The meeting is scheduled to begin at 9 am. Instead of hammering the gavel at that time, the Mayor now simply calls for the Pastor to give the prayer and the hammers the gavel immediately thereafter. It is a farce.
Here is one of the better responses to the lawsuit-. The Red Cross is a secular organization. Probably the most well known in the world. There are plenty of secular help groups Planned Parenthood for instance provides on a sliding scale contraceptions, treatment of sexually transmitted diseases for men and women, general health screening and education as well as abortions, advice on adoption services and pregnancy care.
But there are plenty of secular aid organizations that stay out of the religious issue entirely, and surely a lot of atheists support them. When I volunteer, I make it a point not to broadcast my beliefs. As said above, I think most atheists help to help, and it is beyond this bonehead that anyone could just help without trying to indoctrinate people at the same time. Major case of projection! The largest group on http: Not to mention that a lot of marginalized groups are religious, which is a lot why religious charities are so successful.
People like that infuriate me. We merely try to enforce the separation of church and state as outlined in the constitution, and Christians throw a hissy fit. Hypocrisy, thy name is religion. I donate blood, volunteer at the library, and am a Red Cross emergency responder. So yeah, if you have an emergency in my part of the world, an atheist will show up to help. They use the Red Crescent symbol in Muslim countries where the cross could be construed as anti-Islam, but they are still completely unaffiliated with any religion.
Thanks for thinking of our good works here in Austin. It will be our one year anniversary in September. Since the Foundation Beyond Belief turned out to not be beyond belief apparently we are without a charitable voice. Leigh, thanks for the link. You know instead of acting like, yes, we do need to include a church or two to be really effective. And, of course, continue to keep up my memberships in political organizations I believe in. They concentrate on what needs doing instead of sending a message of religion or irreligion.
Medicines Sans Frontiers is another explicitly secular organization that does fantastic work all over the world. Secular is not the same as atheist. Yes, the Red Cross and others are secular organizations, but there are in fact as far as I know no atheist help centers or anything else. Atheist aggregators like FBB are nice and get a little publicility, but most people see the charity actually delivering the services. Why are atheists so upset? Because of idiots like you, Charles D.
Well, of course, but atheists are not a cohesive group. Christian charities are set up to spread Christianity, but secular charities do good work without promoting religion. They give help without demanding one attend sermons, profess faith, or adhere to religious tenets. They give help because the person needs help, not to get brownie points from a sky faerie. Things like this also ignore the massive benefits that christianized groups get from the state.
Also, christians in the US purposefully undermine secular aid to the poor check out who are right wing and anti-welfare at disproportionate rates-those who are highly attached to christianity , so that the poor have no other option, which means that poor atheists have to shut up or starve unless they are queer, in which case they are just stuck with the starve side.
Because if we had a decent secular social support system, they would not be able to use poverty as a form of religious coercion. Call as a young parent for someone to look after your kids free of charge while you study for your ged in my home town means calling an atheist.
And that lady who gives out free food during hard times? A survey taken in found that half of Americans believed atheism was "threatening" to them.
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Another study by the University of British Columbia and University of Oregon found that people are likely to distrust atheists as much as they do rapists. During his swearing-in speech in , Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley R threw inclusiveness out the window when he made these comments about religion:. It's hard to imagine any other class of people, especially one so large -- we're not just talking nonbelievers here, but people of all non-Christian faiths -- being so casually and expressly dismissed.
Atheists are apparently so detestable that a group of military veteran nonbelievers was repeatedly heckled and berated in during a Memorial Day parade. Apparently supporting the troops comes with a big asterisk, which maybe isn't a shock, considering the military's own record of discriminating against service members who don't believe in God.
Not believing in God could make it harder to get a job, though that would of course require a would-be employer to be aware of a candidate's nontheistic beliefs. The study on distrust of atheists cited above also found that issues of faith carry over to hiring decisions. In a survey, researchers found that respondents significantly preferred religious candidates for jobs that were considered high-trust, while they marginally preferred nonbelievers for low-trust jobs, like servers.
While it may be harder in most cases to determine someone's religious beliefs than it would be their race or sexual orientation -- and therefore perhaps harder to openly discriminate against them -- this means that atheists may feel that they're better off concealing their personal views on God. Nonbelievers also have faced discrimination after being hired. In , a math teacher was fired from her position at a Catholic school after someone noticed she'd joined an atheist website from her home computer and made comments on Facebook about not believing in God.
A few years prior, a government and history teacher in Texas was allegedly fired simply over the suspicion that he was an atheist. Other people have reported similar mistreatment, though the nature of their terminations wasn't confirmed. If atheists can't be trusted to be good employees, they certainly can't be trusted to be responsible parents. Over the past few decades, there have been many documented cases of judges either denying parents custody rights because of their apparent disinterest in organized religion, or in other cases, of atheist parents being ordered to attend church so that their children can undergo "systematic spiritual training.
In , an atheist father emailed The Dish columnist Andrew Sullivan to describe a custody battle that had seen his Sunday visitation rights revoked so that his son could receive "religious instruction" under his ex-wife's supervision. The case took place in Mississippi, and the father said that he feared he would only lose more ground if he challenged the religious judge's ruling.
Do Atheist Help Centers Exist?
When the Upstate Atheists, a charity organization in Spartanburg, S. While the atheists said they had no plans to bring religion into the mix at all, the soup kitchen's director complained that they were "targeting" her organization. The Upstate Atheists responded by setting up shop across the street from the soup kitchen and handing out care packages to homeless people. The battle over the place of God in advertising has frequently led to broader questions about discrimination against atheists. In , a judge ruled that the Central Arkansas Transit Authority had violated the free speech rights of a local atheist group when it denied the group's request to launch an ad campaign on city buses.
The ad organization that worked with the transit authority had regularly approved religious ads. Dawkins recounted the story of a prominent colleague Robert May who always had the same response to creationists: Words do not rule us, we rule over them. When they no longer suit our needs we can change them to perform other duties. Atheists claim that they wish to eliminate all religion.
If they did that then we need to replace the social functions performed by communities of faith now. Humans are not just any beast of the field. But atheism cannot replace the social cohesion that religions give. Uh, many if not most atheists see no reason to couple community organizing and philanthropy to ir- religious gatherings. There are plenty of other secular venues to indulge in those things. Atheist groups, like stamp collecting groups, exist primarily for people who share a common passion to meet and converse.
Not for desperately trying to signal to the world that atheists can give money to charity, too. Those are interesting definitions of atheist and agnostic.
Atheism is just a lack of belief in a dogma. Gnosticism or agnosticism is just a statement of knowledge. They are very different words, dealing with different subjects. I lack a dogmatic belief system, thus I am an atheist. If people want to believe silly things in their homes, then fine, but our government should be ruled by calculations based on testable evidence.
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I could accept that if humans were finite state machines that can enter into only true or false states based on input parameters. Go to any atheist dominated forum and challenge any standard atheist dogma and find out what happens. This is a fairly flawed methodology. You would be selecting only the people who are strident enough to participate on a forum.
Could you give me a list of atheist dogmas? I have no idea what they might be. I had initially attended for a sense of community, but since the university is in a state that would best be described as a near-theocracy, a majority of the group all but me and two others were escapees from local religion.
I lacked the frame of reference of the group, I was less concerned about escaping from the predominant religion than everyone else.
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To be blunt, I got nothing of any value from the group, so I moved on. I also consider myself to be one of the bastard children of atheism, as I am an objectivist-flavored atheist rather than the more common humanist-flavored atheist. Grond The Merciless Quote. Another time I brought up the idea that worshipping God is a byproduct of social hierarchy, i. You would have thought I called them all idiots. I completely see your point Martin.
Atheism has drawn a very young crowd, and they are feeling their oats. I think this is a common issue with any young revolutionary movement.
I Am The Local Atheist by Warwick Stubbs
During the Civil Rights movement, there were the Black Panthers. The very young and motivated Islam movement is all riled up. Just by memory, there is only one group that I can think of who are rude, riled up and old The Tea Partiers. What little exists is mostly ignored. I rarely see modern atheists who are familiar with Quentin Smith or Graham Oppy.
They follow Dawkins instead, and seem to be more of a counterculture to the fundies than a well-reasoned worldview. Meanwhile, Craig is training Christians in proper reasoning and strong foundations for their religion.