Friday, January 10, 2014

FFRC and The Religious Hate Sign In Chicago

Headline: "Atheist group’s sign repeatedly vandalized in Chicago-area park"

"The sign, which reads “[l]et reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds,” was erected in North School Park directly across from a Nativity scene.

According to police reports, the sign was vandalized on December 20, December 22, and again on Christmas Eve.


“I was surprised,” said Tom Cara, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Chicago chapter. “I like to think the Chicago metropolitan area is a very diverse community and very tolerant and very accepting of different viewpoints.”

Cara told The Daily Herald that the sign raises issues that are “divisive and emotional,” but that he would not be installing it again this year. It had been up since November 30, and was scheduled to be taken down soon anyway.

“So perhaps the best thing is to leave it as is, so that people can see what a divisive issue religion can be when debated on government property.”

When asked whether he would install a similar sign next year, Cara only said, “[w]e’re only there because the religious symbols are there.”

“So often when Religious Right groups push to erect manger scenes on public property and the government responds by calling it a ‘public forum,’ there truly is ‘no room at the inn’ for minority or nonreligious views,” said FFRF Co-President Annine Laurie Gaynor in a statement. “There is only a forum for dominant Christian views.”
The sign was an attack designed to generate anger; it did. The purpose of the sign was to indicate how annoyed Atheists are that there are non-atheists in their universe. Note that the sign was NOT the same as a nativity scene which is devoted to a principle and its celebration. The sign was devoted specifically to attacks on the Other, not any principles of Atheist reasoning. There are no principles of Atheist reasoning. The sign is a demonstration of all there is to Atheism: rejectionism based on false claims and unprovable opinion.

It's too bad the sign has been vandalized. A better way would have been a companion sign asking, "Is that all you've got? Can you prove it? Let's see the proof using deduction and empiricism!"

If, as Gaynor claims, the sign is the minority Atheist worldview, then it's a failure. Leave it up, and argue with it.

7 comments:

Michael said...

What always strikes me is how quick such groups are to marginalize their own propaganda as if representative of only a small minority of atheists, as if they conferred with every single one of them before erecting that sign. Yeah, right.

Let's see: everywhere you look on the internet, atheists never miss an opportunity to ridicule and attack religion, especially us Christians, far and away the focal target of their aggression. So much for being equal opportunists. Put simply, if they were doing nothing wrong, there wouldn't be a need for them to preach tolerance. Tolerance sure works good when you're part of a minority group whose primary cause is to eliminate all traces of Christianity from public, as if we're supposed to conceal our religious faith just because they're offended. Well what about all the stuff that offends us, such as abortion, same-sex marriage and so forth? Oh, I forgot, we don't matter. Yet we must tolerate their immorality. Right. The Constitution says absolutely nothing about religious displays; in fact it guarantees religious liberty. It only prohibits the State from endorsing a religion.

By the way, try living as a Christian in any one of their communist utopias and see how tolerant they are of you.

Stan said...

AtheoLeftists naively believe that they can control their utopia using merely their mouths (witness Obama, who thought his speeches would change the world into his own image, and he had no other plan or thought except his own exceptionalism as messiah).

AtheoLeftists tend to be either non-producers or weak producers who are envious of material success, and wish it to be transeferred to themselves. So they couch that greed in terms of salvation of Class X, which Class is oppressed by Class Y. Class Y must be divested of its materiality which will be transferred to Class X. The messiahs inhabit Class X in certain regards, as well as perpetuate it. In other regards, they are the elites, the man-gods with special Rights due to their eliteness.

Michael said...

While I wouldn't define all atheists as being militant, whenever the latter does prop up in roles of authority, they always use their position to silence, remove and deny opportunity to anyone who doesn't conform to their worldview. Hence science being hijacked. Any attempt to stray from the pre-set evolutionary model is shut down immediately in academia and research, because they control both the campuses and peer-review (really an euphemism for 'atheist-approved').

The way I understand it (perhaps you can elaborate), Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood with the intention of using abortion to eliminate undesirables, or "dysingic stocks" as she referred to them. This was predicated on the false notion that it would 'speed up' the evolutionary process.

Ex-Republican. said...

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=9384853

Check this out.
Now Satanists openly want their beliefs endorsed.

TJay said...

Here's a sign that could offend Atheists:

"Never mind Galileo's house arrest.Atheists tortured hundreds of scientists to death during the Lysenko period"

I'm busy reading an Introduction to Evolution.The book is basically an attack on christianity.No objective science,just continual rants about the middle ages and Galileo,with quotes from philosopher Dennet (why him?) and props to Dawkins (the high priest).The book has a whole chapter dedicated to "debunking christianity" but not a single mention of the crimes committed against scientists and intellectuals during the Atheist Communist rule.And it makes no mention of the banning of sciences like Genetics and Quantum Physics during the that same period.

I don't trust Atheists ever to present an objective account of anything,they're have an agenda to save the phenomena instead of saving the truth.

Michael said...

"The book has a whole chapter dedicated to "debunking christianity" but not a single mention of the crimes committed against scientists and intellectuals during the Atheist Communist rule.And it makes no mention of the banning of sciences like Genetics and Quantum Physics during the that same period."

I've read estimates that nearly 100 million people died due to communist-atheist rule.

It's very telling that the author of a book about evolution felt the need to incorporate attacks on Christianity, which is supposedly outside of their materialism, but go figure. Evolution is a religious belief -- it has to be -- because it's never been observed or tested, whatever the mysterious, indeed magical mechanism.

Guess that pseudo-scientists donning lab coats suddenly makes them the go-to experts on theology, spirituality and psychology, to say nothing of morality, ethics and history.

Steven Satak said...

They put up a sign intended to piss off Christians and then are shocked - shocked, I say! - when the sign is defaced. "There must be something wrong with the vandals - they should be more tolerant'.

Or... you know, it just could be that the *sign* was an arrogant piece of crap and dead wrong in the bargain.

For a group that swings the word 'consensus' like a club, they sure don't recognize consensus when they see it.