Another atheist ‏@kaimatai: Any entity able to effortlessly cure cancer in babies but chooses not to, cannot in any sense be called loving or moral. #atheist #atheism

Crispy Sea ‏@CrispySea: If you live in a society where you’re fearful of how people will react if you admit your #atheism you are being oppressed. #HumanRights

Godless Atheist ‏@GodlessAtheist: So which of these praying athletes will God pick for the gold medal?#atheism #Olympics

Rosa Rubicondior ‏@RosaRubicondior: The Holy Bible. Turning the sin of smugly condescending bigotry into a virtue for nearly 2000 years #Atheism #Bible

ANTWOINe 3X10³ ◠‿◠ ‏@StrictlyShorts: Besides being fables, what do Shrek and the Bible have in common?… Talking donkeys! Numbers 22:30 NIV. #Atheism

you’re damned ‏@youredamned: My 5 year old had a personal relationship with a fictional character when she was 3. She called him Gumba. She’s grew out of that. #atheism

Yes, black people are still second-class citizens in some pockets of the nation: Black wedding banned by Baptist church

Here’s an excerpt:

CRYSTAL SPRINGS, MS (WLBT) – It was to be their big day, but a Jackson couple says the church where they were planning to wed turned them away because of their race.

Now, the couple wants answers, and the church’s pastor is questioning the mindset of some of members of his congregation who caused the problem in the first place.

They had set the date and printed and mailed out all the invitations, but the day before wedding bells were to ring for Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson, they say they got some bad news from the pastor.

“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if he went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” said Charles Wilson.

The Wilsons were trying to get married at the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs – a church they attend regularly, but are not members of.

“He had people in the sanctuary that were pitching a fit about us being a black couple,” said Te’Andrea Wilson. ”I didn’t like it at all, because I wasn’t brought up to be racist. I was brought up to love and care for everybody.”

The church’s pastor, Dr. Stan Weatherford, says he was taken by surprise by what he calls a small minority against the black marriage at the church.

“This had never been done before here, so it was setting a new precedent, and there are those who reacted to that because of that,” said Weatherford.

Weatherford went on and performed the wedding at a nearby church. …

Kudos to the pastor for performing the ceremony elsewhere, I guess, but how do you go back to your hateful congregation members after that ugly episode?

Via Reddit from NaCheezIt:

Via Reddit:

Because things like genocide, mysoginy and slavery comprise some of the theology we base our ideology on.

Because we push unverifiable origin theories as fact and spend vast resources legislating them to be taught as science.

Because we can’t wait for the death of this world and will do anything to bring it on sooner so we can get on to the “good part”.

Because a baby is not as cute unless you take a cutting implement to their genitals to honor the covenant with God.

Because we believe the rainbow is a promise that god won’t ever mass exterminate us for vague reasons again. Well until the second coming at at least.

Because we like the idea of eternal torture of those unlike us, to the point we scare it into our children at the earliest possible moment.

Because we see gays as the subhumans they obviously are and believe it should be the law of the land.

Because we believe its better to disown your own family over their belief systems or lack of.

Because…oh wait, no these are all the things we absolutely abhor and will stop at nothing to educate people away from.

All these things are awful. How do you believers cope with these paradigms in your holiest texts?

I found this post interesting because I too was once part of a flock under a Pastor Bob. Different last name, I presume. In any case, I doubt many pastors, like this one, would describe this person as having a “healthy” spiritual journey since he confessed to being a nonbeliever, but he at least seems to understand that, for many people, the world is not just painted in black and white. People do embark on spiritual journeys, even if it leads them ultimately to materialism:

Read more.

Nonbeliever church signs:

This essay is lengthy but well worth a read about how the Southern Baptist Convention is in the process of rebranding itself to be more “marketable” here in the year 2012, you know, roughly 1,979 years after Christ supposedly said that “this generation” will not pass for the kingdom of God will come (also Matthew 16:28). It opens:

The Southern Baptist Convention is a force to be reckoned with. As the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with over 45,000 affiliate churches, it have been shaping and channeling conservative Christian sensibilities since the Civil War, when Southern Baptists split from the North so they could advocate on behalf of slave owners. They fought to keep slavery and lost. Then they fought for Jim Crow laws and lost. Then they fought for segregation and lost.  Now, faced with eroding membership, the Southern Baptist leaders are fighting against irrelevance. Unfortunately, they have committed to a strategy that will make it harder for their members – and for all of us—to move toward a future based on collaboration, compassion and practical solutions to real-world problems. …

and closes:

… Whether they win or lose from the standpoint of re-filling church pews and bank accounts remains to be seen. What is regrettable, either way, is that by choosing to be competitive they have once again pitted themselves against the moral arc of history. Whether humanity can flourish in the 21st century will depend largely on whether we can move beyond competition to collaboration. Population growth, resource depletion and weapons technology have carried us to the point that there are fewer and fewer “winnable” competitions. Humanity desperately needs to find common ground in our shared moral core and dreams for our children. Just as they did on the questions of slavery and the full humanity of women, the Southern Baptists have positioned themselves as moral dead weight, which is a loss for us all. — Conservative Christianity’s Marketing Gimmick to Keep Its Old-Time, Heaven-and-Hell Religion Afloat

there was really no heaven or god? The Laughing in Purgatory blog explores:

1. Regardless of the hype, the sun would still come up in the east and set in the west.

2. The religious would now have to choose whether or not to become sociopaths.

3. People would find new, stupid reasons to kill each other.

4. Cults! Cults! Cults!

Read more.

Talk about trying to shield the flock from the dark and scary world:

Didn’t Jesus dine with sinners and publicans and let a prostitute wash his feet? And Warren here in the 21st century is calling for church members to be isolationists? The New Testament Jesus was no such thing. This is what turns a bunch of people off from the church: the attitude among Christians that they are somehow different or morally superior to everyone else and the general practice of only mingling with like-minded people. I know believers who, in fact, are not this way, but they seem to be a dwindling minority. When I was believer, I didn’t leave my non-believing friends because of their corruptible influence, and in fact, that had no influence on my decision to drop faith. I was perfectly capable of doing my own thinking. Of course, Warren’s email seems to prove that Saddleback is full of people who don’t have that capacity, so as a measure of damage control, the pastor felt the need to sever ties between his sheep and the rest of the online world.

I wonder, Rick, if some of your church members might have actually taken the Great Commission to heart and befriended some non-believers and trouble makers with the expressed intent of witnessing to them, or at the least, reaching out to them in Christian kindness. In a world apparently bound straight for hell, a believer’s witness — that’s church talk for a Christian comes across to fellow believers and non-believers — should be the last thing on his mind. The first thing on his mind should be reaching people for Christ. Twitter and Facebook, it seems to me, could be powerful tools for the church to be able to reach a massive audience, yet, we see here again an example of how insecure church leaders are about their own faith. If it was so self-evidently true and if the evidence were so strong, why be so defensive all the time? It just permeates a sheer lack of confidence.

Edit: I realized after looking at this image again that this must be photoshopped. I did not catch the http://www.churchsigngenerator.com link when I first posted this last night. That’s what I get for blogging while enjoying Fat Tire! I didn’t know there was such a thing as a church sign generator online.