"Irreverent atheists crowdsource charitable giving"

[MarkCharles]

http://news.yahoo.com/irreverent-atheists-crowdsource-charitable-giving-191406711.html

"GENEVA (Reuters) - Atheist bloggers have shown their charitable side by swarming to donate money to Doctors Without Borders, in what turned into the humanitarian agency's biggest online fundraiser.
Doctors without Borders (DWB), also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, gets about 4,000 hits on its U.S. website on an average Sunday. Last Sunday that number ballooned to 50,000 as a horde of redditors, subscribers to the social media site reddit.com, thundered across the DWB homepage.
Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, a site normally given over to finding holes in religions and picking fights with creationists, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000."

........

"Reddit's atheist page, www.reddit.com/r/atheism, boasts more than 300,000 subscribers while the Christianity page has 20,000."

Just scary what "organized atheists" are doing these days!!!

[Warren DeMontague]

1. while Cluckheaded flat-Earth fundamentalists can't even figure out

how to work their phone.

[dmallind]

2. militant bastards these organized atheists!

[Ikonoklast]

3. The atheists in my neighborhood keep leaving literature for me to peruse.

Except the pages are all blank.

[MarkCharles]

4. ROFL n/t

[Thats my opinion]

6. Why, that's their right.

I never saw such a blank piece, and neither have you.

[Ikonoklast]

8. The atheists in my neighborhood have a fine sense of irony.

Unlike some here who are irony impaired.

[Thats my opinion]

5. Last week I sent a good check to DWB

It is high on the list of MANY religious people I know, who give because it is following a command of Jesus to heal the sick--no matter who they are--and the right thing to do. I'm happy that atheists also support this cause. Good for all of us!

[beam me up scottie]

10. "MANY religious people I know, who give because it is following a command of Jesus to heal the sick"

See, that's the difference, atheists give because it is the right thing to do and ONLY because it is the right thing to do.

If the religious really want to live in a better world they can start by ignoring their god's OTHER commands and stop trying to force the rest of us to live according to their instruction manual.

[Thats my opinion]

15. whoever does it for whatever reason--good!

Talk about holier than thou!

[ellenfl]

7. that atheism link? there's no 'there' there. eom

[MarkCharles]

9. Try the article for original link. I'm not sure it's right even there.

Or one might have to be a member of that site.

Or, it might depend upon the date... there are thousands of reddit echo's a day on different topics.

Here's one link I found:

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/n6arm/ratheism_exactly_one_year_ago_we_began_to_raise/

[starroute]

13. The link in the OP has an extra period at the end

Try http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/

For whatever reason, it's got a cute little reddit-mascot sailing through the Milky Way in a teapot as the header image. I've got no idea why.

[JoeyT]

14. It's a reference to Russell's cosmic teapot.

From this Bertrand Russel paragraph:

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

Edited to add: It's basically an argument that the onus of proof is on the person making the absurd claim. The teapot is the basis for the Invisible Pink Unicorn, which eventually was replaced by the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a popular example.

[starroute]

17. Oh, thanks

That's pretty cool.

[NMMNG]

11. Ghastly ORGANIZED ATHEISM again

Helping people and such. The horror!

[darkstar3]

12. DWB: A charity that cares for people because they're people, and for no other reason.

I'll take that over the "soul"-saving missions of charities like Salvation Army any day. It's a far more altruistic and honorable pursuit.

[NMMNG]

16. Another one of those secular charities people claim don't exist

when they're extolling the virtues of religious charities, or lambasting those of us who refuse to give to bigoted organizations like the SA.