Threats and Intimidation, Go Religion!

[Autumnlicious]

Mississippi -- just another hell-hole in a long list of hell-holes that dreadfully need to be nuked from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.

[Faith No More]

I don't really blame the pilots.

I know I couldn't do it.

[frankiej]

If any violence came as a result of this then it simply proves our point that religion is and will continue to be a cause of immense harm.

[Ace Otana]

I don't really blame the pilots. There are still places in the US where even being perceived as an atheist can be detrimental to your property, your pets, and yourself. In one small Mississippi town I lived in, I was shunned, my tires slashed, and my cats killed not because I had openly declared myself an atheist, but because I was seen reading Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith.

That is unbelievable. Talk about intolerance. And they say they're the ones being oppressed and ganged up on. Oh how they love to play victim.
So they are dead against freedom of speech and expression, freedom of thought and even try to dictate what you should believe and even read. Communists anyone? These people are against freedom. They obviously don't support it.

Religion is pretty much a dictatorship, no freedom or democracy.
I wonder how they would like it if they were picked on for believing in god.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know why believers feel the need to threaten or intimidate. Does the threat of eternal damnation leave room for escalation? Whether they smile politely, or pound their holy books and scream at the top of their lungs.......you are still going to be punished, by their god, for eternity.

On a related note. The idea that any god, when all other angles have failed, would resort to preying upon the human desire to relieve themselves of suffering, or avoid physical pain, is the strongest motivation to refuse to acknowledge said gods sovereignty over man: even if said god did in fact exist.

In other words, if god did exist, and was a tyrant (as god is described to be by the worlds predominant monotheist traditions), man would be justified, and in fact committing an act of absolute heroism in rebelling against god.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

Take that Lewis loving theists!

[Epimethean]

"I don't really blame the pilots."

Let's bring this back to the landing strip, shall we? Bullshit on that. So, we're going to all huddle on the airstrip because "the bad christians may have Howitzers?" Ugh, that is pathetic-but we go further and claim a culture of fear and oppression while we sit on our hands and say woe is me. Sorry, but the pilots are chickenshits, and chickenshits have been helping religion along for centuries. How's that old saw go? "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

[reverendjeremiah]

I'm not so sure that we are a first world country any more.

I feel the same way

[Judas BentHer]

It's a great thing that no atheists identity rests in being granted approval or permission by a Theist.

Elitist discrimination perpetrated by Theists against anyone who doesn't tow their mythological self-deprecating superstitious doctrine is anti-American, since they like to toss such a label around so freely as all that. Freedom to believe in nothing, as if it is something hoped for, isn't what is meant when one is a free American.

Freedom from religion as just as equal an entitlement as freedom to be religious, is. It's not the only thing that makes it so however, as the parchment proves, it is the first thing that makes it true.

[Epimethean]

The pilots are still chickenshits.

[The Grand Nudger]

Oh, absolutely, anytime someone attempts to intimidate you, the correct response is 'fuck with me and I'll kill you". Never let a bully think that only one of you is willing to do to violence upon the other, this assumption is the foundation of bullying itself.