That’s What You Call “Taking It In Stride”?

Well, they expect that more than sixty percent of the people alive right now are going to burn in hell. So, yes, that’s taking it in stride.

What do you expect? It’s the same thing they say when asked about homosexuality.

“I’m okay with the gays, they’re the ones who will burn in hell.”

Total bullshit in every word.

Nothing matches the hatred and cruelty you can find in someone who thinks the god of love is on his side.

At least he’s tolerating our right to do as we wish.

LOL!

At first I thought he was saying what they used to say in New York and which I so strongly miss, you think what you want and I’ll think what I want then he continued talking and blew it.

I think if I’d been talking to him in person, I’d have just shrugged and said, “You follow archaic laws written thousands of years ago that have utterly no relevance to modern life if you want.”

But I’d have made damned sure I wasn’t standing too close to the edge of the platform when I said it.

Either that or I’d have just quoted Billy Joel, yet again.

You don’t have to go to another country, there is a Hell, Michigan.

Google it.

Well of course he is right! Do you want to justify any of these?

* Burning people
* War
* Robbery / organised group crime
* Anti-semitism
* Paedophilia
* Eye-gouging
* Flogging
* Genital mutilation
* Blowing up of innocents by the hundreds

There is a God for each of them! Complete with hundreds of stories of divine intervention. And thousands to millions of believers. And centuries of practice.

Take your pick! Keep your conscience clean!

I just have to say I really enjoy reading your blog. Being from Sweden, it’s not that much of a deal to be an atheist, therefore, I find this very interesting! Keep it up!

Couple of thing:

As a journalist, I am very critical of the handling of this clip even it I were a theist (which I am not). The news station didn’t exhibit the minimum journalistic integrity required to interview the group posting the sign. Also, the unprofessional tone of the newscaster was disgusting. Notice how he said: “selling ATHEISM.” You could tell in his non-verbal tone he considered the word on par with “NAZISM” or PEDOPHILIA.”

$25000? I’m torn between saying that these ads are a good idea, or saying that the money could be better spent on charitable purposes or groups like the SSA or science education. Some of the billboards or bus ads were $5000 by my recollection, and a lot could be done with that.

Here in Tennessee, the bible belt buckle, I see plenty of billboards for churches. It makes me wonder if it’s a bit hypocritical of Christians to throw up signs instead of using the money for charitable things like Jesus promoted (Especially in an area where the vast majority of the people seeing such signs already go to church. Is it some kind of competition for membership numbers?). It also makes me wonder if the same could be said of us – although we have no divine command to give our money to the poor and take care of orphans and suchlike, it doesn’t seem to me that atheists are developing a reputation of actually being good without gods, which seems to be a goal to many.

Don’t get me wrong though, rational people need to know that there are other rational people in the world. I’m just pondering if this is the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing what are seemingly collective goals.

Does anyone know if the station is actually in New York or the Web site? I would like to complain from one editor to another about the lack of journalistic ethics.

Ahh, the old “It’s just one opinion of many” shrug-off (and whenever anyone says this, you can all but physically hear the unspoken corollary “and it’s wrong!”).

Thing is, I’m pretty damn sure it’s not just an opinion, but an undisputable, observable fact. There probably are that many people in NY who don’t believe in god, and if you were to rigorously observe them and their fellow theists, you’d probably have real difficulty trying to show that the genuine atheists weren’t “good,” on the whole. Of course, if you make an argument along these lines, the most common, infuriating, religious response is usually to move the goalposts and insist that it is some residual or unacknowledged belief in god that is actually stopping those atheists from just going on a sin-binge and eating baby bagels every day or whatever. The desperate, dissonance-avoiding logic is that since nobody can be good without god (a position on which faith will not allow the devout to budge), and these self-identified atheists are demonstrably not irredeemably evil (irrefutable unless you actually want to deny observational reality itself, something even the most rabid fundamentalist often hesitates to do), the only option left is to insist that they cannot really be genuine atheists, but theists in denial or something along those lines.