Westboro Baptist Church Military Protest Countered By Zombie Demonstrators

A Westboro Baptist Church protest was overshadowed Friday when demonstrators dressed as zombies gathered at a DuPont, Wash. military base to counter the radical group's efforts.

After members of the controversial Kansas-based church announced plans to picket Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a military base south of Seattle, 27-year-old Melissa Neace decided to organize a counter-protest, launching a Facebook group titled "Zombie'ing Westboro Baptist Church AWAY from Fort Lewis!"

"We wanted to turn something negative around, into something people could laugh at and poke fun at," Neace told the News Tribune. "It was the easiest way to divert attention from something so hateful."

About 300 counter-protesters showed up in varying degrees of zombie garb, far outnumbering the picketers from Westboro. According to KIRO in Seattle, just eight protesters from the controversial group showed up.

Fear of opposition to their hate is finally driving down their numbers.

"I think that their message is very hateful, and Jesus was not a hateful person. He loved everybody," one of the counter-protesters told KIRO.

While it is unclear why Westboro Baptist Church targeted the DuPont military base for its latest effort, the group frequently pickets military funerals. The group believes that deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God's punishment for the United States' tolerance of homosexuality. Last year, the group announced it would "quadruple" protest efforts after the Supreme Court ruled that such demonstrations are protected by the First Amendment.

However, counter-protests like the zombie effort in DuPont are becoming increasingly popular. Earlier this month, thousands of people in red shirts formed a human wall around a fallen soldier's funeral to block the anti-gay protesters. At a similar protest at Texas A&M University, students dressed in maroon formed a circle around a funeral and seemingly discouraged Westboro protesters from ever showing up.

Westboro Baptist Church Military Protest Countered By Zombie Demonstrators (VIDEO)

Mussolini Headkick

Confusion Between Science and Faith

I'm going to keep hammering on this until it sinks in.

And continue to avoid reality as long as humanly possible. Screw reason.

We don't know how life began but one of the more fanciful hypotheses is that it began in a primordial soup of organic molecules supplied by meteors, comets, and violent lightening storms. The idea is that the ocean was full of glucose, amino acids, and nucleotides. Glucose and similar carbohydrates supplied the energy for life. Amino acids spontaneously came together to form proteins. Nucleic acids arose by stringing together pre-existing nucleotides or nucleosides.

In the most extreme version, the ocean itself was the primordial soup and concentrations of organic molecules were sufficient to drive the formation of life. A simple back-of-the envelope calculation indicates that the concentration of typical amino acids would have been about 0.1 nM (10^-10 M) [Can watery asteroids explain why life is 'left-handed'?]. This is an unlikely scenario [More Prebiotic Soup Nonsense]. You won't get spontaneous formation of polymers in water at that concentration.

Or maybe an omnipotent being simply willed us into existence. The author has failed to consider the concept of Ockham's Razor, by which the most simple explanation is likely to be correct. 

Read more »

Why I Don’t Believe in God…

Believing in a higher power is one thing, but proving that it exists is another entirely. Having faith is not enough to sway others to share that belief. 

The most common question I get asked is "Why don't you believe in God?" This is a deeply personal question, and like most atheists that are as vocal as I am, it is one I have considered at great length. I was raised by a loving, deeply Christian family. I attended Sunday School regularly in our sparse Lutheran church and was even a senior sacristan at an Anglican private school. I'll be honest though, I was always shaky in my faith, but as certain, or so I thought, as one could be about the existence of God. So for me, I spent most of my young adult life seeking a spiritual awakening. I tried religions on like shoes for a few years. I dabbled in Mormonism, Scientology, and every major denomination of the Christian churches. Never having the born again moment that so many spoke of.

In the end it took a trip to Jerusalem to sway me. I did a tour and saw the wall being built around Palestine; I stood at the Wailing Wall with a cardboard yarmulke on my head. I visited the twelve Stations of the Cross, knelt at the rock of Golgotha, and finally entered the tomb of the holy sepulcher.

It was in this low ceilinged tomb that I lost my faith. As I peered at the marble slab over the place of Jesus' supposed burial I was stuck by the crack in the marble. This crack was a too perfect flaw in a too perfect piece of marble on a too perfect altar in a too perfect room. I peered deep into the dark crack searching for answers, waiting for my personal spiritual awakening. It never came, and I realized…this is silly. This "Holy City" was in actual fact a contrived Disney world from the era of Constantine. I believed in none of it, and realized I wasn't in love with God; I was in love with the idea of God.

[...]

More: http://www.eloquentatheist.com/2012/07/why-i-dont-believe-in-god/

One Million Moms to flip their shit in 3... 2...

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country.

With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.

Proponents of the effort in Washington State called it a game-changing gift that gives them a fighting chance in November.

"To get this from a straight, married couple sends a powerful message that marriage is seen as a fundamental question of fairness," Zach Silk, the campaign manager for Washington United for Marriage, said Thursday in an interview.

[...]

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Original Page: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/x8ugp/one_million_moms_to_flip_their_shit_in_3_2/

NASA Confusion About the Origin of Life: Part II

I'm going to keep hammering on this until it sinks in.

We don't know how life began but one of the more fanciful hypotheses is that it began in a primordial soup of organic molecules supplied by meteors, comets, and violent lightening storms. The idea is that the ocean was full of glucose, amino acids, and nucleotides. Glucose and similar carbohydrates supplied the energy for life. Amino acids spontaneously came together to form proteins. Nucleic acids arose by stringing together pre-existing nucleotides or nucleosides.

In the most extreme version, the ocean itself was the primordial soup and concentrations of organic molecules were sufficient to drive the formation of life. A simple back-of-the envelope calculation indicates that the concentration of typical amino acids would have been about 0.1 nM (10^-10 M) [Can watery asteroids explain why life is 'left-handed'?]. This is an unlikely scenario [More Prebiotic Soup Nonsense]. You won't get spontaneous formation of polymers in water at that concentration.

Or maybe an omnipotent being willed us into existence. The author has failed to consider the concept of Ockham's Razor, by which the most simple explanation is likely to be correct. 

Read more »

Sometimes, the Church is right, and you just have to admit defeat.

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Original Page: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/x8wtt/sometimes_the_church_is_right_and_you_just_have/

Sometimes, the Church is right, and you just have to admit defeat.

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Original Page: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/x8wtt/sometimes_the_church_is_right_and_you_just_have/