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Oh right, liberal bias blah blah blah. You have cornered the persecution market.

I love how Bill O'reilly screams about liberal bias one second, acting the victim, then triumphantly touts his huge ratings the next. Which is it, Bill? Persecuted or adored?

Which, BTW, you can only do once.

Cities? What about self-parking cars?

Don't let the sarcasm drip on you on the way out . . .

So those fundamentalists who thought the mark of the beast was RFID chips under the skin were wrong after all . . .

Truth? You can't HANDLE the truth! {/Jack Nicholson}

It's called 'The Holy Hand Grenade'. Let's see those godless commies try to defend against that one! :)

I believe the parent omitted the crucial phrase "among Trekkies". TNG certainly had the mass market appeal (and was therefore the most successful by the metric of finance) but the "real" Trekkies I know all prefer DS9 to anything else while the closet Trekkies and the I-was-raised-in-the-80s group all like TNG.

Or the current evangelical missionary idea as seen in places like Uganda who are trying to do the same thing with Christianity.

. . . such as there are 4 cups in a quart (2 in a pint) or 5280 feet in a mile or 1760 yards in a mile. Or 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon. Or 16 ounces in a pound and 16 fluid ounces in a cup. Or that fluid ounces and dry ounces are different so you need to use different measuring cups. Seems most people can there are 365 days in 3 out of 4 years, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day??

Oh no! We'll all go down in flame when the average person on the street is using the measurement system that's already used by pretty much all scientists in the US! But, they're probably in on it too, right? Godless hippie commie scientists.

I don't know if he's joking or not yet, I'm still drawing that sine wave . . .

...anyone who dares to disagree with them or who tries to offer an alternative viewpoint.

Oh, and on the other side of the Global Warming coin, I am tired of the godless left as well.

Well what we need is money to build an interstellar cruiser. Now this spaceship will be able to travel through a wormhole and deliver the message and the glory of jesus christ to those godless aliens. Send your money now! Amen.

You know what, maybe as a Human Being you can have some respect for people and let them know how to improve their life! This life is temporary you know (For those Godless individuals), maybe you can help someone who needs it! Thinking about your damn self all the time is pretty arrogant and contributes nothing to this world! I have taken employment law and a little commen sense goes along way! Dont give them anything in writing or electronic (e-mail) and have some balls to tell them verbally in PRIVATE! Whos going to prove anything at that point if they want to get legal about it? The chance it would go there is slim and they can say what ever they want anyway, tell them this is off the record (In other words I didn't tell you this!). Make a difference in that persons life for the better!! Maybe they won't write bad code somewhere else, who knows you could be using a peace of software they had some part in someday, you never know! I also think the public relations thing is good all around for you and the company! Grow a pair, you do have an obligation!

It's a shame this got modded down to Troll, because the vast majority of people in this world fail to understand Fundamentalism in all its guises.

To paraphrase and conflate Ayn Rand and 1 Timothy, the refusal to reason is the root of all evil.

It's nothing more than a simple statement of fact--the war promulgated by Fundamentalist Islamist Extremists against what they consider the Godless Infidel will not end until one side or the other is completely annihilated.

Not that I advocate annihilation of one faction or the other, it's just that it's the nature of Fundamentalism to frame things in these terms.

You should never be without your towel.

I can be an atheist and still think abortion is fundamentally wrong

Not really. What would make it so ? Not god, since an atheist denies the existence of one. Nor laws of physics, since they - being purely mechanical - don't care. Not society, since that ultimately just means that some people arbitrarily decided that something is wrong - arbitrarily, since they have no higher moral authority to base their decision on, there being no higher moral authority in atheism - and not yourself, since that is just you deciding something is wrong without anything to back that decision besides your personal tastes for the reasons mentioned previously.

An atheist really shouldn't talk about right and wrong - and certainly not about "fundamental" right and wrong - since they simply have no meaning in a godless, purely physical world. "Beneficial" and "harmful" might be useful replacements, but they obviously raise the question "to whom ?".

Now let's see how many people flame me with "I'm an atheist and a moral person!", completely missing my point: that since there is no being in atheism capable of authoritatively declaring one set of moral values better than others, and since nature is unable to do so either, "moral behavior" can in atheism be defined by any person any way they want with no one being able to show any reason why that definition would be any better or worse than any other definition; consequently, any behavior is just as moral in atheism as any other (since it's always possible to make up a moral code justifying it, even if that code only says "I can do whatever I want, but the rest of you can't"), which of course means that the word "moral" has no meaning in atheism.

Luckily, most atheists still follow the religion-derived values of the society around them, being unable or unwilling to take their belief - or lack of belief, whatever viewpoint you prefer - to its logical conclusion, and so stay productive or at least non-destructive members of society. And luckily most religious people don't take seriously every weird half-baked phisolophy various theologians with too much time on their hands have added to it over the centuries, especially the parts about killing anyone who disagrees on anything with religious leaders. Laziness is the one thing that unites the masses of humanity anywhere, no matter their creed :).

While it is true that one could theoretically develop an ethical framework without religion, it is simply naive to assume that any ethics system in place in modern society is devoid of a religious influence and therefore ethics and religion are definitely linked together.

This is an odd assertion. In the first place, you don't have to look hard to find a system of truly atheist ethics. Consider, for example, any of the atheist existentialists. Names like Camus and deBeauvoir (not to mention Sartre) are not exactly unknown to people who study ethics.

Next keep in mind that the average Joe on the street has more or less 0 knowledge of the theological basis to religious ethics. The elements of ethics transferred from religious prophets, scholars, and even authoritative texts (scripture) are only the most simplistic shadows of their original statements.

This same process has been operating for quite some time from atheist philosophy to the mainstream. Your average godless materialist has probably not read "Ethics of Ambiguity", but certainly employs some kind of watered-down remnant of atheist ethics. So while I'd agree that it's hard to talk about ethics without even mentioning religion, there are already competing non-religious ethical systems that have been around for quite some time (decades, generations).

Finally, and most importantly, you have to realize that people who take ethics seriously and are religious are still going to (for the most part) discuss ethics in a religion-neutral view. The evangelicals get all the press because they are so loud and out-there. Their idea of an ethical discussion is convince you to accept Jesus as your personal savior first, and then have you believe everything their pastor tells you that Jesus said second. But a lot of religious people debate their ethical and philosophical viewpoints without trying to convert you first (or at all).

In short, not only can any serious discussion of ethics take place without requiring people to assert a particular dogma (atheist or some variant of theism), that's how most serious discussions of ethics actually work.

-stormin

Possible that nobody cares, but this is slightly inaccurate. OS X does not actually keep buttons on background windows active. The reason that you can still use the buttons to close a background window is due to the fact that there are two actions taking place when you click a mouse button. The first action (mouse button down) activates the window. The second action (mouse button up) is the actual "click" which "presses" the close/minimize button.