Satire will be the savior of civilization.

Or so we hope.

Plan would bar Ohio adoptions by GOP

The Daily Plan summary:

With recent bills by anti-gay forces to ban adoption by gays, it was only a matter of time before the potential parenting skills of all manner of groups come under fire.

Ohio State Senator Robert Hagan has introduced a bill to bar Republicans from adopting children or becoming foster parents, since as he argues:

“[C]redible research'’ shows that adopted children raised in Republican households are more at risk for developing “emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.'’

Hagan admits that he has no scientific evidence to support the above claims, but then he notes, neither do those who argue gays are a threat as parents.

Hagan’s bill is tongue-in-cheek, but more seriously, the reality is that 20,000 children each year go into the foster care system who will never get adopted, 20,000 children desperate for a home but who will reach adulthood with no one EVER adopting them.

With so much need to recruit more adoptive parents, it’s a bit crazy (and cruel) that any loving parents, whatever their political party or sexual orientation, would be barred from adopting.

(a joke via Nogodblog.com. At least, I think it’s a joke.)

Praying For World Peace

In Jerusalem, a female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, each day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he was! She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, she approached him for an interview.

“I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN. Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?”

“For about 60 years.”

“60 years! That’s amazing! What do you pray for?”

“I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews and the Muslims.

“I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”

“How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a fuckin’ wall.”60 loan car month7a loan small businessconsolidating about loans studentadelaide loan homeloan rates aircraft interestonline american company loan100,000 loan businessloan 123 llc Map

Anything goes at German carnival - except religion

At carnival time in Germany anything goes — except, this year, mocking religion, a victim of the worldwide controversy over cartoons of the Prophet.

“Religion is in my eyes a delusion and hence should be mocked,” he said. “The humour depicted on the floats simply needs to have some bite otherwise there is little point.”

I keep saying this every time I see it, cuz it pisses me off. A secular news source, Reuters, simply uses the phrase “The Prophet”, as if that is acceptable to everyone reading the article. Prophet? What prophet? Whose fuckin’ prophet? My prophet is the old dude down the block who collects the bottles on Wednesday nights and spouts wisdom from behind the wheel of his rusty shopping cart. His name is Bill. Is that the “prophet” (apparently deserving of a capital “P”) that we are talking about? I think it is. He is my Prophet. Prophet Bill. Can I threaten to kill you if you make a mean cartoon about Bill?

Good for Jacques Tilly for at least saying that religion is a delusion. No kidding.

This caving in to religious extortion is pissing me off. What if atheists started threatening to kill people who disagreed with them (not that we ever would — fundies take note: this is where we are far more pious than you are, punks). Do you think people would go “Oh, let’s not offend the atheists this year. They seem upset and are even offering millions of dollars to anyone who would kill their ideological opponents. Gee. This is a sensitive issue.”

Nope. They’d actually just string us up.

To quote Penn Jillette: “FUCK!”
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I lost someone I love very much recently. It was very unexpected. It did however, lead me to a discovery that was most amazing.

My family is xian. Lite-weight to be sure, but xians just the same. So, I went to a mass of xian burial for this person. (Luckily, it wasn’t in a church). The pastor was female (because Methodists are cool like that) and was there the whole three days. At the wake there were so many people packed into the funeral home that all were shoulder to shoulder- unable to move. After the funeral, people lingered around the coffin despite the 10 degree weather.

Despite this being the absolute worst few weeks of my life, something surprising and fantastic happened at the funeral. Sitting there with my brothers and cousins, listening to the pastor I realized something. You know those sales pitch vacations? You know, the come to Florida to this gorgeous hotel for a free (or really cheap) weekend vacation - but you have to come to this six hour long sales pitch about time shares?

That’s exactly what religion is. Half the service was about gawd and jebus - random Psalms, and verses. You have to sit through the mind-numbing and childish gawd sales pitch in order to get to why you came there- to hear about the loved one passed away.

After she was done babbling on and on, the mayor got up and did the eulogy. It was what we wanted to hear. Funny stories about the one passed, and laughter instead of sobs, if only for a moment.

Then, the pastor got back up to close and asked everyone to recite the Lord’s Prayer. (You know the one drilled into your head like a bad ad jingle?) And absolutely no one in my row recited it. I was sitting with my brothers and cousins, and not ONE of them spoke the prayer. I thought perhaps they just didn’t know it.

At the luncheon that followed we all sat together and I mentioned that no one said it. And something fantastic happened. Nearly all of them (10 in total) piped up with “We know it, but who believes that stuff?”

The one who passed would have been very proud to know they left behind a family of free thinkers, and who maintain it, even in the face of unexpected death and crushing grief.

(sidebar: this finally gave me the opportunity to talk with my new bf about the fact that I’m an atheist. He took it better than I expected, though it was clearly not something he agrees with. But that’s cool. He doesn’t have to agree with me, as long as he doesn’t try to change my mind as I make no attempts to change his.)

An Assembly of God church (already not known to be the most stable xians) in Terra Haute, Indiana has built a huge friggen cross out of bridge beams. Neighbors, predictably, have begun complaining that the “thing” will devalue their property. No shit. Among the more memorable of the quotes comes this stellar observation from their cult Underboss Keith Taylor (looks like a friggen’ pedophile, eh?):

“In the age that we are living in and with the city facing addictions with meth, we felt it was God’s timing to assert a little more presence in the city. It is quite an eye-catcher. Travelers can see that somebody’s not ashamed of the cross and the Gospel”

To be fair, they no longer call their church an Assembly of God, but a Cross Tabernacle; well, whatever makes them happy, but shit taste like shit even if it’s called “sugar”. Of course, I couldn’t stop laughing at “The cross has a small, flashing red light on top to attract attention” and the fact that they will be illuminating it at night. I think that the lighting will make the giant S&M fetish look even slightly more silly than the inevitable vandalism and I hope to have photos of that when it happens!

Slainte!

We saw it coming, folks.

S.D. Gov. ‘Inclined’ to Sign Abortion Ban

PIERRE, S.D. - Gov. Mike Rounds said he is inclined to sign a bill that would ban nearly all abortions in South Dakota, making it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless it was necessary to save the woman’s life.

The ban, including in cases of rape or incest, was approved Friday by South Dakota lawmakers, setting up a deliberate frontal assault on Roe v. Wade at a time when some activists see the U.S. Supreme Court as more willing than ever to overturn the 33-year-old decision.

Poor women, rape victims, incest victims, you are about to be attacked in the most vicious way.

This is happening far faster than some of us may have guessed. And boy could it be the wedge issue of the 2006 election.

If you ask me, all hell’s about to break loose.

Hey, gang. As a professional web geek, I sometimes forget to be more clear about things that sometimes seem obscure. I posted recently about subscribing to RSS feeds and having the web “come to you,” but I think I could have done a clearer job of it.

RSS is truly awesome — especially for keeping up with news sites and blogs.

Google has what they call a “browser-based” reader that just plain kicks butt. I have been playing with it more in recent days and it is just awesome.

You can take a very straightforward tour of it here:

http://www.google.com/reader/things/tour

Once you get started, you can begin adding all of your favorite sites as feeds, and simply go back to Google Reader to see what is new on those sites, instead of having to visit dozens of different web addresses. I have found the GifS comments feed just dandy to subscribe to.

In the Google Reader tour, they will tell you how to search for feeds and how to manually add a feed URL. Manual is sometimes handy — for instance, I tried finding our comments feed and could only find the general feed (for blog entries) through their search. To me personally, the comments feed is so much more valuable.

To get you started, here are two of our feed URLs:

General blog feed:

http://gods4suckers.net/feed/

Comments feed:

http://gods4suckers.net/comments/feed/

Hope this is a little more helpful!

There was something that struck me in reading the article that inspired my earlier post about atheist rights lobbyists.

The article said:

Of those who are “out,” relatively few are young or women. Only a third or so of the folks at Tommy’s Joynt were women, and more than half the crowd had silver hair.

“When a young person shows up to a meeting, they usually always tell me, ‘Go talk to them,’ ” said Adrienne Mowery, a 32-year-old San Franciscan who has been an atheist since her childhood in Texas.

Mowery struggled to explain why more young people don’t turn up at atheist gatherings. Are young atheists just too apathetic to come to get organized, or are most godless types really just white-haired retirees?

“It takes a lot of thinking to get to the point where you don’t believe,” said Jackson, who is 73. As for the gender gap, he says, “Atheism is a head thing. Women might be more inclined to be involved in something rather than to sit around and talk and talk.”

We have a few atheist gals on this site, including Sharon and Lya as bloggers… But it does seem that the number of guys here far outweighs the ladies.

I actually know several female atheists, including my beloved sister. But to tell you the truth, I have never dated one. They have always been either weak theists or some hippy-dippy New Age thing, like neo-paganism. It’s been strange never truly having a partner that sees the world the way you do. I am currently seeing a woman who was raised Roman Catholic, and although very rational, she stops short of denouncing her Xianity. I strongly suspect she finds my atheism kinda interesting, but would never actually go there herself.

So, atheist women of GifS: I ask you… What has your experience been? Has it been hard to find fellow atheist females to make friends with? [All of my closest male friends are atheist or agnostic, and we find great comfort in one another.] How do you handle this? What do you see as the reason for this perceived gender gap?

Would love to hear your opinions.