New Religions: (2) The First Church of Shatnerology.

New Religions: (1) the United Church of Bacon

About the Church
The United Church of Bacon is a real, legal church based in Las Vegas, Nevada with nearly 10,000 members worldwide.

We chose a funny bacon name to expose how wrong it is for society to give automatic respect and special legal privileges to religions. Is our saying we worship Bacon really any stranger than Catholics who say that communion wafers become the body of Christ? Unlike God, who is invisible, at least we can see Bacon. Bacon is demonstrably real.

Our name has nothing to do with a rude term for police officers. We respect the police and our founder is a decorated veteran.

We were founded in 2010 by friends of magician Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. We now have nearly 10,000 members from around the world.

Beliefs and Mission
The United Church of Bacon holds to a list of 9 Bacon Commandments. We tried to make it 10, but ran out of space on the tablets and didn’t want to start over.


Our mission is:

We oppose supernatural claims. We are skeptics and atheists. In our religion, we doubt religion.
We fight discrimination. Atheists are not inferior and should not be hated and marginalized.
We raise money for charity while accepting no donations for ourselves.
We perform legal weddings, always for free. How joyful!
We expose religious privileges as silly by claiming the same rights for Bacon.
We praise Bacon! If you don’t like pigs, praise Vegetarian Bacon or Turkey Bacon.

O'Reilly: Christianity's decline could lead to collapse of USA

He hits all the possible points: religion is going down because of music and drugs (he skipped sex, that's sloppy) while claiming the Founding Fathers did not want the US to be secular (see quotes below)

Thou Shalt Worship None of the Above

'Spirituality' is evolving towards DIY 'beliefs' by

Checking Charlie Hebdo’s Privilege (Douthat, NYT)

Checking Charlie Hebdo’s Privilege

APRIL 18, 2015 - Ross Douthat - NYT

A LIVING cartoonist lecturing his murdered peers makes for a curious spectacle, but that’s what transpired at journalism’s George Polk Awards a week ago. The lecturer was Garry Trudeau, of “Doonesbury” fame; his subject was the cartoonists for Charlie Hebdo, (..)
“ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” (..) David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first “identify the bearer of privilege,” then “hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”
(..)
on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

First, while power flows from pre-existing privilege, it also grows from the barrel of a gun, and the willingness to deal out violence changes power dynamics, even when it doesn’t have a truly revolutionary outcome. The terrorist’s veto on portrayals of Islam is itself a very real form of power, and as long as journalists who challenge it end up dead, the idea that they are “up” and their targets are “down” reflects a denial of life-and-death reality. (..)

Second, we live in a world where William Gibson’s insight that “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” is vindicated every day, and where migration and communication bring cultures that are experiencing this uneven distribution into constant contact. In a globalized world, the faith that the Hebdo cartoonists mocked is the faith of both the powerless and the powerful, (..)

Third and finally, almost every official hierarchy of victimhood tends toward some kind of blindness or partiality.
(..)


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-checking-charlie-hebdos-privilege.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fross-douthat

Free Trade Is Not the Enemy - (William Daley in NYT)

Free Trade Is Not the Enemy

By WILLIAM M. DALEY - MAY 19, 2015
William M. Daley, a managing partner at Argentière Capital AG, was secretary of commerce from 1997 to 2001 and President Obama’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opinion/free-trade-is-not-the-enemy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

CHICAGO — IN 1993, President Bill Clinton tapped me as special counsel to lead the fight to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. (..)

During the Nafta debate, America was on the precipice of great change.(..) So we muscled the agreement through Congress over fierce Democratic opposition.

The economic impact of the deal was immediately undercut by the collapse of the Mexican peso in 1994. But opponents’ predictions of “a giant sucking sound” accompanying the departure of millions of jobs from American workers never materialized, either. (..)

Now Congress is set to weigh in on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which encompasses 12 nations on four continents and dwarfs Nafta in economic size and geopolitical importance. (..)

There is no path to middle-class prosperity without tearing down barriers to American exports. By 2030, the world economy is expected to grow by $60 trillion, with almost 90 percent of the growth occurring outside the United States. Our success depends on how much of that new wealth is spent on American products. But today, of the 40 largest economies, the United States ranks 39th in the share of our gross domestic product that comes from exports. This is because our products face very high barriers to entry overseas in the form of tariffs, quotas and outright discrimination.

When barriers disappear, we prosper. In the 17 trade deals the United States has concluded since 2000, our balance of trade in the blue-collar-goods sector went from minus $3 billion to plus $31 billion, according to an analysis of government data by the centrist policy institute Third Way, on whose board I sit. According to the International Trade Administration, export-related jobs pay 18 percent more than similar jobs in the same sector.

Geopolitically, President Obama is also right. If we don’t set the rules for commerce in the Asia-Pacific region, China will. (..)
(..)
Finally, there is the question of politics. Denying the president the authority to negotiate an agreement to bring before Congress would be a serious rebuke. (..)

Nafta’s shadow hangs over this deal, but the truth is that both its upside and its downside are smaller than anyone likes to admit. Now we have a chance to guide a huge section of the world’s economy to reflect our own high standards for commerce. Why would we deny the president the opportunity to seize this moment?

Do you support religious arbitration courts? (Irving TX controversy)

(A preamble: the debate can be tainted by irrelevant and nasty political posturing
- some GOP politicians will stoke the fire of xenophobia to rally a gawd-help-us base
- some activists will side Islam reflexively in the name of protecting minorities)

The case as presented by UK's The Independent:

On the hair trigger sensitivity of DU 'hides'

I'm a 2015 member with 600 comments or so. And two 'hides'.
I'm not complaining, just discussing the 'hides' mechanism.

Both my posts were jokes. The first one was just relaying an internet animated gif which could be misinterpreted, hidden 5-2, why not.

But the second post was meant as a lighthearted joke, and having asked him/her after the hide, the person concerned had indeed interpreted my post as a joke. Which raises two questions IMHO:

1- the person who 'alerted' a jury is most probably one on the opposite side from me in that lounge. Unless the alerter has a thin skin by procuration, is the 'alert' business used to settle scores?

2- the post as I meant it and as it was read by the person concerned was a joke. The jury was about split 4-3, and I suppose the fact someone bothered to create an alert tipped the scale. In essence, the jury misinterpreted the post as understood by the two persons involved. Should hides be decided when the vote goes 5-2, not just 4-3?

In the meantime, I'll stick to a strict no-jokes policy. A bit over-PC to my mind, but so be it.

Strong decline of religion in the US over the past 7 years

Full report here: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

Amazingly, the percentage of religious people appears to have dropped by one percent point each year

Going from 83% in 2007 to 76.5% in 2014

Reciprocally, the number of unaffiliated rises from 16% to nearly 23% (almost one quarter of the population)



Even more remarkable, the fastest growth groups are atheists and agnostics.

Atheists neatly double from 1.6 to 3.1%. Agnostics almost double from 2.4 to a round 4%.

Jeb probably just handed 2016 to Hillary

GW is the recent president with the lowest image among voters:

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Not to mention historians: