God ♥ Fags

Fred Phelps and his followers are assholes. Sorry about the tautology.

Sam Harris has a new screed up at The Huffington Post entitled "Science Must Destroy Religion". An excerpt:

The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. When a person has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" science here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque — that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.

Preach on, brutha! On the topic of sacred texts comes this ditty about the burning of many books, including the Qur'an, in Kashmir by survivors of the earthquake back in October. In the dark, rainy night after the quake, the Khursheed National Library was pillaged by folks seeking material to burn for warmth. Desperate to survive, people burned whatever they came across - whether it was the Islamic holy book or not. But Allah apparently has no tolerance for the desperate surviviors:

Nazir Durrani, a government official who frequently visited the library and loved to read books on literature, said people did not realize that copies of the Qur'an were going into the fire.

"The burning of these books was a tragedy. When I think of those who did it, they would never be forgotten by God," he said.

What a glorious notion. Hey, if your deity hadn't caused or let the earthquake happen in the first place, burning copies of the Qur'an that can easily be reprinted wouldn't be an issue.

Cheap Monday jeans are a hot seller in Sweden. With a logo consisting of a skull with an upside-down cross on it, they also reflect the views of the jean's designer:

"It is an active statement against Christianity," Bjorn Atldax told The Associated Press. "I'm not a Satanist myself, but I have a great dislike for organized religion."

Atldax insists he has a purpose beyond selling denim: to make young people question Christianity, which he called a "force of evil" that had sparked wars throughout history.

Finally! A fashion statement I can relate to. I'll have to talk to my haberdashers at Target about getting a pair.