Their argument is so ridiculous. Conditions on this planet were hostile to most forms of life for 4 billion years. Then it cooled off, got water and oxygen and became very hospitable to complex life.

If that was the result of an intelligent designer, why did it take him 4 billion years to stop screwing it up? Give me a break.

Not personally but there was this in Tennessee: http://drunkenachura.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/bap...

TL;DR version: Door-to-door Jesus salesmen told a woman her son was burning in hell because she goes to the wrong church. Classy, right?

Their name policy makes Google+ and Facebook both completely out of the question for me. My choice not to be harassed in meatspace outweighs their wish to target ads to me.

A bit off-topic, but I've found a pretty effective way to weed out overly-religious Twitter users is to not follow back anyone who feels the need to mention it in their bio. There's only 160 characters; anyone using that little bit of space to identify themselves as part of the vast, overwhelming majority is probably going to be annoying about it.

A quarter of college-age women and 1 in 6 of all women in the US have had to deal with a rape or attempted rape. That's a number that's not going through my male head as I get into an elevator at 4AM with a guy I've never met already standing in it. Women, on the other hand...

Seriously guys, don't hit on a woman in an elevator.

Reason #1 aggravates me to death. There was some idiot Baptist evangelical who got some ink the other day for saying Anthony Weiner needs Jesus for atonement. Hell of a thing to tell a Jew, by the way.

Where's the morality in a system where you have a free pass to commit whatever crime you want, so long as you properly grovel to the invisible man afterward? Atheists do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Doing it out of fear or for a reward is too self-centered to be called morality.

I think it probably is a risk, though with so much actual persecution going on it's easy to see why. Just look at Damon Fowler. I try to remind myself every so often not to attribute religious bigotry to situations where it might not have been involved.

As for the Christians, they're so used to having their religious beliefs and rituals automatically catered to here by other Christians, so used to being the overwhelming majority religion, that they cry persecution when someone challenges that undeserved privilege. Some of them fully, honestly believe that not being permitted to impose their religious beliefs on others is a violation of their rights. It's blatant hypocrisy but they can't see it. That privilege blinds them.

I want religion to become as harmless and uninfluential to society as astrology.

I don't care what astrologers believe because their weird belief that it matters where Saturn is in the sky has absolutely no effect on my life or on the world. If you don't believe in astrology, nobody cares. Astrologers and believers don't demand that we teach it alongside astronomy. Astrology can be safely and easily ignored by anyone who doesn't care for it.

That's what I want as an atheist, for religion to become as harmless and irrelevant to the world as astrology.

I can't agree with this at all. If the other side were sane, then maybe, but they're not. The Republican Party has been taken over by the lunatic fringe and cannot run candidates with any common sense. Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee are at the top of every GOP poll. These people are absolutely nuts and I'm not casting a de facto vote for any of them by staying home.

Under the current system, third-party candidates don't have a snowballs chance in Hell. The Democrats and GOP both work very hard to keep it that way.

What needs to be done about it is staring us right in the face - the Tea Party. Except in a rare few cases, they don't run teabaggers as 3rd party candidates in general elections, they run them against Republicans in the GOP primaries, then throw their support behind whoever wins against the Democrat. They don't split the rightwing vote in the general election, so they don't hurt the right (in the short term anyway).

We need to do that on the left. Ralph Nader caused a catastrophe in 2000 by splitting the left and giving us the first four years of Bush. What we need to do instead is to go after the corporate flunkies and conservative throwbacks with D next to their name during their primaries, then supporting the winner against the GOP.

I wanted to stay home last November, especially when the White House decided the months right before an election was the time to mock and piss off the left. I also have a Blue Dog, teabagger idiot for a congressman, so I lose either way. In the end, I went out and voted for him anyway because I didn't want the GOP to regain the House. I wanted that guy out but keeping the GOP from controlling the House was more important. I was in the minority on that, unfortunately.

One caveat - this cannot apply to the presidential race. The few times a president has been seriously challenged in their mid-term primary, it led to disaster. It guarantees victory for the other side, so we can't go after the president like that regardless of what we think of the person in the office.

Another thing that I think is needed is for progressive activist groups to sever their "official" ties to the White House or at least distance themselves. It's toxic for real activism because it lets the White House jerk us around on puppet strings. Read this and you'll see what I mean: http://www.alternet.org/news/150467/meet_jim_mess...