Friday, May 27, 2011

Atheists Have the Best Sex

By Jen Doll of The Village Voice

Today in sex studies: You will have much better sex if you are not religious, if by religious you mean the type of person who is plagued with guilt both during and for weeks, maybe even years, after sex because SEX IS BAD. This is the lesson we may take from the Daily Mail's examination of a Sex and Secularism survey from Kansas University, which found that guilty religious types had practically zero fun at all, because even when they were doing something fun, they felt really bad about it. Presumably that ends when you finally get to heaven? Anyone know? According to the study, both religious and nonreligious folks did about the same sex stuff -- watching porn, having oral sex, masturbating, and even having affairs -- with equal abandon. But the religious folks simply did not enjoy the experiences as much because of the feelings of "intense regret" they were left with. Which makes you wonder why they continued to do those things, but that's the kind of twisted lives some people lead.
Here's the breakdown on guilt levels from highest to lowest, of the religions listed:
• Mormon
• Jehovah's Witness
• Pentecostal
• Seventh Day Adventist
• Baptist
• Catholic
• Lutheran
• Agnostic
• Atheist
If you happen to fall in those top guilty religious brackets, take heart: People who had once been religious but became atheists "reported a significant improvement in sexual satisfaction."
Redemption?

Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

By Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, Published: April 29 - The Washington Post

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can’t join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently “spiritual” in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.
Rarely denounced by the mainstream, this stunning anti-atheist discrimination is egged on by Christian conservatives who stridently — and uncivilly — declare that the lack of godly faith is detrimental to society, rendering nonbelievers intrinsically suspect and second-class citizens.
Is this knee-jerk dislike of atheists warranted? Not even close.
A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.
Consider that at the societal level, murder rates are far lower in secularized nations such as Japan or Sweden than they are in the much more religious United States, which also has a much greater portion of its population in prison. Even within this country, those states with the highest levels of church attendance, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, have significantly higher murder rates than far less religious states such as Vermont and Oregon.
As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.
While many studies show that secular Americans don’t fare as well as the religious when it comes to certain indicators of mental health or subjective well-being, new scholarship is showing that the relationships among atheism, theism, and mental health and well-being are complex. After all, Denmark, which is among the least religious countries in the history of the world, consistently rates as the happiest of nations. And studies of apostates — people who were religious but later rejected their religion — report feeling happier, better and liberated in their post-religious lives.
Nontheism isn’t all balloons and ice cream. Some studies suggest that suicide rates are higher among the non-religious. But surveys indicating that religious Americans are better off can be misleading because they include among the non-religious fence-sitters who are as likely to believe in God, whereas atheists who are more convinced are doing about as well as devout believers. On numerous respected measures of societal success — rates of poverty, teenage pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug use and crime, as well as economics — high levels of secularity are consistently correlated with positive outcomes in first-world nations. None of the secular advanced democracies suffers from the combined social ills seen here in Christian America.
More than 2,000 years ago, whoever wrote Psalm 14 claimed that atheists were foolish and corrupt, incapable of doing any good. These put-downs have had sticking power. Negative stereotypes of atheists are alive and well. Yet like all stereotypes, they aren’t true — and perhaps they tell us more about those who harbor them than those who are maligned by them. So when the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich engage in the politics of division and destruction by maligning atheists, they do so in disregard of reality.
As with other national minority groups, atheism is enjoying rapid growth. Despite the bigotry, the number of American nontheists has tripled as a proportion of the general population since the 1960s. Younger generations’ tolerance for the endless disputes of religion is waning fast. Surveys designed to overcome the understandable reluctance to admit atheism have found that as many as 60 million Americans — a fifth of the population — are not believers. Our nonreligious compatriots should be accorded the same respect as other minorities.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.
The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.
The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

Read more of

Sunday, March 20, 2011

28 year old stones 70 year old gay man...because the bible says so. :-|

A 28 year-old Philadelphia-area man admitted he stoned to death a 70 year-old man because the Bible says to stone homosexuals. John Joe Thomas reportedly killed Murray Joseph Seidman, whom he knew, and told police, “I stoned Murray with a rock in a sock,” because he had read in the Bible that gays should be stoned.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The young man and Seidman were often seen together grocery shopping and going to church,” and “He then described how he placed batteries and rocks in a sock, and hit Seidman in the head at least 10 times.”
Read the rest of David Badash's article here.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Sheriff: Vet claiming to be Jesus shoots parents.

Yep. You read that right.





Seymour, Mo (Springfield News-Leader) -- An enraged Seymour man shot his mother and tried to shoot his father Tuesday night after the couple refused to acknowledge their son as the reincarnated Jesus, Webster County Sheriff Roye Cole said.




Read more here.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Wow. Totally speechless.

Meet Rev. Ignatius Kury, 35, of the Holy Ghost Ukranian Byzantine Catholic Church on Brown Street in Akron, OH. What a mouth on this little hypocrite. Read the arrest details at Cleveland.com.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda

Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system informed by childish cliches - they can barely differentiate between lies and truth.

Read the article by Chris Hedges at AlterNet.

Military chaplain: Soldier’s rape ‘must have been God’s will’

WASHINGTON – A lawsuit targeting the Pentagon contains an astonishing anecdote about a retired Sergeant's experience after being sexually assaulted by a colleague during a deployment to Afghanistan.
The lawsuit, available here (PDF), was filed by 17 military women against Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld in Virginia. It assails "the military's repeated failures to take action in rape cases created a culture where violence against women was tolerated, violating the plaintiffs' Constitutional rights."

Read more at The Raw Story.

Start the morning laughing out loud :-)

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Why It's Not a 'Safe Bet' to Believe In God

The idea that you should believe in God "just in case" trivializes both faith and reality, and concedes your argument before it's begun.

Read more of the article by Greta Christina at Alternet.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Christopher Hitchens vs pastor.

Tell Congress to Approve the Darwin Day Resolution!

U.S. Representative Pete Stark (D-CA, in collaboration with the AHA) has introduced legislation that would designate February 12, 2011 as “Darwin Day,” a celebration and recognition of “the importance of science in the betterment of humanity.”
The measure explicitly cites “the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection,” and calls for “a global celebration of science and humanity intended to promote a common bond among all of Earth’s peoples.”
The measure is designated as H. Res.81, and be found here.
Read the whole article at Atheists.org.

Religious talkshow host says Indians have to become Christians to be citizens

(Feb. 8, 2011) Bryan Fischer, Director of Issues Analysis for the conservative Christian American Family Association (AFA), and host of its radio program, Focal Point, today told listeners that Native Americans must leave the reservations and convert to Christianity in order to become "full-fledged American citizens."

Continue reading on Examiner.com:

Friday, February 11, 2011

Demonstrations at Texas Capitol for Church Taxes to Support Education

They’re going to be out there every weekday in front of the Texas Capitol Building in Austin, Texas: and they’re demanding that lawmakers begin levying a small tax on the wealthy churches of the Lone Star State in order to rescue public education.
The project is the brainchild of American Atheists State Director Joe Zamecki. Joe and a coterie of fellow activists hope to draw attention to the “war on public schools” that is taking place throughout the state. Indeed, every time the legislature huddles in Austin, there is a flurry of bills that would further erode the public education system, and undermine the quality of education in the classrooms.

READ MORE