Oh come on! Religion can be fun. It's a system that requires no proof; so while believers think non-believers are all going to Hell for their lack of faith, I enjoy the image of those hateful people being brought before their God and being told they listened to the wrong people and simply got it all wrong, and then being sent to Hell.

Our country reeks of trees
Our yaks are really large
And they smell like rotting beef carcasses
And we have to clean up after them
And our saddle sores are the best
We proudly wear womens' clothing
And searing sand blows up our skirts
And the buzzards, they soar overhead
And poisonous snakes will devour us whole
Our bones will bleach in the sun
And we will probably go to HELL
And that is our great reward
For being the roy-oy-al Canadian Kilted Yaksmen

I believe that you are correct, and Carr was not actually fined or otherwise legally penalized for his remarks.

However, it *was* a possibility that he would be, according to the first line in the article I linked to in my first post in this thread:
"Jimmy Carr could face sanctions for making a joke about dwarves during an appearance on BBC1’s The One Show."

I believe that I read other news articles that suggested that was a possibility at the time it happened, but I can't find anything with a real quick search now.

Going outside of the scope of that single incident, I definitely have seen quite a few reports of things that I would consider to be fairly trivial incidents like this being looked at by the UK government as "hate speech" and therefore potentially subject to "fines, imprisonment, or both" (according to that wikipedia article).

Samples from a quick search include a politician being arrested for quoting a passage about Islam from a book by Winston Churchill, a young man who was jailed for 12 weeks because of "some offensive Facebook posts making derogatory comments about a missing child" (it doesn't say what the posts were exactly; I am not saying I would defend his posts but I don't think anyone should go to jail for being an idiot and running their mouth on the internet), and another young man who was fined for saying that "all soldiers should die and go to hell". Plenty more incidents beyond those as well, it seems.

So while Jimmy Carr didn't end up actually facing any legal repercussions for his joke, I think it is not far fetched at all to suggest that he might have (and there seems to be some evidence that legal repercussions enacted by the government were being considered in that particular incident).

That is what seems crazy / wrong to me. That is NOT freedom of speech; it is freedom of benign speech, with an increasingly narrow view of what speech is benign.

I'm 100% OK with their being "consequences" for Jimmy Carr for his joke. But the government shouldn't be involved in that (and again, to be fair they DID end up staying out of it in that case). The consequences that I think are fine include:

* Ofcom or the BBC passing on some/all of any fines that the government levels against them on to Carr (ie., IF they get fined for breaking broadcast decency standards, make Carr foot the some or all of the bill for that).

* Ofcom or the BBC electing not to invite Carr to appear on any more programs if they are concerned about preventing fines / protecting their image / whatever. They are a business, they gotta look out for themselves.

* Individual people who were offended by Carr's joke boycotting programs that he appears on, refusing to pay to attend his live performances, etc. Obviously. If you don't like what he has to say, you are are of course not obliged to continue to listen to him.

Anything beyond those consequences is going too far in a society that claims it is democratic and free, in my opinion.

i know i'm going to hell for this, but holy shit those teeth !

There isn't anything wrong with vegan food, I love me some samosas and pani puri. I also fully respect anyone's choice to devote themselves fully to vegan-ism.

My only complaint is that vegans tend to go out of their way to make other people, who don't choose to follow the same lifestyle, feel bad for not following the same beliefs. Not all vegans do, but many take it to the same level as religious people, telling people who don't agree with their form of religion that they are going to hell.

That is what I will fight against, as I hate people telling me that if I don't do things the way they think they should be done, arbitrarily. Now making sure you eat animals that were treated humanely before slaughter, I can see that. But cutting them out entirely, based on the idea that someone else believes, not a chance in hell.

@siftbot or whatever entitled asshole...go to hell, not funny or appreciated.

Not to resurrect an extremely old thread, but I happened to stumble upon this old clip, and after having read some of the comments, felt compelled to say this about Hell: that it basically invalidates its own existence insofar as 'nothingness' can be a place.

First, we recall that the Bible makes numerous references to God being omnipresent and omnibenevolent.
Second, as discussed above, we see that Christian dogma says Hell is the absence of God (and His love, since for all intents and purposes they're the same thing, being all-good and everywhere).
So, that means that Hell is a place where God isn't, and God is in every possible place simultaneously, the old throwbacks to pantheism. Therefore, Hell is nothingness.

As an atheist, I think that when I die, my consciousness goes into 'nothingness' anyway- so there's essentially no difference for me in dying and going to Hell and dying in a universe without God.

He is going to Hell.

Yep. One of the keys for me too. What good is He if the only thing He provides is salvation from the Hell He created to punish us for not loving Him to His satisfaction? What else have You done for me, or anyone else I know, in this present day life on Earth God? Nada, and sure some would say God saved so and so from an accident... then but then millions of good Christians die every year from accidents... it's almost like it's random who He helps or not... In fact, He indeed doesn't help any more than any other god does... He at one point had a better army, which allowed Him to spread around to Europe and force them to convert or integrate their holidays into His to make it seem better to those forced to convert.

Okay He created Hell for Lucifer and the angels who chose not to praise Him for a moment... which proves that angels do have free will... which goes against the teaching He created us to love Him of our own free will as the angels had no choice... so either He forced Lucifer and the third of all the angels to rebel, or they have free will. Then we get all those people in Asia, Africa and the Americas and all over the glove who are going to Hell before they heard about the gospel of Jesus as they never had a chance... but wait many Christians say, they won't go to Hell because they didn't know, they'll be judged on if they lived morally... which begs the question, if you are basically fully guaranteed of life in Heaven without the knowledge of Jesus, then why spread the message? Oh, the Great Commission... that command they apparently listen to, while the people like this ignore His command to Love and treat others as you'd have them treat you. How He hung around sinners and tax collectors and talked badly about those who were showing off how holy they were and prayed openly, trying to shame those who didn't do as they did. How He told the crowd who was about to stone a woman at the well "let those without sin toss the first stone" and then importantly doesn't toss any stones Himself, not because He's sinned, but because He's operating on a new covenant. Yet they love to toss stones of discrimination and hate towards those who sin differently than them. He commands us to heal the sick, and yet it is the Christians of this Nation that oppose guaranteeing everyone a minimum degree of universal health insurance, preferring only people with good jobs have affordable health care. And on and on...

And the Jesus is coming soon folks... Seriously I've head from family that even if Climate Change is real, the real damage doesn't come for hundred years or more, and Jesus will have come by then. Just look at the world, gay people can get married now. Clearly Jesus is coming soon. I had another family member note how after the election of Obama the first time that just means Jesus will come sooner now... as if the Bible doesn't say there's an appointed time, let alone that He appoints the leaders...

And then the whole help help we're being repressed attitude... when basically they are being denied special rights and privileges and just coming to equal legal ground with others. Basically they are coming into the situation that forced the Pilgrims to leave a Christian Nation to move to what would become America because they couldn't persecute others as they wanted to, as the theocracy that ruled that Nation didn't agree to go that far.

I could go on for ages. I covered the topic a billion times though... well not a billion...

That is as factual as any of it. If people enter hell because they don't worship the correct god in the correct way, but have no way to tell which way/god is correct, or if any is, that is no fault of their own. If your proclaimed system was fair, god needs to come to each person and make them KNOW his truth, then offer them the choice to reject it. That's not what happens, no matter how many rainbows and sunsets you see.

I won't go to hell then, and neither will any real atheist. I've never seen/heard/read anything convincing about any religion...ever. I don't 'know there's a god' or right way to worship, it seems far more likely there isn't. I say this with all honesty and not because it's somehow convenient or I'm 'angry at god'. I did not 'reject' him, I don't think he exists to reject.

Mathew 7:14 seems to repeat what I said, it's incredibly hard to find the way into heaven and most people won't find the way...according to your brand of religion. It's not that they reject the way, they can't find it, even though many looked with vigor.

No, it's like some guy telling you in the courtroom hallway that the judge will say that, but no one has ever seen it happen, or even seen the judge or what happens after your case is heard, there are no ex cons at all anywhere. This is the same guy that's telling you what the law is, but make no mistake, he's not a lawyer and he's telling you things that make no sense at all (like the judge will let you off for murder if you just SAY you won't do it again).
I don't think even the most hard core murderers and rapist have NO remorse, only the true psychopaths and they're rare.

When I die and god and Jesus are there asking me questions and telling me what the rules really were, I'll believe in them and say so clearly, and admit I was wrong. Not a nano second before they prove themselves though.

Ahhh, but did we have a flat EKG and brain scan on Jesus to prove he even died? ;-)
Also, yes, 3 days later! If you eat poorly prepared blowfish you can go into a total paralysis that looks like death, and come out of it 3 days later +-! It's how Voodoo practitioners probably made 'zombies'. That doesn't happen every day, but often enough that you can't bury people in Japan right away if they eat sushi.

Still sounds like a logical fallacy to me, with some people shoving their heads in the sand to avoid seeing it. I say you can't have it both ways, the punishment is eternity in hell and Jesus should have stayed no matter how special he and his pops are, and since he left (after less than 3 days? pussy!), he didn't even take the punishment he expects humans to, forget taking that amount of punishment for each person. Saying he's 'special' so he didn't have to is ridiculous and shows the mind bending mental acrobatics you must do to make sense of this. It reminds me of the 'I'm too rich to have to go to prison' defense.

Oh, I see, I misunderstood what you were saying about the soul.

You're assuming that people enter into hell through no fault of their own, that it is only due to their imperfect reasoning skills. It says in Romans 1:18-21 that men won't have any excuse on the day of judgment, which means that God gives everyone sufficient grace for salvation. He enables them to make a clear choice, and He honors both the yes and the no. You can't have the possibility of choosing for something unless you also have the opportunity to choose against something.

People mostly cooperate with the devil, they aren't really being fooled by him as such; they are actually willfully deceiving themselves. He is just giving them what they really want and they go right along with it. You couldn't actually blame the devil for a single sin that man has ever committed. Gods judgment on mankind is just, but He has made a way that anyone could avoid hell if they simply were willing to repent of their sins and receive the Savior. People go to hell for what they do know and reject, not for what they don't know.

Matthew 7:13 "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.
Matthew 7:14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Jesus said that the majority would willingly choose hell; that is the sad reality of the human race. It would be like a murderer standing before a judge, and the judge tells the murderer that he is willing to release him if he won't commit murder again. The murderer says, I reject your pardon and I will continue to murder if you release me. I am not sorry for anything I have done. This is the man the world would like God to set free, those who willingly reject His pardon and are unrepentant in their sin. If God released them He would be a corrupt judge. Since He is a just judge, all sin will be punished and accounted for; either by the blood of Jesus Christ or by those who want to stand in front of God without Him.

"Many men of all religions have been raised from the dead...it happens in hospitals every single day."

After three days?

"We've been over the 'paid for our sins' fallacy, if he 'took our punishment of eternity in hell', who was that being 'raised from the dead', not Jesus. If he didn't spend eternity in hell, he didn't take the punishment prescribed for sinning, so certainly didn't even take the punishment for a single sinner."

I think this is a good explanation of why it is not a fallacy:

http://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-paid-penalty.html

"What? Your soul is your enemy trying to destroy you?! What the hell? When did that happen...did you just become a Scientologist?"

The enemy of our souls is the devil.

I talk to people all the time... "I'm an atheist" ... I just walk away

So... in addition to:
- sleeping in on sunday
- eating whatever the fuck you want
- not worrying about going to hell
- have the best comedians

we now have yet another benefit to being an atheist! Thanks, moron!

Sweet monkey jesus, it just gets worse.

The "restraining order" bit? Hah! Stalking women is fucking hilarious!
The "men and women can't be friends"? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? and he accuses atheists of lacking a moral compass?

@Payback, I'll put in my 2 cents on this discussion with @messenger, since it's stayed public.

I feel like you both seem to have a point about why certain users should be reminded of the sift 'rules' about attacking, intentionally offensive, and racist comments. It seems it's really about what gets your goat, for one of you it's racist hate speech, for the other it's self righteous misogyny. They do both add by giving an example of the 'wrong' side of many debates, and can both be trying to deal with.
From what I've seen, lantern has been more egregious about attacking others and actually threatening violence, while Shiny is just the same old annoying, hyper religious 'if you don't believe exactly what I do you're wrong, evil, and going to hell' crap. I'm not sure either really rises to the level of a ban, but both could certainly do with a refresher on what the 'rules' here are (as could most of us at times).

It's officially known as a report on the "Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series." In lay-speak, it's a study of just how long the current pause in global warming has lasted. And the results are profound:

According to Canadian Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics who wrote the paper for the Open Journal of Statistics, "I make the duration out to be 19 years at the surface and 16 to 26 years in the lower troposphere depending on the data set used."

In still plainer English, McKitrick has crunched the numbers from all the major weather organizations in the world and has found that there has been no overall warming at the Earth's surface since 1995 - that's 19 years in all.

During the past two decades, there have been hotter years and colder years, but on the whole the world's temperatures have not been rising. Despite a 13 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels over the period, the average global temperature is the same today as it was almost 20 years ago.

In the lower atmosphere, there has been no warming for somewhere between 16 and 26 years, depending on which weather organization's records are used.

Not a single one of the world's major meteorological organizations - including the ones the United Nations relies on for its hysterical, the-skies-are-on-fire predictions of environmental apocalypse - shows atmospheric warming for at least the last 16 years. And some show no warming for the past quarter century.

This might be less significant if some of the major temperature records showed warming and some did not. But they all show no warming.

Even the records maintained by devoted eco-alarmists, such as the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre, show no appreciable warming since the mid-1990s.

Despite continued cymbal-crashing propaganda from environmentalists and politicians who insist humankind is approaching a critical climate-change tipping point, there is no real evidence this is true.

There are no more hurricanes than usual, no more typhoons or tornadoes, floods or droughts. What there is, is more media coverage more often.

Forty years ago when a tropical storm wiped out villages on a South Pacific Island there might have been pictures in the newspaper days or weeks later, then nothing more. Now there is live television coverage hours after the fact and for weeks afterwards.

That creates the impression storms are worse than they used to be, even though statistically they are not.

While the UN's official climate-scare mouthpiece, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has acknowledged the lack of warming over the past two decades, it has done so very quietly. What's more, it has not permitted the facts to get in the way of its continued insistence that the world is going to hell in a hand basket soon unless modern economies are crippled and more decision-making power is turned over to the UN and to national bureaucrats and environmental activists.

Later this month in New York, the UN will hold a climate summit including many of the world's leaders. So frantic are UN bureaucrats to keep the climate scare alive they have begun a worldwide search for what they themselves call a climate-change "Malala."

That's a reference to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban after demanding an education. Her wounding sparked a renewed, worldwide concern for women's rights.

The new climate spokeswoman must be a female under 30, come from a poor country and have been the victim of a natural disaster.

If the facts surrounding climate-disaster predictions weren't falling apart, the UN wouldn't such need a sympathetic new face of fear.

I was being sarcastic...

http://videosift.com/video/Neil-deGrasse-Tyson-on-aliens-going-to-hell