I just got back from the monthly meeting of the San Francisco Atheists. This is the first time I’ve ever been to such a gathering. I had a good time. I also shamelessly plugged the Bay of Fundie.

If you were at that meeting, welcome aboard! I’m glad you stopped by to check out my blog. I hope you’ll make the BoF a regular stop.

For anybody else reading this post, have you ever considered joining your local atheist organization? You don’t have to be an atheist. They accept all rational people, such as agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers. If you have a brain that you actually use, come to a meeting. You’ll find it filled with some of the smartest people around, and you’ll have some of the most stimulating conversations you’ve had in a long time. Or if you’d rather contribute to the decay of modern civilization, you can sit at home and watch American Idol.

Here’s the website of the American Atheists. If you want to find a local group, here’s their page of local chapters.

I am pleased to announce the latest installment of our occasional feature, Know Your Foe. Today’s lucky winner is Senator Rick Santorum. Be sure to read it; he’s a bad one.

I came across some more information about the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 that I reported on last week. The good folks at Dispatches from the Culture Wars tell us more:

[I]t isn’t true that the ACLU received those amounts in those cases. That may have been the amount that was awarded to the plaintiff (because they won the case, remember), but that’s not what the ACLU actually got.

Out of such awards first has to come all of the costs of the litigation, which can be very high depending on how long the case dragged on, how many depositions were taken, and so forth. Then in most cases, the bulk of the fees will go not to the ACLU but to the private law firm that handled the case. In most such cases, the ACLU will end up with only a small portion in legal fees, but even then they can only recover the fees for the billable hours their attorneys actually put in on the case. So the rewards merely cover the expense of the trial. It’s hardly a profitable thing to do.

Only actual attorneys fees go to the attorneys, and nobody is skimming money off the top for fees not earned. The Public Expression of Religion Act is just a disingenuous way of getting state and local governments off cheap when they violate our constitutional rights.

. . . even if you need it real bad!

Why is anybody stupid enough to go on the Colbert Report? I’ve been cruising the web looking for blogs of interest. I came across BoingBoing.net. He has a great link to a YouTube video. To quote BoingBoing:

In this video, Stephen Colbert nails Georgia Representative Lynn Westmoreland, a Congressman who’s co-sponsored a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Reps and the Senate.

Please watch and enjoy!

Over at My Left Wing, there is an interesting discussion going on over this desecration of an American symbol:

Much of the discussion involves just how much of a “Christian nation” this is. Paul Rosenberg has an excellent post. It says, in part:

America was founded as a liberal nation, not a Christian nation. That meant that everyone had the right to worship God in the way that they saw fit. Every nation on earth that called itself a “Christian nation” told some of its citizens that they weren’t real Christians, and they didn’t have the same rights. That’s what “Christian nation” meant!

I recommend that you read his entire post (roughly halfway down the page) as well as the rest of the comments.

I just came across this site comparing fundies and Nazis. Read the page, then make up your own mind.

It’s interesting that most of the quotations on this page are from the Fundie Research Council. Not all Nazis were alike. There was the rank-and-file Nazi, and then there was the SS. I think we know who the Fundie Research Council is.

As I was cruising around the Cybercast (a.k.a. Christian) News Service’s website to read the article I mentioned in my last post, I noticed that all of the articles that these people have in their Archive section have an improper date stamp.

The Mt. Soledad article, for example, displayed what they believe the current date is: July 4, 106. You read that right; we’re living in the year 106! Check it out yourself, right below the menu.

What a Freudian slip! These people still act like they’re living in the second century. Their website proves it!

Obviously this is a Y2K issue, but Y2K was 6 years ago! How pathetic is that? What are they running? MS DOS 3? They probably didn’t think they would need to update their software, because they expected Jesus to return on 1/1/2000.

Here’s another fun article from our friends at Cybercast News Service. It’s entitled “Efforts to Save Mount Soledad Memorial Face Deadline.”

If you aren’t familiar with this matter, you can check out my last post. To quote CNS:

Activists trying to protect the Mount Soledad veterans’ memorial in San Diego, Calif., say the Fourth of July weekend would be the perfect time for President Bush to appeal to his conservative base by taking federal possession of the monument under eminent domain.

Whoa, Nellie! They want Bush to “appeal to his conservative base” by using eminent domain? Are these people stupid? Conservatives hate eminent domain! I know not all conservatives think alike (it just seems that way most of the time), but I bet that most fundies objected to last year’s Supreme Court decision that greatly expanded the government’s ability to seize property. (Note that outrage at this decision has cut across the political spectrum, but conservatives have published some of the most strident objections.)

So let me get this straight. Eminent domain is bad when people you don’t like do it to you, but eminent domain is good when you do it to people you don’t like? OK. It makes sense now!

The knuckle-draggers currently keeping this issue in the courts are at the Thomas More Law Center, a “public interest” law firm dedicated to, among numerous other regressive agendas, demolishing the wall of separation between church and state. They represent a group calling itself “San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial.”

They are using a strategy that conservatives everywhere are brilliant at: Changing the debate by changing the name. What sort of communist could be opposed to a war memorial? I’ll bet the guy who filed this suit is an atheist!

The article continues:

The battle over the cross began in 1991 when Federal District Court Judge George Thompson ruled in favor of atheist Philip Paulson and ordered the city to remove the cross.

Hide the children! He is an atheist!!

The journalistic integrity continues:

The Mount Soledad cross was built in 1954 as a memorial to Korean War casualties and veterans.

Wrong!! See my last article. The current version was built in 1954 in honor of the resurrection fantasy. It has been known since the beginning as the Easter Cross. An earlier version was built in 1913. I know that the Korean War is still technically going on (it ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty), but I had no idea that we’ve been at war with North Korea for 93 years!

“They are prominent features atop hillsides in publicly-owned parks,” Linda Hills, executive director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, told the San Diego Union Tribune in 1998. “Their Christian import is clear and has been acknowledged by the courts. Their maintenance by the City and County, respectively, is tantamount to a governmental endorsement of Christianity.

But [Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center] disagreed, saying that the cross has a meaning that transcends religion. “It would be a devastating tragedy that we would not recognize the sacrifice of these veterans and their families by honoring that with a cross, which is a universal symbol of sacrifice,” he said.

It’s not a “universal symbol of sacrifice”! It’s a universal symbol of Christianity! The cross doesn’t symbolize sacrifice to me. It symbolizes blind following, intolerance, hatred, theocracy, oppression and subjugation of women, and numerous other crimes against humanity. That’s the last thing I want my tax dollars supporting.