I certainly don't fit in with the massive amount of liberals that seem to be the majority of atheists, although I am rather liberal when it comes to things like gay rights and other social issues where personal liberty is hampered by religious bigotry.

I have kept politics out of my blog for the most part, since all it does is put me in a position where everybody is on my case, and I didn't start the blog to discuss politics. I do occasionally make my ideas known where there is some question about how someone can hold a certain stand for entirely secular reasons, such as how an atheist can be against abortion.

I think that Nietzsche had it right when he said that Christianity promotes weakness, and I think the same can be applied to liberalism in many cases.

It's all good to help the helpless, but it must be done in a way that doesn't encourage people to remain helpless that may otherwise find a way out of it.

I don't think it should be looked at as somehow evil to have money either. In fact, I think that politicians tend to use the money of the rich because the poor aren't likely to complain when they get new social programs, and there aren't enough rich people to do anything about it.

Overall though, I think all the parties have it terribly wrong.

Mormons believe in outer darkness. That is not the same as hell. D&C 76: 43-45
43 Who glorifies the Father, and saves all the works of his hands, except those sons of perdition who deny the Son after the Father has revealed him.
44 Wherefore, he saves all except them—they shall go away into everlasting punishment, which is endless punishment, which is eternal punishment, to reign with the devil and his angels in eternity, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched, which is their torment—
45 And the end thereof, neither the place thereof, nor their torment, no man knows;
The hell referred to in the Bible is not merely reserved to "Sons of perdition". Further, outer darkness is not a place of burning, it is a place of darkness.

And it's not just a regular belief that gets you put there. You have to have actual knowledge, not just faith, and then deny Christ.

Murderers don't go there either, which is the only other sin that Mormons believe is unforgivable besides denying Jesus. They go to the Telestial kingdom.

So, take me seriously or not, I don't particularly care.

I would have to agree. I think it's because Mormon's have worked hard to put a moral image to the public, so it may be that the reporter worked on that.

Having grown up in a Mormon family, and in Utah, I have to say that Mormons do have a Catholic church like affinity for hiding their individual improprieties.

The first time I realized this is when I was a kid. A neighbor, who was about my age, molested a 6 year old girl in the neighborhood. When we outed him, he immediately went to his parents and told them what he had done. Their response was to take him to the bishop, who then went to the family of the girl and somehow talked them out of calling the police. Instead they dealt with it "in house".

Three days later, the kid then had the nerve to tell me that it was my fault that he did what he did because I let him watch porn. He said he had been forgiven for what he did, but I was going to hell.

I guess he forgot that Mormons don't believe in hell.

Anyway, that was the first of many of those types of things I have seen happen. I would have to say that protecting a child molester is the worst, but I'm sure I would have been privy to even more had I not stopped going to church when I was 14.

Now, I would bet that you will never hear, "A Baptist mother of three was charged with sexual..." That is most likely because it isn't seen to be that abnormal, since there isn't any organized cover-up.

I think that this really got out of hand from the beginning. This political correctness crap has generally been dismissed by conservatives, but now they are embracing it because it gets them publicity.

FreedomWorks used the guy's call to get publicity, and the talking heads were all willing to shout their outrage from the rooftops. Because of that, Geico was forced to act. Now we have people who are assuming that Geico is acting politically, just because they did what they had to do to keep from being viewed as a politically biased company because of the negative publicity. What were they supposed to do, keep the guy employed after all the negative publicity they have gotten? They couldn't do that or conservatives would have accused them of horrendous things. Now they took some action and guess who's upset now.

In other words, both sides on this have no reason or right to put Geico in the middle of this, but that doesn't stop both conservative and liberal groups from doing so.

The militia movement grows when democrats are in power and dwindles when republicans are. Democrats have so often threatened to take certain rights away, including gun ownership, that people feel threatened merely because there are in power. I don't remember Obama ever saying anything about taking people's guns from them, but that didn't stop the price of my ammo going up when he got elected, merely because people were so afraid that suddenly Obama would go after their guns that they bought it all up.

Fear begets fear, and fear of people owning guns causes people that want to keep their guns to instill fear in those that would take them. It is a circle, and people are too short sighted to realize that. People are so caught up in their own lives and beliefs that they refuse to see the other side of the coin, and in the case of this argument, the threat of the remedy is also the disease.

This is nuts. It sounds like people really just trying to sneak in their religion into schools. I bet money that if it were my high school, we would have just chosen someone to give a satanic prayer just for a joke. I guarantee if that happens just once, those same Baptists will be back fighting for its repeal.

Sorry for the third post, but I was thinking about what Kant said, and why it pertains to this. You are saying that God is moral, simply by the nature of his being. What Kant says about existence applies to this as well, even though existence and morality are quite different concepts.

Morality is the concept of an overall set of good and bad acts. Morality is therefore only exemplified in a thing. By saying that a person is moral, we are saying that that person's actions are an example of the concept of morality. This holds for the concept of good as well. Good is not a property, it is concept of things which we consider moral. Good and moral are synonymous when used in the context where it is speaking of actions, not opinions on things like food tasting good for example.

We make this confusion with lots of things. For example, if I say you are human, that means you have the attributes of what it is to be human. Now, if I say you are Stuart, that is totally different. Stuart is not a concept, Stuart is an actual thing, and it happens to be subset of the concept of humans.

Thus to say that God's nature is moral is the same as saying that God is the concept of the set of all the good and bad things, and this would also say that God is merely a concept. If you want to hold to that, I'll let you.

Sorry, I think it was actually Kant, not Hume.

Stuart, how does the burden shift to the person that does not believe? The number of things that don't exist is infinite, while the number of things that actually exist is finite. Since that is the case, using your logic, people should be burdened with disproving all the things that don't exist. So since I'm sure that you agree there are an infinite number of things that don't exist, I challenge you to to go about disproving all of them, and I will get back to you in an infinite amount of time and check on your progress.

"The burden of proof lies with the claimant."

There is a reason we have this phrase.

Hume explained what being is fairly well in refuting the ontological argument. Might want to look it up before saying that God's being necessitates anything.