Have you ever noticed that the more fundamentalist and conservative the Christians, the more obsessed they appear to be about sex? It seems to range from remaining chaste before marriage to marrying Jesus and remaining chaste for the rest of their lives. It seems like sex is a really big deal for Christians. So, there's a really interesting movie that's going to be available for free streaming over at Vimeo, tomorrow: Give Me Sex Jesus.

Not that long ago, I (like most people) thought that there was once a guy named Jesus, who was a 1st century cult leader and faith healing charlatan, and that his story was heavily embellished and exaggerated, blown out of all proportion -to become the legendary character on which all the various and conflicting denominations of Christianity are based; Unitarians, Binatarians, Triniatarians, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, all of them.

However, after years of being pointed at as “divisive”, I know full well that it’s going to take more than an appeal to getting things done to make that happen. Such appeals aspire to a veneer of civility, and such a veneer is incompatible with seeking justice. In order to maintain it, we have to be passive in the face of the injustices we see. Saying that someone is perpetuating injustice will always be viewed as uncivil. We have seen this over and over and over again.

Some people have a really easy time with change. They see the need for it, the areas it will better our lives and the world, feel the excitement with something new and want so much to jump. I like to think that I am one of these people—until I realize that I am quite thoroughly, not.

Traditional marriage is just being asked to share its sandbox with others. It gets to keep all its toys. It’s still got plenty of room to play. Nobody’s kicking sand in its eyes, or telling it to go home, or borrowing its bucket and shovel and not giving them back. If traditional marriage can’t play nicely with the other kids, that’s its problem, not theirs. It can learn to share the space, or go home to sulk, but nobody’s attacking it.

A week or so ago, I previewed the Room for Doubt program, making some predictions about what it would entail. This past Sunday (September 13) was the inaugural day of the campaign, and having watched one local church’s live broadcast, I realized that I had presumed a bit too much about how the program would be implemented in the twenty churches currently participating.

The idea is that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ get sin cooties if they’re anywhere around what they (mistakenly) think is sinful behavior in others, so if they’re not fighting it tooth and nail 24/7 and complaining loudly enough about it to be heard from orbit, then they’re actively participating in it themselves, at least in their weird bizarro-universe.

Of all the assorted fights and squabbles in the atheist/ humanist/ freethinker/ secular/ godless/ whatever movement, I’ve tended to stay away from the one about which of these “whatever”s we should call ourselves. A lot of this has to do with my own personal and philosophical views on naming and language — and a lot of it has to do with my experience in the LGBT community, and my experience with the squabbles we went through about what to call ourselves.

This vision of eternal punishment puts all the rest to shame. Hell 2.0 is entirely self-inflicted, it’s virtually flame-free, and you can rest easy knowing that your version of eternity removes every trace of divine retribution from the mix. Now you can mete out all the punishment without looking mean yourself.

I thought I should take a moment to explain what, exactly, I mean by “leader.” I’d thought this would be obvious, but perhaps it’s not: When I say “leader,” I don’t mean “person you never oppose.” I don’t mean “person who tells you what to believe.” I don’t mean “enforcer of a dictated belief system.” I don’t mean “dictator”; I don’t mean “demagogue”; I don’t mean “pope.”

Not long ago, I was having lunch with a colleague and we got around to the almost-always-perilous subject of religion. He asked me how I define myself, and I said, “I’m Jewish. And an atheist.” He laughed and said, “No, really, what are you?”

Matthew expects the anti-theist to prove that religion is the only factor contributing to the dismal situation of our being, and if the anti-theist fails to prove that, it means that the link between religion and its social ills are weak. But that is not so. We only have to prove that the link is there. We simply have to prove that the link exists.

Almost one in ten Americans say that they’re Catholic—but that Catholicism isn’t their religion.

What thousands of children go through because of the failure of a supposedly loving God to intervene is unimaginable. Because of the religious brainwashing those children go through, it’s likely most of them are perpetually praying to that same god to help them and stop what’s happening to them. If the abuse stops, that has nothing to do with the child’s prayer or any unsought intervention by a loving god who sees a child in need.

I’m skeptical of this, as I am with the “abortion forgiveness” move. In both cases, the Pope is tweaking things so that the church doesn’t give up even an inch of ground when it comes to telling people they are a bunch of worthless sinners because they are sexual. It doesn’t do anything to change the sadistic church teaching that holds that God loves to punish and judge people for acting on urges that, by their own measure, he gave to people in the first place.

Debunking Christianity

Tracie Harris offends a believer by answer his questions.

Religious conviction originates from the emotions first, then the intellect. That’s why the reasons they give us for the things they believe seem so weak to us and so strong to them. They feel the heat of their own personal commitments, and it predisposes them to accept things with far less support than it would require for anyone else to accept them. These beliefs were likely built upon a foundation of emotion during a period of time in which the believer was open and vulnerable to persuasion.

I was sent this list of 10 “biblical” beliefs that poison Christians, hosted on a site that opposes ‘spiritual abuse’. It’s a weirdly twisty look into the views of a fairly liberal but clearly fervent Christian — I actually agree with them that a lot of these beliefs are actively harmful, but the reasoning they use to reach that same conclusion is odd, to me. That makes it interesting to read, because it provides a peculiar perspective on concerns that are familiar to atheists.

Religions exploit our existing fears and sometimes manufacture fears that are exploited. Can this continue? Are we doomed to be fearful forever?