended to be a description and not a definitive formula."

The judge said of the approach he had taken with regard to the meaning of religion that the evidence was "amply sufficient to show that Scientology is within it".

The government signaled that the judgment could fuel a political row now there was the prospect of the Church of Scientology avoiding business rates.

The local government minister, Brandon Lewis, said his department would be taking legal advice. Lewis said: "I am very concerned about this ruling, and its implication for business rates. In the face of concerns raised by Conservatives in opposition, Labour ministers told parliament during the passage of the equalities bill that Scientology would continue to fall outside the religious exemption for business rates.

"Now we discover Scientology may be eligible for rate relief and that the taxpayer will have to pick up the bill, all thanks to Harriet Harman and Labour's flawed laws. Hard-pressed taxpayers will wonder why Scientology premises should now be given tax cuts when local firms have to pay their fair share."

Should the Scientologists get a fair shake? Of course they should. They should pay taxes, like all pseudo-philosophical nonsenses. And they should pay for their own lawsuits, costs, and all other resources they waste on crap like this.

‘Acts of worship’? Acts of lunatics, more like.

How two people go about getting married is nobody’s business but the couple’s.  

Respecting someone’s right to an opinion doesn’t extend respect to the opinion itself.

So in short, I respect their rights to have an opinion, but an evil alien overlord? Having evolved from clams? Pandering to a terrible writer’s bad fiction? Please.

Those opinions deserve nothing but ridicule.

Embedded for your enjoyment, a nice montage little clip from YouTube:

 

Enjoy.

Till the next post then.

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The Accidental Metaphor Of Broken Glass – More Muslim Madness

Cross posted @ the Atheist Oasis

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall. – Anonymous

It isn’t a tragedy per se, but a sad head shaker:

Thousands of bottles of beer smashed in sharia crackdown in Nigeria

Head of religious police warns that officers will stop consumption of alcohol as 240,000 bottles are publicly destroyed

About 240,000 bottles of beer have been shattered by an earthmover as part of a widening crackdown in Nigeria's northern city of Kano.

Alcohol is banned under sharia law, imposed in the city in 2001, but authorities had turned a blind eye to its consumption in hotels and the Sabon Gari Christian quarter.

At the public destruction of beer on Wednesday the head of the religious police board warned that his officers would put an end to alcohol consumption.

Bars in Sabon Gari were the target of multiple bombings on 29 July. The attacks, which killed 24 people, were carried out by suspected Islamist militants who have claimed authorities are not properly applying sharia law that governs nine of Nigeria's 37 states. The country is divided between a mainly Christian south and predominantly Muslim north.

Both literal AND figurative buzz-kills. It’s difficult to argue when dissent can easily be snuffed out like a candle.

It saddens me that this nonsense still plagues our species well into the 21st century. Sadder still, is it no longer shocks me.

Till the next post, then.

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