Idaho State Senator Objects to Hindu Prayer: “They Worship Cows”

But but cows are better than gawd  + cows are real 😉

Disclaimer
All prayers are .. insane, you know, humans talking to themselves.. Ohh dear master of the universe bla bla lba 🙂

A Deity Made of Chocolate Spurs a Religious Debate

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As religious questions go, it is a relatively small one.

But, inevitably, it must be asked: Is it O.K. to eat a chocolate statuette of your favorite holy figure?

The matter arose recently at Bond Street Chocolate, a bite-size East Village boutique that traffics in intricately detailed figurines of Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh.

Last week, an organization called Universal Society of Hinduism issued a demand:

“Upset Hindus urge withdrawal of Lord Ganesh-shaped edible chocolate,” read the society’s Feb. 1 news release.

The owner of the store, Lynda Stern, was puzzled. For more than five years, she has been selling the gold-dusted Ganesh and his shelfmates, beside passion fruit bonbons and chocolate-coated wasabi peas, with barely a whiff of controversy.

In the release, the society’s president, Rajan Zed, wrote that Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, was “highly revered in Hinduism and was meant to be worshiped in temples or home shrines and not to be eaten casually.” The chocolate statues, he wrote, were an insult to Hindus
Read more
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Pray, what wrong did I do, asks atheist teacher

Religion, it creeps and slithers like zombie-cancer
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When all in his school fold their hands during prayer, Sanjay Salve keeps his hands firmly behind his back. The 41-year-old English teacher in Nashik is fighting imposition of prayers during school hours. “Only the national anthem should be played in school,” he says.

But Mr. Salve has paid a price for his “defiance.” Though eligible for a higher pay grade since 2008 – the year after his revolt – he has been denied it for ‘indiscipline.’ The management of the state-funded Savitribai Phule Secondary School sullied his 2008-09 Confidential Report. It was the same management which gave him excellent CRs in the preceding 12 years. “And fellow teachers with whom I once had cordial relations now avoid me,” he says.

Ironically, the school has been named after one of Maharashtra’s greatest 19th Century social reformers. Savitribai was the first woman teacher in the first women’s school and founded one for girls from the marginalised castes. Mr. Salve is an assistant teacher in the school run by the Mahatma Phule Samaj Shikshan Sanstha. Of nearly 1,600 students here, almost 60 per cent are either OBCs or Dalits. Around 35 per cent are Muslims. Mr. Salve is a Dalit who embraced Buddhism. The school management is overwhelmingly OBC.

Mr. Salve, who joined the school in 1996, says “the national anthem can instil more values in students. In any case, compulsory prayer is contrary to Article 28 (3) of the Constitution. Nor is there scope for it in the Maharashtra Secondary School Code.”

He has sought redress from the Bombay High Court. The next hearing in the case – whose outcome could seriously impact the debate over religious preaching and prayer in schools – is on September 6.

The son of poor parents who never finished school, Mr. Salve is a B.A. B.Ed. His wife is completing an M.Phil. Savitribai Phule would have been proud of them. The school isn’t.

It all began in June 2007 when Mr. Salve and other teachers waited in the playground for the day’s prayer session to begin. “As students began their prayers and pledge, I remained standing as I was, my hands behind my back. Everyone else was praying with folded hands. My action was spontaneous and not intended as a revolt. I just stood there, wondering why I should pray to the god of a religion which I do not follow,” he says.

Only a furious headmaster, Madhukar Bachchav, noticed his action and demanded a written explanation from him. “I told him I am an atheist and cannot participate in prayers to any god, that such compulsion violates the Constitution,” says Mr. Salve.

“Had we overlooked this indiscipline, it might have spread to others. It was on this ground we did not find his work satisfactory. Hence, he was denied the higher pay grade,” Mr. Bachchav says.
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Atheist/ anti-superstition campaigner murdered in India

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INDIA is so crammed with colourful “godmen”, quacks hawking dodgy medicines and palmists to trace your fate, it is easy to miss the mild-mannered rationalists in the scrum. Extreme followers of Kali, the goddess of power, occasionally still leave a decapitated human sacrifice at one of her temples, provoking a storm of attention and debate. But when a group of unbelievers organised a “hug an atheist day” on June 7th nobody noticed.

It took the murder on August 20th of an anti-superstition campaigner to remind India of the lot of its faithless. Narendra Dabholkar was on a regular morning stroll, in Pune, Maharashtra, when a pair of hitmen parked their motorbike and shot him dead (mourners paid their respects in traditional fashion, pictured above). He had campaigned for 18 years against those who pretend to use, or offer protection from, the arts of black magic or other religious or mystical harassment. He wanted a law to prosecute such con artists and to protect their victims from extortion and bullying.

A local sect and assorted Hindu right-wingers opposed his law, which Maharahstra’s state government finally agreed to enact, in Mr Dabholkar’s memory, on August 21st. He had received death threats before. The chief minister, Prithviraj Chavan, compared the killing of the rationalist to the murder of India’s most revered figure, saying that “just as Gandhi was killed by those who could not digest his thoughts…[Mr Dabholkar] too was eliminated”.
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Superstition & Stupidity – Hindu Style

I wonder how many rapists are there.. cleaning their sins in the holy sewer

Kids ‘silent victims’ of faith healers

Religion poisons everything… also, religion is the most stupid thing ever invented, made from bs!
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If doctors at Kashmir’s only tertiary neo-natal and child care hospital are to be believed, then something abhorring is happening to hundreds of newborn toddlers of the Valley at the hands of ‘faith healers’.
A two-year-old child from Ganderbal in northeastern part of the Kashmir
valley born with a Down’s syndrome (mentally and physically challenged) has been admitted in the hospital with at least 13 burn scars of 1 cm each in his abdomen caused by cigarette buts.

And the cruel act has been inflicted on the child by a so called ‘faith healer’ in front of his parents, doctors treating the child quoted the family members. Dr Abdul Rashid, registrar of GB Panth Hospital in Srinagar told the Hindustan Times that the child was first taken to a faith healer by his parents before coming to the hospital.

“Though suffering from Down’s syndrome from birth, he had cough and fever along with convulsions when brought to hospital on Tuesday. When we examined him we found multiple cigarette burn mark on his body. He was in pain,” Rashid said. “We got suspicious and enquired from the family of the child who first denied but ultimately revealed the cause,” he said.

The official said the practice was a known thing for the doctors working in the hospital. In the remote town of Kangan from where the family hails, many visit faith healers to seek cure to their health problems.

“These types of cases keep coming to the hospital. There are such people living in Jammu and Kashmir who consider a burn mark inflicted by a faith healer to have spiritual effect,” Rashid said.
Read more

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Clergy Asaram Bapu: Rape victim as guilty as rapists

Religion = Fancy word for insane madness

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Sex, Death And The Meaning Of Life Richard Dawkins

Episode 2
Richard Dawkins explores what science can tell us about death.
It’s a journey that takes him from Hindu funeral pyres in India to genetics labs in New York.
Dawkins brings together the latest neuroscience, evolutionary and genetic theory to examine why we crave life after death, why we evolved to age and how the human genome is something like real immortality – traits inherited from our distant ancestors that we pass on to future generations.

He meets a Christian dying of motor neurone disease, reminisces about the Wall Street Crash with a 105-year-old stockbroker, and interviews James Watson, the geneticist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.

Dawkins admits to sentimentality in imagining his own church funeral, but he argues we must embrace the truth, however hard that is.

In a television first, he has his entire genome sequenced to reveal the genetic indicators of how he himself may die.

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLulcfyqrc0&list=PL0JTU77EqVPaU8kJvPH-Cho5AuXfx0_Gm&index=1

Have We All Been Here Before?

The most stupid questions show… WARNING lost of stupid madness in progress, choking hazard, rotten brain, IQ killer etc AKA People sold on the “Nigerian” afterlife/reincarnation scam

BBC1 27 February 2011

Part 2: WARNING IT GETS WORSE, MUCH WORSE, that blonde.. man, damn arrrgghhhh IT BURNS.

Reasonably Certain

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