Smooman:

1) the constant battle over evolution science class and prayer in schools is proof that Religion continues to try and enforce it's will over school curriculums, this is to what I was referring. Abstinence only sex ed is a recent development, that has occurred only in the last 8 years after our former administration made it a requirement for any school wanting to receive federal money.

2) You only have to look at the entire gay marriage debacle to see a prime example of the type of legislation that I'm referring to. And yes our government and system of laws really is that screwed up, and it's getting worse as Evangelical Christianity gains in strength.

Taxes, being a percentage of profits, wouldn't bankrupt any small church, as you claim. All building overhead, community outreach costs, and staff salaries would be deductible from their tax burdens as operating costs, just as similar costs are deducted from business tax burdens. So if as you say that nearly all money that churches receive is turned back to the community, small churches would pay little-to-no taxes. The megachurches on the other hand that end their year with billions of dollars in profit, it's only fair that they pay their share in taxes, especially when they use those profits to contribute to political campaigns and buy tons of advertising for ballot amendments.

Anyway, it's understandable the frustration, it really is. I am not exempt from this. But feeding off of one's emotions and acting out of anger are no ways to solve problems.

Well that's not really a big deal for me, the only place I show my frustration is on the internet. I can't risk it in my community, my job and my life would be at risk if I were to speak out as I have here.

>> ^HollywoodBob:
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
They just want it to dwindle away naturally once all the perks religion has on behalf of nonbelievers are banished.
Naturally dwindle away once perks religion has on behalf of non-believers are banished... I don't understand that sentence. What does it mean exactly?
Regardless, the central position of some of these atheists seems to be that religion ISN'T just dwindling away. In fact, they seem quite alarmed by the fact that the opposite is happening. Therefore they are wanting to suppress/oppress religion in order to prime the dwindling pump so to speak.

I don't want to ban religion, I think it's dangerous and I've given examples why, but if you practice a religion because you think it makes you a better person and in doing so don't deny others their chance at a full and happy life, that's fine.
I'll settle for two simple things:
1) Get religion out of school curriculums. I don't care if kids want to pray or don't believe in evolution, so long as the Church hasn't forced the school to provide time for prayer and label evolution as "Just a theory". And if you don't want your kids having sex fine teach them not to have sex, but if we're going to have any kind of sex ed programs they should be comprehensive not abstinence only (which we know doesn't work).
2) Strip religion of it's political power. When a piece of legislation's only basis is Bible verse, it shouldn't even be allowed on the ballot. Faith based governmental programs, they can go too. And lets also get rid of tax exempt status for churches, if they've got the millions to spend on advertising and propaganda campaigns they can do their part to pay for our government.
The above suggestions aren't terrible or drastic. I won't expect to see them ever put into practice, but it'd be nice to see more people advocating them.


1) Religion is and has been out of public school curriculum for quite some time now. As per sex ed, well I havent been in High School for almost 10 years but when I was we were NOT taught abstinence only. It should be noted that I graduated from Sapulpa, OK, THE buckle of the Bible Belt.

2) I am 100% FOR separation of Church and State. I'm pretty sure this is just an over the top statement but, "When a piece of legislation's only basis is Bible verse, it shouldn't even be allowed on the ballot" if you actually believed this is what happens then perhaps our government and system of laws is FAR more muffed up than we realize.

Rid tax exemption from religion? I'm positive now that this is an angry rant rather than a constructive, thought out, criticism. Firstly, take away religious tax exemption and probably more than half of non profit charities bankrupt overnight. My dad was a minister for almost 40 years. I think the largest congregation he ever pastored was somewhere around 400. Most were 50-200. You may not be familiar with pastoral income which is understandable but NO ONE gets into the ministry for the money. That's not to say that the "megachurches" dont bring in a substantial amount of income. They do. And yes, there are churches or pastors who DO take unfair advantages of these exemptions (most notably Benny Hinn and his nutjob squad).
From a business standpoint, a Church is a nonprofit organization. Take for example my dad. The money he received as "salary" came from the offerings of the congregation. My dad being a good steward took a small fraction of it as his pay. The bulk of it went to bills. It costs money to lease a building to hold services. It costs money to power and heat/cool this building. What was left after that went to community outreach programs. Food drives, house care services, holding services for the Nursing Home (at their request) etc etc. If we wanted to attend things such as church camps or youth conventions, that money came out of our pocket or from fundraisers.
In fact most pastors that I know, and I know a whooooooooole lot, have 2 or 3 jobs. Pastoring is a part time job for most BECAUSE of the "pay".

Anyway, it's understandable the frustration, it really is. I am not exempt from this. But feeding off of one's emotions and acting out of anger are no ways to solve problems

UP! UP I SAY!

my president doesn't need the FSM's blessing to take office, thank you very much, and he certainly doesn't need the avatar of said deity to be some gay-hating megachurch-running self-help peddling asshat like rick warren

They really don't make money. None of the ones that I went to did, anyway. I saw one that only pulled in half their expenditures.

The one I went to growing up? The house that the pastor lived in was little more than a run down shack - the church spent most of their money running a soup kitchen for the homeless or trying to feed the needy in Africa.

Sure, megachurches are evil. Don't knock the small ones, though.

Hmph. I'm an Atheist, and I'm tired of Atheists trying to convince everyone that we're right. I don't like it when religious folk push their values on me, so let us non-religious folk practice what we preach (heh) and not push our values back on them.

Believer or non, to get on TV, give seminars, lead a congregation, proselytize... you have to have some agenda other than the one you're claiming. And I'm sick of everyone's agendas. Dawkins (even though I happen to agree with him) is as big of an egotist as any megachurch preacher out there, and I'm sick of smug, arrogant pricks like these trying to make themselves our spokesmen. It makes us all look bad.

Live and let live, people. Sheesh.

(Sorry, had a big bowl of grumpyflakes for breakfast)

how do you find this many stupid people in one area? go to any town in america on a sunday, find the nearest megachurch that happens to share a parking lot with a mall (which isn't hard) and hold a TV camera. works every time

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

So true. Hillsong is a giant American style megachurch in Sydney. Their pastor shares my name. Brian Houston, weird.

I come from an upper-middle-class liberal suburban place pronounced Missour-EE within a red state called Missour-UH in the United States of Jesus. My high school had a very high percentage of children of professors at Washington University, and if you added up all the jews, blacks, asians, and mixed people, that was probably over 50%. My mother hails from UCC, which is probably the second most welcoming and nondogmatic of sect of Christianity behind Unitarian Universalism (Barack Obama is in UCC). My father was a woowoo evangelical. Some of my recollections on the subject of religion during childhood are:

1. In third grade, some kid started going around asking everybody, with a dichotomous intonation, "Are you Catholic, or Christian"? I suspect he was an evangelical. I don't recall giving any reply, but even at the time I had doubts due to the lack of any fulfillment of prayer. I had grown to distrust all adults and authority figures as a reasonable extension of my discovery, as a five or six year old, of Santa Claus, the first thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and many other lies. I had also grown to suspect something was terribly rotten in our society due to the cruelty of many homophobic bullies who called me names that weren't even true and the teachers who didn't care. Because of my alienation, I was not inclined to presuppose that the majority opinion was more likely to be correct.

2. Around this time, my (divorced remarried noncustodial) father also took me to see a faith-healer. I don't recall what he was trying to cure me of. He attended some crackpot semirural megachurch, and his business was "no money down" real-estate, another religion.

3. Within two years afterward my father was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for schizophrenia because he believed he could communicate directly with the spirits of Joan of Arc, Jesus, and other saints, and they told him to fight demons by committing arson. He later said the charges were trumped-up and unsuccessfully tried to get out with a religious freedom argument.

4. Teachers from sixth through twelfth grade stressed the importance of critical thinking and incorporated it into the curriculum.

5. In seventh grade, I recall being asked of my religious affiliation, and replying that I was sitting on the fence between agnosticism and atheism. There was no retribution or suprise or stigma. I was already an outcast and had nothing socially to lose, anyway. About a year prior I first acquired persistent unsupervised access to the internet, which I have had ever since. In the following two years I did quite a lot of research online and debating in online bulletin boards. This drew me closer to atheism by gaining a greater understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc. In other words, a greater understanding of how the world came to be the way it is. However, I would still call myself a teapot-agnostic.

6. In high school, I found a clique of atheists and agnostics. Shortly after 9/11, when the Missouri legislature enacted a bill that compelled schools to recite the pledge of allegiance at least once a week, some of my classmates and I openly expressed our disapproval on the grounds of separation of church and state. No gasps were heard. This was long before the Newdow case. When the Bible As/In Literature was taught in English class, several of my classmates and I expressed our disapproval again on the same grounds. In classroom discussions on that book, I recall many viewpoints being expressed with no great gasps of shock. I, the nerd, said openly that I thought the bible was a collection of fairy tales, poems, and forgeries, while the big football jock next to me expressed a predilection for biblical literalism in not so many words. I recall a very hot semi-orthodox Jewish girl who told me she would only date Jews.

I agreed with, or even said openly online, much of what is contained in the God Delusion, before the book was published. I suspect some others have had similar experiences. Not every consensus is a flock.


The ID movement, and the fact that every single suicide hijacker/bomber is faith-based, and the loosening of taboos by (e.g.) the Daily Show, have probably been three of the most important factors that led to the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. In Dawkins' case, the ID movement alone may have been the most important factor because of his biological profession. Hitchens tends to write books extremely quickly (averaging a book a year for the past 24 years), and it's very plausible that he began writing his after, and because of, the success of The God Delusion.

Most nonatheist people's comments on the Sift about Dawkins accuse him of being too shrill. Accusing one's opponent of too much enthusiasm (stridency, shrillness) is irrelevant to the subject matter of the debate. I personally find nothing unpleasant about Dawkins' manner of speech except his affinity for hooptedoodle. His grotesque description of the god of the old testament is spot-on. A book only appears strident in relation to one's perception of orthodoxy, and neither the orthodoxy nor one's perception of orthodoxy are necessarily correct. Rather, debate the substance of the issue. Neither Dawkins nor any of his followers is advocating curtailing the religious freedom of believers, so his opponents have nothing to fear but the holes in their theories.

The thing about Dalrymples article is that its full of unfounded criticisms and deliberate misrepresentations of the various books. Take the following quote of a quote.

Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?

Here Dalrymple presents the "commandment" "Question Everything" as if it is something Dawkins forces upon us. The whole point about Dawkins use of those "atheist commandments" was that he took them of a random website just to show that its not really difficult to come up with a counterpart to the Old Testament commandments that's just as good or better.. Its an anecdote to support an argument, not meant as a serious suggestion for replacement of the commandments..

Then theres this:
Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14

Good for you, Dalrymple, and what Madrassah did you attend? What megachurch did your parents drag you along to to have 40 year old virgins scare you shitless about hellfire?

And how does your early teen dissection of these myths speak for the need to step gently around those who claim them as if they were true? If you made all these points at 14, isnt it about time 9/10ths of the worlds population wake the fuck up? No lets cuddle some more with these twats, lets leave them alone as they insulate another generation from common sense. Thatll work. Let them bang on with their apocalyptic bronze-age myths next to the enriched uranium.

I honestly don't begrudge people for silly beliefs; I think most of us have something we're a little funny about.

It's the people who turn it into a business - open megachurches, fund terrorists, etc. - that I get angry about.