The folks over at popeaccountability.org did quite an extensive review on the pope’s accountability for crimes against humanity. They offer a free pdf version of their review on their page, I suggest you check that out (don’t worry, it includes a summary). And they actually submitted charges against pope Joseph Ratzinger at the ICC in The Hague, awesome.
In addition, the IHEU (International Humanist and Ethical Union), which possesses consultative status with the UN, recently called the Holy See to account at the UN and called upon the Human Rights Council to take action against the Holy See.
As a follow up on my recent post “Teach the controversy?” I found an actual example of what that would look like. Mind you that this is an actual page taken from a school book used in the U.S.A., and not altered in any way.
I will take the liberty of quoting Reddit user GrumpyAtheist on this manner since he seems to address this quite fitting.
“I love how it’s referred to as a theory when it doesn’t even meet the requirements to be considered a hypothesis, i.e. testable.”
There are ten times as many atheist as mormons, when will non-believers become a political force? This is the main question Adam Lee openly asks himself, and it makes a very good read.
“Some corporations have been accused of having a “glass ceiling,” an invisible barrier that prevents women and minorities from rising to the topmost positions. In that sense, American politics clearly has a “stained-glass ceiling,” a de facto barrier to atheists running for office. Despite the many great Americans who’ve been nonbelievers, despite the guarantees of secularism written into our Constitution, outspoken atheism is still seen as an insurmountable liability for anyone who seeks to serve our country as an elected officer of the government.
Why is this? It’s not because atheists are so rare that politicians can safely ignore us. On the contrary, nonbelief is far more common than many people realize.”
Peter Brietbart just posted a teaser of his upcoming short documentary “Madman or something else” and I must say, it looks very promising! A little info I copied from his page:
Jesus of Nazareth was an awful moral philosopher. He compares badly to such modern greats such as Mill, Rawls or Ross and also to historical thinkers such as Aristotle, Diogenes or Plato. His moral contributions are not original, and his original contributions are not moral.
God is little more than a pleasant fable for adults, a pacifier for the mind that quells the nervous forebodings of death. And so Lewis is right. The Nazarene was a Madman or Something Worse.
This film was shot in the summer of 2010 on no budget, and over the course of the next few months, sections of it were animated by Many Artists Who Do One Thing, a Brighton-based multidisciplinary artist, whose imagery also populates this website. The project is currently in the final stages of production, and the planned launch date is the 25th of June 2011.
Sam Harris did a nice TED talk last year about how we do not need, nor should want, religion to answer questions of morality. I’m a big Harris fan and in addition to watching this video I suggest you take a look at some of his books. Both “The end of faith” and “Letter to a christian nation” are a must have for everyone who opposes religion on this planet.
“Depending on how your childhood went, you may remember a time period when you first began to doubt Santa Claus’s existence, but you still believed that you were supposed to believe in Santa Claus, so you tried to deny the doubts. As Daniel Dennett observes, where it is difficult to believe a thing, it is often much easier to believe that you ought to believe it.”
Think about it, this is even more profound than you might think. Instead of actually believing all the crap in the bible, people just think it’s good to do so. If only they knew..
A neat little initiative over at Wearscience, they offer a complete “teach the controversy” t-shirt section. Obviously it wouldn’t be such a problem to teach a controversy, if only there was one!
“We calculate that the human species has been around now for about 100,000 years. In order to believe the Christian message you have to believe this. For those 100,000 years, people were born, died, usually, many of them in child birth, either the mother or the child. Life expectancy perhaps twenty years, twenty five, died of micro-organisms they didn’t know existed, Genesis doesn’t mention them because the people who write Genesis don’t know there are micro-organisms.
Earthquakes would have been terrifying, tsunamis, volcanoes, mysterious events. War and famine superimposed on this, you can all fill out this picture for yourselves, I’m sure. That was our life, for tens of thousands of years, on and on it went. Maybe a gradual upward curve, of a sort. We seem to have made some progress, very painfully, and with infinite suffering and labor. And with our solidarity still in tact.
Now here’s what you have to believe, you have to believe that Heaven watched that for 98,000 years. And after 98,000 years decided it may be time to intervene. And the best way of doing that would be to have a filthy human sacrifice in a very remote part of Palestine. And the news of this has still not penetrated to the rest of the world, and I don’t think will be believed when it does, and isn’t believed by me, and can’t be believed by a thinking person.” – Christopher Hitchens
Allright kids, winning a quiz has never been so easy! Who knew there where actually two stupid answers, to one question! Sit back, relax, and watch the bible get torn apart by three stick figures. Where’s your god now?
This is some serious ass kicking. In short, some christian numb nut is making ridiculous claims about Darwin and his theory of evolution. He gets his ass handed to him, badly.
So yeah, this blog is pretty much all about kicking religion in the nuts. It's time for people to open their eyes and start seeing religion for the monster it truly is.
p.s.: I pretty much pirate all my content from other sources but don't cry I will include the original links when possible.
