Several of the singles from it have atheistic themes, including the song “The Future Goes“:

An excerpt from the lyrics (at the 1:14 mark):

So when we say that we’re better than you/ essentially that//
is to say that we pay attention to facts//
So come with us. We can teach you every attack//
the pseudoscientific mindset sets in a trap//
You will never go back/ Once you’re given the awe//
it’s grander than any caricature religion could draw//
I had a vision of all/ of us in a prison of straw men//
My mission is to make sure they ain’t winning this war//
So the battle lines are drawn in the sand/ ‘cos all that I am//
is a man/ shaping his logical thoughts to a plan/ Damn//
We need clear heads to get out of this mess//
So tell religious leaders step aside; it’s probably best/ Yes//

Who needs Gospel music when there’s Godless rapping to be spread?

Buy the album and keep this sort of thing going!

The band, Bye June, conveys the message via shadow puppets and swans. The obstacle to the swans’ love? Not a surprise…

The lead singer/songwriter, Gil Kline, said this about the video:

“I wrote this song because my cousin is in 10 year relationship and he can’t marry his partner. They are so in love, and it angers me that politicians try to tell other people who to love and spend their life with”.

Damn right.

There’s a Facebook page dedicated to the Swan Pride movement and the stories on the wall (scroll down for them) are absolutely inspirational.

(Thanks to Paul for the link!)

The banner will read “Football beats church anytime – atheists.org.” The banner is scheduled to be in the air from 9:30-11:30 AM local time.

Dave Silverman, President of American Atheists, stated, “We took advantage of a unique opportunity to remind many Americans that their religion is not as important as they like to pretend it is. In many cities around the country the running joke is that football is the most popular religion.”

Mr. Silverman continued, “The banner will be seen by thousands of tailgaters, who clearly agree with American Atheists since they chose to sit on a tailgate instead of a pew. They chose to party with friends instead of praying with preachers.”

Silverman also paid for banners to fly over select cities last July.

Back then, many pilots refused to fly the banners, but there doesn’t seem to be much resistance this time around.

He recently released this video promising to fight against House Joint Resolution No. 6, which would limit marriage to that between a man and woman only:

As if I needed another reason to love Rupert…

His campaign site is here, in case you’d like to bask in his awesomeness.

(Thanks to Ron for the link!)

While men still outearn women, the gap is shrinking. When it comes to young adults, women are graduating from college in greater numbers, have higher GPAs and for the first time ever, are more likely to earn a PhD than a man is. Women are also getting married and becoming parents at younger ages, while men are still more likely to live with the 'rents. What is the cause of this growing divide?

On the flipside, William J. Bennett, CNN contributor, and author of The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood recently wrote that, “for the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men.” The New York Times reported in 2010 that women account for more than half of college students and nearly half of the work force.

It should be a woo-hoo!-women moment. And it is. But it’s hard to be completely happy about the fact that while women are becoming more successful, men seem to be regressing.

Bennett writes:

Today, 18-to-34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to-17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways.

Articles from Hanna Rosin (The End of Men), Kay S. Hymowitz (Where Have the Good Men Gone? and Fiona Roberts (America’s Lost Boys: Why ARE so many young men failing to grow up?) have also highlighted the plight of young men in America.

According to the Daily Mail article by Roberts, psychologists blame the man-baby trend on a range of factors, from boys becoming disillusioned at young ages about their roles in society to the rise of video games and the internet.

Research like the ones cited above might hit close to home, considering many atheists are young and male. Research from Ariela Keysar (2007) reports that one-third of American atheists are under 25 years old, and half are under age 30. About one-fourth of 25-year-old white men lived at home in 2007 — before the latest recession — compared with one-fifth in 2000 and less than one-eighth in 1970 according to the New York Times article cited earlier. However, research also tell us atheists tend to score high on measures of IQ, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy.

So what is the problem with men these days? Or is there even a problem?

Immature men get a "Hall Pass" from their wives in this 2011 film.

It’s not like there are a ton of great role models out there. Ashton Kutcher? Chris Brown? Ben Roethlisberger? Even the usually brilliant Richard Dawkins got some heat last year for mocking Rebecca Watson after she said she felt uncomfortable when a man propositioned her in an elevator.

Mark Driscoll, noted sexist and a founding pastor at Mars Hill Church, thinks more young men need the Bible to grow up.

Earlier this month, Driscoll wrote:

I’m a pastor, and I know this will seem crazy, but let’s put down the remote, set aside the porno, and see if maybe the Bible has any wisdom since what we are doing isn’t working.

In an older RELEVANT magazine interview, Driscoll said that men have entered an extended adolescence as “guys.”

It’s just extended adolescence, where 20s, 30s, sometimes even in his 40s, he doesn’t really want to get married, doesn’t really want to have kids, doesn’t really want to pursue a career. He has a lot of hobbies, got a lot of buddies, watches a lot of porn, gambles, has a lot of fun, maybe plays in some band or is in a guild of World of Warcraft, or something ridiculous like that… I think part of the problem is, as well, that the Church in large part has accommodated that.

Those guys tend not to go to church. If those guys do show up at church, it’s usually just to find a couple of gals to break the commandments with. And the Church doesn’t really know what to do with them, so the least likely person in America to go to church is a guy in his 20s who is single. Without knowing what to do with those guys, they commit crimes, they get women pregnant, they’re a drain on social services, they don’t raise their kids, they don’t contribute to church, they’re not getting ready to lead the next generation. I’d say it’s nothing short of a crisis, it’s a real problem.

According to an article on The Catholic News Agency’s website, “Nearly 40 percent of post-abortive women in one study reported that partners pressured them into having the abortions.” Emory University professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is quoted as saying “the most enthusiastic fans of abortion have been men — at least until they have children of their own.”

Christian blogger Ruthie Dean also writes that women have been damaged by dating immature guys who don’t want families — immature guys like the one she calls “Mr. I Don’t Believe in Organized Religion.” She wrote on a christanitytoday.com blog post last week:

…standards should not be created based on the worst examples but instead on what God deems right…. humans cannot change people. God is in the business of changing and redeeming men’s hearts.

I know someone who agrees with Driscoll and Dean. She told me she wishes the guy she is seeing (he is 23ish) would move out of his parents’ and go to church. She mentioned his atheism as if it was a problem that would keep him from maturing. I took offense to that.

OK, well, sure, there are some basic, positive concepts that could benefit anyone in the Bible.

But there’s a whole lot of scary stuff, too.

Should women be treated like property and killed if they don’t cry out for help while being raped? Should men be willing to give their wife sexually to a pharaoh as a bargaining chip like Abraham did? The Bible is a literary cornucopia of men behaving badly.

As a pre-teen in Bible school, I heard the story of David, Bethsheba and Uriah. When my Bible teacher read the verses where God described David as a man “after my own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14; Acts 13:22), it made me feel like if a murderer and pervert was the closest person out there to God’s heart then humanity had to be absolutely hopeless. The message I got was that something was wrong with each and every one of us.

Now I’m a little older and a little smarter. And what I hope for is to not marry a man like David. And I don’t want my future kids to have a dad like Abraham, who would sacrifice his son because he heard voices. I definitely wouldn’t want to marry a man who prays upon and bases his ideology on the Bible, especially not with messages like these:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. — 1 Timothy 2:11

If men need fiction to grow up, I’m thinking books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Handmaid’s Tale, If This is a Man (not fiction), and Brave New World are good starts. To me, Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium series offers more of a solid condemnation of violence done to women than the Bible does.

What do you think? Are the statistics concerning the growing immaturity of men overblown? And if not, what will help?

(Image via Shutterstock)

An excerpt from the lyrics:

…the other side interested in scaring
the rest of us here with a message of fear
so todays questions appear
through the lens of yesterday’s perception of fair
and the prejudice clear
whenever they’re debating on who gets to be married
always saying to protect the kids
really they’re afraid we’ll reject their myths

The entire album or just the single can be found on his site.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll see:

I don’t know anything about the bands or DJs playing, but if Christian Nightmares is a part of the show, it has to be good, right?

Obama legally kills babies and now he can legally kill Grandmas!

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

That’s what became of Victoria Jackson, who appeared on SNL from 1986 to 1992:

More recently, she appeared in a webseries called PolitiChicks. In Episode 1, they ripped on “Gays, Muslims & Gay Muslims”:

So after you hear all this, you start asking questions…

Is she really that crazy?

Is this all some sort of weird alternative comedy routine?

Is she trying to out-Colbert Stephen Colbert?

Julia Sweeney — also a former SNL cast member around the same time (she famously portrayed androgynous Pat) and an atheist who wrote a wonderful one-woman show about losing her faith — gets asked about Jackson a lot, as you might imagine.

In a post on her website today, she tries to answer those questions and reluctantly admits it’s probably not an act:

So, to answer the question that many have asked me…. Yes. She is for real. She really does believe all the things she says. To my knowledge, there will not be a day when she says: the jig is up. It was all a performance piece.

What bothers me is that she wants to have it both ways at once. She wants to get the laughs that are there for characters who are kooky and dimwitted, but then she also wants to use this persona to make real points and arguments. Points and arguments that are not ironic, they are completely naked and honest and forthright. But she’ll take the laughs…

…

She’s not Andy Kaufman (as many emailers have asked me.) The “there” you think is “there” is not “there.”

As far as I know.

If it turns out Jackson has been doing an act for this long, it may go down as one of the greatest Poes we’ve ever seen.

But if she really is as kooky as she comes across, it would just be… sad. How someone could get that brainwashed by the intertwining of conservative Christianity and politics — especially when she (presumably) knows many liberals, has worked with them, and ought to know they’re not as bad as she makes them out to be — is really stunning.

Adam Savage, the co-host of Mythbusters, has just been added to the lineup!

“We are thrilled to add Adam Savage to the roster of amazing speakers,” Reason Rally organizer David Silverman said. “His star power and versatile talents will translate well with the rally attendees.”

The full list of speakers is here. Are you getting excited?

Chorus 2X:
Living a lie.
Never given the time to even think but you were given a mind.
Start to think and you’ll find the very truth that is hidden inside
and stop believing in the lie the sky. (The lie in the sky.)

Verse 1:
Brainwashed since birth to believe so they’ll live in fear.
Get them scared at a young age of a god that isn’t there.
Train the youth to hate ya, for obeyin’ human nature.
Major religions taking young children to mutilate them.
I wish there was a hell so the Pope could see the beast
for covering up crimes of the pedophile priests.
We don’t need religion to teach morals… ridiculous.
Your backwards way of thinkin’ is looking so hideous.
Mother Teresa wasn’t special; it was a cover up.
Witnesses of her so called miracles, they would shut them up.
Magazines printing full stories that reeked of fabrication,
while the sheep followed so blindly and gave her adulation.
If we all come from a white Adam and Eve, some one
tell me where all of the different colors of the world come from.
There’s no evidence for a god, but there is for evolution.
Let’s rebuild the mind that religion’s been polluting

Chorus 2X:
Living a lie.
Never given the time to even think but you were given a mind.
Start to think and you’ll find the very truth that is hidden inside
and stop believing in the lie the sky. (The lie in the sky.)

Verse 2:
The church imprisoned Galileo for the birth of modern science
’cause they don’t want us to learn. They want mankind’s compliance.
Giving us facts, but religion had to take him out
for teaching we went around the sun and not the other way around.
Religion gave us the dark ages, the heartless
thousand-year period of intellectual darkness.
How can you believe that creation was instantaneous?
Yet all the worlds genocides, god also gave to yas?
Modern organisms from simple to complex
only reflect an evolutionary process.
When someone young dies, “god’s work’s a mystery.”
Forget the millions killed in his name throughout history.
Coincidences happen and some become spiritual
and suddenly wanna label the incident a miracle.
Mind control is just religions main obsession.
Born with curiosity but you better suppress it.

(Thanks to Mark for the link and lyrics!)