Samantha Bee with part two of her examination into the history of the Religious Right.

Okay now I really liked this show before, but right now I am nursing a serious admiration boner for Samantha Bee. (Yes admiration boners are a real thing, that I totally just made up for this post.)

She is not only making me miss Jon Stewart less she has inspired me to write a letter to the folks over tat TBS to ask why in the fuck the show is not on five days a week, instead of once.

Dammit I need more programming like this.

Hell we ALL need more programming like this.

Samantha Bee just did to the Religious Right what they have been doing to America for the last forty years.

Okay first off let me just say that Samantha Bee is singing my song and the melody sounds delightful.

This is what I have been talking about since the very beginning of IM. In fact this issue is why IM even exists.

And damn did she do a good job or what?

This is right up there with the deep dives that John Oliver has been doing over at HBO, and that is high praise indeed.

Do yourself a favor and watch this entire segment.

And then do the country a favor and spread it far and wide.

In sign of desperation Donald Trump tries a little too hard to woo the Religious Right.

Courtesy of KXAN:

After initially declining the invitation, Trump spoke Friday in front of several hundred social conservative leaders at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington. He joined a speaking program that includes Republican rivals with long records of dedication to religious causes — among them, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who wants his colleagues to risk a government shutdown to block funding to Planned Parenthood. 

Trump brought his Bible along once again, and briefly addressed his faith between attacks on his rivals and Democrats. 

“I believe in God. I believe in the Bible. I’m a Christian,” he said. He ended by bemoaning the increased use of the term “Happy Holidays” in place of “Merry Christmas” as a sign that Christianity is under attack. As president, he said, he’d reverse the trend.

God, the jumping on the "War on Christmas" bandwagon.  That is possibly the lamest pandering that any politician can do.

And as Mediaite points out Trump is more than a little vulnerable to attacks on that topic himself:

And that is only the cherry on top of the numerous tweets that Trump sent out over the years to friends and co-workers wishing them, not a Merry Christmas, but the more politically correct "Happy Holidays."

Ah hypocrisy, where would the Trump campaign, and in fact the entire GOP "deep bench" of nominees be without it?

This Values Voter Summit is also where Trump got booed for calling Marco Rubio a "clown."

Yeah I think Trump's starting to feel the heat.

Yeah in politics BS will only take you so far (Of course in the Republican party that distance is the top of the polls) but eventually people are going to start getting sick of the dog and Pony show and demand to see what you've got.

And all that Donald Trump has got, is more dogs and more ponies.

Watching Ted Cruz get cock blocked by Huckabee staffer during release of Kim Davis might be my favorite thing ever.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

When Mr. Cruz, who met with Ms. Davis, exited the Carter County Detention Center, a throng of journalists beckoned him toward their microphones, but an aide to Mr. Huckabee blocked the path of the senator, who appeared incredulous. 

Soon after, Ms. Davis emerged, apparently wearing the same clothes she had worn in court Thursday. Mr. Huckabee stuck close by her side, along with Mr. Staver and her husband, Joe, as they approached the reporters and cameras. Ms. Davis remained silent, letting Mr. Staver and Mr. Huckabee do the talking.

Damn you know this must have REALLY pissed Cruz off.

Here he flies all the way to Kentucky and he is left standing on the sidelines, watching Huckabee jam his lard-ass into the spotlight.

A very sad Ted Cruz, not on stage. pic.twitter.com/MaAM6lvA4A

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) September 8, 2015

However before you get too sad for Rafael, you should know that he got his time pandering to the religious right as well..

Praise God Kim has been released! https://t.co/Ev47wkemvD #ImWithKim pic.twitter.com/pHRqajimE3

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 8, 2015

Still it was Huckabee that got to announce, along with her attorney, “Kim Davis is free.” And then of course offer himself to be jailed in her stead.

Gee I wonder what they think about gay marriage? Actually no I don't.

My favorite part is that they are parked in a handicap spot.

What the future could hold for America if the religious Right Wing get their way.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

A 10-year-old pregnant with her stepfather’s child will not be allowed to get an abortion because the government of Paraguay doesn’t believe that her life in immediate danger. 

On April 23, the unnamed girl was reportedly checked into the hospital by her mother. She complained of stomach pains and tests showed she was already 21-weeks pregnant. Earlier this week, her mother apparently requested her daughter be given an abortion, and when it was revealed that her stepfather impregnated her, the mother was taken into custody. 

Doctors requested permission to perform the procedure. In Paraguay, abortions can’t be performed in the case of rape or incest, and only if the government decides that a life is in danger. In this case they decided it wasn’t.

So not only did this innocent child suffer the trauma of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, but now she is expected to carry his baby to term. Which for a ten year old child is a prospect fraught with danger. 

For those who do not think this can happen in America, you are right.

For now.

But if the religious conservatives get what they ultimately want, incidents like this will start to take place right here in the US of A.

As a matter of fact if Mike Huckabee were to be elected, we could be dealing with this as early as 2017.

This courtesy of a New York Times article from 1996: 

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.

Frightening isn't it?

And it is not only abortion that the Religious Right wants to do away with. It's also access to birth control.

From a book by Robert Boston called "Taking Liberties": 

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church lobbied to restrict access to all contraceptive devices and medications. Many Protestant leaders did as well. Most Protestant denominations would later drop their opposition to birth control. The Catholic hierarchy never did. 

It’s important to understand that church officials sought to ban birth control even for married couples and non-Catholics and that this continued until the 1960s. In addition, the laws that church officials pushed to pass didn’t just outlaw birth control, they also forbade information about birth control. Well into the twentieth century, in some states, a married couple could ask a doctor for advice about how best to limit the size of their family and be told that he could not legally distribute such information. Laws like this were common throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century in New England states, which had a strong Catholic tradition.

Today these anti-contraception ideas have spread from the Catholic church and metastasized within the Evangelical community as well. 

They don't often publicize with the same ferocity with which they oppose abortion, but the Hobby Lobby case opened a preview into what they are ultimately fighting to attain.

Total control over a woman's reproductive system, which they see as a birthing center for God with which no man, or woman, has the right to interfere.

So do I need to remind you again why it is of the utmost importance to make sure to elect a President who will choose Supreme Court Justices that are pro-choice?

I didn't think so.

Is the slow motion death of religion in America more the fault of the Republicans than it is the fault of outspoken Atheists? Could be.

As all of you know the only thing that fascinates me more than politics is religion. And I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about its origins, evolution, and its decreasing popularity in America, and increasing popularity in other parts of the world.

Seriously I could write, debate, and learn more about it every day and not grow bored of the subject.

So when I happened upon this article from Salon I had to share it.

It sets out to essentially understand what is behind the increase secularization in America today.

It does discuss the Atheist movement led by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and others, as well as the Catholic church scandals, the rise of the internet, and a few other contributing factors.

However the one that caught my eye was this one:

For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House. 

What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of “nones” in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, “After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.”

These are very good points that I agree with wholeheartedly. 

In fact, as I have shared many times before, the factors above have quite a lot to do with your ability to visit this blog today.

It was in response to that Republican branding, and the attempt to paint themselves as the moral superior of every other political group, that pissed your favorite Alaskan blogger off so much that he started channeling his frustration through a keyboard.

However as much as I agree with authors about how the Republican Religious Right poisoned the well, I still think that without the internet we would not be seeing the changes we are witnessing today.

Anybody care to disagree?

The political power of the religious Right is coming to an end, and we have the Millenials to thank for that.

Courtesy of The Guardian:

Even in the deep South, the Republican base of white evangelical Christians is shrinking – and in some traditional conservative redoubts like Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, it’s declined as a percentage of the population by double digits. Even Alabama is becoming less Christian. Meanwhile, there’s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to vote more Democratic. 

While the effect on evangelicals is new, the general pattern isn’t. The Catholic church, the largest single religious denomination in America, was the first to feel the pinch. Church leaders and Catholic apologists have been fretting for years over the problem of aging and shrinking congregations, declining attendance at Mass and fewer people signing up to become priests or nuns – although their proposals for how to solve the problem all consist of tinkering around the edges, or insisting that they need to try harder to convince people to believe as they do. 

America’s next-largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, held out a bit longer but has now come down with the same affliction. Membership has been declining for the last several years – to the point where half of SBC churches will close their doors by 2030 if current trends persist. And as with the Catholic church, the SBC defenders with the biggest platforms have insisted that they don’t need to change anything if they just double down on their existing policies and pray harder for revival. 

What’s driving the steady weakening of Christianity? The answer, it would seem, is demographic turnover. 

The so-called millennials (Americans born between 1982 and 2000) are far more diverse, educated and tolerant than their predecessors. They’re also the least religious generation in American history – they’re even getting less religious as they get older, which is unprecedented – and the majority of them identify Christianity as synonymous with harsh political conservatism. 

As older, more religious generations fade away and younger generations replace them, the societal midpoint shifts. And this trend is going to accelerate in coming years, because the millennial generation is big. They’re even bigger than the baby boomers.

You know the main focus of this blog has never been about Sarah Palin, she actually came along four years after I started it. It has always been about taking down the Religious Right and destroying their stranglehold on our politics.

Remember back in 2004, when The Immoral Minority came to be, George W. Bush had just won his second term in office, we were in the middle of two unnecessary wars, the Evangelicals had insinuated themselves into every facet of government and the military, and secularism was under assault from all directions.

As an Atheist it is no exaggeration to say that I was terrified about the direction we were headed, and what that meant for my daughter and the future of this country.

It is for that reason that I have worked so hard to reveal the ugly truth about the Evangelicals chosen star of 2008, and what she demonstrates about the hypocrisy of that politically powerful group.

In fact Sarah Palin has been incredibly helpful in revealing much of the sordid underbelly of politics and religion in America.  Her fake pregnancy to attract the pro-life folks, her fake Christianity to attract the Bible thumpers, her fake conservatism to attract the Reagan-ites, have all been revealed on this blog and many, many others.

And through those revelations we have also been able to get a look inside the true agenda of the Right Wing which is to use the easily deceived religious folks to amass great power and influence, and then use that to essentially line their own pockets at the expense of those who trusted them and bought into their line of bullshit.

That is why I am such a fan of the Millenials. THEY are the result of greater access to information on the internet. THEY are the result of the Religious Right's power grabs. And THEY are the what we need to break the grip of ignorance and superstition, and to move toward greater enlightenment and a better understanding of our place in the universe, and our responsibilities here on this planet.

And boy am I glad they are here, for it is not a moment too soon.

Even one year of extra schooling makes it 10% less likely that a person will be religious or superstitious.

Courtesy of The Economist:

 Just one extra year of schooling makes someone 10% less likely to attend a church, mosque or temple, pray alone or describe himself as religious, concludes a paper* published on October 6th that looks at the relationship between religiosity and the length of time spent in school. Its uses changes in the compulsory school-leaving age in 11 European countries between 1960 and 1985 to tease out the impact of time spent in school on belief and practice among respondents to the European Social Survey, a long-running research project. 

By comparing people of similar backgrounds who were among the first to stay on longer, the authors could be reasonably certain that the extra schooling actually caused religiosity to fall, rather than merely being correlated with the decline. During those extra years mathematics and science classes typically become more rigorous, points out Naci Mocan, one of the authors—and increased exposure to analytical thinking may weaken the tendency to believe.

Really helps to explain why Conservatives and the Religious Right are always attacking public education don't you think?

Conservatives now using public education to spread Right Wing propaganda and dumb down the population.

Courtesy of Salon:  

One of the biggest obstacles for the conservative movement when it comes to recruiting new members is, to be frank, reality itself. History, science, economics are all fields constantly churning out information that makes right-wing ideology look silly, nonsensical and even delusional. In response, the conservative movement has launched a massive media campaign against reality that spreads out on Fox News, talk radio and the web, but despite all this, conservatives are not satisfied. The kids are who conservatives really want. That’s why the right is relentless about its attempts to get into public schools, throw out actual information and replace it with false and misleading ideology. Whether or not they’ll actually be successful in tricking kids into becoming conservatives is up for debate, but in the meantime, they are doing a lot of damage to childrens’ ability to get a decent education. 

The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas. The state is often at the center of conservative-fomented education controversies, as right-wingers there keep trying to sneak creationism into the science classroom. Texas also continues to maintain its abysmally high teen pregnancy rate by pushing sex “education” that usually doesn’t bother to mention contraception. While the right has been losing some ground on those two issues, a new report from the Texas Freedom Network suggests that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into public school history classrooms.

The article goes on to remind us that the textbooks adopted by Texas are often the only ones publishers bother to print, and therefore become the textbooks used by public schools all over the country.

So how bad are these books really?

Well here are some of the troubling findings documented by ten scholars studying textbooks proposed for public school classrooms in Texas as reported to the Washington Post: 

A number of government and world history textbooks exaggerate Judeo-Christian influence on the nation’s founding and Western political tradition. 

Two government textbooks include misleading information that undermines the Constitutional concept of the separation of church and state. 

Several world history and world geography textbooks include biased statements that inappropriately portray Islam and Muslims negatively. 

All of the world geography textbooks inaccurately downplay the role that conquest played in the spread of Christianity. 

Several world geography and history textbooks suffer from an incomplete – and often inaccurate – account of religions other than Christianity. 

Coverage of key Christian concepts and historical events are lacking in a few textbooks, often due to the assumption that all students are Christians and already familiar with Christian events and doctrine. 

A few government and U.S. history textbooks suffer from an uncritical celebration of the free enterprise system, both by ignoring legitimate problems that exist in capitalism and failing to include coverage of government’s role in the U.S. economic system. 

One government textbook flirts with contemporary Tea Party ideology, particularly regarding the inclusion of anti-taxation and anti-regulation arguments. 

One world history textbook includes outdated – and possibly offensive – anthropological categories and racial terminology in describing African civilization. 

A number of U.S. history textbooks evidence a general lack of attention to Native American peoples and culture and occasionally include biased or misleading information. 

One government textbook … includes a biased – verging on offensive – treatment of affirmative action. 

Most U.S. history textbooks do a poor job of covering the history of LGBT citizens in discussions of efforts to achieve civil rights in this country. 

Elements of the Texas curriculum standards give undue legitimacy to neo-Confederate arguments about “states’ rights” and the legacy of slavery in the South. While most publishers avoid problems with these issues, passages in a few U.S. history and government textbooks give a nod to these misleading arguments.

The conservatives have been attacking public education for decades now, often attempting to undermine them by pushing for charter schools, or  encouraging parents to home school their children.

Now it seems that they are attacking education at its source.

Let's face it the conservatives and the religious right do not care one bit about truth, facts, or accuracy. All they care about is continuing to promote their agenda and maintaining a level of ignorance that allows them to continue to perpetuate their bullshit.

Remember facts have a liberal agenda.

93 year old founder of Chick-fil-A passes away.

Courtesy of WSB-TV:  

S. Truett Cathy, the billionaire founder of the privately held Chick-fil-A restaurant chain, died early Monday morning. He was 93. 

Under the religiously conservative founder, the chain gained prominence for its Bible Belt observance of Sunday — none of its hundreds of restaurants are open on that day, to allow employees a day of rest. Its executives often said the chain made as much money in six days as its competitors do in seven. 

Those religious views helped win Cathy and his family loyal following from conservative customers, but also invited protests when Cathy's son denounced gay marriage. 

Cathy's son, Dan, who is currently chairman and president of the chain, had told the Baptist Press in 2012 that the company was "guilty as charged" for backing "the biblical definition of a family." Gay rights groups and others called for boycotts and kiss-ins at Cathy's restaurants. The Jim Henson Co. pulled its Muppet toys from kids' meals, while politicians in Boston and Chicago told the chain it is not welcome there. The controversy later subsided.

It is too bad that a man that the business that this man worked so hard to create is now synonymous with homophobia. Though considering the crowd that he pandered to, I guess it was not entirely unpredictable.

They did not say exactly what killed the 93 year old, so it could simply have been old age.

I mean unless there was some outside influence on his health, you know like a nasty infection or possibly a curse, but I could not imagine what that might have been.

Can you?

94 years ago the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified. These are some of the arguments used against it.

And let me just remind you that the very same middle aged conservative white men that are today arguing against raising the minimum wage, closing the gender pay gap, and reforming immigration is the same demographic that fought so hard almost 100 years ago to nip this in the bud as well.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Fundamentalists are not convinced people are getting the message that THEY are being persecuted. So their newest foray into movie making is titled "Persecuted." There, that should do it.

Here is how the New York Post describes the film:  

The Lord works in mysterious ways but “Persecuted” works in blundering, obvious ways, straining a Christianity-under-attack theme through a dopey thriller. James Remar plays a Billy Graham-like evangelist who refuses to back a corrupt senator (Bruce Davison) pushing some sort of religious-unity bill for which details never quite emerge but that would effectively neutralize US Christianity. Or something. Framed for rape and murder in moronic ways that wouldn’t fool anybody, the evangelist turns fugitive while he tries to clear his name with the aid of his dad — a priest played by Fred Dalton Thompson. Hey, you know who else wandered in the wilderness?

Of course as all of you know "Arts and Entertainment" is one of the mountains described in the Seven Mountains mandate put forth by the Dominionists. 

And this movie, along with "Heaven is Real," "Noah," "Exodus," and a whole slew of others is supposed to convince the nonbelievers that God is real and religion is necessary, and also gives the believers something to watch which kowtows to their primitive superstitions.

Personally I welcome the idea that the Religious Right is turning to cinema as way to prove the existence of God.

That just makes it all the easier for me to convince the naysayers that Batman is real.

After all HE has been in tons of movies, almost as many as Jesus. So take that you, Dark Knight atheists!

P.S. But seriously this movie is, if you will pardon the expression, god awful. And it is certainly not going to win any converts, though it might help to reinforce the American Christian's ever increasing persecution complex.

I think we can all agree on this.

Have Conservatives abandoned science altogether?

Courtesy of Salon:  

The recent reboot of the show Cosmos on Fox further demonstrated how partisan the very idea of science and empiricism has become. The show, which features astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson taking over the host role from the original’s Carl Sagan, was aggressive in defending science, curiosity, and following the evidence from people who would rather rely on faith or authority, but it took no partisan positions. Nonetheless, it was immediately understood by Americans both left and right as a “liberal” show, merely for its strong insistence that facts should not be ignored in favor of wishful thinking. 

Even though the show was hosted on the Fox network channel, Fox News, the conservative cable channel, did not hold back in the slightest from attacking Tyson for perceived liberalism. In a shockingly racist segment, host Greg Gutfeld and guest Gavin McInnes dogged relentlessly on Tyson, insinuating that he can’t really be an astrophysicist and making fun of “white liberals” for being enthusiastic about Tyson and his work. It only grew uglier with McInnes claiming that Tyson deserved to be mistreated based on his race when he was young because he “fit the profile” by having “a huge afro.” 

While that was the ugliest example of race-baiting, overall conservative media had a tendency to treat Cosmos like its insistence on empiricism and rationality was inherently a culture war issue, so much so that many Christian conservative media outlets attacked every episode in the series with fervor. It wasn’t just when it came to Tyson’s acceptance of evolutionary theory, either. Christian conservatives threw a fit because the show told the story of how Giordano Bruno, a 16th century monk, was burned at the stake for free-thinking. Even though the story fit directly into the larger argument the show made about the dangers of repressing free inquiry, Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute felt that criticizing the church for torturing a man to death should be off-limits because the man in question was a monk, not a scientist. 

Or, even more hilariously, when Tyson mentioned in passing on the show that Christmas was established by the church not because it’s actually Jesus’s birthday but because the church needed a holiday to compete with the popular pagan Saturnalia, Richards completely exploded in rage and denial. “We learn that the holiday celebrated by a couple billion Christians is really a camouflaged take-over of Saturnalia, the High Holy Day when ancient Romans celebrated Saturn, the god of agriculture,” he whined. The only problem is that when Christmas was established, Christianity wasn’t a religion with two billion followers. It was an upstart faith and Saturnalia was, in fact, one of the hands-down most popular days of the year for the followers of the pagan faiths that had been dominate for thousands of years. None of this requires math to understand, but now the right has gone so anti-evidence that even boring old history is considered up for debate.

Part of what I loved about the new Cosmos is that it so fearlessly discussed facts that I knew were going to cause the Religious Right and conservatives to rend their clothing in response.

And it did so with such nonchalance, as if it were simply stating the obvious and suggesting that those who rejected the reality were simply afraid to let go of the comfort provided by fairy tales told to a child.

It also helped to illustrate just how deeply the divide is between those who rely on faith to navigate through life, and those who rely on reason.

A divide that may have been best characterized by the show's creator Ann Druyan. (The late Carl Sagan's widow):

During my all-too-brief phone conversation with Druyan, we also discussed her brilliant rereading of the story of the Garden of Eden, which she sees as the story of humanity’s escape from “a maximum-security prison with 24-hour surveillance.” Adam and Eve’s capital offense is that they seek knowledge and ask questions, precisely the qualities that define the human species. At least in that story, God appears to demand a subservient and doctrinaire incuriosity, and many of his followers continue to insist on that path to this day. 

The show simply HAD to be attacked by the conservatives who desperately need a populace that makes decisions based on fear and ignorance, rather than facts and intelligence.

Personally I hope the success of the show opens the door to a whole new era of similar programming that will help educate a populace whose public school system is right now under attack by those who cannot abide a well educated citizenry. 

Religion in America is rapidly moving toward extinction. And those responsible? The very people who tried to force it down our throats.

Courtesy of Salon:

 Every piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent. 

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. If that gives you reason to celebrate, consider this: by the year 2130, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian will equal a little more than 1 percent. To put that into perspective, today roughly 1 percent of the population is Muslim. 

The fastest growing religious faith in the United States is the group collectively labeled “Nones,” who spurn organized religion in favor of non-defined skepticism about faith. About two-thirds of Nones say they are former believers. This is hugely significant. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over-zealousness of the Christian Right. 

Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.” 

Ironically, the rise of the Christian Right over the course of the past three decades may well end up being the catalyst for Christianity’s rapid decline. From the moment Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, evangelical Christians, who account for roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population, identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. Michael Spencer, a writer who describes himself as a post-evangelical reform Christian, says, “Evangelicals fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith. Evangelicals will be seen increasingly as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.”

November will mark the tenth anniversary of The Immoral Minority's birth.

On that day I was fired up about a recent election loss to George W. Bush, a criminal war, and the oppressive environment that I felt the Religious Right Wing had created in our country.

All I wanted to do was educate people about the lies that the Bush administration was telling us, provide hope for my liberal friends that we COULD take back the presidency, and make my case that morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace.

In those ten years I have seen amazing changes take place.

The wars are coming to an end, the country is shifting to the Left, and the religious stranglehold is loosening every day.

There is clearly much more work to be done, but damn the progress has been glorious.

My new goal is to stretch my time on earth out long enough to make it to 2062. I would then be 92 years old, so that would be some achievement. (Update: Oops, make that 102. Well that's certainly not better.)

However if I could live until the scales were tipped, and finally those who make decisions based on logic and fact based research outnumbered the superstitious, that would be blissful indeed. On that amazing day I would gladly breathe my last, knowing the future of mankind, and the future of our planet, were in safe hands.

Sarah Silverman's new PSA to raise awareness about the “From V to Shining V” national pride day for women, is going to make some on the Religious Right fit to be tied.

Courtesy of Mediaite:  

In a new PSA that is guaranteed to anger some Christian conservatives, Jesus tells Silverman, “Fertilized eggs aren’t people, people are people.” But, he adds, “people who believe fertilized eggs are people are people too. You have to love them. You’re not better than them.” 

From there, Silverman goes on to say that “using religion to dictate legislation is un-American, but it’s happening.” The goal of the video is to raise awareness about the “From V to Shining V” national pride day for women, which is being organized by Lady Parts Justice on September 28th, 2014. The group is aiming to set up rallies at all 50 state capitals; Silverman will be leading the one in Concord, New Hampshire.

Yep there are going to be Fundamentalist panties in a twist ALL OVER the country in response to this. 

Which of course is exactly why I posted it.

Oooh, I'm such a stinker.

2013 was NOT a good year for Evolution.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast: 

Never mind the increasing evidence—64 percent of white evangelical Protestants reject the science, and professors at Christian colleges are attacked if word gets out they teach it. 

Evolution did not fare well in 2013. The year ended with the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Doubt as Amazon’s top seller in the “Paleontology” category. The state of Texas spent much of the year trying to keep the country’s most respected high school biology text out of its public schools. And leading anti-evolutionist and Creation Museum curator Ken Ham made his annual announcement that the “final nail” had been pounded into the coffin of poor Darwin’s beleaguered theory of evolution. 

Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved. 

The connection between acceptance of evolution and political affiliation has grown stronger over the past three years, exacerbating the polarization now plaguing Congress. Among Democrats, acceptance of evolution increased by 3 percent, to 67 percent, while among Republicans it decreased from 54 percent to 43 percent. 

The trajectory is not encouraging, especially as it runs in parallel with a steady increase in the evidence for evolution—evidence now piled so high that not even one evolutionary biologist at any of America’s research universities rejects the theory. Evolution is as widely accepted in biology departments as gravity is in physics departments. 

So how is it that 64 percent of America’s “white evangelical evangelical Protestants,” an unusually powerful and wealthy demographic, remains so strongly opposed to evolution?

Well that is pretty simple actually, because they are taught to believe rather than to think. 

Because they are a wealthy and powerful demographic they are targeted by the Republicans and Religious Right to keep them as undereducated as possible. After all wasn't it Sarah Palin who eschewed the virtues of a college education and suggested a trade school for young people instead?

You know, like beauty school for instance.

And when they are not attacking educators living in "ivory towers" they are going after anybody who is living their lives directed by logic rather than faith.

"How will you know how to solve your problems if you do not reach out to God for guidance?"

I don't know, perhaps by educating yourself and learning how to deal with complications that may arise in your life? Just crazy enough to work.

But the Religious Right realizes that time is not on their side. Not with Google providing immediate access to information about virtually any question that one could ask, and with science making incredible discoveries on a daily basis.

Soon there will come a day when nobody will feel the need to rely on faith to provide answers, nor religious affiliations to provide a sense of community. Instead we will all be connected by the technology that mankind created to facilitate a global community, and have our needs met, in a far more satisfying way, via logic and science.

And nothing frightens those who make a living spreading ignorance, and fear, and divisiveness more than realizing their days are numbered.

If Creationism shows up at all in a science textbook then this is the only acceptable way for it to be included.  

 I could live with this.

Conservatives and the Bible.

Courtesy of AlterNet:  

Conservatives have not read the Bible. 

The Right has successfully rebranded the brown-skinned liberal Jew, who gave away free healthcare and was pro-redistributing wealth, into a white-skinned, trickledown, union-busting conservative, for the very fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are astonishingly illiterate when it comes to understanding the Bible. On hot-button social issues, from same-sex marriage to abortion, biblical passages are invoked without any real understanding of the context or true meaning. It’s surprising how little Christians know of what is still the most popular book to ever grace the American continent. 

More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible, while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves” is a biblical verse. 

So, if Americans get an F in the basic fundamentals of the Bible, what hope do they have in knowing what Jesus would say about labor unions, taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, and food stamps? It becomes easy to spread a lie when no one knows what the truth is. 

The truth, whether Republicans like it or not, is not only that Jesus a meek and mild liberal Jew who spoke softly in parables and metaphors, but conservatives were the ones who had him killed. American conservatives, however, have morphed Jesus into a muscular masculine warrior, in much the same way the Nazis did, as a means of combating what they see as the modernization of society.

The problem with all of this is that the only people who can wrestle Christianity out of the hands of the conservatives are those more liberal folks who actually live their lives as they believe Jesus had intended for them to.

The problem with that is that, as far as I can tell, the more reasonable members of Christianity are kind of a pansies when it comes to confrontation or fighting for what they believe.

Hell if this were my religion that was being poisoned like this I would be standing on a pile of conservative bodies looking to assholes to add to it. But then again I have anger issues.

Actually right now the more liberal, more Christian if you will, Christians have a rather powerful ally on their side.

In fact with the Pope on their side THIS might be the best time ever for those who actually understand and embrace the teachings of Jesus to take back their religion and kick the science denying, under privileged abusing, conservatives out of THEIR religion.

Let them find their own religion. I hear Scientology is always recruiting.

Some actual facts about Christmas that will NOT show up in Sarah Palin's crappy book.

So essentially the entire holiday was stolen from the pagans. And the story of Jesus is filled with inaccuracies and contradictions.

I can almost hear the Religious Right's heads exploding all around the country. But fear not, these are facts, and as we know facts are not something that fundamentalists pay much attention to.

You know there should be a new movement started demanding that we change the holiday back to Saturnalia, and then WE can celebrate it without having to hear all that bitching about the "reason for the season."