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Honestly, if you've been stupid enough to support the Humane Society (and you HAVE been..you just advocated sending $ to them) you've not familiarized yourself with the facts about that organization - try Humanewatch (access is available through Facebook). PETA gets all the attention because that is the intent - to draw attention AWAY FROM "animal advocacy" groups primarily interested in sustaining the substantial salaries at the top levels of the organization with no apparent regard for alleviating animal abuse and neglect..it's just a PR ruse managed by the usual suspects..manipulative sociopaths and psychopaths brilliantly duping the public and using them as tools to further this godless shame. Who knows if you're not one of the hired minions trolling the internet to distort and confuse?

I tried, but there were no defenses of atheism on the first page of Google results. But there were a number of articles and clips for blaming atheists (or godlessness, if he makes a distinction) for America's problems and "attacking" atheists. But no defenses of atheism that I could find.

Does he list his positions anywhere? Or is the fluidity of his positions one of the reasons he's interesting?

Glenn Beck on Atheism

Results:
YouTube - Glenn Beck Attacks Atheists and Interviews James Dobson ...
YouTube - Glenn Beck blames godlessness for America's problems
Friendly Atheist Glenn Beck Calls for Americans to Unite. Not So Fast Atheists
"If you happened to catch Glenn Beck on CNN Headline news, there was a segment entitled "Atheist Agenda" regarding the new movie Golden Compass"
MNpublius Glenn Beck: Atheism = Insanity

Yeah, quite a history of Atheism defense there...

It is well know that there are vast, untapped, oil reserves all over the world. The largest of which happen to lie in the US. We could easily increase production if many of the bans on oil drilling in the US were lifted.

That's right! There are "vast" "untapped" seas of oil everywhere! And beneath that, there is more "vastly untapped" oil! Some rocks, then more oil! Infinite supply of energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years to be consumed and consumed and consumed so that it can be all used up in a few centuries ... no wait! God would never let it happen! How would all them born-again Christian Texan Oil company magnates get their righteously owed due?! (or alternatively, how would Allah's chosen families of the house of Saud get theirs?!)

So its Oil! Oil! Oil! Oil all the way down!

And its only because these unreasonable tree-huggers and pinko-commies wont let the Glorious and Righteous Oil Men to drill and drill everywhere until the entire landscape is covered in Glorious Oil Wells, horizon to horizon, instead of them sissy trees and the like, that the prices ever go up! Bastards! Off with them bushes and shrubbery, off with them fish, make way for The Towers that Squirt Black Gold, The Liquid Glory of Supreme Greed at All Costs!

And bonus! There is more! If you squint just right you will see that God (or Allah, if that's your vice) provided for the future (with the somewhat unlikely help of the Soviets) too when the center of the Earth somehow runs dry at the end of slurping tubes of the Glorious And Magnificent Oil Men!

So while all these godless commie tree-huggers panic, real God-fearing men like you should all get a bigger Hummer. 48litre displacement, 26 cylinder one.

Or bigger.

Then again, maybe, just maybe, you've been, just a little bit, a totally gullible victim of the ever more whiny and panicky propaganda courtesy of the utterly blind and irresponsible greed of oil-men and die-hard ideologues of this supposed cure-all system called "Capitalism" who are ever more desperate to hide the fact that their activities (and the long cause-effect chains of these activities) are nothing less than some of the most wasteful and destructive actions in the entire history of mankind, no? Oh and that little small problem: the entire planet's biosphere in total never had enough biomass to account for all of these "vast and untapped" oil "reserves", never you mind in the time-frame during which accumulation of fossil fuels occurred. And that doesn't even include factors such as the amounts of the solar energy thus trapped and the efficiency of the entire process.

Outside of the demented fantasies of oil companies and all those whose comfortable life-style depends on insane actions of irreparably destroying reserves accumulated over period near a billion of years in just a tiny percentile of that time, oil is running out. Permanently. The energy trapped within (along with the base materials for polymers) is nearly gone. And because, thanks to idiots like you, most of the Western world is dependent on wholly insane prices of what is ultimately a unique and irreplaceable material, any shortages of this material will cause societal upheavals the like the world has never seen.

I just hope that all these apologists like you get to live to see that day and get a full, violent brunt of the reckoning when it comes. Right in your faces.

Waaaaahh, the godless liberal commie perverts aren't kowtowing to me. I can't have prayer in schools or the ten commandments plastered everywhere. This is worse than the holocaust! Oh how I have suffered.

Pardon me is I have no sympathy for my bitchy thin skinned christian "brethren".

When can't get served in a restaurant, attacked with dogs and fire hoses, or forced to suffer any of the everyday indignities that many minorities experienced in the past and still today, then they can proclaim oppression

Oh, yeah, I forgot: Christian-Bashing is the last acceptable and politically-correct form of prejudice and ignorant hatred.

Hardly. Quit crying until Christians quit bashing atheists or pagans or anyone else they feel is a godless heathen. You're not even remotely close to the bottom of the pile.

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."

From the second link:

According to this poll, 91% of Tea Partiers want a smaller government with fewer services. Despite this hostility to big government, 62% of Tea Partiers believe that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are worth the cost (apparently no one bothered to tell them that Social Security and Medicare are evil Godless socialist programs).

No matter what the heroes of the Tea Party think or say, the majority of the members believe otherwise. Even a majority of conservatives reject Paul Ryan's budget plan.

Yes, it came from the sudden and cold realization that Russia was technologically superior in space as of Sputnik. The fact that a regime that we knew executed millions through forced starvation was in control of that tech was quite scary. That they were godless matters more to you than it did to this atheist as they routinely executed or hid away anyone who spoke openly.

Yes, context is everything. Technology and its possession has been a driving force forever, as well as economics and religion. They have and will always play a mix. But that push was mostly about technology. That they were murderous was much more a consideration than if they were religious.

>There is no evidence that religious people in middle America are unwilling to pay for science or oppose the purchase and launch of weather satellites. Indeed, middle America happily paid for the Apollo moon program and took great pride in it

That was 50 years ago. And it wasn't about science, it was about "them godless communists that beat us to space first, but we'll beat them to the moon."

Context is everything.

--
BMO

The problem with whether you should know what your teacher believes in is many are whacko so yeah, please keep religion out of schools. I know because we pulled my two boys out of public school in the 5th grade because a teacher actually brought her bible into class and gave a 45 minute lecture on "Godless heathens and sodomites" when my two boys where in class. FYI one is Catholic, the other is gay. Yes we could have sued and owned the fucking school (which is what I wanted to do) but at the time my sister was in the last stage of a terminal illness and frankly the rest of the family had too much stress already to deal with that on top.

But in the case of being gay, we aren't talking about "advocating" one way or another, we are talking about teachers actively supporting bashing either by inaction or basically taking the attitude "God hates fags so they get what they deserve". Replace the word gay with black or Jew and see how long this shit would be allowed. Religious bigotry is one of the few openly bigoted stances this country allows anymore, and frankly it really needs to end.

Yes, but they *could* have just been infiltrating Palin's supporters all along with plans to start a false-flag operation by editing some other mostly irrelevant Wikipedia article to make her supporters look crazy!

I tell you, you can't trust anyone these days. Especially those godless liberals who hate Sarah Palin.

--Jeremy

Well you better hop on the next bus or plane and leave before your head blows up. A bloody revolution is just what we need alright just look how wonderful that strategy works for the rest of the world. It's ridiculous easy to charge the barricades and destroy something but building it back up is not easy and chances are what does get built will be no better or even worse than before. Take some time and study the history of the US and tell me where you find a single year in which someone was not declaring loudly that the country was doomed. Take a good look at all the problems the country has dealt with since it's founding. The religious right in the late 1800's and early 1900's make todays religous right look like look godless heathens. They were able to inact prohibition for god's sake! The left side of the political divide loudly and whole heartily supported leaders like Lenin,Stalin, and Mao while ignoring the millions of people who were purged to create a society of their liking. The disparity of wealth in this country is loopsided but it is still more balanced then it was at the beginning of the industrial age. Look up "Robber Barons" and compare them against today's corporations. Take a look at the civil rights struggles in th 60's and see some really aggregious behavior perpetrated by the police, court systems, and both the federal and state elected governments. This entire country is still very much a work in progress and shouting at the sky and throwing your hands up in the air will not help anything. But maybe we can all just rely on your superior intellect to save the day for the 75-85% of the people you proclaim as ignorant.

What government is claiming that ships don't sink or planes don't crash? Please tell me, so I can stay clear of them in the future.

OTOH, after Chernobyl most Western governments claimed that such a thing could NEVER happen in the West, because our technology and safety measures are SO much better than those of these (godless, communist) Soviets. And then Fukushima proved them wrong.

It's 6:30 here and my plans were to go buying food for the week, like all sundays. nobody suddenly flew up into the sky, but that must be because I live in godless communist hellhole France.

Here in New Zealand, it's nearly twelve hours AFTER zero hour and somehow most of us managed to survive. In fact I must admit I slept through the apocalypse at 6am - is that very bad of me?

Very few people seem to have disappeared skyward either, but perhaps we're a particularly godless nation.

As someone who actually has a scar on the back of his head from a cop that said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't know which I hate more' (and BTW that "fucking nigger" I was driving was a baptist minister that was doing a mini tent revival tour to raise money for the homeless, whom I was playing bass for and driving as a favor and because I believed in the cause even though I'm an atheist, which he would always counter with "Just because you don't love God doesn't mean he doesn't love you"), allow me to say, from the bottom of my heart.....please get the panties out of your ass dude.

Jokes and satire are what we use to know only alleviate some of the hasher realities of this world we live in, but to also shine a light on people's misconceptions without being ugly about it. It is like what my GF who is Cherokee says when people start talking Spanish to her, assuming because she is brown she must be a Mexican "Me no Mexican, Me Cherokee, Me scalp your ass!" and by doing so sets the record straight without any preaching or PC bullshit (and always gets a laugh out of me when I see their faces).

So please, do get the panties out your ass, the sand out yo vagina, or however it is kids put quit being a stuck up prick these days. It is all the PC bullshit that leads us down the slope where you have "victim classes" and "hate crimes " (excuse me? If someone bashes my head in it don't count as much if my head is white? WTF?) and other "sensitivity" horseshit.

Oh and since I'm an atheist Irish/Creek Indian mix, feel free to make all the Godless Heathen, Drunken Mick, and Wild Injun jokes you like. If it is a good one I'll even be passing it around so please keep all jokes GPL or PD.

Now as for TFA? Apple is one of the most lawsuit happy corps bar none, so is anyone surprised? Everyone made a stink about MSFT and TomTom while ignoring the fact that MSFT offered TomTom (who are making money with their devices, not giving them away) the same RAND pricing they offer the flash manufacturers, no discrimination because they weren't using WinCE, and in the entire history of the company they've been the instigator of a whole 7 lawsuits in the company's history. I wonder how many Apple has started? because I bet it is a hell of a lot higher.

If modern designs are so safe, why is no private company willing to insure a new construction effort?

One of the supposedly safe designs that is often mentioned on Slashdot are peddle-bed reactors. Well, recently we had a scare in Germany, where some of those peddles went missing. (They weren't actually missing, just misaccounted for if memory serves right.) Anyway, during the reporting on that incident, the public learned that a substantial amount of these peddles had cracked -- calling into question the fundamental safety of this design.

When Chernobyl blew up our politicians and nuclear operators said that we shouldn't worry because (a) we weren't effected by the fallout and (b) our safety measures are so much superior to the (godless, communist) russians that such an accident would never happen. Both statements have subsequently been proven wrong. People in Bavaria still have to check wild game for radiation before they can eat it, 20 years after Chernobyl and more than a 1000 km away. And the best safety measures are worth nothing if the operator decides to fake them or if the engineers are working on false assumptions, such as a maximum possible wave height of a tsunami that did not take into account the historical record in Japan. (Apparently, the true record was not known at the time the design criteria of many nukes in Japan were formalized.)

It shouldn't surprise you that people outright reject any claim of safety of nuclear plants, given that previous claims of that nature have turned out to be wrong and the incalculable risks that nuclear energy poses. This doesn't even touch on the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and the relationship between civilian and military use of nuclear energy.

And by the way: 11 of Germany's 17 nukes are currently offline. Still, there are no blackouts whatsoever. That's not surprising given that Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes. What's more, the prices for electricity at the Leipzig exchange have not gone up. That suggests that the market for electricity is completely saturated in the region. Apparently, we don't need nuclear energy in Germany at all, contrary to what the operators and politicians told us just a year ago. The recent events in Germany have made it obvious that nuclear plants are nothing but cash-printing machines for big energy companies. But while they are making hay, crucial investments in alternative energy are delayed. It's the same old game for nuclear companies: Profits are privatized while costs are socialized.

Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious.

There actually was a fun study awhile back on the Colbert Report. The more conservative a person was the more likely they were to think that Colbert was a serious conservative, the more liberal the more likely they were to think we was being purely sarcastic.

Basically, it is amazing how much cognitive biases color the world.

I used to live in a very liberal college town, and people routinely called me a fascist, neo-con freemarketeer. Now I live in a very conservative city and I'm a leftist, socialist, Mao worshiper. I've been called an "evangelical" on atheist boards (for disagreeing with pure materialism), while every single one of my religious friends think I'm a godless heathen.

I'm guilty of this too. One of my friends I haven't seen since high school came back from Afghanistan where he worked as an interrigator, and espoused being a Libertarian. I quickly dismissed him as being some flavor of Tea Party loon. After a bit of discussion I realized that we have a fair bit in common, though we disagree on core issues. He probably though I was a leftist pinko.

We only see the world in black and white, and it colors our perceptions of others. If you don't agree with my subjective opinion you must be diametrically opposed to everything I see as "good and true", and therefore the enemy. Sadly we let this trend take over, and it has become the whole basis of our debate. It isn't about whats best for people, its about furthering my ideology and banishing those I view as being its enemy.

This is why I completely stopped watching broadcast news. This is why I dread the upcoming primary season. This is why Slashdot is even getting tedious... here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and this no room for actual conversation.

If I had one wish, it would be for the rebirth of rational civil discourse, or at least a higher standard of it.

A fair point, and it is admirable, but it's perhaps worth clarifying that I wasn't only referring to tuition (substantial though it is, the aforementioned godless commie government helped me out a lot in that regard) - I can't imagine living with a commercial loan of that size like so many Americans do, but it's straightforward and clear, it's like the sticker price on the education one receives.

The bit that was unexpected, the bit that really made me think "These guys are in it for the money", was the (sometimes petty, sometimes substantial) hidden costs enforced by university policies. All first years had to live on campus, in housing with rents a good 40%+ above other local options. Many housing plans came with mandatory pre-paid meal plans: distinctly average cafeteria food at rates that work out to $12/meal; an effort to donate all unused pre-pay meals to charity was deemed too costly to implement. Student run societies needed to go through bureaucratic approval in order to purchase food for events from any sources other than the university's private catering contractor. Not only did courses require $70+ textbooks, the campus book store tended to sell them at rates a good 20% higher than Amazon.

It's beginning to sound like I had a real problem with the place, and that's absolutely not the case. I learned a huge amount and there were parts of the American system that I would love to see adopted in England. It's just jarring to go in expecting a public service organisation, albeit one with a significant up-front cost, and instead find the administration to be treating you as a captive audience of customers.

You probably didn't mean anything deep by it, but I find the choice to lump universities under the broad heading of 'charity' an interesting one. Although I think there's little better use for one's money than promoting education, my time spent at a (fairly well-regarded) American university seemed (to my godless commie foreign eyes) a surprisingly commercialised experience. It's clear just from looking at the campus that an awful lot of money is given back by alumni, and this action by Bose further confirms it, but I don't think I could ever get over the voice in the back of my head saying "What about all those times you tried to screw me out of every penny I didn't have?".

I applaud the efforts of people like Bose in giving something back, and I know this is something of a digression. It just seems odd, from my external perspective, that people are happy giving such vast gifts to organisations that treat their students in such a mercenary manner; or, I suppose, that organisations receiving such vast gifts still feel the need to squeeze their students so much...