Following the Brit Hume controversy, John Stewart on the daily show decided to poke some fun.
I’m loving the satire of the “no, MY RELIGION is right!” mentality plagued by many in the religious community. The panel went even further and correlated their religions with their ethnic backgrounds, and John Oliver even jumped in with his humorous view on reality.
Thanks to American Atheists for bringing this to my attention and the image to the right (which you can click to see the full-size image). You can read the full blog post here. 
In the search field type “Christianity is” and you will see recommendations of “bullsh*t, not a religion, a lie, false, a cult, wrong, fake, dying, Jewish, and not a religion t-shirt.”
In the search field type “Hinduism is” and you will see recommendations of “monotheistic, false, polytheistic, the majority religion of, the oldest religion, not a religion, fake, most commonly found, characterized by, and wrong.”
In the search field type “Buddhism is” and you will see recommendations of “not a religion, wrong, not what you think, bullsh*t, polytheistic, a religion, false, based on what concepts, the best religion, and atheism.”
In the search field type “Judaism is” and you will see recommendations of “false, not a race, not a religion, a race, a religion of the book, not Jewish, a gutter religion, monotheistic, a cult, and a religion.”
Try typing “Atheism is” and you will see recommendations of “a religion, dead, not a religion, wrong, the new fundamentalism, growing, a non-prophet organization, so senseless, illogical, a religion supreme court.” Clearly they are not holding back on the Atheists.
Now, let’s try Islam. Type in “Islam is” and you will see…
Absolutely nothing. That’s correct. Google makes no recommendations based on searches of “Islam Is.”
Why is Google blocking search recommendations for “Islam is?”
Islam, being the second largest religion in the world and obviously therefore a popular search term, should in theory have a list of search recommendations when prompted. That is, of course, unless Google specifically programmed their search engine to block the recommendations.
It’s ridiculous in the sense that Google and other corporations are “bullied” into going out of their way to not offend people, when in reality the problem lies within the Muslim community itself. Sure, people may not like it every time Jesus is killed on South Park (although I found it pretty funny), but then again Christians don’t riot over such things.
An Irish atheist group has published a series of quotations on religion in an attempt to challenge a blasphemy law that went into effect on New Year’s Day.
The 25 “blasphemous” quotations include the words of Jesus, Mohammed, Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie and Bjork.Atheist Ireland published the list on its Web site Friday. It says it aims to challenge the law, which makes blasphemy a crime punishable by a €25,000-($35,800) fine.
“Despite these quotes being abusive and insulting in relation to matters held sacred by various religions, we unreservedly support the right of these people to have published or uttered them,” the group said on the site.
Sad enough to say that there really is no such thing as “freedom of speech,” for in reality, even in America harassment is a crime. But when exactly did insulting ideas that others might be offended by due to religious beliefs become anything like harassment?
“Blasphemy laws are unjust: They silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilized society, people have a right to to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.”
Kind of like how I find religious ideas outrageous.
You can find the list of quotations by clicking here.
The Phelps family, part of the Westboro Baptist Church located in Topeka, Kansas, is notorious for picketing against homosexuals, claiming that terrorist attacks are God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance of homosexuality. A few years ago they made mainstream media rounds.
While obviously not every religious nut in America is like the Phelps family, the way in which religion was used by Fred Phelps to manipulate and brainwash the minds of his family cult is flat-out disgusting. Below is part 1 of 8 of BBC’s Louis Theroux following this family.
“Fuck critical thinking” mentality at its finest. This is how you become a zombie, folks.
Credits: QualiaSoup.
I think I’m just absolutely falling in love with this guy’s videos so much so that I may start a series of his well-explained and well-illustrated videos. So enjoy: QualiaSoup for the Soul.
In this article, Bryner of LiveScience shows us a list of which U.S. states are the happiest, and which are the least.
A new study found that a person’s self-reported happiness matches up with objective measures of state-level happiness.
The results are based on an examination of two data sets, one that included personal reports of happiness for 1.3 million Americans and the other that included objective measures, such as how crowded that state is, air quality, home prices and other factors known to impact quality of life.
Click here for the list.
And I have to agree; the White House and our government in general need not promote any sort of religious holiday. Christopher Hitchens writes:
A reported scheme for a “nonreligious” celebration of Christmas in the Obama White House was over before it began, long before it could become part of that old seasonal favorite, “the war on Christmas.” I never believed the original reports anyway: The president has no need to incite those who already think that he is a closet Communist or stealth Muslim. But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to argue about. The White House is, as some recent interlopers have again proved, public property. And its East Room is one of the parts of it that are not reserved for the First Family’s private life. So the constitutional question — should taxpayer-funded space be used for the affirmation of any faith? — is as real there, if not indeed more so, as it is anywhere else.
He goes on to talk about the origins of Christmas:
I never cease to be amazed by how little the Bible-believing Protestants, who constitute most of the soldiery in the Christmas wars, know about their own tradition. Under the rule of the Puritan Revolution in England, the celebration of Christmas was banned outright. This was for three reasons: The December fiesta was actually the honoring of paganism in disguise, and a descendant of the old rites of the winter solstice. Then, it was also a manifestation of popery and superstition (the “Christ-Mass”). Finally, it was an excuse for the riff-raff to get drunk and disorderly. Only the last part seems to have survived.
Yes, that’s it, Bill! Atheists are jealous of Christians celebrating the holidays! Man, if only I were born with such natural logic and had divine reasoning skills that of O’Reilly.. Then again, I’m only human!
Filmed in London by the cinematographer Mark Waters and directed by Frank Da Silva – part of Earth 2.0 series as a teaser for the up coming feature-length documentary film based on The Venus Project and Jacque Fresco’s visionary ideas.
To learn more about The Venus Project, click here.
The Life of a Priest is HELL 