Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

Post by Dardedar »

The real reason religious people are so grumpy with even just the word atheist:

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The word itself suggests to a believer that someone thinks they have "devoted their life to a folly."

"There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly." --Dan Dennett
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Ozarks Electric Pays $95,000 in Religious Discrimination Suit

"FAYETTEVILLE--Ozarks Electric is paying out $95,000 to a former employee to settle a religious discrimination suit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The suit charges that Ozarks did not provide a Jehovah's Witness employee with a reasonable religious accomodation and then fired her for her relgious beliefs. According to the lawsuit, Ozarks denied the employee a requested day off to attend a Jehovah's Witness convention and then fired her when she chose to attend the convention rather than report to work.

Ozarks maintains that it did not violate any illegal employement practices. In addition to the $95,000, Ozarks will now have to modify its leave policy to include an appeals process for employees who believe they are being unfairly denied a religious accomodation. The company will also have to provide training to its personel on religious discrimination, submit reports to the EEOC for two years and post a notice reinforcing the company's policies on Title VII and its procedures for reporting and preventing discrimination in the workplace.

Ozarks Electric is a not-for-profit corporation that supplies electric power to its members in Northwest Arkansas and Northeast Oklahoma."

LINK
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Typo and all:
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Sam Harris on:

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Faith and the Good Society

"People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion—delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account of a “god gene” that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: The United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality—belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society’s health.

Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle."

The rest here: An Atheist Manifesto
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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The religious effect in a nutshell:

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Bill Maher
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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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You Wouldn’t Believe How Fast Americans Are Losing Their Religion – But the Fundamentalists Have a Plan

"Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination.

This change has come on surprisingly recently, and from a historical perspective, with breathtaking speed. As recently as 1993, almost two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestants, a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it’s been sliding ever since. Whether it’s the “mainline” Protestant denominations like Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians, or the independent evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist sects, the decline is happening across the board. The rise of so-called megachurches, like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California or Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation.

What’s happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they’re not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They’re becoming “nones,” as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts it. It seems likely that this is the same secularizing trend being observed in Europe, as people of advanced, peaceful democracies find religion increasingly irrelevant to their daily lives."

Church & State
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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Interesting page and well laid out a resource:

Christianity Disproved

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Girls don't count:

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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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Just in April... Whacked out religious quotes from politicians:

--North Carolina legislators proposed a bill declaring their right to establish an official state religion.

--US Senator (R, LA) David Vitter sent a letter to his constituents that read, "Easter reminds us to look past our many self-made problems and remember that God gave his only Son for our salvation.

--US Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) spoke before the Subcommittee on Energy and Power and said, "… the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy."

--In Washington state, where a bill that would allow discrimination based on religious beliefs is being considered, the attack was venomous as well as ignorant. When asked what rural gays should to do if the only gas station or grocery store for miles won't sell them gas and food, a staffer in Washington State Senator Mike Hewitt's office answered "Well, gay people can just grow their own food."

From an email from these guys.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Religious News/Quotes of the Day

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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