A quote from Dan Savage

I simply don't know how any reasonable person can look at all world religions, living and dead, and come to the conclusion that one particular tribe or prophet or science-fiction writer got it right and every other tribe, prophet, and science-fiction writer got it wrong.

Dan Savage, in his Nov. 7, 2012 Savage Love column.

Yet another Christian leader ignorant about Atheists

Did you hear the one about the Anglican minister who said atheists have no reason for grief? I didn't, until Greta Christina blogged about comments by Rev. Gavin Dunbar, who argued that, unless you believe in God, you have no reason to care whether the people you love live or die, or even to love people at all.

Thank you, Greta, for saying what needed to be said - but I wonder if Gavin Dunbar even bothered to read your excellent comments. He obviously needs a LOT of education. He has no idea who Atheists are, our very real values and feelings. Is he ignorant - or willfully insulting?

North Carolina votes for... what?

Yesterday, North Carolina voted to ban not only gay marriage, but all legal civil unions, including those of straight couples.

This does not strengthen marriage in North Carolina. No straight, religious, married couple in North Carolina is now going to be married longer, and have a more fulfilling, happy marriage, because of this vote. That's absolutely irrefutable.

Here's what this amendment does do:

• If a gay person is admitted to a hospital and the hospital decides only family can visit that person, his or her same-sex partner cannot visit. It doesn't matter if that couple (yes, they can still be called a couple) has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person dies, the parents, siblings or children of that person - who that person may not have talked to in years - will have all rights regarding the funeral and burial. Regardless of any relationship that person may have with someone of the same sex, even a 20-year-old partnership, that partner can legally be excluded, entirely, from the planning - even from attending. It doesn't matter if that couple has spent thousands of dollars and oh-so-many hours to have legal paperwork that says they will have this right if such a scenario presents itself. That paperwork is null and void in North Carolina.
• If a gay person gets a job that gives health insurance coverage to a spouse, his or her same-sex partner cannot get that coverage, under any circumstances. 

How does any of that make straight marriage stronger? It doesn't! In fact, straight Christians will continue to sometimes (often?) have relationship and sexual problems, will continue to sometimes (often?) have adulterous affairs, and often get divorced. This amendment does NADA to address those things.

By contrast, without this amendment - if you, North Carolina, allowed gay marriage - here's what would never, ever change:

• If your church does not recognized gay marriage, it would still not recognize gay marriage. Just as a Baptist church is under no obligation to allow Muslim weddings, just as a Catholic church could refuse to marry to non-Catholics, your church would get to continue to refuse to recognize gay marriage. You can refuse to perform such ceremonies, you can ask such people to leave your grounds. That doesn't change no matter how marriage is defined.
• You get to continue to be disgusted by gay marriage, just as I'm disgusted by child marriage, a marriage where there is more than a 30 year age difference between the partners, or religious marriages that require women to stay in abusive relationships. You get to continue to speak out about how you think it's awful, stand up and leave the room in a huff when someone says they support it, ignore people engaged in it, etc.
• You get to continue to refuse to attend any wedding among any two people you don't think should get married, gay or straight.
• Straight people like Kim Kardashian and Brittney Spears will get married for just a few hours/days.
• Gay people would continue to live together, love each other, even hold hands in public.  

So what good did this amendment do you, straight married religious couples of North Carolina?

None. Zilch. Nada.

Consider this, voters of North Carolina: most of you are Christians. But you aren't the same kinds of Christians. In fact, some of you would say that some others of you are NOT Christians. I've heard Church of Christ people say no one else is Christian but them, I've heard Catholics say no one else is a Christian but them, I've heard Baptists say that neither Catholics nor Mormons are Christians, and on and on and on. You people loooove to debate who is and isn't a Christian. You would have gotten to do the same thing regarding gay people had you NOT passed this amendment: you would have gotten to continue to say, "I believe marriage is between one man and one woman and, therefore, those guys over there aren't really married." You would get to continue to believe that, with all your heart. But if you are an intensive care unit nurse, you would have had to keep that belief to yourself when a man came to your unit to see his husband - would that REALLY have been so hard? Are you going to feel better telling that man, "No! You cannot see him! Ha ha!" Is that really what Jesus would do?

Why should your religion - which I do not believe in, by the way - get to determine which loving, adult, consenting couples get to get married? You say marriage is something that is sanctified by God and was created for the purpose of having children - yet here I am, an Atheist who is not having babies, and I was allowed to marry. Are you going to try to take away my marriage now?

This was a vote that was driven entirely - ENTIRELY - by religious people, particularly and especially Christians. And it represents so much of why we Atheists find you just as reprehensible as you find The Gays.

You think the Koran is violent? Have you read the Bible?!

I was raised in a Christian household, in a Christian community, in the Bible Belt. The faction of choice, for the most part: General Baptist, though there was a lot of Methodist meeting attendance also going on. That means there were at least weekly Bible readings going on (often more). I knew a lot of the bible by my teen years, but I decided reading excerpts at least twice a week wasn't enough to really understand it, and so I went through the whole enchilada, cover-to-cover. And as I read, I realized, more and more, that I didn't believe. Reading the Bible over several weeks, cover-to-cover, helped me come to terms with my disbelief -- which I'd always had but would never admit to. I was officially an un-believer shortly after that, per a phone call from a church youth leader asking me to come to church camp, and my saying, for the first time out loud (but not the last), that I am not a Christian.

For various reasons, about 20 years later, I decided to do it again: read the Bible cover-to-cover. I needed a refresher course to keep me sharp for comments like, "Jesus said homosexuality is a sin" (he never did, actually). I remembered that the Bible had made me uncomfortable, even angry, as a teen, for some of its assertions, but as an adult, I was absolutely flabbergasted at how incredibly violent and woman-hating the text is, over and over again. I had remembered the hate of the Bible from the first time around, here and there, but the text is permeated with it, and the violence -- wow. I hadn't remembered that from the first time around. Horrific. And nothing I wanted any part of!

(I have to admit that, on this second reading, I gave up at Revelation -- it's just too crazy to get through)

A couple of years later, I decided to read the Koran. All sorts of Christians were telling me it was oh-so-violent and women-hating, and so I wanted to see for myself. And... I was shocked at how far, far less violent it is than the Bible. It is far from woman-hating, as the Bible is. In fact, it does, quite often, lay out the rights of women -- something the Bible never does. "There are at least 30 verses in the Koran that support equality between women and men and that refer to women's rights in various aspects of life." (reference). Further research showed that Islamic cultures that are anti-women base their beliefs on Hadith, an oral tradition of quotes attributed to the Prophet Muhammad but that are in wide dispute as to which are authentic, on ideas they think are in the Koran but aren't (a lot like Christians who think Jesus commented on homosexuals -- which he never did), and on cultural practices that preceded Islam. While I'm still no fan of the religion (any religion), it's a shame that militants are taking over a religion whose basis for belief is actually far more peace-promoting than the Bible.

In short, Christians certainly have plenty of Biblical basis to beat their wives, rape women, keep their wives and daughters hidden at home, beat their children, and kill whomever they deem as a non-Believer. To have these same Christians claim the Koran is violent shows a jaw-dropping duplicity. By all means, condemn violence and justifications for such -- but condemn ALL justifications for such. Condemn the 911 hijackers -- and the men who blew up clinics and shot doctors in Christ's name. And if you want to say that And if they give birth, I will slaughter their beloved children. (Hosea 9:16 NLT) shouldn't be taken literally, fine -- but you have to say the same for the Koran. If you want to claim that when Paul says oh-so-clearly in 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 that women should be silent in church that, really, he's just saying women only have to be silent when tongues or prophecy is happening, then you ALSO have to acknowledge that the Koran is ALSO open to interpretation.