If you want BS or Political Correctness you have come to the wrong place.
FAQ How can you be an atheist Jew?
An atheist is one who disbelieves in (or denies) the existence of God, Gods, and other supernatural beings.
A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew, or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.
The first year of blogging was slow. I made a post a week, and got very few visitors. Here is my 50,000 visitor post from June 30th this year. Things changed early this year as some of the bigger bloggers out there discovered me, and now I get between 200 and 300 visitors a day on average. I probably get a good 20-30% of visitors from Google searches. Number 100,000 was doing a "Steve Irwin atheist" search. There is no indication Stevo was an atheist, but obviously I am, and I wrote a tribute to him when he died. Some of the word searches that have got me visitors are hysterical, but I haven't written them down, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Thanks to everyone, especially my regular visitors. You two know who you are:)
It is tiresome when I read that Atheists are not moral, or cannot be moral, or have no moral code. The biggest problem with the idea of morality is that, like snowflakes, no two people agree on what exactly morality is, and what exactly is an immoral act. The definition of morality is totally subjective. I define an immoral act as an act that causes the individual committing the act any degree of guilt and/or an act that was done maliciously or selfishly that causes any degree of hurt or grief onto another living being. I'm 100% certain that everyone who reads this has a different idea about what is moral and immoral. But that is my premise. Now, to prove it. Here is a casual quiz. You can put your answers into the comments here, or just walk away knowing I'm right:)...............as usual.
Rate every statement from 1-10 where 10 is a moral act and 1 is as immoral as you can get. Also, a 0 would mean the question doesn't have enough info. And NA would mean you don't find the question to be a moral issue. An 8 or 9 would be slightly immoral.
1. An unmarried woman had sex with a man who she is no longer seeing and became pregnant and has an early abortion. How immoral or moral was the act of the abortion?
2. An unmarried woman gets violently raped by an escaped convict and becomes pregnant and has an early abortion. How immoral or moral was the act of the abortion?
3. Premarital sex?
4. You are 18 and you take a few tokes from an illegal marijuana joint?
5. You are married with young children and walking the dog, and see a really sexy person. On your way back home you start fantasizing about having sex with this person, and when having sex with your partner, you pretend your partner is that person?
6. Killing a a career criminal who is caught on tape robbing and killing a clerk in a convenience store, by lethal injection?
7. Killing a harmless daddy long legs spider that was in your bedroom?
8. Living together before marriage?
9. Telling a loved one he or she looks great when you don't think that is the case, just so that person won't spend money at a spa because you don't think the spa will help?
10. Finding $5000 in the attic, 3 years after you moved into a new home and not trying to contact the former owner?
11. Not feeding a dying relative who has terminal cancer and is in endless pain when it is their wish not to be fed.
Christmas to me, is as relevant as Halloween. I'm not for banning either. It is a great time for Christians on the planet to hook up with their families and boost the economy by buying presents. It is also a good time to diss certain relatives (by not buying them gifts or not inviting them to Christmas gatherings).
Most people who have done any research at all realize that Christmas can't be Jesus' birthday, by the way the NT is written and the "clues" of his birth. Of course, no date was mentioned in the bible to make it easy for the Christians to have a date to celebrate Christ's "real" birthdate....this would make things too easy.
Maybe, it is because the NT is just a story. Finding Christ's birthdate in the NT is like finding the state that the Simpson's hometown of Springfield is located in. The difference being that it is a running joke in the Simpsons. The real reason that December 25th was picked as Jesus' birthday was to usurp the Mithra celebration for the birthday of the sun....that is sun, not son.
As far as Christmas being an American constitutional or even Protestant thingy, I think you should read this from Wikipedia:
The Reformation and the 1800s
During the Reformation, Protestants condemned Christmas celebration as "trappings of popery" and the "rags of the Beast". The Catholic Church responded by promoting the festival in an even more religiously oriented form. Following the Parliamentary victory over King Charles I during the English Civil War, England's Puritan rulers banned Christmas, in 1647. Pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities, and for several weeks Canterbury was controlled by the rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans.[21] The Restoration of 1660 ended the ban, but most of the Anglican clergy still disapproved of Christmas celebrations, using Protestant arguments.
In Colonial America, the Puritans of New England disapproved of Christmas; its celebration was outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681. At the same time, residents of Virginia and New York celebrated the holiday freely. Christmas fell out of favor in the United States after the American Revolution, when it was considered an English custom.
By the 1820s, sectarian tension in England had eased and British writers began to worry that Christmas was dying out. They imagined Tudor Christmas as a time of heartfelt celebration, and efforts were made to revive the holiday. Charles Dickens' book A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, played a major role in reinventing Christmas as a holiday emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion over communal celebration and hedonistic excess.[22]
During the early part of the 19th century, interest in Christmas in America was revived by several short stories by Washington Irving in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon and "Old Christmas", which depicted harmonious warm-hearted holiday traditions Irving claimed to have observed in England. Although some argue that Irving invented the traditions he describes, they were imitated by his American readers.[23] The numerous German immigrants and the homecomings following the American Civil War helped promote the holiday by bringing with them continental European Christmas traditions still upheld in Catholic and Lutheran countries on the continent. Christmas was declared a U.S. federal holiday in 1870.
Any hoot, I don't celebrate Christmas because I'm a Jew. In fact, I'm the only house on my block without Christmas lights. But I do understand the meaning of Christmas, probably a lot more than most Christians.
I'm sure many of the bloggers on the Atheist blogroll has put this on their site by now, but I must confess that during the last couple of weeks I haven't been checking out too many blogs....due to work and just getting over the flu. What doesn't kill makes me stronger. Anyway, this is pretty good sarcasm, unless you are a Fundy.
Actually facts are Jew haters and Muslim conspiracy theorists worst enemies. I didn't lose any immediate family members in the Holocaust, so it was not as big a topic of conversation in my home growing up as it could have been, but when I watch the 60 minutes segment called Hitler's Secret Archive on Sunday night, I was completely moved. In fact at one point I had to fight back tears. I think a lot had to do with the immediate vindication the piece had in light of the Holocaust Denial Conference, and after watching pukes like David Duke getting another 15 minutes of fame in getting his message of Jew hating through the guise of protecting free speech. If you haven't seen it, here it is. The first video is just over 9 minutes long and the second is very short: NOTE: The video were taken down but the entire 12 minute segment is available here.
We'll see how quickly Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and David Duke take a field trip to Bad Arolsen in order to seek the truth about the Holocaust. That is what they are after, isn't it?
I was curious so I checked out the forums at Stormfront and David Duke.org and a few other known hate sites, and there was not one word mentioned about the 60 Minutes piece. My guess is that they will either ignore it or conjure up yet another grand conspiracy theory: something like, the Jews have had 60 years to fake all the documents found at Bad Arolsen.
The release of the documents will defintitely weaken the Stormfront/Islamic Jihad alliance that has formed and strengthened of late.
