it's funny that the westboro baptist church viewed as so outrageous and obviously stupid as to not even be worth mocking and now, over a decade later, bob is like "no, no, they have a point".

why does this community continue to tolerate this level of bigotry as if it was a disagreement over ice cream flavours?

Let me guess, another from the college level advanced creative writing class for seniors in high school being presented by her as a normal everyday class book (and hinting it’s in 4th grade classes).

If you’re upset a senior in high school might be voluntarily exposed to this material in his college prep class, you need to move into the Westboro Baptist Church compound and hate sex and freedom along with them, leave the public out of your puritanical shariah insanity.

You get worse language on prime time broadcast tv, WAY worse on say, Howard Stern, or Jersey Shore…this is maybe pg 13+ content, not xxx….and guaranteed not required reading. Get a grip.

Westboro boobs dont deserve free music

Your video, Foo Fighters Troll Westboro Baptist Church Protest, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Kinda gonna disagree with you here.

I like sorting nuts by nuttiness. I expect murder rates to follow from the combination of nuttiness and number of members. I'm not aware of murders out of the Westboro Baptists(yet at least). Plenty of murderers though have claimed generic christianity though. I still class Westboro as less tolerable than generic christianity.

Going back to the video, this crowd is pretty far over on the nutcase scale.

That just sounds an awful lot like two wrongs making a right.

Claiming an established well defined name for your group/association, and then proceeding to define your group as something completely different is BAD communication. That is an objective fact, not something that varies depending upon your subjective POV. Whether that bad communication also has some morality attached to it sounds more like what your addressing, which is something I was saying nothing about.

Having groups like Westboro Baptists claiming to be either Christian or Baptist is like you said much the same. Morality wise, infinitely worse. Communication wise they might arguably be more accurate, although their words and actions look nothing like the Christ they claim to follow, I do understand that their group at least claims to truly believe in and follow their God. Secular Satanists apparently neither worship nor even believe in the existence of Satan, making the moniker more misleading. Their push for religious neutrality/separation of church and state however place them as far superior morally. Again, these examples are laden with my opinion regarding morality.

Morality aside though, you honestly can't say that claiming a name for your group with a strongly established meaning and definition isn't bad communication when your group shares neither the beliefs(grammar edit) nor practices of that established meaning and definition.

We don't stand for that kind of crap up here in Canada...

Jokes aside, we make exceptions to free speech and hate speech is something you CAN be prosecuted for. A teacher that was trying to teach holocaust denial was convicted for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_Canada

My 2 cents, punching a nazi is more wrong because of the vigilante aspect of it than in an absolute moral sense. IMO the state should have laws about support for or membership with known criminal, terrorist or hate groups. Nazi's and KKK for starters, Westboro baptists and Saudi Wahabiism too depending on where society wants to draw the line. Morally though, I have no problems with declaring that debating merits of fascism and even mistreatment of Nazi germany historically is free speech and protected, but at the same time wearing a swastika on your arm or a pillow case on your head while marching in the streets to support your 'cause' should see you convicted and sentenced.

Very analogous to Westboro Baptist "church" stooges. They (ab)use their constitutionally protected rights to free speech to say the most offensive and provocative crap that they can come up with, specifically with the intention to incite a (violent) reaction against them. Why? Because pretty much the entire Phelps family are lawyers, and they know that they can generally win any assault case that they can provoke people into. All that hate they spew boils down to a stupid, petty moneymaking scam.

Is the Seattle Nazi that devious and cunning? I doubt it. Probably just a crazy / fucked up guy, as Maher said. That doesn't excuse his fuckwittery, but it does reinforce Maher's argument that punching the guy is NOT the best response.

Morello is awesome, with RATM and Audioslave, and now Prophets of Rage, etc. But he's dead wrong on this issue, and comes across as a bit of an "internet tough guy". Outside of just ignoring them, I kinda think the only way to one-up these people is to know the law, what constitutes assault etc., and essentially beat them at their own game (ie. provoke them into doing something to you). On the other hand, there's something to be said for using using passive-aggressive snark to mock / humiliate them in a nonviolent way, ala the Foo Fighters:

That hardly seems the most straight forward reading though as it seems at odds with later advocating love your enemy and all, no?

One of the things that both protestants and catholics have almost always agreed upon was that the line about "will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished" is that everything WAS accomplished, at the latest, with Jesus death. That's the wiki that came up first quickly summarized:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Covenant

I'll not object to vehemently disagreeing with the interpretation, but can you at least acknowledge that centuries of 'christians' under a multitude of different sects have held pretty consistently on the notion that the old testament kill all unbelievers was CONTRARY to Jesus teachings and direction for his would be followers. That doesn't negate plenty of people right up until today(westboro) who still do want to take your more bloody interpretation instead.

"They murder over tiny details".

Question, who is 'they'? The 'Christians' who ran the crusades? The protestant 'Christians' bombing the English Catholic 'Christians'? The Catholic 'Christians' cleansing the protestant heretics? The current pope of the Catholic church? The folks in your neighbourhood that attend a church sometimes? The people that check off 'christian' on the census?

Your entire exposition gives the distinct impression that you include everyone in the whole group as 'they' and liken them not only the the very worst in the group, you even insist that the worst aren't quite bad enough(Westboro), are as bad as what YOU define their beliefs to be.

Is some lengthy theological dissertation refuting your interpretation of the bible required evidence before you'll accept that calling all christian's murders is unfair? I'm sorry I won't present you that kind of evidence in thread, but I'm quite confident you are as capable as me to quickly google for the likely hundreds of hefty books already dedicated to exactly that...

I guess adding or building on my above post. If you justify contempt and vitriol against beliefs in a deity, likening it to Krampus, because in essence your view is the correct one that's dangerous. It is in point of fact EXACTLY what the Westboro Baptists tell themselves, most of ISIS too for that matter.

Cool. Coming out of a baptist family I get it, even if i was never that extreme -- westboro... i knew some families sort of like them though... home schooled on the belief that the Bible is the ultimate framework for governing. Not too far off from the us versus them. Same family that taught an anti-evolution class for our youth group. *shudder*

I became an indignant atheist not long after leaving religion. Now, I embrace Took me many a long night hating on religious people.

Until I had a long conversation with a friend who was a microbiologist, observing evolution on a daily basis, and maintaining a healthy Christian perspective. (Well, at the time it was... now he is sort of Phelping me. It's really hard for me still, to accept religious people, even when almost everyone I know is -- many of whom will always judge me for who I am.)

I mostly enjoy the diversity among my Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, Buddhist, and Hindu brothers and sisters. They just need to respect my beliefs and recognize that I am not recruiting them and they are not recruiting me. Atheists are the worst at this.

As long as there is seperation of church and state. That is an important concept in maintaining a diverse nation open to dialog like she suggests.

Also, opening dialog with people only works if they reply back hahaha -- most of the angry internet people i know post across a wide array of websites and don't really return for replies that often.

Please expand, because while I can see that he's picking and choosing some easy targets for criticism (over the top SJW stuff) that may not be representative of the at-large "Progressive" agenda, nothing really jumped out at me as a "straw man" argument.

I'm a somewhat conservative-leaning person (at least on issues that I think should be in the realm of government), but I feel like I have a legitimate beef with some of what the party that is "supposed" to cater to conservatives actually does in government; what the GOP seems to present as its "platform".

This guy is a liberal-leaning person who feels like he has a legitimate beef with some of what his party thinks their platform should be. And I tend to agree with a lot of what he's saying.

And I would hope that even if I didn't agree with anything that he was saying, I'd be all for protecting his right to say his piece. Some people/groups test our patience for that, like the Westboro Baptist Church -- ostensibly a crazy right-wing organization that just wants to get their message (of hate and bigotry) out there. But in reality they are just a bunch of con men who stir up trouble in order to provoke violent or other responses that they can start litigation over. The point is, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with idiots like that.

Threats to free speech from the other side of spectrum are much more subtle, and therefore perhaps more insidious and dangerous. For example, at about 3:00 in the video where he lists "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia" as "meaningless buzzwords". For many people, those words are NOT meaningless, but real, concrete problems that they actually have to face in their lives. Problems many orders of magnitude more significant and weighty than any of the minutia that can make or ruin our average day. Unfortunately, those words do tend to carry a lot less weight when they are bandied about willy-nilly every time we disagree with someone for any reason.

I guess, we all really do have more things in common with each other than things that separate us from each other. The frequent and extreme factionalizing and partisanship today seems very counter productive. And there's plenty of blame for that to go around.

Meanwhile this filth and the horrible people who voted for Trump and support the Republican party, AKA radical right Christians HATE homosexuals themselves. They don't show their hate via bombs, but via tossing stones of bigotry and laws to discriminate against them for daring to sin differently.

And there is no opinion on climate change... again it is science. No denying the science. You are entitled to your own opinions, yes, but not your own facts. Sorry, but the universe isn't only 6,000 years old, no matter what your stupid book says.

And you can think gay marriage is a sin. Nobody on the Left ever said you had to accept the sin, to accept the homosexuality, but you do have to accept them as people. It is the right who wants to deny them rights as human beings, just because they sin differently than the rest of us. Jesus said let those without sin toss the first stone, and then notably didn't toss any stones himself, who hung out with the sinners and taught love was the most important thing, but the Right is far comfortable tossing those stones against the gays, to deny them a wedding cake, to deny them a wedding and other rights, just for a sin that doesn't effect anyone but those doing it. It isn't murder, but the Right treats it as such. That isn't just stating an opinion, that is full action against another human being for being different than you, and this ass hole and anyone who agrees with him is a horrible human being for wanting to deny somebody rights for being different. Yes, we may disagree that it being a big deal, but there isn't an effort to deny you the right to speak out against homosexuality if you are so inclined, but you can't claim you are being repressed when you are the one seeking to do the repression. Apparently the Right's attitude is "my sin, isn't as gross as yours, so it's not as bad... and God isn't doing a good job of convicting you of it, so I'll do that job for Him" as He's too weak or something to do it Himself apparently.

Sodom's sin was being a land of plenty and not doing enough to help the needy and the poor in her borders, and other versus talk about how rude it was to foreigners... sounds a lot like the Republican party in the US... actually, the Republican party and Trump sound a lot like the anti-Christ system in Revelations... but I'll ignore that and assume that Christianity is still more than likely just as fake as the other 5,000 gods. Now, yes, the Bible does mention the sexual immorality of Sodom, so it likely didn't help, but it's specific sin, the thing God judged it for, was not doing enough to help the needy and the poor, though it had plenty of resources to do so. Basically the "I don't want my tax dollars going to help those [needy and poor] people" as my evangelical brother in law once said. That sums up the Right these days, fuck the poor, and help the rich, who cares what Jesus said about the rich and the poor.

Then the whole, you can't judge a whole party based on a few bad apples... yet the Right sits in judgement of all Muslims and want to deny people refuge who are trying to escape the radicals, because one or two radicals might slip in for each thousand saved... that's showing the love of Christ, "stay there you Muslim bastard, have your women raped, and you children forced into military camps and be radicalized, serves you right for daring to be having an accident of birth being born in the wrong country and being raised on the wrong faith". That is the attitude the Right sends out when they want to deny refuge to refugees.

So I sit in judgement of all Christians based on the fact the KKK, Nazis, Westboro... and frankly what seems to be the vast majority of evangelical Christians these days. If they can sit in judgement of others, I'll sit in judgement of them. I realize the hypocrisy of that, and admit it, which is FAR more than anyone on the Right ever would do. But as the Carman (famed Christian singer whom I've seen many many times live when I was a Christian) song says, their "witness could have been more than it had".

Basically this is 5:32 worth of hypocrisy that is so typical of the Right that those deep in it can't even begin to see it.