Non-Prophet

Atheist Ads

God forbid (pun intended) Freethinkers put up billboards in Colorado. It's like the end-times around here.

rockymountainnews.com

Here's an unusual sign that the holidays are coming: just in time for Christmas, a group of atheists and freethinkers plan to sponsor 11 billboards in Colorado.

Against a blue sky backdrop, their billboard poses the question: "Don't believe in God? - You are not alone."

COCORE, an umbrella organization of 11 groups ranging from the Boulder Heretics to the Humanists of Colorado, are spending $5,000 to post their message at 10 sites in Denver and one in Colorado Springs, for four weeks starting around Nov. 17.

The group wanted to put up signs in Fort Collins and Greeley, but a billboard company refused to carry the message.

The Christian Right Killed The Republican Party

Jane Devin makes some very interesting points regarding the fallout of a divide and bifurcate approach taken by the religious right over the last decade. It had been a GOP compromise for votes, a dissonant consortium of two groups with their own agendas. 8 years ago it was a voting block that appeared to have a lot of common ground, but now I see the religious right and authentic conservatives like oil and water. The whole policy thrust of the right is a mess. Pushes for constitutional amendments that restrict citizen rights aren't conservative. The mouth of Mordor has something of a sock stuffed in it this time around and the GOP is paying big time. The cry of "value voters" has vanished, along with the convenience of looking the other way in order to get some extra votes. I for one am very proud of my country for having this common sense.

Huffington Post:

When Ronald Reagan began courting the religious right in his bid to win the Presidency, I doubt he knew he was spelling death to the lean tenets of Goldwater conservatism. Yet soon afterward, under the thumb of right-wing religion, the Republican party became a bloated fool, stuffed with hypocrisy, greed, and anti-intellectualism. In 2008, the price is being paid through lost elections and a loss of public trust.

While Bush railed about the axis of evil, there was another axis that gathered steam during the Reagan years. The Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and The Christian Coalition were all formed within years of each other as religiopolitical groups. Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson, the respective leaders of these movements, formed a triad that sought to influence politics through a gospel of neo-conservative Christian rhetoric aimed at millions of faithful adherents whose votes, it was hoped, could swing the socio-political pendulum away from progress and back to "traditional values."

In order to win the votes of the triad's faithful followers, Republican politicians bartered themselves into a hear-no-wrong, see-no-wrong trade-off. This trade-off allowed Falwell to hold sway with politicians, and appear as a respected political pundit on right-wing shows, even after outlandishly insisting that the purple Tinky Winky children's character was gay, or that the anti-Christ was coming in the form of a Jew. He could promote the idea of ending the public school system in favor of church-run schools, as he did in his book, America Can Be Saved, yet still wield considerable influence in Washington.

Things are getting ugly.

I know it isn't fair to film a few idiots and then act like they represent a larger group of people. My point here is that some idiots are facing losing, they're getting worried and quite frankly, exposing their idiocy.

The Lord Will Not Be Mocked

Focus Asks Christians to Pray for Rain on Obama

Here, Stuart Shepard comes off even more evil than usual. This guy is giving Jesus a bad name.

Huckabee is Un-American

Good Lord Man. This shows -- more than anything I've seen so far -- why this "dude" is entirely unfit to serve in any public office. To have a view based on one's own convictions, even to cite those convictions, is one thing. But to stand up and say in plain English that you want to create a theocracy out of the good ole U, S of A shows a short sightedness that boggles the mind. This guy doesn't seem to understand the nature of what we are founded upon. One's reasons for wanting to amend the constitution shouldn't be because of the word of one particular God, but because one believes that reason is righteous outside of a theology. Good ole boy Mike should know better than to spew this kind of nonsense. This is in its entirety, un-American.

Off of Alternet:

The United States Constitution never uses the word "God" or makes mention of any religion, drawing its sole authority from "We the People." However, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee thinks it's time to put an end to that.

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

(from a tip off the N8. :0)

Silly Global Warming

Oh man! Watch Stuart Shepard totally tear apart all of those silly global warming alarmists! Scientists can get so excited over nothing! I'm glad Focus on the Family was around to get my brain working correctly. Stuart asks a whole bunch of really good questions and then implies that they don't have any answers. :0)

here.

Soulforce Civil Disobedience @ Focus

Soulforce is staging an act of civil disobedience RIGHT NOW at Focus on the Family. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

From an email I received a few minutes ago:

Colorado Springs, CO, February 19, 2007 -- Soulforce, a national civil rights and social justice organization, has launched an ongoing campaign called "Focus on the Facts," which aims to intervene in James Dobson and Focus on the Family's representations of lesbian and gay families through an ongoing campaign of civil disobedience modeled on Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent social change.

What: Lesbian couple enters Focus on the Family headquarters to engage in dialogue and civil resistance: they seek an end to anti-gay propaganda.

When: Monday, February 19, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. MST

Where: Focus on the Family, 8605 Explorer Dr., Colorado Springs, CO

At approximately 11:00 a.m., Dotti Berry and Robynne Sapp of Blaine, Wash., entered Focus on the Family headquarters to join a regularly scheduled tour. Once inside, the two women will attempt to speak with visitors and staff about the organization's defamation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans. They will not leave voluntarily until Focus on the Family (FotF) and James Dobson promise to cease their misleading statements about research on lesbian and gay parents.
Arrests are possible.

[UPDATE]

(Colorado Springs, CO) - At approximately 1:30 p.m. on February 19, 2007, Dotti Berry and Robynne Stapp of Blaine, Wash., were arrested and removed from Focus on the Family headquarters in police custody. The couple entered the building earlier in the day and refused to leave until the organization's founder, James Dobson, takes a step toward reconciliation with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities by ceasing his misleading statements about research on lesbian and gay parents.

They have been charged with trespassing and have not yet been released.

"I am here today because I believed Dr. Dobson's teachings for many years, and it almost led to my suicide. My healing came from my acceptance of myself and my acceptance that God loves me exactly as I am," said Stapp. Stapp and Berry have toured Focus on the Family twice before to dialogue with visitors and staff about LGBT individuals and families.

Dobson has consistently misrepresented LGBT families with misleading references to social science research. In recent months, several social scientists--including Dr. Carol Gilligan of New York University and Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale--have publicly rebuked him for mischaracterizing their research conclusions.

Dobson and other Focus spokespeople frequently discredit LGBT parenting with references to "more than 10,000 studies that have showed that children do best when they have a mom and a dad." According to the American Psychological Association (APA), such claims rely on "studies that simply do not address gay and lesbian parents and their children." Moreover, "no credible evidence shows that children raised by lesbian or gay parents differ in any important respects from those raised by
heterosexual parents."

Berry and Stapp are the first participants in an ongoing campaign called "Focus on the Facts," which is modeled on Gandhi's Satyagraha campaigns in South Africa and India. In the words of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi "rightly believed in the efficacy of pitting the soul force of the Satyagraha against the brute force of the oppressor and in effect converting the oppressor to the right and moral point."

"I am here to mirror Dr. Dobson's human essence, so that the reflection will cause him to fully understand why it is important to begin telling a new and true story, one that empowers all of us," says Berry.

Berry and Sapp will speak to the media outside Focus on the Family headquarters when they are released later this afternoon.

This Is Just Freaky...

The Simpsons on the Culture War.