YES thank you. You are my shero.

@ReadyforaChange Thanks, but I'm no "hero". Just an defiant female,
who refuses to conform.

@KKGator I am the same, so YES you are my shero. Any one of us who stands up to the establishment is a SHERO. I have been doing so for most of my 57 years. Nice to have company.

@ReadyforaChange My mother always told me that I was born defiant, and as soon as I could speak, my two favorite words were "no" and "why?".
Nothing has changed in nearly 58 years.

@KKGator Sounds like the way my mother brought up myself and my 3 siblings. Keep asking why and saying no if the answer didn't make sense.
It's how we brought up our two children, stubbornly inquisitive, and how my grandchildren are encouraged to behave. None of us accepts dogma.

@KKGator Was thinking just yesterday about another defiant female who refused to conform … and how her convictions ultimately led to her death … but how her spirit and that of her son and granddaughter (Jon & Robin) live on within many.. Atheists owe her. I miss her much, but glad she remained true - another shero

Yes they can be.

some ppl have religion; some take SSRIs or harder drugs.
not really sure if one is worse than the other.

I don't remember it being political before the Orange One.

@MizJ My take is ‘the orange one’ slid in after the republican industrialists had sufficiently groomed the nation, via hate radio & cable propaganda. Though I doubt even they thought something as sick and corrupt as him could slither through!

Reagan is when I noticed the divide become religious based … ironically, having run againt one of very few religionists I respect, Jimmy Carter ~

@Varn The GOP first started courting Evangelicals in the 1950s, perhaps before.

Early in his political career Reagan was actually pro-choice. As a whole politics has been sliding to the right for decades, not just here but in Europe as well.

@MizJ I’m sure they have… Through my formative years it appeared they were the party of big business first, the supposed purveyors of morality second.. ‘They’ are what’s wrong with America ~

Posted high on telephone poles around my small town are wooden hand made signs that say things like repent. They don't go for whole sentences.

I've gone to yard sales, farmer's markets and flea markets where preachers stand at booths with literature at the ready, pitching theology to people walking by. I give 'em hell for the barbarous plagiarized fairy tales. They hang their heads, wait for me to leave and jump out at the next guy with the same pitch.

We've got lots of brutally hot summer arts and crafts and street food festivals, where churches have booths as well. The less rabid people from the churches hand out bottles of water and literature about their church. Because they've heard about me, they're not preaching theology at random strangers. Petunia hates it when I take their icy cold bottles of water and dump their literature in the nearest garbage can. She correctly thinks I ought get out of eyesight before approaching a garbage can. At least they escape my wrath and indignation.The labels on the bottles suggest they bottle their own tap water.

@WonderWartHog99 Here in South Eastern Spain the local Anglican church holds an Easter fair and a Christmas fair, selling home made produce and tat to raise funds. Nowhere does anyone preach. There are simply leaflets available for the already converted to pick up and nod to in agreement.
We have the occasional Jehova's Witness, who are very polite, so I invite them in for a cup of tea, then discuss evolution with them. All very polite, while they seek the first opportunity to thank me for my hospitality and escape. I haven't seen any for a while, though. Strange, really.....

@Petter We have the occasional Jehova's Witness . . . .

Does anyone ever ask for a subscription to the Watch Tower?

They show up here as well but always appear as a group of two to five people.

They're polite but the more I talk with them the less frequently they show up.

@WonderWartHog99 They never go around singly and here they give out free copies of Watch Tower.

@WonderWartHog99 Neither have I, but I have seen a parrot's cage with several different copies at the bottom.

@Petter I've forgotten if Watch Tower was a magazine that had slick glossy paper or the absorbent qualities of a typical newspaper.

I'm getting old and forgetful. However I can remember the sticker shock I got when a former girlfriend told me buy her a parrot for her birthday. For that price, I could have made a down payment on a new car. They had just jacked up the amount of time tropical birds had to spend in quarantine before they could be sold.

Animals entering another country can be so expensive that one pair of movie stars brought a yacht so their dogs could stay in the harbor and never set paw on English soil.

Yes, identity.

Very well written

Agreed. Though, I’ve not noticed any beheading in USA...

It's not just the southern states either. The anti abortion legislation is throughout the u.s.. In America it's more rural vs. Urban.

@Varn It's Not Unusual for the Evangelical fundamentalist freaks to label atheists as not americans. America, according to them, is gods country.

@Varn Christian Theocracy and biblical law have not yet been established here in 'merca but the conservative, evangelicals are steadily working on it.

@ToolGuy ...forgot about those.. Seems the ‘christian taliban’ have nearly cornered the market on guns

@Varn You know beheadings only happen in Saudi Arabia, the great friends of the US the ones who are mainly behind 9/11. Oh yeah about 150 Palestinian Arabs were beheaded by Jewish millitants in 1948.

@Jolanta Really? - Nov. 2015: “*KABUL — The beheadings of women and a child by ISIS-linked militants in Afghanistan and a propaganda video showing extremists overrunning an army base have raised fears that the group's supporters are tightening their grip on parts of the country.”

“The seven civilians beheaded were Hazaras, an ethnic and religious minority that have been discriminated against for centuries in Afghanistan. Fellow Shiite Muslims have also been massacred by ISIS and other extremist groups in neighboring Pakistan, as well as in Iraq and Syria.*”

@Varn What are you trying to say here? Are you trying to muddy this, and make it out like all Muslims do this heinous crime, because it seem like you are. Where do you think ISIS comes from? From no where? You every heard of The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend, so we need to keep our "friends" in weapons to do the work for us.

@Jolanta Only correcting your misstatements…

@Varn Not once do you say anything about what I said about Saudi Arabia but then you probably were not aware of that it is the place that beheads people and that other Islamic countries don't do it. You make it out like they all do. Look it up.

I still classify as agnostic, but I despise the evangelical/fundamentalist Taliban like Jesus freaks.

@Kojaksmom Now I am back in UK I see how little difference churches make to people's lives, I prefer to leave em be.