Sorry, I found this way too funny! LOL

A list of 40 harmful effects of Christianity

A list of 40 harmful effects of Christianity:
1. The discouragement of rational, critical thought.
2. Vilification of homosexuality, resulting in discrimination, parents disowning their children, murder, and suicide.
3. Women treated like second-class citizens based on religious teachings.
4. Children growing up to hate and fear science and scientists, because science disproves their parents' religion - leading to appalling scientific illiteracy.
5. Tens of thousands tortured and killed as witches (a practice which still continues today).
6. People aren't making the most of this life because of their belief in an afterlife.
7. People dying because they believe their faith makes them immune to snake venom, or other lethal aspects of reality.
8. People dying - and letting their children die - because their religion forbids accepting medical help.
9. People choked, starved, poisoned, or beaten to death during exorcisms.
10. Genital mutilation of babies endorsed by religious texts.
11. Psychological and physiological conditions blamed on demons, preventing believers from seeking medical care for themselves and their children.
12. People disowning family members for leaving their religion.
13. Friendships and romances severed or never started over religious differences.
14. "Abstinence-only" sex education, resulting in five times the amount sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies - often leading to ill-fated "emergency" marriages.
15. Women having septic abortions—or being forced to have unwanted children they resent—because religious organizations have gotten laws passed making abortion illegal or inaccessible.
16. Censorship (often destructive) of speech, art, books, music, films, poetry, songs and, if possible, thought.
17. The demonization of other religions, e.g. Christianity demonizing Pagans ("They're devil-worshipers!")
18. Children spending the period of their lives when the brain is most receptive to learning new information reading, rereading, and even memorizing religious texts.
19. People who believe the world is about to end neglect their education, are not financially responsible, and in extreme cases take part in mass suicides.
20. Long-term environmental issues ignored because of beliefs that the rapture/apocalypse or something will happen soon, so they don't matter.
21. Wives told they will be tortured forever if they leave their abusive husbands (and vice versa).
22. Holy wars - followers of different faiths (or even the same faith) killing each other in the name of their (benevolent, loving and merciful) gods.
23. The destruction of great works of art considered to be pornographic/blasphemous, and the persecution of the artists.
24. Slavery condoned by religious texts.
25. Children traumatized by vivid stories of eternal burning and torture to ensure that they'll be too frightened to even question religion.
26. Terminal patients in constant agony who would end their lives if they didn't believe it would result in eternal torture.
27. School boards having to spend time and money and resources on the fight to have evolution taught in the schools.
28. Persecution of "heretics"/scientists, like Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake) and Galileo Galilei.
29. Blue laws forcing other businesses to stay closed or limit sales, while churches can generate more revenue.
30. Mayors, senators, and presidents voted into office not because they're right for the job, but because of their religious beliefs.
31. Abuse of power, authority and trust by religious leaders (for financial gain or sexual abuse of followers and even children).
32. People accepting visual and auditory hallucinations unquestioningly as divine, sometimes with fatal results.
33. Discrimination against atheists, such as laws stating they may not hold public office or testify in court, or in half a dozen countries around the world, laws requiring their execution
34. Missionaries destroying/converting smaller, "heathen" religions and cultures.
35. Hardship compounded by the guilt required to reconcile the idea of a fair god with reality ("why is God punishing me? What have I done wrong? Don't I have enough faith?").
36. Human achievements—from skillful surgery to to emergency landings—attributed to gods instead of to the people actually responsible.
37. Mother Teresa, prolonging the agony of terminal patients and denying them pain relief, so she can offer their suffering as a gift to her god.
38. Tens of billions annually in the US alone spent to build, maintain, and staff houses of worship.
39. Grief and horror caused by the belief that dead friends and family members are tortured as punishment for disbelief.
40. Natural disasters and other tragedies used to claim God is displeased and present demands to avoid similar events (it's like terrorism, but without having to plan or do anything).
Thanks to "copycatgod" on Reddit for this list.
What do you think of this? What are some other ways
Christianity has harmed people and societies?

The first Thursday of May has been designated by the United States Congress and approved by the President as the “National Day of Prayer.” If government only endorsed religion just one day a year and left us with a secular government the rest of the year that wouldn’t be so bad. Sadly that is not the case. Unfortunately, the “holiday” could be called the “Day When Government Unconstitutionally Endorses Christianity Even More Than They Usually Do.”
According to the National Day of Prayer website, their mission is to “mobilize prayer in America.” Interestingly enough, they don’t seem to stop when the day is over. The people who support this “holiday” treat every day as a National Day of Prayer.
The reality is that the first Thursday of May is just an excuse for religious elements in our government to openly ignore the principle of church/state separation. Even though many government officials have no problem violating church/state separation with regard to religious invocations at the beginning of legislative and judicial sessions, voting for religious language in our national motto and on our currency, recognizing religious holidays as national holidays, favored tax-exempt status for religious groups and churches, and allowing purely religious arguments to dictate many of our laws, they at least have the decency to play lip-service to the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state.
But on the National Day of Prayer, all that goes out the window. The President goes to a prayer breakfast where he elevates religion over non-religion in an official capacity, and legislatures around the nation actively endorse religious belief, alienating atheists and other secular-minded citizens.
I would almost give the National Day of Prayer a pass if the other 364 days a year religious believers weren't trying to use government to endorse their religious beliefs. As a result, this day just seems like it is an amplification of the already existing problem. It has become a day in which the lunatics are openly allowed to run the asylum.
The worst part is that we know prayer doesn't work, and in some cases prayer can even be dangerous. Instead of a day of prayer on steroids, we need 365 days of a secular government that does not endorse the use of prayer at all. What we really need is 365 days of reason.

Source:  Staks Rosch Atheism Examiner

MOST atheistic song???

I was trying to find the MOST atheistic song out there and I kept coming back to this one. You tell me if you have a better, more fitting one.

I have also included a song that aptly describes my day to day feelings. If anyone can recognize then please comment or contact me some other way.

Thanks
American Atheist.

And here is how I feel everyday.

Everyone stay safe, and happy!

American Atheist!

Embrace of Atheism Put an Indonesian in Prison.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Growing up in a conservative Muslim household in rural West Sumatra, Alexander Aan hid a dark secret beginning at age 9: He did not believe in God. His feelings only hardened as he got older and he faked his way through daily prayers, Islamic holidays and the fasting month of Ramadan.

He stopped praying in 2008, when he was 26, and he finally told his parents and three younger siblings that he was an atheist — a rare revelation in a country like Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. They responded with disappointment and expressions of hope that he would return to Islam.

But Mr. Aan neither returned to Islam nor confined his secret to his family, and he ended up in prison after running afoul of a 2008 law restricting electronic communications. He had joined an atheist Facebook group started by Indonesians living in the Netherlands, and in 2011 he began posting commentaries outlining why he did not think God existed.

“When I saw, with my own eyes, poor people, people on television caught up in war, people who were hungry or ill, it made me uncomfortable,” Mr. Aan, now 32, said in an interview. “What is the meaning of this? As a Muslim, I had questioned God — what is the meaning of God?” He was released on parole on Jan. 27 after serving more than 19 months on a charge of inciting religious hatred.

Indonesia’s state ideology, Pancasila, enshrines monotheism, and blasphemy is illegal. However, the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and speech, and the country is 16 years into a transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

But Mr. Aan’s case is one of an increasing number of instances of persecution connected to freedom of religion in Indonesia in recent years. Although Indonesia has influential Christian, Hindu and Buddhist minorities, every year there have been hundreds of episodes, including violent attacks, targeting religious minorities like Christians and Shiite and Ahmadiyah Muslims, as well as dozens of arrests over blasphemy against Islam. Numerous churches have been closed for lacking proper permits.

According to human rights organizations and various surveys, religious intolerance is on the rise in Indonesia, at least partly because of the growing influence of radical Islamic groups that use street protests and acts of violence to support their aims. Some of these radical groups demonstrated in Jakarta, the capital, before Mr. Aan’s trial in West Sumatra in 2012.

“His case very much ties in with that whole trend,” said Benedict Rogers, the East Asia team leader for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human rights organization founded in Britain. The group released a report in February warning that religious intolerance in Indonesia was spreading beyond traditionally conservative Muslim bases like West Java Province.

“Of course there would be religious people who would take offense about someone publicly expressing this view” about atheism, Mr. Rogers said. “But I think if it weren’t for this growing Islamism and extremism, Alexander’s case probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Mr. Aan’s troubles began in January 2012 when a mob in the Dharmasraya district of West Sumatra showed up looking for him at a government planning office where he worked as a data analyst.

“They wanted me to stop saying there is no God,” he said. “I told them that it was my right to express my beliefs.”

Police officers were called to prevent any violence, and they instead escorted Mr. Aan to the local police station, where he found himself being interrogated and, within hours, charged with disseminating information aimed at inciting religious hatred. The next day, he was charged with blasphemy and inciting others to embrace atheism.

A court in Padang, the capital of West Sumatra Province, threw out the blasphemy and atheism charges, but it convicted Mr. Aan in June 2012 of trying to incite religious hatred under the electronic information law and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison.

“What I posted was for discussion, not to incite hatred,” he said in the interview.

Mr. Aan’s case was among several controversial prosecutions over comments made on the Internet in Indonesia, where Twitter and Facebook are extremely popular.

A homemaker was jailed and charged with defamation in 2009 after complaining about what she said was an incorrect hospital diagnosis in a private email that found its way online. In February, a Twitter user was sentenced to a year’s probation for “libelous tweets” against a former national lawmaker who had been convicted and sent to prison for corruption.

“It’s funny — we say we have freedom of expression, but it’s only up to a certain point,” said Enda Nasution, an Indonesian blogger. “I think we are absorbing all of these new norms, and with the Internet, we are experimenting with what we can and can’t do. Atheism is a no-no, it seems.”

Christian groups and religious and human rights advocates say that rising religious intolerance is also linked to the efforts to promote regional autonomy in Indonesia in 1999 as part of the country’s transition to democracy after three decades of highly centralized, authoritarian rule under President Suharto.

More than half of Indonesia’s 491 provincial districts have enacted various bylaws inspired by Islamic law, or Shariah, in recent years.

“So much power was given to local authorities, and in many cases — in particular in regions where Muslim organizations dominated — there were violations against religious freedom, and freedom, for example, for someone to say they are an atheist,” said Theophilus Bela, secretary general of the Indonesian Conference on Religions for Peace, a nongovernmental organization focused on interfaith dialogue.

While serving his prison sentence, Mr. Aan lay low, reading books and playing chess, and he said that by the end of his time behind bars, he had gone from being an outcast to having friends among his fellow inmates. Now, he is preparing to apply to universities to pursue a master’s degree in physics.

“My case was a religious issue and a human rights issue, both because Indonesia is a Muslim country and because it’s a developing country and new democracy,” he said. “I was just searching for the truth, and everything I felt, I expressed.”

These days, Mr. Aan said, he is still active on Facebook and Twitter, but he never mentions religion or his criminal case.

Young Atheist's Handbooks sent to secondary schools

Copies of Alom Shaha's 'Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God' donated by the British Humanist Association.

 'Schools should be places where pupils are free to encounter the full range of philosophies' … children at the Thomas Tallis secondary school. Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian.

After Michael Gove gave copies of the King James Bible to every school in England, the British Humanist Association is this week sending out copies of The Young Atheist's Handbook to secondary schools in England and Wales.

Subtitled Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God, the book is by science teacher Alom Shaha and tells of his upbringing in a Bangladeshi Muslim community in south-east London, "how he overcame his inner conflict surrounding his atheism, and the lessons he learnt in leading a good life, full of awe and wonder, based on humanist principles", said the Association.

The BHA raised more than £11,000 to send the book to schools through public donations from "thousands of people" at Justgiving, and hopes the initiative will give young people "access to resources that enable them to come to their own decisions about their values and beliefs".

A spokesperson for the BHA said it had received "loads of lovely responses", but that a couple of Catholic schools had said they would dispose of the book if the Association didn't provide a stamped addressed envelope to return it.

"Which we think is a shame, as we only sent the books to state schools and we think all such schools should want their young people to be exposed to a variety of views and to make their own minds up in a spirit of free inquiry," said Sara Passmore,  the BHA's head of education.

The Association points out that the book was "well received" by RE Today – the magazine said that "this book will make you think and it's hard to give a greater compliment than that" – and says it "has been welcomed by RE teachers".

The scheme was suggested to the BHA by the science teacher Ian Horsewell, who got in touch with the Association after it helped launch the title. Horsewell has said that he was "amazed by the evocative prose in [Shaha's] book and the challenges he faced moving from nominal believer to outspoken freethinker".

"It made me realise how fortunate many of us are to be able to take for granted our own freedom to believe, or not, in the faith of our parents. It seemed to me that the very students who needed to read Alom's book would find it hard to buy for themselves, so instead I wondered if we could place a copy in every secondary school library," said Horsewell.

BHA chief executive Andrew Copson added that "in a large number of schools, pupils will have access to a number of religious perspectives on life's bigger questions, but not to what most non-religious people believe and how they find happiness and satisfaction in their daily lives".
"We believe schools should be places where pupils are free to encounter the full range of philosophies and world views available to them in modern Britain," said Copson.

But Trevor Cooling, professor of Christian education at Canterbury Christ Church University, told the Times Educational Supplement that "the humanists seem to be behaving a bit like a persecuted minority. Children should be exposed to many and varied ideas, but this book seems to be an overreaction."

"The evidence suggests that most children's understanding of science is already largely atheistic. The BHA itself says that most children have non-religious beliefs, so why do they feel it is so important to send out this book?" said Cooling. "The status of a handbook written by a science teacher from London cannot be compared with that of a sacred Christian text and it cannot in any way be said to be offering balance."

The Young Atheist's Handbook is published by Biteback Publishing. The BHA said the initiative was not a response to Gove's Bible mailout, which cost £370,000 in private money, rather that Horsewell had felt The Young Atheist's Handbook is "a book that all young people should have access to".

My Interview with Joé McKen @ Preliator Pro Causa

Hello All,


  I have been reading the writings of  Joé McKen over @ Preliator Pro Causa
for a while now and decided to pick his brain on a few questions because I am always curious
about what other people believe.

  I am going to only include the questions I had for him, and of course his answers. I hope we don't bore you too much, but after reading his answered I believe that he and I share a lot of the same opinions and views. So here goes......

1. What in your own words is your personal view of what Atheism means?
2. Do you believe in any kind of existence after death? (As we both know, energy is never lost)
3. How old were you when you began thinking of yourself as an Atheist?
4. When you started Blogging was it all about atheism, or just for fun etc?
5. What is the ONE thing that would make you change your mind and believe in a God? (If Anything)
6. Do you have any tips for young people who might be struggling between belief, and non-belief?
7. As I told you before you have a very easily navigated Blog. Did it come naturally, or did you, like me have to do a lot of learning?
8. If for some reason you were forced to practice a religion (Any religion you like) and if you didn't someone you loved would be hurt or maybe killed, what religion/philosophy would you choose and why? 

 I stopped at only 8 questions because I didn't want to have him sitting there for hours answering my questions. 


  And here are his thoughts. I hope at least some of you found something that at least made you think.

Here you go. :) I hope my answers don’t run too long. Please get back to me if you have any further questions or comments; I’ll post this on my blog sometime tomorrow whenever my body chooses to wake up.

 

——————————————————————————

Q: What in your own words is your personal view of what Atheism means?

 

A: I think people need to keep in mind there are two definitions for ‘atheism’ nowadays: the lack of belief in deities, and the social movement to legitimize non-belief among the public. The two are often conflated when people use the terms ‘atheism’ or ‘atheists’ without further context, which leads to plenty of miscommunications and headaches. Of course, one can be an atheist without being part of the secular movement, and vice-versa (plenty of practicing believers, such as Rev. Barry Lynn [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_W._Lynn], are also ardent secularists who believe religion and politics, or public life in general, need to be kept separate).

 

Q: Do you believe in any kind of existence after death? (As we both know, energy is never lost)

 

A: No, I don’t believe in any form of post-mortem existence; I see no good reason to. Of course, there may be an afterlife – just as there may be gods and leprechauns; we cannot prove negatives – but it’s quite clear that even if such a thing does exist, there’s really no point in pretending to know anything about (or living with any expectation of) something that, by definition, is not part of the natural, scientifically observable world. (Also, energy may never be lost, but only in that whatever forces and constituents that power our bodies and minds will eventually be used otherwise by nature after we die. There is no need for any supernaturalism in the equation.)

 

Q: How old were you when you began thinking of yourself as an Atheist?

 

A: I really began to consider myself godless when I was about 16, back in circa early 2008. I had never been particularly religious (I never really took the Bible seriously, and I always hated church – boring a child that badly should be cause for CPS, I tells ya), and though I did believe in God (perk of growing up in a nominally Catholic society), that just sorta went away over time. I was always too curious and critical; I suppose God-belief never really stood a chance with me.

 

Q: When you started Blogging was it all about atheism, or just for fun etc?

 

A: Well, you can see for yourself (if you’re a bit masochistic) by checking out my first, archived blog, Respectful Defiance [http://respectfuldefiance.blogspot.com/]. Nosebleed-inducing aesthetics aside, it originally began as overtly anti-religious and rather antagonistic (somewhat akin to PZ Myers’s Pharyngula, which is where I got most of my early inspiration from, anyway), but over time (and particularly since switching to Preliator), I’ve both mellowed and branched out, with most of my current writings surrounding politics and poking fun at stupid people in general. But really, I’ve always just blogged about whatever I felt like; I don’t have any set themes to adhere to.

 

Q: What is the ONE thing that would make you change your mind and believe in a God? (If Anything)

 

A: This is a bit tricky to answer; any such event would be so very personal and subjective that it’s almost impossible to say what would work and what wouldn’t. But, to give a general answer, I’d guess that if something happened that A) was very clearly divine in nature (booming voice from the heavens, oceans turning to cream cheese, I dunno), B) could not be explained by any rational or scientific means, and C) demonstrably affected other people as well (yet beyond what could be attributable to conversion disorder or mass hysteria) – in other words, if we could actually prove beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt that it was the “real deal” and that it wasn’t all just in my head – then yes, chances are I would be swayed, as such a phenomenon would be objective reality. Anything less, though, and I’d probably chalk it up to the human condition (hallucination, delusion, ignorance, inattentiveness, brain fart, etc.). I’m a boring realist that way.

 

Q: Do you have any tips for young people who might be struggling between belief, and non-belief?

 

A: Honestly, I believe that anyone who’s undecided on the matter should be left to their own devices until they sort things out for themself. I don’t believe in trying to push anyone in the direction of any particular belief; after all, we hate it when theists do it, so we should rise above it and trust that people can make up their own minds. (Of course, no-one’s stopping you from giving such people your honest opinions about matters, however anti-religious they may be.) Just expose young people to the widest possible variety of information about different faiths and let them pick whatever suits their particular spiritual needs.

 

Q: If for some reason you were forced to practice a religion (Any religion you like) and if you didn't someone you loved would be hurt or maybe killed, what religion/philosophy would you choose and why?

 

A: I suppose if I absolutely had to pick my poison, I’d probably go with Deism, simply because it’s the closest thing to atheism that still technically counts as a religion.

 

Q: As I told you before you have a very easily navigated Blog. Did it come naturally, or did you, like me have to do a lot of learning?

 

A: Preliator’s current design is the product of 95% trial and error, and the rest comes from searching around for solutions to whatever I wanted to do (rotating banners, various post and comment widgets, colors and layouts, etc.). Blogger Buster [http://www.bloggerbuster.com/] in particular has been a huge help in this regard. As for aesthetics, I just had a general idea for what I wanted – simple, clean and easy to navigate – and tried to make it work, bit by bit. I’m still tweaking details to this day as my tastes change over time. There’s also a third, “unofficial” definition of ‘atheism’, which reflects the fact that not only do many (if not most) atheists today lack any belief in god(s), they actively believe in the non-existence of deities, which is semantically different from ‘atheism’, which is strictly the absence of belief either way. This third variant is really more suitably labeled ‘anti-theism’, but I suppose people just stick to the one label, ‘atheism’, out of convenience.”

Thanks again. I’ll be posting the Q&A on my blog shortly.

 

Regards,

— Joé

Thanks again Joé
American Atheist (Erin Carney)