That is the finding of the 2015 survey on theState of Atheism in America by the Christian polling outfit Barna Group that puts atheists and agnostics under the common label of skeptics. They find five major shifts within the last two decades, as shown by this graphic.
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The election of a black president seems to have completely unhinged some people who are convinced that he is a Kenyan Marxist who seeks nothing less than to install a communist dictatorship. This is yet another even more extreme example of the white paranoia that I linked to yesterday and it is not limited to just a few crazy fringe elements. In certain parts of the country it has gone mainstream, as we see from the armed militias that have taken it upon themselves to prevent government agencies from doing their work.
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The New Democratic Party has surprised everyone by winning the Alberta province elections in Canada, ending 44 years of conservative dominance by the Progressive Conservative party and elevating Rachel Notley to be the head of the provincial government. (Thanks to reader left0ver1under for alerting me to the Alberta result.)
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Zeke Miller writes that the Republican party faces an even worse debate problem than they had back in 2012 when the huge number of debates they held seemed to turn voters off as it gave their candidates many more opportunities to stumble and to attack each other.
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Thanks to PZ Myers, I learned about an email exchange that Sam Harris had initiated with Noam Chomsky about morality as applied to the actions of governments and other political entities. Myers gives an entertaining round-by-round account but I want to focus on a couple of points from that exchange that particularly struck me as key to their differences in content and style of argument.
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This cartoon is from Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine (2002) that looked at America’s obsession with guns. Given the recent spate of killings in the US and the rise of heavily-armed militias that seem to be seeking to confront the government, this may be a good time to re-release the film.
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US imperialistic power is overtly demonstrated by its massive military that can be used to easily overpower most nations, though we have seen that controlling the aftermath is much more problematic. But a major source of US power is exerted more covertly, by controlling the financial centers of the world. Note how it uses that power to annex the assets of countries it has conflicts with and prevents them from having access to international capital or denying them the lines of credit and insurance that are necessary for trade.
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How do I know? Because I heard it from one of the people who is closest to god, and that is Rick Santorum, the once and future and forever candidate for the US presidency. What happened is that when he was asked by Buzzfeed about Bruce Jenner’s announcement that he was transitioning to a woman, this is how his reaction was reported:
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