In related news, half the school was arrested on suspicion of rape, after evidence of drawing penises was found.

It's far worse than that - half the school was is possession of penises! They were armed and ready.

The other half were in possession of tools of prostitution.

Probably as soon as atheists stop talking about people who choose to follow a religion as though they're stupid misguided children, or living under a delusion, or any of the other rhetoric that gets spouted by the most vocal atheists.

You have cause and effect directly reversed.

It should be noted that this is one of the primary tactics of the religious extremists trying to destroy freedom of religion. Attack attack attack and then when they're laughed at they feign offense.
This, in spite of the fact, that they have over a thousand year history of burning alive and murdering in other fiendish ways anyone who didn't bow down to them.

It's really sick, dude. I'm sorry I don't believe in magic like you do. You should really look at why you are so ashamed of what you believe that you can't be happy unless everyone does too rather than spout factually incorrect nonsense which is the diametric opposite of the truth.

If you're a "store" and have a serious issue with the idea of "selling" your "merchandise" to your "customers" then it is critical that a large scale investigation is immediately launched against you and those you're engaged in business with.

That is the primary issue.
Police thugs tazering people in support of blatantly non-legitimate businesses is secondary.

Blaming the victim is your craven thirteenth tier approach.

Die in a concentration camp you boot licking brown-shirted bitch.

Heretics will never know the Beer Volcano that He has prepared for us in His Noodly Paradise.

Sure, they won't know that one but they'll have their own. It's a bit flat and crappy, but still a beer volcano which is cool.

Well, that's pushing it a little I'd say, to the point of hyperbole.

I disagree on the hyperbole and think it's more a question of time. Religious rule will necessarily tend to get more and more savage as time goes by. Never underestimate the value of crying "heretic" as a power grab bathed in blood. That's one of the major reasons Christian dogma is what it became as opposed to what it was in the early days.

Paul was clear that the whole birth life death and resurrection did not happen on Earth but on a spiritual plane like a platonic ideal and the very idea of a Jesus on Earth destroys the fundamental value of the sacrifice as he wrote the story. Most of what's in the New Testament was put as the official canon by warring groups of bishops jockeying for power over the Roman Empire and using heresy to murder their rivals.
As long as you're dealing with something that there is no evidence of, you can replace bits and pieces more or less as you please for whatever purposes you choose.

When some TV preacher or politician says "the US' laws are based on the bible" I say "then why is pot against the law but adultery is perfectly legal?" If the US were truly a Christian nation, there would be no poverty in the US.

Well, of course, but that goes to my point. The most gung ho people on pushing Christianity into the American government are generally the most ignorant of what it actually says now. They're also generally the least moral by biblical standards (divorce, murder, rape, unwed pregnancy etc. etc. etc.). This is why it will get much *much* worse like Sharia, since the Bible and the Koran are pretty much the same on the extreme nastiness the glorification of which makes up the bulk of the Bible and those using it for power will be happy to make up whatever else they want to get ahead. Heck, look at the Mormons completely nonsensical garbage barely related to the original story and there are a ton of them calling themselves Christians and fighting tooth and nail to spread their gay hatred across the country.

Atheism however IS a religion. It is a religion based on the POSITIVE belief that there is no god and then forms a belief system around this foundational belief.

You, sir are a liar and a scoundrel.

There is a VERY good practical reason for why Atheists deny that their religion is a religion and that is the separation of church and state.

No, but you do make your agenda clear. Atheists, in America at least, are getting much louder these days because religious scoundrels like yourself are trying to destroy the separation of church and state. Prior to that we mostly (can I speak for most of you...not really, but...) didn't really care that much. I thought adults who still believed in the tooth fairy (putting it that way to be nice as it's far less ridiculous than what you actually believe) were pretty silly but live and let live I say.

Just one example is in the issue of Darwinism.

I don't know what that is. You apparently mean the theory of evolution by natural selection, but once again you're attempting to make something which isn't a religion sound like one. I guess even you know how silly your beliefs are and want to make yourself feel better by pretending everyone is as silly as you. I feel really bad for you. Maybe a hug and a cup of hot cocoa would do you good.

it used to be that you couldn't teach Darwinism, now you can't teach anything BUT Darwinism and only the evidence in favor.

LOL, what? I'm guessing that you don't know what the word "evidence" means. Perhaps you could present some...ha ha..evidence to support this statement?

Sorry, that's not science, that's Atheistic religious dogma.

Wow, a non religion with dogma. You're pretty far out, man. You do realize that there are many many millions of religious people including Christians who have no problem understanding evolution, right? I mean they need to say...uh but goddidit, which is kind of cute but much less silly than your position.

Christianity is comparable with Darwins view being true or false as we have other evidence and arguments that are not affected by it,

LOL, if you had evidence then it wouldn't be a religion. Since all the evidence goes against the existence of your god (not the deist god...that one is unfalsifiable as it doesn't actually add anything to the discussion) and no evidence whatsoever supports the idea your desperation at your sillyness is just getting sad now.

but Darwinism being false is fatal to Atheism.

No, you're just begging the question, which is what almost all "arguments" for your god end up doing. You're assuming that there is a god and insisting that if the most likely scenario supported by evidence is false that you magically get to claim that your fairy tale daydream is therefore real. It's sad, it's deeply dishonest and it really makes you look pathetic rather than silly.

(Actually, quite a bit of modern science is fatal to Atheism

Were that true, than atheism would be dead, right?

I shouldn't have bothered since you're clearly not capable of rational understanding on this issue as your parents abused you horribly as a child and scooped out a god shaped hole in your brain that will leave you always out of touch with reality. Truly horrifying the damage stuffing antique iron age fairy tales down children's throats like the cock of a rapist have on people in the modern age.

The US Republican Party is not a right wing party anymore. They have been effectively hijacked by nut jobs, extremists,

They are absolutely a right wing party more so now than ever before.
Cater to the elite? Check
War mongering? Check
Religious extremism shoved into government? Check
Oppression of the lower classes? Check

Maybe you don't actually know what right means in a political context. Do you even know why they use left and right? In the pre revolutionary French assembly the representatives of the crown, the aristocracy and the church (which is to say the *rulers* not the *leaders* keep in mind) sat on the right, whereas the representatives of the people sat on the left.
Our constitution was designed to prevent right wing ideology as it is *Liberal* by design. Right wing is rabidly anti-liberal and "Conservative" was specifically coined to mean anti-liberal in order to go back to the good old days of hereditary aristocracy and monarchy with religion in its normal use as a tool to control the sheep.

We are exactly where the Republican party has been driving intentionally since before WW2 when the party owners were largely huge fascism fans including the father/grandfather of the two recent right wing extremist nutjob Bush presidents.

The right wingers ran a good enough propaganda campaign that there are people in this nation, like yourself, who unashamedly call yourself a right winger even though this nation was founded on diametric opposition to right wing ideology *by design* and both the American revolution *and* both world wars were us and our allies, that is Liberalism and the Left fighting our natural enemy that is the Right.

You should be ashamed of yourself for being so damn ignorant if nothing else.

Drug dealers use guns in crimes, which is not a "gun" problem but rather a drug problem.

No, it's not a drug problem, it's a drug law problem. We did an experiment in the 1920s known as prohibition. What we learned was that making things people want illegal for moralistic reasons leads directly to a massive increase in violent crime and organized crime. The exact thing happened with the war on drugs as was easily predicted. The violent crime has to do with unethical lawmaking, not with the specific details of what is unethically made illegal.

You missed the root cause as well. Hope this helps.

If the hex() change and the division operator are the only "warts" in Python

Hardly. It uses white space for syntax. It's badly broken by design. That crap hasn't been done since FORTRAN and that was designed that way out of necessity for punch cards.

ARRGGH!!! &$ )!$!@$ !@ !!&*(!#@!!!!!!!!!

Now while writing an entire sharepoint replacement in one line of perl is impressive, it doesn't really constitute a specific argument against MFC.

Can you imagine if we used our nuclear technologies for something so backward as, say, ironclad steamboats?

Nah, that would never work. There would be too much steam and you'd have to use the rest for something even more anachronistic...like a catapult or something.

i.e less people, less power required, less agriculture, less environmental stresses.
<pedant mode>
*fewer* people, less power required, less agriculture, *fewer* environmental stresses.
</pedant mode>
Thank you for taking this as a possible learning opportunity rather than grammar nazism as it helps alleviate the brain unsettlement caused by reading that ;-)

And why the hell do we need to terraform a planet that is hostile to life when we have one that's pretty sweet right here and now ?

Eggs, baskets, distribution ratios...I dunno, there's a saying.

Since we are all pretty well aware that we are between ice ages

No, we are not. We're in an interglacial period *of* an ice age.

If you're that poorly informed about basic terminology, why should anybody listen to you about more complicated things?

Dunno if either of those options are acceptable to you

Fine, cut off rural deliveries and make the welfare leeches pay their fair share of something for once. Perhaps they might stop voting against their best interests and mine. If that isn't enough, start making them pay their fair share of water, power, phones, network etc. etc. etc.

I'm happy to help support the less fortunate except when they use that as a weapon against this nation, spout crap like they're the real America and whine about welfare when they're the primary recipients.

Enough coddling of the boot licking leeches, I say.