The power struggle in the Westboro Baptist church since the death of founder and patriarch Fred Phelps seems to be ending with new leadership emerging, says Fred’s son Nate Phelps who defected from the church a long time ago but who keeps in touch with other defectors who still live in Topeka, Kansas.
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The idea that people can deny services to those who views they disagree with is a menace to the smooth working of society. The people who are the latest victims of this are David Silverman and Amanda Knief of American Atheists who went to a local bank to get a document notarized. This is a routine service that banks provide but to their surprise, the notary refused to sign it, though they had had no problems in the past with this bank.
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I came across a poll from December 2013 that supports the idea that religion is on the decline in the US. The latest one is the Harris Interactive poll and it reports that the number of people who believe in a god has dropped to 74%, after staying at 82% through the period 2005-2009. Other measures show a similar decline.
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Bill Donohue, head of an outfit called the Catholic League and who is more Catholic than the pope, seems to make a good living and gains publicity by protesting loudly at anything that can be interpreted as a slight on Catholicism. He was predictably outraged (his outrage meter is always at 11) at the attempts by LGBT groups to march in the St. Patrick’s day parades in New York and Boston. When they were rebuffed, Donohue was again outraged that beer companies Sam Adams, Heineken, and Guinness withdrew their sponsorship and vowed not to drink their beer.
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You may have heard of the Christian school teacher in Louisiana who ridiculed a student in her class who happened to be Buddhist. She seems to be a real piece of work and what was worse, was backed up by school and district authorities.
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The Christian Science Monitor has reproduced the 32-question survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life to gauge people’s knowledge of religion.
According to the Pew results:
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In an interview given to Rolling Stone magazine, Bill Gates reveals himself susceptible to that fatuous argument from incredulity, that just because he doesn’t understand how the complexity of the world came about, it must imply that there is a god, which is basically the intelligent design argument.
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It looks like there has been some kind of putsch at the Westboro Baptist Church with some kind of junta composed of all male members of the church taking leadership of the organization as founder Fred Phelps goes into decline.
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So Bill Maher stirred up a hornet’s nest with his riff against religion, focusing on the whole story of Noah that has suddenly come to the fore because of the upcoming film, and correctly saying that it shows god in such a terrible light as a baby killer that no one in their right mind should worship him.
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Ashutosh Maharaj was the leader of a religious commune in a small town in Punjab, India, one of the many gurus who infest that part of the world and concoct mystical theories about life and the universe. In January of this year the guru, who was supposedly in his seventies, experienced chest pains and was declared by doctors to be clinically dead.
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