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Indonesian Man Faces Five Years For Atheist Facebook Post
An anonymous reader writes "31-year-old Alexander Aan faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for posting 'God does not exist' on Facebook. The civil servant was attacked and beaten by an angry mob of dozens who entered his government office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board on Wednesday. The Indonesian man was taken into protective police custody Friday since he was afraid of further physical assault."
While you probably won't get jailed for saying such...
...you can still get the Christian mob to lynch you, eg. Jessica Ahlquist
No sig today...
Actually, not quite true. Many state constitutions do specifically require that only Christians can hold public office (And some define Christian in such a way as to exclude denominations unpopular at the time of writing), but there was a supreme court case years ago which ruled that these aspects of the constitutions are incompatible with the first amendment to the US constitution - and the US constitution overrules state constitutions.
Atheism isn't a belief system, but the rejection or lack of one.
"Atheism is a belief system" is a definition born of an American cultural background. Since theism is the majority position (86%), the distinction between strong disbelief in make-believe beings Vs. mere indifference in same, is given exaggerated importance.
It would explain the relatively small proportion of the population that atheism makes up, as well as why that small proportion is spread throughout the world with no great central region to call home.
I'd say australia is doing fairly well with the atheist business, the census five years ago indicated that approx 30% of australians don't believe in god. And of those that are religious australia has among the lowest church attendance rates in the world, even the believers rate it fairly low on their priorities placing family, work, leisure time and even politics ahead of it.
When Ahlquist won Facebook and Twitter filled up with direct threats against her life and physical well being.
When the Cranston Florists started a Facebook page to take a stand against the "atheist hate" directed at them for refusing to make deliveries to her, the content of the threads I looked at contained no threats of any kind. Lots of criticism, but not even that many insults.
It's night and day in behavior.
Sure, there are assholes on both sides. But the Christians appear to have the lion's share this time.
Most of the laws of the old testament, including the ones you give as examples, pre-exist their supposed divine revelation in the old testament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
Hitler was not atheist in the slightest, he made many references to Jesus in his speeches. He also got to power in part thanks to support from right wing social conservatives and Christian fundies. In his speech to justify giving him emergency powers he calledon the neeed to protect germany from socialism and atheism.
You are right about Stalin being an atheist, but it wasn't atheism that motivated his actions. He just generally "eliminated" anybody who had power he could not control. The church was just one of many examples.
I don't actually know of any atheist country except maybe some communist dictatorships.
Most countries with a high number of atheists ( such as Sweden ) are best described as secular. The difference between a secular government and an atheist one, is that the secular one doesn't comment on whether there is a god or not. Secular governments are built on the principle that it is not for the state to promote religious beliefs ( or lack thereof ).
I think you're getting confused. Pretty much all the pro-choice groups and individuals are pro-contraception - in fact the biggest boogeyman of the anti-abortion movement in the US, Planned Parenthood, actually puts most of its resources towards providing contraception. It's the anti-abortion groups that tend to be against contraception, and in favour of telling kids in school that it doesn't exist and making it harder to obtain in general.