Actually Atheists are as bad as people that are religious, unfortunately the heuristics that allowed humans to be great at surviving also mean that we cut corners when processing information about others.

The major processing flaw is that whether we are religious or Atheist, we judge ourselves based upon all of our memories of our actions and beliefs, we judge others who display the same actions/beliefs/physical looks, to be the same as ourselves, however we judge others as different with attributions based on a much more narrow spectrum of actions/incidents.

If you (a human) were to steal $10 dollars, you would judge yourself on the totality of your actions. If you saw another person steal $10, then most people judge them solely on that one incident and thanks to the glory of heuristic processing, that judgment is generalised to the rest of their race/nationality/religion/etc.

The level of generalisation depends number of degrees that you see the person to be different.

Unfortunately I will use the example from before of Catholic Priests.

There is an incident with one priest;

A catholic may attribute that incident to being localised to that single church.

A Protestant may attribute that incident to all catholic priests.

An Atheist may attribute that incident to all religious people.

i'm an athiest/agnostic and i attribute the action of the westboro church, to the westboro church and not to all christians.... ;-)

oh i was never intending to claim that all churches were the same as these nut jobs. obviously this is a 1 off group.

http://www.cnn.com/...testers/index.html?hpt=T2

dang, Westboro is getting into it with the KKK.

that's like me arguing with RD.

KKK probably figured that it will improve their reputation to go against Westboro.

It was really funny once, an Australian Jewish comedian went to America to try and join the KKK as part of his show as a joke.
He got them to conceed that he could join if his father was Jewish but not if his mother was Jewish, then they chased him out and ended the interview when he pointed out that Jesus's mother was Jewish, so Jesus wouldn't be allowed to join.

i might be missing something, but jesus himself was a jew.. why would his mother being jewish preclude his joining the kkk, but his own judaism wouldn't? And then for the Australian comedian, as well?

urpa derpa

anyone know how i can join the westboro baptist church, and does anyone know if there is an annual fee or anything????

i knew you hated christians, but i didn;t know you hated gays and the military, too? :P

http://www.youtube.com/..._1LzY&feature=related

lol, John Safran was annoyed a mormons so he went around as a door to door atheist

They spew their hate because Fred Phelps is still in the closet and pissed off about it.

Most Christians understand that it is not their place to judge others, and so they live and let live. I therefore have many Christian friends.

Those friends might call me atheist which isn't wrong, but I prefer the term humanist since it describes what I believe rather than what I do not believe.

Unfortunately if you examine a large enough group of people of any belief, you will eventually stumble over some highly objectionable members of that group. Religion didn't cause WBC to behave this badly. I suspect that family would have been haters no matter what. This was merely the medium they chose.

A good point, Terror, I also have many Christian friends, they are some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet and they do not judge anyone because they recognize that it's not their place to be the judge. I wonder about the "hunaist" movement, though. It seems to be difficult to maintain that there is no God. I would struggle with the idea that this all just "happened" without some kind of intervention.

I think that there must have been something that stimulated this. I have no other explanation for the beauty of the world that we live in.

Humanists have a bit in common with Jews who really don't care if you want to be Jewish with them. Humanists are not looking to recruit people. If you have both the intellect and the upbringing to accommodate Humanism, then it's a pretty natural choice.

Your notion that the world is beautiful is purely subjective. Self-replicating molecules have had over a billion years to compete against other self-replicating molecules, and that is a long time to ensure that every biological niche that might accommodate a species is being filled by something. I think it's only a matter of time before Earthly life finds ways to take advantages of resources outside of Earth. Expansion of life to claim all available resources is nothing new. It happens as surely for humans as it does for the mold taking over the cheese you left in your refrigerator for too long.