atheismfuckyeah:

IRS regional manager Peter Lorenzetti told pastors attending the Faith Leaders Summit meeting in Washington that activities that could result in loss of tax-exempt status include endorsing or opposing candidates, campaigning for them or making contributions to their campaigns.

But pastors are free to do any of those things as private citizens, U.S> Rep. G. K. Butterfield, D-N.C., said.

“You simply cannot do it in your capacity as the pastor of the church and give the implication that the church is endorsing the candidate,” Butterfield, a former judge, said.

Lorenzetti said churches can distribute voter guides that educate about political issues without favoring a particular candidate.

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KWTX.com

It’s one thing to warn, another thing to follow through with action.  Churches have been advocating politics and thumbing their noses at the IRS for years.

bigbrightgoldenhalo:

As an agnostic I find myself baffled by a few habits of the religious, one of which is the strange Christian (and post-Christian) preoccupation with the sufferings of Christ. Let me put the sufferings and crucifixion of this simple carpenter into context for you: some thirty years after the apparent execution of the man Yeshua (Anglicized ‘Jesus’) on Golgotha in Jerusalem, thousands of Jews (count that, thousands - specifically, somewhere between 3,000-4,000) were simultaneously crucified on the road out of Jerusalem when elements within the community tried to rebel against the harsh rule of the imperial Roman governors. That is, everyone leaving or entering the ‘holy city’ would have seen thousands of Yeshua’s Jewish brethren hanging on crosses - some nailed and some bound by ropes - writhing in pain, bleeding, most eventually suffocating due to lung collapse before they could starve to death.

Men in our own time are being tortured and slowly killed in worse ways than this distant carpenter. Hell, his own closest friends were martyred in increasingly more barbaric ways: Peter is recorded as having been crucified upside down, Matthew was chopped to death with an axe, Thomas was lanced and burned to death etc. etc. The apparently malevolent God of the Judeo-Christian matrix, it seems, has come up with hundreds of ways - each more barbaric than the last - to scourge and execute his creations and loyal followers. It’s disingenuous for religious folk to turn the sufferings of Christ into sacraments and nullify the shocking nature of the Christian message; which effectively boils down to the maxim ‘suffering is good’, and the teaching that it is out of suffering that people are saved from their base natures. This is and should be anathema to anyone who loves and prizes freedom and progress.

Very well said

atheismforthewin:

That the blog posting all of the bible chapters is called, “freedmentalstate.” 

It seems a bit contradictory, you know?

Just a thought.

-Victor

I blocked that one almost right away.  It’s a complete waste of space.

And you are an obvious troll, because I refuse to believe that anyone could be this dumb.

lunaradvent:

1. If I (atheist) deny Jesus yet don’t go to hell, then Jesus is a liar.
2. If Jesus is honest and you (progressive Xian) don’t think that I deserve hell, then Jesus is unjust.
3. If Jesus is both honest and just, then you believe that I deserve to spend eternity in hell.”

• SciencePundit

This conundrum is easily solved either by assuming that Jesus never existed or that if he did exist he wasn’t a god and didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.  (Get it?  What the “hell”?  I just crack me up sometimes.)