Hedonwriter

About the freedom to think original thoughts and do original deeds

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Thou Shalt Not Be Naked!

Thou Shalt Not Be Naked!

Whose idea was it to proclaim nakedness a sin? The Catholic Church and the various Protestant organizations began sending missionaries to faraway places to establish their prestige and increase memberships and tithes. That is nothing more than good business practice. The God of the Bible never proclaimed nakedness a sin. Reading your Bible, however, will give you the impression that people…

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Tax-free Churches? There’s No Such Thing!

Tax-free Churches? There’s No Such Thing!

You pay what churches don’t! US churches* received an official federal income tax exemption in 1894, and they have been unofficially tax-exempt since the country’s founding. All 50 US states and the District of Columbia exempt churches from paying property tax. Donations to churches are tax-deductible, making for a double-dip loss of revenues by the government. They are not tax free. YOU pay…

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Faith and Facts

May 23, 2009 “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” [Clarence Darrow] “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a…

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Politics

The closest thing to religion that we have going for us is politics. That may be because the church once ran the whole thing. Between the Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, they had a couple thousand years or more to set things up that way. Opinions are in the forefront; facts have no bearing on anything. People vote against their own best interests because they have been trained that way.…

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Love

Love Love only becomes meaningful by demonstration. If you have to brag about loving people, you’re not demonstrating it. If you have to brag about God’s love for people, God’s not demonstrating it. My words. I will not ask you to believe them. Most of us are astute enough to recognize when love is absent. We are most of us astute enough to recognize when we are confronted by hatred. Whether…

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Rudeness Rudeness Donald Trump demonstrated quite effectively that he can get the religious vote by getting them accept him as one of them and his opponents as someone they would find undesirable.

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Rights

    Rights Rights are just one of many similar things that bother the heads of atheists. They don’t really exist but we make them exist by agreeing to honor them. That’s why I tend to speak and write about such examples of quasi-reality in terms of persistence more than existence. This is very important to a full understanding of atheism and I shall have to pay strict attention to my wording…

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Propaganda

Propaganda It was as true at the beginning as it is now. As demonstrated by the recent election, the best propaganda wins. Simply telling the truth gets nowhere; it will be used against you by an effective propagandist who can twist your honest words to mean other than what you said, the way David Barton does. Propaganda against Hillary began while her husband was still in office, and got…

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Abeyance

Reposted from Hedonix of December 3, 2013 Abeyance Lloyd H. Whitling Hang it up. Put it back on the shelf. Keep it in cold storage. Give it a rest until we see a reason for it. Abeyance… If you study only all you’ve been handed, you will never learn anything that goes beyond that. You will never feel the joy of making your own discoveries. You’ll have only old stories to tell children already…

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Persecution Persecutor A persecutor is a person or group guilty of the following wrongs: 1: those who stalk, harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict; specifically: those who cause to suffer because of belief or absence of belief or difference of belief.

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Why Science Works Why Does Science Work? Why Does Religion Fail? This graphic, thanks to uncountable people from whose tutelage it grew, has turned into one of my favorite creations.

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Pain Pain All the ugly sensations get dumped into the heading for PAIN'. Can you imagine a world without pain?

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Outcomes Outcomes It's not necessary to know a lot of science to be a good atheist, but it helps you to hold your ground when confronted by the inevitable Christianists lusting to Christianize you.

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Orthodoxy Orthodoxy Orthodoxy is taking the word of an ancient line of thought without question. To swallow anything that's old whole without a very careful check is guaranteed to lead to pain.

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Oppression Oppression The lot of a not quite smart animal just bright enough to pick the least hazardous path toward the future, oppression builds as societies age and politicians wrestle to gain power and control.

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Nature

Nature I will acknowledge a fondness for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (“But, that is about something that’s not real.”) I won’t argue against that. What role the Flying Spaghetti Monster can play for everybody is as a stand in for testing other beliefs. If whatever can be said about the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not also true about the belief being tested, that belief could be true. It doesn’t…

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Memetics

Memetics Sometimes scientists seem obliged to ask silly and deceitful-sounding questions. We must keep in mind that real scientists have spent the better part of a decade or longer going to school to learn to ask those irritating questions, and argue for and against what seem like idiotic viewpoints, however much they may remind us of certain seven year old children. Those questions are part of a…

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