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In the meantime, we will have wasted our time, and ceded any moral high ground, by lowering ourselves to the level of 5-year-old "ha ha told you so ha ha ha!" nonsense.

You don't need any moral high ground when the facts and evidence support your claim and destroy the claims of the opposition - an opposition, by the way, that has been disparaging, threatening, ostracizing, maligning, torturing and murdering us 'godless heathens' for millenia. Screw them and their feelings.

Yes and no.

The Boy Scouts only discriminate against gays and atheists that they are aware of. If you don't think there are some godless gay Scout Leaders, you have another thing coming. So, they only object to out, proud atheists and homosexuals.

So, I think their (immoral) homophobic stance is indeed incompatible with contemporary social standards, but moreover it is primarily contrary to the Open Source model. Indeed, haven't we seen that an open society has improved itself the way open source has? With more eyeballs and more data, both civilization and software improve.

The phrase "godless communists" doesn't come out of nowhere. You don't necessarily need to be an atheist to be a communist, but most communist states were officially atheistic, not just simply secular as Western governments are meant to be.

Karl Marx, both athiest and considered the father of communism, said religion was "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,...the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." In particular, Marxism-Leninism communism explicitly stated that religion was a tool used by the bourgeois to control and further exploit the working class.

To look at an example, the Soviet Union, the only communist state to be a world power (I think, right?), was officially atheistic. The ruling party professed atheism, as well as half of the population (figures determined after the fall of the Soviet Union). Even their propaganda went that way. For example, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, the official Soviet news claimed that he said, "I don't see any God up here!", which is an unlikely quote.

However, in your defense, you won't find much about atheism or religion in The Communist Manifesto. There is a line saying communism "abolishes all religion", but this is more poetic than anything else. Also, lack of religion doesn't imply atheism (most of America's "founding fathers" were not religious, but they were not athiests either).

So, if you meet someone who claimed to be a communist and you had to bet on whether or not s/he was an atheist, I would argue that your money is safest if you bet on the additional adjective "godless" to go in front of "commie". This doesn't work the other way though: I would say (gut feeling again here) it is unlikely that someone claiming to be an atheist is also a communist.

Note: I am an atheist, but I would hate to live in a communist state. So I am not trying to say "one is bad so the other is also bad" or "one is good so the other is good". I am guessing you are either a religious communist or a non-communist athiest and, in both cases, dislike the association.

IANA-American, but from what I understand, if the Republicans win, consider it hax.

Amirite ?

Oh, I'm sorry, are you nauseated by my godless gay-spreading liberal "bias" ?

Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!

Don't you get tired of throwing out the bullshit that has been the standard GOP attack line for decades? That the Democrat is an elitist liberal who will raise your taxes for the sake of raising taxes, take away your guns, sell us out to the UN, and a godless flipflopper.

It's been 40 years since Nixon won the White House. You'd think you could come up with something new.

First off, let me say that I'm not sure what the personal jab you mention is; I assure you my intent is not to offend.

The question about people getting what their taxes go for is one that I've heard a lot, and I understand both sides of the issue, having argued much the same thing on different issues at different times in my life. It seems to me, though, that when we pay our taxes, we do it on the presumption that they go for the betterment of the community, rather than just ourselves. We do not make every road a toll road because some people don't drive, or make people who file charges pay the prosecutor's salary. You might reasonably argue that since you didn't need those services, that you shouldn't have to pay for them, or less reasonably protest that you should have the option of spending that money on a private road system or alternative system of justice. But we don't allow that because we recognize that the system doesn't function if it doesn't know where its next paycheck comes from, and that even if you don't use those facilities, they still benefit you indirectly. It seems to me that the school system falls into that category.

The question of less money for the public schools is a big one, because nobody really agrees on how much less money there will be, and where or when that will have an impact is essentially unknowable. What we do know is that requiring more finely grained accounting of per-student funds changes the allocation schedule, which gives the school less time to spend the same amount of money. That increases the opportunity cost per student, reduces the school's ability to capitalize on their liquid assets and trims another degree of flexibility from an already rigid purchasing system. Even if the total amount of money the school has on hand in a given calendar year remains the same, the method of allocation changes the game in a big way.

About the children/parents who need/want an alternative education- I understand. Bob Jones University is right up the street from me as I type this, and some of my close friends and neighbors from years past have attended it on the principle that no cost was too great to spare their child from the Godless classroom. Some of them were not wealthy people, and labored mightily to make ends meet, and for those people, school vouchers would represent kindness in a great degree.
However, much as my sympathy lies with those people whose convictions drove them to seek what they felt was a more appropriate education for their children, I feel a greater share of compassion for the child whose parents don't give a damn where or if they attend school. The kid who takes the bus every day to a broken down inner city school in the hope of finding truth in the promise of our country- that with hard work, a little luck, and the perseverance common to all successful men, anyone can carve for themselves a better life than the one they were born into. And sadly, this is the child that gets hurt by these plans. That's the million or ten million children whose futures we shortchange in headlong homage to the questionable virtue of an education in diversity.

The question about the relative position of the poor is a reasonable one, but one which does not take into account 1) the issue of opportunity cost, 2) the fact that children are extremely nonliquid commodities (much though toddlers sometimes seem to be an exception), or 3) the limits of institutional flexibility, especially with regard to absorbative capacity. It really isn't possible for a child to be shunted between schools as one star rises and another falls, and certainly isn't desirable for either public or private schools, since the major expenditures of both of those organizations do not scale linearly with the number of students. Between these factors and the smaller cash pool, public schools will be forced to do more with less, while simultaneously being hamstrung by the new accounting requirements.

I'd like to reiterate that I know where you're coming from on this.

The US must act with all urgency to close the cyber-militia gap with those pesky chinks. If not those pesky russky cyber militias will kill all our chillun and convert us all to godless capitalism. The US must develop multiple independently retargetable cyber-militias to close this gap.

As an addendum to that, many blame Christianity for a lot when the worst massacres of the last hundred or so years were performed NOT by Christians, but by godless communistic totalitarianism (Stalin); pagan Nazism (Hitler and the holocaust) and militant Islamism (Darfur, pick a spot in Africa). All of which were opposed by Christians.

Also, practically EVERY in the pre-American Civil War period practiced slavery...and it was Christianity which fought against THAT and prevailed.

historical religious claims?

as in, an isolated incident, one where no modern proof exists?

you have GOT to be kidding me. right??

a god who can't perform CONSTANT 'miracles' is no god. if you require 'special things' to experience god, then it isn't god.

nothing at all about 'history class'. all I need to know about god is what I read in the papers each day; that the world is 100% godless and no one is there 'watching over us'. clearly, no one is watching over us. or, if this is 'protective care' then I don't want any more of it, ok god?

only a fool (or a child) continues to believe fairytales. grow up and see the REAL world around you. magic and religion are both non-real. modern man has (or should have) no more use for such things. lightening and thunder (for example) is not something modern man should still be making up stories to explain! and for things that don't have a current explanation, just let it be rather than trying to COOK UP some hoaky story just so you'll sleep well at night.

this is not about history classes. its about observing how FALSE religion is and how FALSE the whole idea of 'god' is. any real god would continue to prove his existance. there is simply no logical reason why he should 'hide' and only 'believers' would see him. that's your first clue that this is made up shit and not at all factual information. if it was factual, then the 'god miracles' would happen today just like you claim 'from history'.

He could have been stationed in Germany facing the godless commie hordes. It's not that long ago that the Berlin wall came down.

So take a break, don't be an idiot all your life.

The flaw in Bush's plan is that he tends to appoint conservatives. But a conservative judge is even less likely to support anti-constitutional laws than a liberal one. He either needs to to appoint godless commies (who will support his police state but not back his social plans) or conservatives (who will back his social plans but not his police state). The trick is to get people with no principles at all, who will support his arbitrary philosophy, but those people are very hard to find, especially with bench experience.

If I thought for half a second

That would be a lot for you. Don't strain yourself. It's the least this friendly christian could advise you.

See how well it worked on you?

Oh, I thought that it was more like, if you look at which side is most likely to win, I would think that you'd have to with the culture that wins, hands down. Christians win. That's the thing. You couple a nuclear family with lots of kids, a largely peaceful stance coupled with the occasional holy war, and the next thing you know, you have a -dominant- cultural force that not only influences human culture but human evolution just by sheer weight of numbers.

By contrast, what does your godless liberal atheism offer? A chance to be in a minority that can't even breed enough to sustain itself? An offer to be on the side that choose pigs over people? Atheism doesn't exist, pagan religions all failed, because they were not as successful as the mix that is Christianity.

There's not even a threat to Christianity from atheism.... the numbers are so different. There's what, 2 billion christians of some kind, versus an ever miniscule number of atheists? I mean, come on liberalism is screwed up from the get go because you lower your birth rate by supporting abortion... and that's really funny in a tragic way because here you people prattle on about Darwin, yet, you ignore everything he teaches about how to make a successful culture and a dominant species.

And now, having done that, you propose to top it all off with a sort of environmental foolishness that diminishes the wealth of people. What's that going to do? You go ahead and tell people that they have to be poorer to save mother earth for your view. We'll tell people that God loves them and forgives them, and that they should do with the earth what they will, and then the heavens beyond it, when we can reach them. You tell the people that all they have is dust on death, and we'll tell the people the truth about an afterlife if we triumph in God's name. You can insult it, degrade it, and call it what you will, but you cannot deny that when it comes the fundamental values of Christian civilization, not only is God on our side, but Darwin is too.

See on the flipside, oh passenger pidgeon!

If it's the depiction of violence that is to be outlawed, the movie and video industries are in deep trouble. Just imagine where they'd be without sex, violence, and sex-and-violence.

Of course, killing people is considered good clean fun just as long as there's none of that vile, godless S-E-X.

There's no such thing as a "good" bear. They're all godless killing machines, soulless devourers of helpless news pundits. Just ask Dr. Stephen Colbert, D.F.A! He'll tell you!

Noah saw it all.

Not Lucifer, my friend, Cthulhu.

Ia fhthagn

Please stop perpetrating Godless, liberal left, illogical, unscientific ( based on fiction) agenda. Please keep it to technical/Computer/Electronic/Programming etc.

you mean 6000 years ago, and if by a drought you mean a flood, and if by 2000 human beings, you mean one bad-ass yachtsman named Noah and his hot wife Jessica Alba, then I would be inclined to agree. Otherwise I'm afraid this is just another godless article passed off as 'science' by Lucifer-worshipping scientists and their ilk over at CNN.

You actually hit rather closely to my thoughts on this. However the truth of it is; if you watch this video close minded to anything touched on you with either believe it's the greatest thing or think it's the largest crock of bs. To me it just shows zealotry exists on both sides of the fence.

I think anyone who embraces either theory or concept entirely is a fool, as stated several times you can't disprove ID/Creationism. It's not a fair fight since there is no TRUE way to test it, which is why it's largely ignored. However at the same time a lot of the assertions made for the success of evolution that are based on "facts" aren't always fully substantiated either. Unfortunately as mentioned before evolution is the best "scientific" explanation that we have, however that doesn't mean I'm going to hook my buggy up to it either since a lot of it's is based on extrapolated data and little verified geological or archeological data to substantiate it's claims (there are some, but nothing I've seen that made me say "that's it!").

I also don't think Ben Stein is arguing evolution as a method for adaptation either, from what it sounds like he's discussing even further back into the creation of the cosmos. Sure, we have the big bang theory which isn't debated that heavily except by those that realize it has to have had a point of origin as well. So how did we get something out of nothing? Feel free to toss theories out there, I've yet to see one that the math wasn't off or when played in reverse didn't only delay the question of "ok so where did THAT come from?"

So for me the jury is out, and quite honestly I could care less if the question was ignored and people were left to believe what they want. I understand the arguements against another "dark age" but the truth of it is; people are just as capable of doing horrible things to each other as they are to do great things on their own. NO MATTER THE JUSTIFICATION, people will continue to do so. We are quite the grab bag, and killing ones belief in something isn't going to stop bad people from doing bad things (and yes this is a debate in and of itself I know). There are plenty of godless individuals doing horrible things right now and no one bothers to cite that in a debate over why we need to remove the tooth fairy from our children's minds.

My 2 cents, if you don't want to pocket it just leave it on the ground for someone else to pick it up.