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But what's in it for $GOV? Any time there is a significant power imbalance you can be virtually guaranteed it will be exploited, it's the natural order of things. You're not one of those Godless Pinko Muslim Commies that thinks governments should be bound by silly things like "human rights" and "the rule of law" are you?

Whether or not this is true, this report could cause the fundamentalist noise to drop radically as religious people flee the godless internet. Mission accomplished.

It's well understood that America's power and glory rests on her freedoms.

And by that I mean the restriction and (when possible) elimination of all things free of cost. We FAIL as a NATION when citizens don't have to pay for things, because when citizens don't have to work, they become morally corrupt, and very likely to stop attending church or vote Socialist. If people don't have to work hard every day of their lives, we'll be no better than the filthy, Godless Europeans. Why do you think Roger Ailes pays dozens of astroturfers to post to so-called "free" software forums? Free of cost is the opposite of freedom - and we all know that freedom is obedience to the law.

When clean air and clean water are freely available, it subverts the American way. It's our patriotic duty it pollute as much as possible - sure, mountain top removal and fracking are more expensive and difficult than carbon-neutral biofuel production or wind farm construction, but neither of those helps get bums off the street and into the cancer wards; wind and wood just don't pollute enough to be desirable. We need more coal, more fracking, and more tar sands to keep America great, we need to get to the point where every family has to purchase air and water on the free market from one of the many large corporations that make America the finest nation in the world.

Centralia is the great shrine of American economic philosophy; a permanent, self-sustaining source of pollution for the future! We should all thank Saints Rand and Reagan that God has given us the blessing of Centralia.

America! Freedom! Pollution! Fight for the filthy skies, it's your birthright!

Goodness no! Remember, citizens of the free world, it works like this:

Godless commie chinese and those fanatic heathen arabs we buy oil from? "Censorship" and "Surveillance".

The Good Guys? "Content Filtering" and "Lawful Intercept Capabilities".

I'm glad we cleared up that misconception.

Hey AC, I think you're onto something.

The godless heathens advocating this marriage agenda are defiling the institution of prostitution.

The traditional definition of prostituition must be preserved, so in the spirit of fighting for peace, let us all fornicate for chastity.

we dont need activists or guerilla armies to get ourselves out of this mess, the future is now. we need nerds to fight, not guns.

Oh look, the ape woke up and smelled the shit that's flying. It seems angry, and confused. Aren't you aware that people who express sentiments such as yours are exactly the "radical anti-government" extremists that big brother has been preparing for? Shut up with your "fearful masses" bullshit. Perhaps you missed the 70's? Did you happen to miss how quickly the FBI got involved with squelching the Occupy protests?

Take it easy there greenhorn, the other side has got a huge jump on you. Your voting system is compromised, and your governmental process itself is stacked against you. You don't need to be added to the terrorist list, haven't you been paying attention? They already suspect everyone, and are automatically collecting all of our correspondences.

It's not whining and fear that keeps people from doing anything to fix it, it's the cold hard fact that most people are stupid, emotional, and ignorant. So long as emotional appeals work against all these damn dirty apes, then this deceptive bullshit will continue. The answer isn't reactionary bullshit, your opponents have adapted and are now resistant to it. I mean, just look at the purposeful blatantly lies that won backing for the Gulf War, or the McCarthyism before that, the "red scare" and adding of "god" to our money and pledge of allegiance to distance us from "godless commie bastards", etc. Hell, the FBI has been blatantly corrupt for over a hundred years. Omnivore, Carnivore and ECHELON mass surveillance programs have been going on for decades. PRISM's room 641A existed long before 9/11. The USA has been waging socio economic WW-III since the 70's....

And you what? You want to disable license-plate scanners? You want to do some "hactivism" against the NSA and wind up locked up as a pedophile, or framed for rape or murder, just plain old disappeared? Get real. I'm glad you've been roused from your slumber, but education and reform is the answer, not fighting a cyber war against your government. Make no mistake, you'll have given your life in vain and only helped to strengthen their tools of oppression. It's dipshits like you that will get our devices, automobiles, phones, PCs, cameras, etc. rendered inoperable unless an approved citizen authenticates them periodically with a government approved WIFI tower and ID code. They've already mandated the black boxes in our vehicles. Go fight the battle in California where they're proposing mandatory phone kill switches -- The next step after the "anti-theft" kill switch is just to turn the black-list into a white-list, and presto, no phones work unless big bro allows them. Intel already demonstrated their ability to add such cellular kill switches to their CPUs.

I can see the headline now: Cyber Terrorist, Resfilter, Arrested - "The terrorist resfilter has been apprehended and charged with treason and crimes against humanity after coordinating an attack against government infrastructure. Intelligence sources indicate he may be working with Iranian hackers. The FBI reports finding child pornography and videos of Islamic female genital mutilation rituals on his home electronics." You'll be deemed a terrorist and detained without trial to protect national security, since Obama and congress have already eli

What it comes down to is that in the US we've had roughly 100 years of brainwashing to learn that socialism is evil.

Ie, communism is bad because, well.. um just accept it as a lemma and if you don't agree you're either not American or else a traitor. But now socialism is just communism-lite, so that's bad. Time to teach the kids to stay awa from the socialism gateway drug, don't emulate those scandinavian socialists who eat smelly fish. Next up is unions; unions are bad because they are a gateway towards socialism. Besides unions means workers getting more money which means that they have to take that money from someone, and that someone is the hard working god fearing anti-socialists (which should be you if you've been attending all the brainwashing sessions). At this point everyone should instinctively know how to treat anything new; shorter work weeks is a gateway to godless communism, civil rights activists are just trying to keep us out of Vietnam so that the commies can win, and so forth.

However it all sort of fell down once the soviet union collapsed. We lost the great force that we could all be united against. But it was soon replaced with terrorism. You could tell that it was the replacement because the same cold war rhetoric was being used: "they hate our freedom!"

It seems you also don't understand the wearing of the burqa. There is no right or wrong about it, it is to show devotion to god. You know, exactly how nuns cover their hair. It's just that most 'christians' are godless heathens whose religion means nothing to them.

(there has never existed a more regulated society than the modern West).

They call it Byzantine for a reason......also 1700s Germany gets a special mention, and it wasn't by accident Prague produced Kafka. So your claim is somewhat questionable.

People that just make up statistics as they write. Somewhere on the web there should be a right wing bullshit generator, akin to the HR or corporate BS generators.

Pick one from each group....

Group A:

1. It's telling that

2. It just goes to show you

3. Never in human history have

4. In yet another example of

5. We need to be rid of

Group B:

1. Godless liberal

2. Socialist goose stepping

3. Unpatriotic

Group C:

1. Democrats

2. Agents of Satan

3. Union workers

4. Pension recipients

Group D:

1. are waging unprecedented attacks showing their true motives

2. are exposing their moral bankruptcy

3. show their true colors

4. prove once again their stupidity

Group E:

1. in the war on Christmas

2. in the battle against godlessness.

3. in the futility of compromise with Liberals.

4. in class warfare. The only cure is:

Group A 1. lower taxes for the job creators.

2. elimination of regulations.

3. A constitutional amendment establishing the US as a Christian country.

4. return to the principles that made this country great. Let's try it out now.

A=2, B = 1, C = 3, D = 2, E=1 The only cure is A = 1

It just goes to show you, Godless liberal Union workers are exposing their moral bankruptcy in the war on Christmas.

The only cure is lower taxes for the job creators.

Oops, I think I just accidentally invented Fox News!

> With a critical mind and some more reason, it's fairly quick and easy to harness as a tool of control over others.
Oh, just like Math (see "finance") and Justice (see "law") you say?

And to GP thank you for asserting the godless universe in a religious way ("because I, and a bunch of atheists who fail by making arbitrary assumptions").

Back to topic. Who the hell cares if religion is good for your brain. Are we supposed to choose based on convenience? That choice is then irrelevant to an hypothetical just God.
What counts is: do I believe in one, is my belief free from interference, how does it stand against other people's opinions and so on.

It's their anti-science position. Going to Europa and finding alien life might encourage the teaching of evolutions in schools.

It will also interfere with their plan to teach that the Earth is a the center of the universe, and the eventual mandate to make it official policy that the world is flat.

That will put the godless atheists in their place: in the lower left corner of the flat world, where the climate is terrible and all the icky stuff collects at the bottom.

Except it won't - they'll just claim it was faked or staged in some way. The mentality of these sort of people is that they will automatically and unquestioningly reject anything that does not fit their world view.

It will also interfere with their plan to teach that the Earth is a the center of the universe, and the eventual mandate to make it official policy that the world is flat.

That will put the godless atheists in their place: in the lower left corner of the flat world, where the climate is terrible and all the icky stuff collects at the bottom.

Being "godless" makes them smarter in my book, and since "hell" doesn't exist, I am fairly sure they aren't worried about that.

Those godless faggots can go to hell for being unnatural scum.

No, my good man, they're talking about NSA, as in National Secularists Association. It's those godless commies who are degrading online discourse.

PS. I may have eaten your lunch. Label your food in the fridge next time.

What are you even talking about? We can't observe what happened one second ago; we can only observe the present. We can extrapolate what happened in the past based on observations made in the present, though. Science is a mechanism for understanding the universe; there is nothing real that is outside of the realm of science.

Well, is the universe real or are you in a Matrix tub right now? Science is trying to deduct a system from observations but there's no absolute proof that any of them are genuine. We can say it's the solution that best fits the evidence. They can say the Bible is the truth and the universe a hoax, an elaborate test of faith or at best that it's a non-literal summary. It's like arguing with a paranoid person, no matter how everybody seems to ignore him they're just pretending. There's no evidence that could make him believe they're not following him, just like there's no evidence that could stop the religious from seeing god in everything.

That is where some people seem to go wrong in think that if we only fill enough libraries with evidence, they'll eventually come around and say we were right all along as if the scientific point was in doubt. That's not it, the evidence is already overwhelming but they fundamentally dismiss it all as valid evidence. If it disagrees with the Bible it's not true, it's the devil or false gods or godless men trying to trick you and confuse you and turn you away from the one true faith. You can't win that battle by piling up books.

It also means a country full of religious hotheads, who are going to view their own increasingly bleak existence as the result of a conspiracy of all those godless people in Europe and Asia. You sure you're enthusiastic about that kind of development in a country as heavily armed as the U.S.? I'd rather see them be smart, personally.

it just seems that Tea Party candidates has theocratic backing in primaries.

If you look into the GOP demographics, you'll see that the Tea Party is quite distinct from the Christian Right. Now the later likes the Tea Party because they perceive the Tea Party as sticking it to the godless liberals -- but they have many different beliefs, and beliefs are actually important in politics.

I happen to agree with some Tea Party and Evangelical positions, but am appalled by the anti-intellectualism. For example, I hate abortion, which is why I support sex education and access to contraception. (The life begins at conception is just made-up whole cloth so that evangelicals can sound scientific -- just like intelligent design.) I also believe in limited government and Hayeking economic principles. (But this should be data driven -- so, for example, taxing the rich a tiny bit more is a small sin compared to balancing the budget, and the Tea Party will not support cutting the parts of government that really need to be cut: medicare, social security, and the military. The reason is that many Tea Partiers are older white people who collect social security and medicare.)

Well, what are you going to replace it with? Advocates of what some call "scientism" think that science can replace value systems, like religion, when it comes to making decisions about how one should act. In the aftermath of 20th-century megalomania, Eric Hoffer called out the True Believer who, although godless, was nevertheless anything but irreligious.

Will there ever be evidence that anything at all is "good" or meaningful? There are self-styled rational people who want to help others live lives that are free of "delusion" and contribute to the "well-being" of humanity, as if those things were somehow valuable. Yet, when pressed on what exactly well-being consists of, or whether people ought to have it or not, or the point of humanity in the first place, I get the sort of make-believe these people are trying to save me from.

There is no meaning in the universe that isn't utterly make-believe. Our existence is an absurdity; nothing can be proved beyond its physical nature, and there is even a certain tenuousness about that. Perhaps the most dangerous and deluded people of all are the ones who think they are free from delusion because they haven't got religion.

Do you want to know what brings about the biblical apocalypse? Ignorance of the natural world in which we live. Buckle your seatbelts, because the ignorant are starting to drive this bus we call civilization, and the last stop is not utopia.

I hate religion as much as the next godless heathen, but really now.

Surely you don't think climate change is a direct result of belief? At worst, fantasies about the afterlife can make the world appear more disposable to the god-bothered, but I don't think it's churchy mumbo-jumbo that drives hyper-capitalism.

Something else has led the west to overproduce, overconsume, overbear and overlord. And the causes and reasons are rather more prosaic than heavenly.