Load of shit takes shape in Kentucky-Big surprise!

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  A wooden rib that is part of a ship based on the story of Noah’s ark is raised into place in Williamstown, Ky., on Thursday, June 25, 2015. The Ark Encounter will be a religious tourist attraction when it opens next year. (AP Photo/Dylan Lovan) (The Associated Press)

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. –  In a rolling Kentucky pasture, the first few wooden ribs of a giant Noah’s ark tourist attraction have begun to sprout up.

For now, there’s only a foundation, some concrete pillars and the ribs. But the Christian ministry building the ark says the public will be awe-struck by the size of the 510-foot-long ship when it’s finished next year.

“This is going to be huge attraction just for the structure itself,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Kentucky-based group, Answers in Genesis.

On Thursday, journalists were allowed to tour the site for the first time — following a hard rainfall, as it turned out.

The religious theme park project that was announced nearly five years ago is still afloat, after hitting a stretch of rough waters. The ministry had to break the project into phases after private funding stalled a few years ago due to a soft economy. The ark is the first phase, and plans for other attractions at the site were put on hold.

Answers in Genesis says it will pour nearly $90 million of private donations and bond funding into the attraction, which will be called the Ark Encounter. So far, Ham said, about $70 million has been raised.

The Christian group says it has researched the Noah story to determine the size of the boat. In the Bible account, the ark was built by Noah to carry pairs of all the earth’s animals as the world was destroyed by a flood.

“Most people don’t really understand the size of the ark, and we’re going to answer questions like, how could he fit all the animals on board,” Ham said at the construction site Thursday.

Ham’s ministry opened the Creation Museum in 2007 a few miles from here. It has drawn criticism from science educators for exhibits that challenge evolution and promote a view that the earth is about 6,000 years old.

TV star and educator Bill Nye, who suggests the tourist-friendly ark could divert young people away from science, debated Ham on evolution at a widely-seen event at the Creation Museum last year. Nye said if Noah’s ark had actually been built, it would have been destroyed by the sea.

The big boat project took another hit last year when the state of Kentucky withdrew a tourism sales tax incentive that would have meant about $18 million for the attraction after it is up and running.

State officials said in December that tax incentives shouldn’t be used to “fund religious indoctrination.” Answers in Genesis disagreed and filed a federal lawsuit to get back into the incentive program, saying they should not be excluded because of their religious beliefs. The state has asked a judge to dismiss the suit, and a hearing is scheduled for next week.

Ham said the ark attraction is meant to reach more people “with God’s word.”

“But we’re not forcing people to come here, they come of their own free will,” Ham said. “And when they come here and go through, we’re not going to be forcing them to believe our message, we don’t do that. They’re going to have a great experience regardless of whether they agree with us or not.”

-Ken Ham, the complete idiot who believes that Tinkerbell really CAN fly, said the the exhibit, based on the complete bullshit myth that all of the fucking animals in the world came to a wooden ship of their own free will, will inspire single-celled organisms to further believe in misogynistic assholish bigotry and will, in the future, completely crush the Supreme Court and those meddlesome gays once and for all. Ham was also witnessed talking to his own dick and shoving flowers into his own pee hole…..

Win! Win!

Washington (CNN)In a landmark opinion, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, establishing a new civil right and handing gay rights advocates a victory that until very recently would have seemed unthinkable.

The 5-4 ruling had Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority with the four liberal justices. Each of the four conservative justices wrote their own dissent.

The far-reaching decision settles one of the major civil rights fights of this era — one that has rapidly evolved in the minds of the American pubic and its leaders, including President Barack Obama. He struggled publicly with the issue and ultimately embraced same-sex marriage in the months before his 2012 re-election.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” Kennedy wrote. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were.”

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia blasted the Court’s “threat to American democracy.”

“The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me,” he wrote. “But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch.”

The relevant cases were argued earlier this year. Attorney John Bursch, serving as Michigan’s Special Assistant Attorney General, defended four states’ bans on gay marriage before the Court, arguing that the case was not about how to define marriage, but rather about who gets to decide the question.

The case came before the Supreme Court after several lower courts overturned state bans on gay marriage. A federal appeals court had previously ruled in favor of the state bans, with Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals writing a majority opinion in line with the rationale that the issue should be decided through the political process, not the courts.

Fourteen couples and two widowers challenged the bans. Attorneys Mary Bonauto and Doug Hallward-Driemeier presented their case before the Court, arguing that the freedom to marry is a fundamental right for all people and should not be left to popular vote.

Three years after President Barack Obama first voiced his support for gay couples’ right to marry, his administration supported the same sex couples at the Supreme Court.

4 things we learned about John Roberts

“Gay and lesbian people are equal,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices at the oral arguments earlier this year. “It is simply untenable — untenable — to suggest that they can be denied the right of equal participation in an institution of marriage, or that they can be required to wait until the majority decides that it is ready to treat gay and lesbian people as equals.

The same-sex couples who challenged gay marriage bans in Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio were just a few of the estimated 650,000 same-sex couples in the United States, 125,000 of whom are raising children.

The challenges included same-sex couples who wanted to marry, those who sought to have their lawful out-of-state marriage recognized, as well as those who wanted to amend a birth or death certificate with their marriage status.

By the numbers: Same-sex marriage

The lead plaintiff in the case is Jim Obergefell who married his spouse John Arthur in 2013 months before Arthur died.

The couple, who lived in Ohio, had to travel to Maryland aboard a medical jet to get married when Arthur became gravely ill. And when Arthur died, Obergefell began to fight to be recognized as Arthur’s spouse on his death certificate.

Map: Where same-sex marriage is recognized in the U.S.

The plaintiffs from Michigan are April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, two Detroit-area nurses who are also foster parents. They took to the courts after they took in four special-needs newborns who were either abandoned or surrendered at birth, but could not jointly adopt the children because Michigan’s adoption code requires that couples be married to adopt.

Milestones for LGBT rights

Sgt. Ijpe Dekoe and Thomas Kostura became plaintiffs in the gay marriage case after they moved to Tennessee from New York.

The pair had married in New York in 2011, but Dekoe’s position in the Army took the couple to Tennessee, which banned gay marriage and refused to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.

–SCOTUS has finally stepped in where others were afraid to tread and FUCK Antonin Scalia and his dissent! Finally a sweeping tribute to freedom and a definite slap in the face to conservative cousin-fucking Duggerites!

Unholy Trinity continued Goddammit!

Drop the muthafukin’ base!!

Mormons are truly daft!

Please Help!! Tax religious organizations!!

AMERICAN ATHEISTS V. SHULMAN

How you can help
This case has the potential to undo the discrimination that has been written into our tax code. We have no doubt that this is a case that will go all the way to the Supreme Court. To help ensure that American Atheists has the resources we need to carry this case to the end, we need your help. Please consider making a tax-deductible gift to American Atheists to support our critically important legal work.

To donate, please click here.

Introduction
On December 12, 2012, American Atheists and two co-plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky demanding that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stop giving preferential treatment to churches and religious organizations via the process of receiving non-profit tax-exempt status under the Internal Revue Code (IRC) procedures and definitions.

Groups like American Atheists receive tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) but, because the organization is not classified as religious, it costs American Atheists and other secular non-profits significantly more money each year to maintain that status. In this lawsuit, American atheists and the other plaintiffs are demanding that all tax-exempt organizations, including those characterized as religious by the IRS, have the same requirements to achieve and maintain tax-exempt status.

In order to qualify for nonprofit tax-exempt status, any religious or secular organization must demonstrate it exists to benefit the public. After that basic element is established, religious non-profits are almost always declared automatically tax-exempt under the current IRC rules and definitions. However, secular non-profits face a lengthy application and a fee, which can be as high as $850.

Religious organizations and churches are treated differently from secular organizations. The exemptions are applied in a way that discriminates solely on the basis of whether an entity’s members express beliefs and practices accepted as religious. The IRS treats your organization better if you profess belief in a supernatural deity.

The lawsuit also covers discrepancies in how secular and religious organizations are treated in maintaining their tax-exempt statuses. Secular nonprofits complete Form 990 annually, which details information about finances, donors, volunteers, and personnel; the IRS estimates it requires 211 hours to complete the Form 990, which is then public information. Religious nonprofits are exempted from filing the Form 990, so there is no public record about their finances, donors, volunteers, or personnel.

This requirement can put organizations like American Atheists at a fundraising disadvantage compared to religious groups because many people choose not to reveal their atheism for fear of prejudice and discrimination.

American Atheists and its co-plaintiffs are asking the Court to find that such disparity of treatment between religious and secular non-profit organizations is unconstitutional and require the IRS to make the tax-exempt filing process uniform for all nonprofit organizations.

Government Motion to Dismiss
On June 7, 2013, the United States government filed a motion to dismiss our lawsuit. In their filing, the Government, among other things, challenged American Atheists’ standing to bring such a suit, alleging that we had suffered no real harm from their preferential treatment of religious groups in tax filings.

On August 6, 2013, American Atheists filed a response to the Government’s motion to dismiss.

Oral Arguments
On November 21, 2013, American Atheists’ National Legal Director Edwin Kagin argued the case before the United States District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky, in Covington, Kentucky. The case was heard by Senior Judge William O. Bertelsman. The full name of this case is American Atheists, Inc. v. Shulman.

Distrit Court Rules
On May 19, 2014, the District Court ruled on the government’s motion to dismiss. The Court ruled in favor of the government’s motion. The full ruling is available here. American Atheists is currently evaluating the decision and will determine the next steps shortly.

-Churches suck over $87 Billion out of the tax system every year by not paying their fair share! These organizations pilfer billions a year from parishioners that foolishly donate money to them every year. Many religious charities give money to support services to the poor, but many of these tax evaders also steal money to keep their leaders rich! LET THEM FUCKING PAY TAXES!!!!

Interesting WP article

Five Myths
Challenging everything you think you know
Five myths about Jesus

By Reza Aslan, Published: September 26, 2013
Reza Aslan is the author, most recently, of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Perhaps no historical figure is more deeply mired in legend and myth than Jesus of Nazareth. Outside of the Gospels — which are not so much factual accounts of Jesus but arguments about His religious significance — there is almost no trace of this simple Galilean peasant who inspired the world’s largest religion. But there’s enough biblical scholarship about the historical Jesus to raise questions about some of the myths that have formed around Him over the past 2,000 years.

1. Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

The first Christians seem to have had little interest in Jesus’s early years. Stories about His birth and childhood are conspicuously absent in the earliest written documents about Him: the letters of Paul (written between A.D. 50 and 60) and the Gospel of Mark (written after A.D. 70). But as interest in the person of Jesus increased, the nascent Christian community tried to fill in the gaps of His youth to align His life and mission with the myriad, and often conflicting, prophecies about the messiah in the Hebrew scriptures.

Five Myths

A feature from The Post’s Outlook section that dismantles myths, clarifies common misconceptions and makes you think again about what you thought you already knew.
Archive

One of those prophecies requires the messiah, as a descendant of King David, to be born in David’s city: Bethlehem. But Jesus was so identified with Nazareth, the city where most scholars believe He was born, that He was known throughout his life as “the Nazarene.” The early Christians needed a creative solution to get Jesus’s parents to Bethlehem so He could be born in the same city as David.

For the evangelist Luke, the answer lay in a census called by Rome in A.D. 6, which he claims required every subject to travel to his ancestral home to be counted. Since Jesus’s father, Joseph, was from Bethlehem, he and his wife, Mary, left Nazareth for the city of David, where Jesus was born. And thus the prophecy was fulfilled.

Yet this Roman census encompassed only Judea, Samaria and Idumea — not Galilee, where Jesus’s family lived. What’s more, since the purpose of a census was taxation, Roman law assessed an individual’s property in the place of his residence, not his birthplace.

Simply put, Luke places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there but because that story fulfills the words of the prophet Micah: “But you Bethlehem . . . from you shall come for me a ruler in Israel.”

2. Jesus was an only child.

Despite the Catholic doctrine of His mother Mary’s perpetual virginity, we can be certain that the historical Jesus came from a large family with at least four brothers who are named in the Gospels — James, Joseph, Simon and Judas — and an unknown number of sisters. That Jesus had brothers and sisters is attested to repeatedly by the Gospels and the letters of Paul. Even the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus refers to Jesus’s brother James, who would become the most important leader of the early Christian church after Jesus’s death.

Some Catholic theologians have argued that the Greek word the Gospels use to describe Jesus’s brothers — “adelphos” — could also mean “cousins” or “step-brothers,” and that these could be Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. While that may be true, nowhere in the New Testament is “adelphos” used to mean anything other than “brother.” So there is no rational argument for viewing Jesus as an only child.

3. Jesus had 12 disciples.

This myth is based on a misunderstanding of the three categories of Jesus’s followers. The first was made up of those who came to hear Him speak or to be healed by Him whenever He entered a village or town. The Gospels refer to this group as “crowds.”

The second category was composed of those who followed Jesus from town to town, village to village. These were called disciples, and according to the Gospel of Luke, there were 70 or 72 of them, depending on which version of the text you believe.

The third category of Jesus’s followers was known as the apostles. These 12 men were no mere disciples, for they did not just follow Jesus from one place to another. Rather, they were given permission to go off on their own and preach His message independently and without supervision. They were, in other words, the chief missionaries of the Jesus movement.

4. Jesus had a trial before Pontius Pilate.

The Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as an honest but weak-willed governor who was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities into sending a man he knew was innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history, however, was renowned for sending his troops onto the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews lodged a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, let alone Jews accused of rebellion. So the notion that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, let alone grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.

It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of His crime warranted special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which He was being executed.

5. Jesus was buried in a tomb.

The Gospels say that after the crucifixion, Jesus’s body was brought down from the cross and placed in a tomb. If that were true, it would have been because of an extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented, act of benevolence on the part of the Romans.

Crucifixion was not just a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, some criminals were first executed and then nailed to a cross. The primary purpose of crucifixion was to deter rebellion; that’s why it was always carried out in public. It was also why the criminal was always left hanging long after he died; the crucified were almost never buried. Because the point of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten witnesses, the corpse would be left to be eaten by dogs and picked clean by birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a trash heap, which is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name: the place of skulls.

It is possible that, unlike practically every other criminal crucified by Rome, Jesus was brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest men in Judea. But it is not very likely.

outlook@washpost.com

End Game

We are doubling our population every 50 years, this will go to doubling the population every 25 years. I wonder what the stupid Christian answer is to this unsustainable truth? Between oil spills, fertilizer runoffs, greenhouse gasses and other things that the super rich are in charge of, what is the end game? I know that the stupid liberals will hope that man gets a grip, but we know that it is too late. The stupid Christians think that their idiot god will deliver them, but really, what the fuck is the end game?

God in His never ending grandiosnessesssness

I have been receiving very sophomoric typical replies to comments that I have made on other blogs here.When I read an extraordinary claim made on a Christian themed blog I am known to comment briefly by challenging the claim and rebutting with simple logic. Regarding a claim that God is great and responsible for the many wonders that are explainable by basic science, I usually reply using my knowledge of demonstrable evidence to give the right explanation to a bogus claim. The Christian replies to that with the typical idiocy fed to them by their clergy and parents which is usually vacuous faith based bullshit not grounded in the real tangible world of common sense. I usually direct them to some of the hundreds of posts on my blog quoting the latest evidence available and get a fearful rebuttal based in biblical ramblings. These people are so scared and deluded that when presented with a way to change their thinking and beliefs they choose to cower in fear and hide behind a book of fables.

Now I understand that changing a world view requires courage and vision as well as being willing to alienate people that one has known for a lifetime. Most people that have rejected the lies of religious life have been shunned and cut off from their communities. Religion is a disease of the mind, rooted in the laziness of faith which is the easiest choice to grab onto when actual research would pull one out of the lifetime comfort zone. Faith is Linus’s security blanket that assuages anxieties and fear without having to address and solve the problem that caused the fear in the first place. Faith is the ultimate cop-out used to dispose of real effort and the challenge of facing the actual truth, but I understand why people cling to it. I, for one, fear irrationally the finality of death even though I am an entrenched atheist who believes 100% in demonstrable evidence. I fear because I don’t know the final resting place of sentient versus inanimate energy. Does it go away to an ultimate dead zone, or does it exist on in time and space as pure energy? I know that my consciousness as an individual being means nothing in the scheme of the universe and that no human being is going to a golden city to walk the gilded roads with fucking Jesus, that’s obviously the human construct of an anthropomorphic god meant to allay the fear of death.

Funny that even the most devout believers in the God myth are still uncertain in their faith. I have been at many a death bed and have observed the fear in the eyes of people who earlier were so very eager to join Jesus in the mystical world of Heaven and now they quake in terror because the uncertainty has set in. The reality that it might all be just bunk has now become a reality in these minds and God is no where to guide them through this suffering, just as He is no where to be found when children suffer the ravages of dread disease. God id everywhere they say, and was always there regardless of the fact that most Christians attack atheists based on the ‘something from nothing’ argument. How could the universe come from nothing, what happened BEFORE singularity? Well, what happened BEFORE God? God was always there? Impossible, how does something come from nothing? They cannot answer because they have now painted themselves into the very same corner that they tried to paint the atheist in and they always lose because of the application of skeptical rational thinking!

The explanation that you can’t explain everything ends up going both ways and the debate then descends into quoting the bible to prove the bible. The William Lane Craigs and Cye Ten Bruggencates  of the world are always defeated by their own circuitous arguments and flawed logic. The simple use of common sense is usually the best defense against ‘smart stupid people’, as Bill Maher calls them. I am always floored when I find out that a renowned scientist or educator believes in the God myth, not because I claim to know everything, but because when researched, the myth appears as just that and you end up having to believe that these people have had something happen in their life that truly scared the shit out of them and God just serves as their security blanket as well.

The simple minded are not the only ones who turn to mythology in times of fear. If one thinks of humankind as just a speck of life on a speck of a planet in a nondescript galaxy, then the perspective is revealed and it makes perfect sense for educated people to fall into the trap of religion. We are NOT special and were NOT made for some ultimate purpose in the galaxy and for modern man to labor under this obvious illusion speaks to the backward nature of the race. Let discrimination over skin color die and I will say that THAT is a significant advance of our species, but we can’t even accomplish something so simple yet.so why is it so disturbing to me that intelligent people believe in fairy tales?

As primitives in the Bronze Age, we surely believed that our existence was some sort of special occurrence and that the stars above our heads were but lamp lights illuminating our sky. Primitive deduction had the sun and stars revolving around the Earth with us as the central figures in the scheme not remotely aware that there were billions upon billions of planets out in observable space. We now are aware of this due to advances in science and no longer need to believe that spirits keep heavenly bodies in motion or that we are special in any way shape or form. Fools such as Ken Ham and other New Earth Creationists are now only akin to Flat Earthers who believe in absolute folly and try unsuccessfully to use existing science to explain the belief in fairy tales. Fools such as these stare into the proof against their ridiculous beliefs and prove their foolishness by pissing in the face of the obvious and trying to twist facts into evidence for idiocy.

I will keep rebutting the Flat Earthers, or God folk by using the science at hand to keep these throwbacks constantly off balance and the grow the cause of skepticism. Only logic and fact are effective against people who refuse to live in a world of reality. Atheism and agnosticism are growing at a rate unstoppable by the legions of believers struggling to keep us in a dark age of ignorance. At this time, these demographics are the fastest growing in the world and will soon overtake the number of those who hide behind blind faith and choose to believe in myth over reality. God is NOT great, because He would actually have to exist to be great and while disasters and illness continue to decimate scores of the faithful, the non believers will continue to actually work to slow this with science and hard work instead of useless prayer. Atheists have no time to waste on praying to the sky spirit as if this equates to rolling up one’s sleeves. Praying is what one does when they want to imagine that they are actually helping. I say, unclasp your hands and don’t insult my intelligence, I don’t believe in sky daddies so get your Goddamn ass off of your knees and do something real! The next time that you comment on a post made by an atheist, please don’t use your mythology to try to prove your baseless myth, and read the evidence before you use the ‘God is eternal’ argument. If the universe couldn’t come from nothing then your God is no immune from that argument either!

Marriage

You know, ALL of my friends aged around 40 or so have miserable marriages male OR female. I take this as the institution of marriage is a passe thing and needs to be disregarded. Why ruin a good long term relationship with the death spectre of marriage? There are what, 0.5-10% of people who will describe their marriage as good and half of those are lying? So what is the benefit besides legal? I say that the law needs to be adjusted to consider the people who are too smart to resign themselves to the dungeon of marriage. 

I am unsatisfied I can tell you. The reason is because I cannot separate myself from my wife without her making the lives of our children miserable. She is so shallow that she cannot let me go and move on, she has to let the children know how much she is suffering! Unreal! I am willing to not fuck with their heads in this manner but she seems to derive a satanic glee in doing the exact opposite. She has her own career but will fight me to the end to get child support even though I want equal custody. This is because she co depends her deadbeat parents and forces me to take care of them even though their actions allowed their drug addict friends to rape her twice before the age of 10. I have tried to help her in this area but have been told that I do not qualify to tell her how to run her life. 

I have tried to break away with disastrous consequences all the way around. I implore my readers now to examine the families of the people that they are considering marriage too and urge them to consider the greatest choice of long term relationship WITHOUT paper involved. Yes, I am against marriage as an institution of the weak and brand it as a religious institution of bondage!