See, there are plenty of things we can disagree on and have a rational conversation about.

Are important services better provided by private corporations or government departments?
Does your right to free expression override other people's right to freedom from harassment?
How can we manage the economy while protecting the environment?
Most of these come down to individualism vs collectivism, and that's far from a settled question; I personally doubt it can be settled... life is too nuanced.

But there are some questions that are settled. The vote is in and the answer is known, and if you disagree, well, you're just on the wrong side of history. You are the Catholic church arguing the earth is the centre of the universe.

If you think that it's ok to discriminate against gay people.... you're a moron.
If you think climate change is a hoax... you're a moron.
If you're a creationist... you're a moron.
If you believe in homeopathy... you're a moron.

I don't have to "convince" you that those things are true. Your opinion on them is irrelevant. So is mine. They are done. If I change my mind tomorrow and decide that creationism is real, it won't alter reality one bit.

This is the problem with Trump.

I disagreed with Romney. I didn't like him and I felt a lot of his ideas were bad. Hell, I'm not a huge fan of Clinton either. But it's possible to have a rational discussion on their stances.

Trump may have one or two semi-reasonable positions, but so what? They are completely overshadowed by all his awful positions.

Coffee was originally banned by the Catholic Church, but then a pope baptized it to thwart the devil.

er, by the time of the Last Crusade, Indy has seen:
- the literal manifestation of the power of god melt Nazis faces
- some magic rocks burning an Indian guy

I think it's pretty safe to say that Indy has accepted that in his fictional universe, the supernatural is real. Hell, if I saw what he'd seen by that point, I'd be a god-fearing Christian.

As for Pascal's wager, I've always viewed it as the height of moral cowardice. If you want to believe in God and you're not shoving your beliefs down everyone else's throat (looking at you, ISIS, evangelicals, catholic church in Ireland, etc), go nuts.

But don't believe because you're afraid of hell. If you're a good person and you die and it turns out there is a god, if he condemns you to eternal suffering for not believing in him, then fuck him, he's an asshole and I wouldn't want to spend eternity under his thumb anyway.

Doing these things as a prelude to proselytizing means they aren't altruistic, they are a part of the indoctrination process. If your church does all these things without ever mentioning religion, asking for donations, or asking for those helped to volunteer, it is incredibly abnormal.

"You dont get to see those kinds of Christians because they don't call attention to themselves"
And yet, here you are calling attention to yourself (and them), so you proved your statement wrong by stating it publicly. Oops! ;-)

Churches are for profit institutions, why shouldn't they pay taxes? The Catholic church is a haven for pedophiles, why have it's assets not been seized under RICO statutes? Many other for profit companies donate food, shelter, and services, yet they also pay their share for the public services they enjoy. Why should it be different for an organization who's product is intangible and invisible?

There won't be an effort to exterminate Christians, there may well be an effort to exterminate Christianity, along with all other divisive religions. I hope I'm around to see it.

Once again I would ask, why do you question your god's clear wish that I (and others) not believe in him? Shirley, you don't think you know better than he/she, right? (that's right, I called you Shirley.) ;-)

Doing 100 good deeds and one incredibly evil deed makes one evil. No church in history has ever reached that level of goodness. Churches are evil. I hope that clears things up.

It keeps astounding me how the catholic church keeps evading any kind of charges regarding their child fucking issues. If any other organisation had as many incidents of accusations of raping children as the catholic church, they would've been closed down for good so many freaking years ago. If Lidl, a grocery store chain in my country, had as many complaints regarding child abuse as the catholic church had, it would be illegal to take children into a single Lidl store.
Apparently, Jersus loves you. Especially if you love children. With your cock.

Once again, the Catholic Church is clearly and incontrovertibly guilty of being a criminal organization. Why in the hell have they not been brought up on RICO charges and had every penny they own in each country converted to public property? They are actually more guilty than NAMBLA, who at least admits who they are and what they do, rather than using their considerable power and influence to hide it and continue the abuse in 'secret', or protecting well known perpetrators from prosecution.
Fuck the church. Organized religion is one of the most disastrous ideas in human history.

Will be interesting to see how the Catholic church responds to this. I can't imagine this will go over well with his bosses. Hitting kids is always a tough sell.

Ok, I think this got out of hand. My apologies. I wasn't talking about the abuse.

You said "Hers is that faith alone. Take it away and she would either A-shut down, or B-more likely kill herself."

My reply was specifically about "that faith". I didn't mean that she would get through the abuse with the help of friends and family, I meant she would get through leaving the church. And yes, this has happened. Thousands of people left the catholic church in Ireland after the child abuse scandals, many of them lifelong devout catholics.

I would never suggest that anyone simply "get over" that kind of abuse, but I can see how you might have misinterpreted my post, so I apologise for that.

That said, people do get help for abuse without churches. There are plenty of secular options available (counselling, support groups, etc).

As for the rest, I still maintain that my direct experience of abuse or lack thereof has no bearing on the argument. I could tell you all kinds of things, but you wouldn't even know if they were true, to say nothing of a betrayal of trust on my part.

Or would you expect rape trauma counsellors they have to be raped to help victims?

As for the black man example, again, you know nothing about what discrimination I may or may not have faced (hint: the Irish didn't have too flash a time of it for a long time). I would never be so condescending as to say that I know ANYONES life, but that doesn't mean I can't empathise with them. Even if I've never been shot by a cop, I'm damn sure it's something I wouldn't like.

See, I agreed with everything you said up until that last statement (that I quoted below).

All organized religions brutally and mindlessly suppress individual freedom. But lately the target de jour seems to be Islam. People like Sam Harris got off track when they forgot that the real target is the dismantling of all organized religion and focused almost exclusively on denouncing Islam--usually with obnoxious overgeneralizations and a complete lack of understanding how diverse Islam actually is.

And that's the major problem with the whole argument Dawkins and Maher are proposing (i.e. that you can't criticize Islam anymore). You can't criticise Christianity or Judaism or any other major religion without hugely overgeneralizing, either. Instead you need to target specific denominations within specific communities and how they practice the religion.

For example, are you upset about how "Christianity" has helped spread AIDS or protected pedophiles? Well then really you're really looking to criticize the Catholic church and it's stance on contraception and handling illegal activities within the church, not Christianity as a whole.

Upset with how gay people are viewed? Again, you're probably not looking to criticize the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and many other Christian denominations who have reformed in recent times to be accepting of LGBT members and clergy. It's not a Christianity problem so much as it is a problem of how specific people in specific places for specific cultural reasons interpret the texts of their religion.

Basically, I don't think it is a problem if people want to criticize how Islam is practiced in a specific context (say, for example, the use of female genital mutilation in some subsets of Islam in Africa). But I do think it is a problem when the speaker is simply set on demonizing the religion as whole rather than making a rational argument, for example overgeneralizing female gential mutilation (which actually pre-dates Islam and was incorporated into it later after Islam's rise of influence in the region) as an example of why Islam is evil.

Certainly people have the legal right to make such an argument (in the U.S. at least). However, I'm guessing most universities don't want to come across as looking in support of such ill-structured arguments that are more akin to tabloid magazine hit pieces than an actual intellectual argument which is grounded in facts and reason.

All that said, I have no inside information about the real administrative reasons why certain speakers have been declined/uninvited at specific college campuses.

Three things I have to say, @bobknight33:
1. You're complaining about christianity being attacked. Ok, fine, I'll tell you something: I am tired of your religious beliefs invading my life like an middle eastern dictator a small, oily country. Oh, I have it good, I'm a straight, white middle-european man, I'm fine so far. Others are not. They're tired as well.
I can go on a meth-bender, marry one of the Kardashians in Vegas and annul the whole affair in less than a week. If I win the lottery, I can post on Craigslist and get myself a nice gold-digging whore who'll sign a certificate that makes us husband and wife if I'm willing to trade lackluster blowjobs for money. Best part, it ain 't prostitution if you're married, legally worldwide. Heck, I can even become an abusive piece of shit as long as I can beat her well enough so she won't complain to others.
Because marriage is sanctimonious.
If I was gay and would like to marry the guy of my dreams that I've been with for 20 years, that isn't possible. Because the book doesn't approve.
If my sister got raped, you people would force her to birth the child of her rapist. Her concerns don't matter, life is a holy gift from god. Care to explain to me the position of the catholic church (you know, those christians that make up the majority of christianity) on slavery during centuries slavery? How holy was life in all those european colonies back in the day with all these missionaries teaching the good book? What exactly was their statement as an organisation when millions or people were murdered during the third Reich?
All that silence but when it comes to abortion, you people show up with guns and show the value of this great gift by murdering doctors. Fuck my sisters concerns, right? It just rape, walk it off.
I'm well of, I could join the club as a full member anytime. As long as I'm not calling the cops on the pedophile priests and the self-loathing faggots can stand on their pulpits and tell little children they're broken. I could be among you.
But I have a conscience. I can't buy all that talk about love and forgiveness and ignore all that hatred and cruelty that is in the very basis of your beliefs, that wretched, old bible of yours.
I have to look that man in the mirror in the eyes.
The only way you can impose all that crap on me anymore if through the government. I believe your faith has as much place in there than Tom Cruise's. None.
The Prodigy said it best and I think the people who lived at the time the bible was written would agree: Invaders must die.
Your religion invades my rights as a human being.

2. Did he rise?
Nope, little, brown Jewish got killed. End of facts, begin of story. I don't trust the testimony of men (and I said this before) who consider a walkman witchcraft. People at that time could be convinced that they farted because they swallowed an angry spirit that wants to escape.
You book did a terrible job of explaining how the world came to be (we're golems that had so much incest that they inbred mankind), makes up the worst disastermovies (everything turns to Waterworld but we have a boat with a pair of every animal in existence [imagine all those different kinds of ants alone] and then incest till population is back up) and turns mushroomtrips/mental illness in supposedly accurate future predictions (you know it's the end of the world because none of the riders is called "Incest").
The only reason people buy into the mythology and the extended universe (where's that bible chapter about Satan ruling the Sarlac Pit and Santa being canon again? ) is because for centuries children were taught it at a young age. And then you told them not to question it as heretics get the stake. Ashes yes but not the quick Buffy way.
Don't get me wrong, I like that Jesus fellow and I'm willing to believe his basic message but let's be honest. If J.K. Rowling was born 2000 years earlier, we'd pray to Harry Potter and wear lightning shaped jewelery around our neck. You guys got big because the Roman empire made you relevant. That's it.

3. What's up with '53'? Is that the christian answer to '42'?

It is quite funny because the guy on the video, the so called 'priest' is one of the most twisted and unchristian leaders of the polish roman-catholic church. He is a businessman who begs old ladies like these, to send him their last money. He is a cynical hunter of 'jews' and 'anti-poles', whose sole purpose seems to be getting more money. He should be removed from the church, because he pushing it even beyond what catholic church normaly does, but he has such a fanatical following, that it is possible that he would start his own church. Number of followers possibly in tens of thousands, mostly poor people from the smaller cities and villages, older people, generaly people who feel forgoten and cheated by the system. He has a radio station, a tv station, a school - all catholic, tons of money etc. etc. The tv logo is his tv.

tl;dr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Rydzyk#Controversies

Shows pretty well how two person can't talk about muslims without one of them accusing other to be a racist. It happens on anti-racist rallies too, you put 10 people who are all opposed to racism in to the same room and 10 minutes in someone is already labeled.

Weirdly, this infact made me respect Ben Affleck. He is on the good side of the battle, misinformed but i can recognize that fury that comes when i suspect someone starting to veer the discussion to topics like "why all muslims yada yada yada". I go fucking ballistic, i see blood of the innocents in the gutter and i wanna kill that nazi before it happens again.. It is the same fury that rises on me when people link Israel and Judeism to the same category. But both Israel and muslim world require criticism in order to progress. It is just very hard for people on the "same side" to talk about those two subjects without responses like we see in this video. Racists know this very well and it is because of bigotry we can't criticize nations and cultures objectively, we need to spend most of our time to explain why criticizing is not bigotry, how questioning catholic church and their views and islam and their views is EXACTLY the same thing. The less we talk about the actual subject and more about why we aren't talking about the actual subject, guess who wins?

And it IS frustrating since we can't get anything done. Fucking racists and yes, i can identify racism towards racists in my on views and i have to think about that too (how racists are just humanbeings yada yada but that's my problem..). So maybe i should just say fucking quilt over actions and views hold by few is preventing us from honest discussion.

His points are, on the face of it, correct. However, the whole question here is whether religion itself creates these issues or if they are inherent in society. One might argue that they are inherent, but that would be incorrect. The fact of the matter is that the more a society is based on science and secularism, the more peaceful and prosperous they will be. See pre-McCarthy United States or Sweden or Canada today.
So I agree with him that painting a large brush across all Muslim countries is idiotic, but at the same time, we can do that quite successfully with secular countries. They are, quite simply, more moral countries. And for those of you who want to argue that Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia were extremely secular and atheist, I urge you to re-evaluate the evidence you have of this. Nazi Germany was distinctly religious in numerous ways, including in the deep relationship they had with the Catholic Church. And it would be easy to succeed on the argument that Soviet Russia, while appearing atheist to the outsider, worshiped an altogether different kind of religion: communism.
While Reza is correct that not all Muslims or their countries are violent or willing to subject women to numerous horrors, they are certainly more likely to than secular countries.

Or when you read a comment by someone who can't help but interject completely irrelevant points into a conversation.

@newtboy, the bible doesn't say much about sex with children. It's far more concerned about the real evils of the world, like mixing cotton and polyester.

and I think it's time we all just agreed that the Catholic Church cannot be allowed to exist anymore. I don't give a fuck about what good works they may or may not be doing. Just because someone gives you a biscuit doesn't entitle them to punch you in the face.

Stop listening to the catholic church.

That goes for you too, everyone else in the world.