The Annual Imagined War on Christmas Cometh.

It begins. As mass consumerism sweeps the land, the religious right must paint atheists as scapegoats in the erosion of our values. The whole "defending the Constitutional rights of non-Christians" thing really gets their panties in a bundle as they try and blur the lines between government and their religion. One mayor has already taken to saying that erecting a giant cross on public land is a "holiday tradition" that "may be construed as religious." A cross is not a religious symbol? Yeah, right. Next they'll be telling me this Jesus guy was real.

I Thought We Were Over This.

Great. FTB is at it again. Trawling forums and comment sections for evidence against the undesirables. For a group of people so disgusted with the Slyme Pit, I'll never understand why they spend so much time there.

This time, it's Al Stefanelli in trouble again, with his whole, wild "sharing public information isn't doxxing" theory. Somehow this contributes to his blatant racism, I'm sure.

A little disappointed in Ophelia. Actually, I'm not. After our conversation on twitter where she agreed the knee-jerk reaction of banning "tone trolls" when they ask questions or offer dissenting viewpoints was harmful, she continued to do just that on her blog. Now she's retweeting Justin Vacula's defense of Stefanelli to garner attention and stir the pot again.

We should have known. It had been too quiet for at least a week from that camp. I'm surprised they left the world open to such things as harsh criticism and valid questioning for so long. Anyway, looks like their back on the job.

It's funny, when I have a fallout with someone on a social network, I stay away from them. I don't peruse their tweets and comments and then call them stalkers. Just something I do for my own piece if mind. Funny that other grown adults haven't got that yet. We can't just agree to disagree here. Every imagined injury must not go unpunished. I thought we were over this.

Morality by a Show of Hands

Nothing bothers me more than Internet cowardice. User "bella swan" commented on my "I Forgot I Screencapped This" post to tell me she had asked atheists how many of them grew up in a religious household and most of them raised their hands. Her implication is that the claim that morals don't come from religion is wrong because she got a few of her friends to raise their hands.

What she wrote is not even what bothers me. Yes, the idea that a silly little anecdote could discount generations of moral philosophy is absurd and laughable, but I'm more annoyed by the fact that she picked a post that had nothing to do with the question of morality, that is over a month old and that is buried beneath my most recent posts.

This isn't the first person to use an unrelated, buried post to make a theistic argument in the hopes that only I will see it, so from now on I'll be bringing them to light in future blog posts so that my readers will be aware of their game.

I invited bella swan to comment on this post if she wants to talk about morality and address some points I made, but I doubt she'll have the balls to do so. Theists dwell and thrive in the darkness of willful ignorance where they don't have to face dissenting voices.

Davis Area FreeThinkers

I've been awfully busy lately, so I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks. I want to talk about the first meeting of the Davis Area FreeThinkers.

Chris and I sat outside of Mikuni in Davis Commons after having salads at Plutos. We didn't make a sign beforehand, so we propped a Moleskin notebook up and wrote "SacFAN meetup" on it. That was sufficient until we got a few people gathered, at which point it was pretty obvious who we were.

It was a group of about ten or twelve people, including a member of AGASA, the student group at UC Davis.

We talked about what kind of group we wanted. There's a range on what kind of group we can form, from an informal chat where we share ideas for local events to a formal non-profit. We chose the former because SacFAN already acts as a sort of umbrella for atheist and secular events that support non-profits.

I've scheduled the next meetup for the last Monday of this month and changed the time to six to see if that is more accommodating for working people.

Minus the Freethought Day in Sacramento last month, this was the most atheists I have ever seen in one place, IRL. I'm excited! I'll update this blog if we are going to be doing any big events.