Posted on 12/06/2008 4:36:38 PM PST by llevrok
An anti-religion placard posted alongside Christmas displays drew a thief, a preacher, a part-time elf and a security detail to the state Capitol on Friday as a weeklong uproar over religious speech hit a bizarre peak. It all started Monday, when the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation unveiled a winter solstice sign in the grand marble hallways around the Capitol Rotunda in Olympia.
The sign’s atheistic message – reading in part that “Religion is but myth and superstition” – drew top billing on conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s TV show.
Several days of angry messages to Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire followed, and Friday morning, someone removed the atheist sign and apparently hustled it out of the Capitol.
KMPS radio station in Seattle soon reported that an unidentified man had dropped off the pilfered placard, and the Washington State Patrol dispatched someone to pick it up.
Meanwhile, people flocked to the Capitol to check out the crime scene, set up their own protest signs and speak to a bank of TV news cameras jamming the hallway
(SNIP)
State carpenter Jim Buenzli, who first noticed the missing atheist sign Friday morning, said he was fed up by the whole furor. That’s why he applied for permission to place the Festivus pole, which he planned to buy and install next week.
“I got sick of the way these things were going, so I wanted to put some humor into it,” he said. “They’re making a big mockery out of our state on the news.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewstribune.com ...
Airing of grievances for all!
Festivus for the rest of us...
How long until FSM makes an appearance?
“Logic and reason aren’t enough: You also have to be a dick to everyone who doesn’t think like you.”- Richard Dawkins (South Park)
“I gotta lot of problems with you people!!”
As soon as they begin the ritual of pirates, midgets, and italian chefs. Communion is served with the Holy Mug of Grog.
Well, there really is no full separation of beliefs and state. Moral laws are based upon moral beliefs, which usually come from one source more than another, and in a Democracy the people effectively decide by their votes what the basic religion will be that is manifest by the State in it’s laws. America just happens to increasingly be choosing the wrong one, to their own hurt, as did Germany, and Russia (and no, Hitler was not acting out Christian beliefs, no matter how much “brites” insist he was, while insisting atheism was not to blame at all for Stalin’s and Mao’s atrocities).
Sir Francis Bacon, Of Atheism
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