Separate the church and the state, you mullet wearing asshole!

Mississippi school district fined $7500 for opening assembly with prayer
Published July 27, 2015FoxNews.com

Brandon High School where the assembly in May 2014 took place. (City of Brandon)
Allowing a school assembly honoring high-achievers to open with a prayer made one Mississippi school district $7,500 poorer – and a student who sued $2,500 richer.

The Rankin, Miss., public school district was hit with the fine after U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves said it defied his prior order barring prayers school events. According to the judge, the prayer violated a 2013 court settlement that ordered the district to stop “proselytizing Christianity.” The alleged violation, which came at an assembly last year for students who scored above 22 on their ACT college admissions test, prompted the judge to apply fines for that and another incident, in which Gideons International was permitted to hand out Bibles to elementary school students.

“The district’s breach did not take very long and it occurred in a very bold way,” Reeves wrote in his judgment. “Its conduct displays that the district did not make any effort to adhere to the agreed judgment.”

Reeves also ordered the district to pay the student’s legal fees, an amount that will be determined at a later date, and threatened a $10,000 fine for any future infractions of the order.

The assembly at Brandon High School in May 2014 began with a prayer led by local Methodist pastor Rev. Rob Gill. Although not mandatory, the assembly honored the district’s students who scored higher than a 22 on their ACT college tests

The school district first came under legal fire when the same student took the school district and the school’s then-principal, Charles Frazier, to court in 2013 for forcing him to attend a series of assemblies that promoted Christianity.

Attorneys for the school district have argued that Gill’s prayer did not violate the 2013 orders or the student’s First Amendment rights because attendance at the assembly was optional. Reeves, however, believes the district has been trying to indoctrinate students with Christianity.

“From the accounts detailed in the record, it appears that incorporating religious script and prayers with school activities has been a long-standing tradition of the district,” the judge argued.

In a statement issued by an attorney, Rankin County Superintendent Lynn Weathersby said that despite the court’s ruling, students and teachers will continue to pray. However, district staff will have to adjust in order to comply with the ruling.

-Awesome ruling. Separation of church and state people, period, no explanation necessary! School children should not have their scientific minds stunted by being told that mythology is to be believed as real. The reality is is that we do not know what exactly is beyond this life, if anything. A narrow view shouldn’t demand superior advertisement when there are so many other myths to choose from. The ham-handed doctrine of Christianity speaks for itself, if the god of Abraham is as incompetent as the literal bible describes, than it might be a better bet to worship the My Little Ponies!

Right-Wing Christianity IS about hate speech!

Rubio: Gay marriage proponents pose ‘danger’ to Christianity

By Alexandra Jaffe, CNN

Updated 2:49 PM ET, Wed May 27, 2015

Marco Rubio respects courts on gay marriage in Florida 02:59

Washington (CNN)Florida Sen. Marco Rubio took a decidedly conservative turn on same-sex marriage in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network this week, warning that “there’s a real and present danger” that gay marriage proponents will cast the teachings of mainstream Christianity as “hate speech.”

“If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater,” the Republican presidential candidate said.

RELATED: Rubio: ‘We’re going to abide’ by gay marriage rulings

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“After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech and there’s a real and present danger,” Rubio warned.

Rubio has always been personally opposed to same-sex marriage and has argued the issue should be left up to the states.

But his comments to CBN Tuesday mark a notable shift in tone for a candidate who told CNN earlier this year that if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, “that would be the law of the land that we would have to follow until it’s somehow reversed.”

His choice to sound the alarm on a possible attack on Christianity aligns him more closely with the evangelicals he’ll be courting in the early primary states of Iowa and South Carolina. But Rubio’s statement comes at a time that Republicans increasingly see themselves losing the battle for public opinion over gay marriage.

In a sign of how fraught the issue has become, a prominent Christian conservative group just announcedthat it’s eliminating its “marriage pledge,” a 14-point credo the Family Leader circulated to candidates in 2012 that required them to pledge to back the definition of traditional marriage as between one man and one woman, among other things.

-Hey Marco, Hitchens67 here! What you spew from your myth-believing pie hole IS hate speech and not in line with what most logical people call, “Reality.” In 2015, in the U.S, we STILL have a large amount of people that believe an imaginary figure guides their lives, that, I find, is disturbing indeed!

Wake up and take control of your own lives! If you need a sky fairy to keep you on the straight and narrow then you just lack a REAL conscience to guide you! I just do good things because it’s the right thing to do, not because of the threat of some mythological Hell in the afterlife! Get fucking real and ditch the fairy tales Marco!

Famous Hitchens quotes.

 RIP Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

The 20 Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes
December 16, 2011 by Daniel Florien 246 Comments
Christopher Hitchens has a lot of quote-worthy material, but here are 20 of my personal favorites:
“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
―The Portable Atheist
By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?
―The Portable Atheist
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
―God Is Not Great
What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
―God Is Not Great
Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world…. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
―God Is Not Great
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.
―God Is Not Great
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
―God Is Not Great
If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.
―God Is Not Great
Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?
―God Is Not Great
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.
Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.
Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.”
―God Is Not Great
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
―God Is Not Great
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
―God Is Not Great
Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
―God Is Not Great
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
―God Is Not Great
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
―Hitch-22
Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.
Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

–I am reminded every day of why I have such high regards for the late great Christopher Hitchens. He was one to shun foolish PC crap, yet champion the rights of everyone as long as they were trying to play well with others. In this day and age, we are constantly reminded of why we need in-your-face, unafraid intellectuals such as Hitchens to bring people back to their senses. I will never abandon his wariness of anything religious due to it’s ability to take believing in mythology too far and create false morality around it! I LOVE Hitch and his honesty, even though there are areas in which he and I would have most likely strongly disagreed. He might have well told me to piss of as he did some of his best friends due to political differences. I actually LIKE a person who is not afraid to tell a close friend that he thinks that he is fucked up in thinking a certain way! THAT is a person in which you can invest trust! That is a man who will not sell you out, an honest man. GAWD bless you hitch, and may Jeebus keep you in the eternal cheese pit of the Christentatious!

Hitchens EASILY owns Dinesh D’Souza, did anyone expect otherwise??

1 of 9 debate Harris vs. Craig

I would love to actually see a factual account of Hitchens, Harris or Dawkins being owned by a believer in mythology! These empty claims surface on Youtube but are always proven wrong by critical analysis of the video, something that hysterical apologists can’t understand. Just because you debate ignorance well does not lend credibility to the fallacy of religion

GOD BLESS YOU HITCH!!

Tonite I raise a glass to the late great Christopher Hitchen, a truly intelligent and moral man! You have been gone two years now and not a day goes by that I don’t use the knowledge from your writings to combat Bronze-age throwback bullshit! To you, I salute the memory of your lifelong struggle to bring light into the minds of small minded people believing in fairy tales! Your lasting impression on everyone that you have come in to contact with will live on forever!!

Hitchens at his best!

According to the mass deluded, he is probably burning in a bronze-age Hell!!

Hitchens at his best

Christless? I think so!

Hey bloggos! I am sitting here on this rainy day listening to the very beautiful Ingrid Michaelson and musing atheistic. I am also having a very interesting back-and-forth with a fellow WordPress blogger on the subject of my idiocy in the area of ‘HIS’ existence. In other words, he is using the bible to tell me how foolish I am for not believing in ‘The Lord.’ He believes that quoting bible verses makes people who question the god thing seem completely out of their minds. The only reason that I have even entertained this lunacy is because I am bored as shit and proving, yet again, that people are close-minded sheep for the most part. 90% of the masses will believe almost anything that someone ‘in authority’ tells them and will use the ‘ misery loves company’ mentality to spread the word of mass delusion.

Now, we know that all of the biblical passages mentioning Jesus were written approximately 30-80 years AFTER his death. There are no eyewitness accounts written about Jesus, and only two disputed articles written within 100 years before or after his death making any so-called evidence of ‘His’ existence completely contrived and 99.99% complete bullshit! During the time of Jesus and shortly thereafter, over 50 most prominent people of the time wrote NOTHING of the man called Jesus! These names include Josephus and Apollonius to name two and the others are found at the touch of a Google search, all easily referenced. Info on this is included on the sites http://www.jesusneverexisted.com and http://www.nobelief.com. There are also hundreds more that have been contributed to by countless trusted authorities on the subject, so please do the research and check these out for yourself. I handle my atheism like I handle my money. Why would I blindly trust someone else with something so important when I can learn the information myself?

The silence of history is also upon the existence of the apostles, and you would think that a man and followers who had caused such a shitstorm in the Jewish and Pagan faiths would have had a few more ‘Wanted’ posters drafted in ‘His’ image, but curiously that honor only falls to the OTHER famous folks of the time! Now the History Professor Bart Ehrman states in his book, Did Jesus Exist, some very interesting suppositions regarding alleged proof of the existence of the man Christ, but is refuted in several instances that are also available in a simple Google search and is the reason that I cite the title of the book. I do not name the rebuttals only because the ability to access them is only a keystroke away! I am not here to insult intelligence, only to expand it.

The REAL interesting meat of this all is on The Thinking Atheist website under podcast #101 which includes an interview with the renowned Prof. of Ancient History and Christianity expert, Dr. Richard Carrier, who appeared on the show’ Faith Under Fire’ and has debated none other than William Lane Craig! Dr. Carrier also has the pleasurable distinction to appear in Warren Allen Smith’s book,  Who’s who in Hell’, a list of non-believers who are going to burn in Yaweh’s imaginary lake of fire! I always like the whole’ if you don’t believe in my god you will burn in Hell’ idiocy! He also has given many talks on ancient history and Christian accounts of history that have been proven false. He has spoken on the Gospels and why they are mythological by including literary and writing analysis that has proven beyond a doubt that many of the book’ s cited authors were in fact not the stated ones.

Dr. Carrier published a book, On the Historicity of Jesus Christ, ‘ that confronts the accepted false accounts used by popular historians to supposedly prove jesus’ existence such as how priests communicated with Christ in vision and prayer as well as how he came upon this Earth in very much the same manner as several other deities. Theologians will dispute the ‘Other gods similarity,’ claims, but that is where careful research comes into play and attention to detail.

Dr. Carrier also has critiqued Dr. Ehrman’s book “Did Jesus Exist” and has called it very poor in writing and fact as if written very hastily, but recommends Ehrman’s book, ‘Jesus Interrupted’ as a mainstream manual on how modern day religious historians explain their position on the existence of Christ. Dr. Carrier has had several heated exchanges with Dr. Ehrman on the subject of Ehrman’s books that can be read by internet searching, ‘Dr. Carrier/Dr. Ehrman recap. The 1st result is usually “Ehrman on Historicity,’ and links to all of the other exchanges between the two individuals.

I have done much of this research myself and have come up with so many holes in the myth that is christianity, leading me to dismiss it as a definite appeal to the masses for control! I have been reading literature by Carrier and Ehrman to further inform myself so as not to expose myself to ignorant sheep-like behavior!

My father-in-law who has NEVER taken a religious history class and had been a life long bigoted racist until the recession told me that even though he does not believe in God anymore he knows that the historical Jesus HAS been proven. I countered with my evidence based in years of scientific research only to be told that I didn’t know what I was talking about. This is the tired old refrain of the lemming, don’t do research and inform yourself, just listen to the magic box in the living room!

I ask my blog followers to please do the research, no matter how in-depth it gets, so that the myth can be refuted and placed in the dustbin of all other dismissed crap. Listen to the above-mentioned podcast and digest the very informative and credible information. Until then, have a godless existence!

HITCH

Funny!