@ryan.  Don't worry, they have so marignalized the pagan faiths, including Luciferianism, that none of the evangelical theocrats is going to round them up and build a fire of faggot kindling.  No, it is the non-believers who will be victimized this time around.  We will be blamed for 9/11 and all manner of unfortunate events because the pols are dumbing down the electorate; one version of the GOP platform even includes a push to rid schools of "critical thinking" curricula.  That way, you can blame 9/11 on the non-believers "because" they represent just the sort of thing that would give the U.S. a bad press in places like Riyadh, Tehran, and other places, apostacy being the very worst of all possible crimes wherever Shariah prevails.

We non-believers strongly go ahead. Governments always try to push their agenda; Sometimes by religion and suppression, and sometimes by freedom and democracy.  People also see the surface of any political movements. Hegel says: “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

Hegel was channeling Santayana.

Probably, one and half century before Santayana in Germany

Nope.  In quantum theoretical space-time they both existed at exactly the same time.

Nice one!

http://www.atheistnexus.org/group/new-atheists hey I agree and I love your group.You might also like my group in the link above.

I got this from Atheist Humor. Thought it fit here too.

The look on that kid's face says it all!  "Man, what is up with all this kneeling shit?"

@Love & Science Diet, let's hope so, even though old Fred Nietzsche said hope was the worst of the homily grits.

@james haaaaa indeed.. catharsis w/o knives or guns is best

Click here to help fulfill Malala's dream!

Mulla's mexican wave :)

The Mulla who's standing is Iran's Head of Judiciary, he has signed hundreds of death sentences.

The expression on his face and his self-effacing gesture give him away as a complete phony and hypocrite.  All of them are.  They are trying to manipulate their portfolios with regard to oil interests, and you should see their porno collections.  They are preying on millions of delusional people who think Allah spoke to Mohammed in Old Testiment language and ideas, the Koran being more political than sacred.  Some Americans might secretly wish that a drone wold rid the earth of Mulla Numbnuts we see here.

@james, How beautifully and concisely you described that moment and also behind the scenes.

Yeah, one day a drone will send all of them to Paradise.

James, I'm an American and I have the wish. The thing is, my wish isn't secret.

Mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. Denis Diederot.

Sayed, it is most unfortunate that by giving them a quick exit from this horrible, evil world, and escape from the clutches of the great satans in Europe and the U.S., we provide them with three huge nails, a telephone pole, and a big hammer.  It's like treating a masochist with kindness.

Denis Diederot edited the first encyclopedia for the Age of Enlighenment, so he had to have based this opinion on experience, Pat.  As you know, during the Reign of Terror, the first to be taken to the National Razor for the parting of heads from bodies were RCC priests.  The masses realized Rome was in on the game, empowering imperialism and serfdom.

As so often happens in intelligent discussions, I had to turn to the dictionary to know of what you write.

Apostate: 

1 a person who abandons a cause or organization usually without right <an apostate from communism, he later became one of its harshest critics>

2 one who betrays a trust or an allegiance <became anapostate to liberalism after he had gotten wealthy>

Well, if losing confidence in politics and religion, and economics is apostolic, I plead guilty, stand proud and confident that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness stands as a higher aspiration. I cannot pledge allegiance to a government that found ways to snoop in citizens' private affairs and imprison some without access to processes of law, to religions that placates voters to vote against their self-interests, and to economics that uses both politics and religion to suck assets out of those who work for wages. 

Careful with "apostolic," Joan, as I think that refers to something else, something we find anathema.

James, I know apostolic is a word that generates negative connotations, and I know that when I looked it up I was very surprised about the definition. Apostolic Atheist doesn't fit the dictionary, but it fits how I feel. 

Another word that fits for me is heretic:

1: a dissenter from established religious dogma; especially : a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who disavows a revealed truth

VikingDon, Oh! would that be true! Sweet revenge! I am having a bit of problem getting that image out of my mind. 

Viking Don, the 72 virgins did not become livestock, though your image is much more imaginative; it was a rare type of raisin, as I recall.  It has been a while since I read Sam Harris's End of Faith, but the virgins-raisins mistranslation error was in a footnote in that book.  It has cognate to the evangelical notion of the Rapture: it is based entirely on a book in their bable by John of Patmos whose coded warning was of Nero Caesar, not anything yet to come.  Both Christians and Muslims turn out to be fooled.  There is no apocalypse short of one we make.  There is no god but Man.

Well, how much time would it take to go through 72 virgins if you were horny and in heaven?

Oh, and, duh!  Since when do we hand off our "virgins" to be deflowered by who knows whom?  The thought of it suggests pedophilia and worse. 

It suggests MuhaMAD had a dirty, evil mind.

I like the late Christopher Hitchen's take on the whole "72 virgins" thing. Be careful what you wish for, because part of the package is 72 mothers-in-law.

Pat, I think Sam Harris had it first, if only in a footnote.

Wow.  That makes me proud of American family law.  Then, again, who knows; in some states I would think there's no prohibition of marrying at six, but only with parental permission. I gather most Muslim marriages are arranged?

Ah, OK, Joan.  I get it I think.  I forget, are you a recovering Catholic?

My question: how far off is a woman's will to marry from the financial benefit seen by her parents? Women in America are incapable of loving a man for anything other than his money. Money is the only thing that's not negotiable. So if the woman's parents always chose the rich guy, and an American woman by her own will always chooses the rich guy, how fundamentally different are we than the oppressive Hindu and Muslim societies when everything is boiled down?

Oh, lordy, ms Kalliope, that stuff sounds positively medieval.  That is what we are experiencing all over the globe today, a kind of selfish medieval thing; might as well call the New Feudalism.  This is the America envisioned by the 2% who use religious dogma in a Senecan manner (cynical?), proscribing birth control and attacking organizations that further the cause of poor peoples' rights to their own bodies. I feel sorry for women born in such countries: they start at the bottom of the totem pole and are given the freedom to nothing from birth until death.  In such hopelessness, I would take hemlock and be done with it.

Brian, your generalization about American women has at least one exception that I know of: my wife.  She has remained as devoted and interested in me while I have been unemployed as I was when I made high-five-figures a year, perhaps more so.  Indeed, I could name several other women I have known whose attitudes are remarkably similar.  If the women you are hanging with are only interested in your wallet, You're Hanging With The WRONG WOMEN!!!

James, I, personally am not a recovering catholic, but I do descend  from a mixture of Puritan stock from 1632, Roman Catholic who emigrated about 1900, a Free Methodist, and a Presbyterian. Though my parents were not active church goers, they still held on to the old beliefs about women and children, and the responsibility of man to have control over them. Obedience was a high value, as was very hard work. The net result was the usual dysfunction in families who came through the Great Depression and WW II moving out of the old traditions but not yet ready to take on such heresies as a woman capable of thinking for her own benefit, and that women and children who would not submit to patriarchy were not worth their salt. 

As someone famous once said, I am a protestant, too, in the sense that I protest.

Why apostate?

Apostate: A person who has given up their religion or left a political party. (Cambridge Dictionary)

I have intentionally chosen this name for the group because it is the closest translation for ‘Murtad’ which means ‘anyone who leaves Islam’. Islam estates that Murtads are traitors and they must be killed immediately.  This term (apostate) has been chosen to break the taboo of leaving Islam or any other religions.

In 21st century, in some parts of the world, particularly in Middle East, Atheists can face execution and imprisonment.

There are places in the US where that is already happening, Joan.  Witness the reception Bill Nye got in Waco, Texas when he asserted that the moon is not a light source, but reflects light energy from the sun.  There's also the matter of ID / creationism being approved for teaching in Tennessee and Louisiana.

These idiots are convinced that running their country on the bible is the right thing to do, and given enough traction, they will do just that ... and therewith turn the US into another Saudi Arabia.

Thanks, Loren.  If ID is true, and God is perfect and created us in his image, why do I have a prostate gland that wraps around my urethra and, nearing 70, I have EPS, such that while the gland swells it cuts off my flow.  I go the men's room all day at, about, 45-minute intervals.  What is intelligent about THAT?!  There is no god but Man.

James, in your apostasy, you forget god's wisdom as well as his wrath.  The more you sin, the larger your prostate grows.  It's kind of like Pinnochio's nose.  It's somewhere in Deuteronomy.  At my current rate of sin, when I'm 70 my prostate will be the size of Rhode Island.  

It's pretty clear to me, Joan, that it is more important to these people to be right with their deity than it is to be intelligent and/or informed.  Of course, their church leaders LIKE them this way, because it's all the easier to lead them around by the nose and swallow any insane BS they tell them.

Kill Bill 3 (The Islamic Version)