Religion 101 Final Exam

You are the incarnated Son of the all-powerful and all-loving Creator of the universe. What would be a good way to demonstrate your compassion and power?

1. Cure cancer forever
   
2. Cause all the earth's deserts to bloom with food crops
   
3. Unite the world with a common language and an end to poverty
   
4. Conjure up a jug of wine and follow it up by walking on water

Since we can never "know" whether or not a God exists - it is fundamentally a matter of "faith" - it's best to be a believer since you have nothing to lose, but everything to lose if your disbelief is incorrect. Keeping in mind that the fate of your soul depends on the right choice, in which God should you place your belief? For extra credit, include a brief essay justifying your choice, along with the reasons why you reject the other three.

1. Zeus
   
2. Quetzalcoatl
   
3. Vishnu
   
4. The Holy Trinity

(*Note: The first choice assumes you were born around 400 A.D. or later, after the invention of the Trinity)

Religion 101 Final Examination

The American Destroyers

Quotes from the modern day Hitler Youth gang.

From Grandpa Bushy:

"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God"

From the Queen of sleeze, Ann Colter:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."

"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed'"

The American Taliban

Bush kills over a half million

The 9/11 attack killed 2,973.

Bush has killed or maimed 655,000 Iraqi.

If it could be measured, which is the worst criminal?

Iraq Deaths

War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis or more than 500 people a day since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.

Violence including gunfire and bombs caused the majority of deaths but thousands of people died from worsening health and environmental conditions directly related to the conflict that began in 2003, U.S. and Iraqi public health researchers said.

"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5 percent of Iraq's population have died above what would have occurred without conflict," according to the survey of Iraqi households, titled "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq."
The survey, being published online by British medical journal The Lancet, gives a far higher number of deaths in Iraq than other organizations

.

Guns Kill People

States With Higher Levels of Gun Ownership Have Higher Homicide Rates

"... states within the highest quartile of firearm prevalence had firearm homicide rates 114% higher than states within the lowest quartile of firearm prevalence. Overall homicide rates were 60% higher.

Harvard School of Public Health

Jesus Fake

"Who was the Son of the highest God, and the biggest healer in Antiquity? He healed the sick and even raised the dead. Hear and behold: former paralysed walked again, the blind could miraculously see again, and the deaf could listen and the mute speak after the Master's gentle touch! But he did not only heal the body, he also healed the soul. They called him Saviour and Redeemer, and he healed both rich and poor, men and women, young and old, slaves and free men, friends and enemies. In one occasion a paralysed man was brough to him in his bed, and took his bed and left walking after the Saviour had touched him. What was this Saviour's name?"

Asklepios

Original or Fake?

Christian Science is not

"Christian Science theology holds that one healing proves that Christian Science is a scientific system for healing all diseases. The church's healing claims encourage parents to take foolish risks with their children's lives. Furthermore, the church claims that legislators give Christian Scientists religious exemptions to child neglect laws because of these healings."

Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty (CHILD, Inc.) is a non-profit national membership organization established in 1983 to protect children from abusive religious and cultural practices, especially religion-based medical neglect. CHILD opposes religious exemptions from duties of care for children.

ChildrensHealthCare.org

Bush Kills more then Bin Laden

U.S. military deaths in Iraq
pass 9/11 toll

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The deaths of six more American soldiers in Iraq pushed the U.S. death toll to at least 2,978 -- five more than the number killed in the September 11 attacks -- as bombs killed more than 20 people in Baghdad on Tuesday.

Reuters

Ted Haggard Babbles

Richard Dawkins interview with Ted Haggard.
See the video:

Guess what? Haggard is an idiot!

Jesus didn't know what he was talking about



Proving that nobody can get into heaven

You've been lied to

Jesus, Moses and all the rest are no more true than something coming from the pen of J. K. Rowling. Though a lot more dangerous.

The cost to humanity of fifteen centuries of Christian savagery – of hundreds of millions of lives brutalised and truncated, sacrificed to war, torture, pogrom, burning, pestilence and plague – is incalculable.

Christianity is the worst disaster in human history.

Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD - the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.

Following a star would lead you in circles.

The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches.

The original Mary was not a virgin. That idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses.

Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road.

"Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure" ? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.

Jesus never existed.com

Kids Pray the Darn'dest Things

Here's a site that has great potential:

ReligiousFreaks.com

"ReligousFreaks was born in October 2005 .... Mostly, it grew out of my growing disdain for religion and the hatred and ignorance it breeds. The goal of ReligiousFreaks is not to incite hatred towards people of faith, but rather to expose the hypocrisy in their chosen religion."

Register Phones not Guns

Let's see if I have this correct.

The right-wing says, "Don't register guns, the evil government will come around and confiscate them all."

However, the Fascists say that it's fine to wire-tap and collect the calling records of every living person in America.

They all lie

Jews, Christians, Moslems

"According to the Bible, Solomon was both a master builder and an insatiable accumulator. He drank out of golden goblets, outfitted his soldiers with golden shields, maintained a fleet of sailing ships to seek out exotic treasures, kept a harem of 1,000 wives and concubines, and spent thirteen years building a palace and a richly decorated temple to house the Ark of the Covenant. Yet not one goblet, not one brick, has ever been found to indicate that such a reign existed.

If David and Solomon had been important regional power brokers, one might reasonably expect their names to crop up on monuments and in the diplomatic correspondence of the day. Yet once again the record is silent. True, an inscription referring to "Ahaziahu, son of Jehoram, king of the House of David" was found in 1993 on a fragment dating from the late ninth century B.C. But that was more than a hundred years after David's death, and at most all it indicates is that David (or someone with a similar name) was credited with establishing the Judahite royal line. It hardly proves that he ruled over a powerful empire.

Moreover, by the 1970s and 1980s a good deal of countervailing evidence--or, rather, lack of evidence--was beginning to accumulate. Supposedly, David had used his power base in Judah as a springboard from which to conquer the north. But archaeological surveys of the southern hill country show that Judah in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. was too poor and backward and sparsely populated to support such a military expedition.

Moreover, there was no evidence of wealth or booty flowing back to the southern power base once the conquest of the north had taken place. Jerusalem seems to have been hardly more than a rural village when Solomon was reportedly transforming it into a glittering capital. And although archaeologists had long credited Solomon with the construction of major palaces in the northern cities of Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo (better known as the site of Armageddon), recent analysis of pottery shards found on the sites, plus refined carbon-14 dating techniques, indicate that the palaces postdate Solomon's reign by a century or more."

False Testament: Archaeology Refutes the Bible's Claim to History

Penn & Teller say:

The Bible is Crapola

Bush - Let's Bomb Iran!!!

THE IRAN PLANS
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Bush a Liar

Surpise, Surpise

"The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."

New York Times

It's so much clearer now!

New Christian Science Textbook

Idiot Box

Another Bush Stooge

The Dumb appointing the dumb

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re thinking, Deutsch is just being pedantic over what to call the Big Bang, since it is in fact a scientific theory. Maybe you’re thinking this has nothing at all to do with a perversion of science.

But you’d be wrong.

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

Emphasis, once again, is mine.

Now gee, why would that statement make me angry? Why would a NASA politically-appointed employee suppressing science, gagging a scientist, and trying to insert a narrow religious (and demonstrably wrong– the Big Bang is most certainly not a matter of "opinion" ) viewpoint into government educational activities get me so angry I could hop in a plane right now, fly to DC, and testify before Congress about these insane actions against the core of what we know to be true?

Yet, incredibly, it gets worse:

[Deutsch’s email] continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

Bad Astronomy Blog

Freedom Test

Free from Religion

Take a test:

". . . the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; . . ."

Where does this phrase appear?

A) The U.S. Communist party platform
B) A speech by Abraham Lincoln
C) American Jewish Congress
D) U.S. treaty signed by President Adams

"In 1797 the United States entered into a treaty with Tripoli, in which it was declared:

As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquillity [sic] of Musselmen . . . it is declared . . . that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This treaty was written under Washington's presidency, and it was ratified by Congress under John Adams, signed by Adams.

Freedom from Religion Foundation Quiz

Who are the Insurgents?

My thought has always been that invaders are insurgents.

Here's the definition from Wikipedia:

"An insurgency is an organized rebellion that engages in deliberate actions to cause the downfall of a governmental authority, through destruction and armed actions.

This can include a range of behavior, but primarily focuses on armed activities of irregular forces that rise up against an established authority, a government, an administration, or a belligerent military occupation.

Those carrying out an insurgency are "insurgents". Insurgents engage in regular or guerrilla combat against the armed forces of the established regime, such as conducting sabotage and harassment. Insurgents are in opposition to a civil authority or government primarily in order to overthrow or obtain a share in government, to further a separatist or revolutionary agenda, or improve their condition."

Insurgent