it. will. today on our team one nation under god might be wanting to kick god out of the equation but again with the growing atheist movement here in the u.s. so is this growing demographic about to flex their political muscles we'll debate. the supreme court is sending a stiff message to people who download or illegally share music pay for the music or pay the price of prosecution we'll tell you how one boston university student who has a six hundred fifty seven thousand dollars verdict hanging over their its head is fighting back. and lights camera pentagon the deal d. in the white house released top secret info about the raid that killed osama bin laden to a hollywood director is this an attempt to gain positive attention in an election year we'll explore.

it's wednesday may twenty third five pm in washington d.c. i'm abbie martin and you're watching our t.v. the first amendment clearly states that congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion the founders clearly understood the importance of your right to practice or not practice religion in this country however in a predominately christian nation the significance of atheism is growing poppy that popularity has underscored in today's social dialogue atheism is one of the fastest growing social movements in the country yes it is a movement and it's gaining substantial political ground earlier this year d.c. has reason rally and brought in twenty thousand people in the pouring rain to stand for it theistic ideals so as atheism a force to be reckoned with and what will this mean and then dynamics of our country to answer that i'm joined by c sorry but i see it monthly is not here and david silverman president of the american atheists. thank you for having me on the

show abbi thank you so much so why do you think that you know atheism is growing faster than any other movement it seems why do you think it's a largely ignored or marginal. in the social dialogue well it's been largely ignored or marginalized because religion wants it that way and religion does not want their parishioners or their flock talking to atheists because it's quite frankly we make a lot more sense than they do so they tell them they tell their parishioners that we're bad were evil we are grumpy we have no morals and the atheists in this country are getting really tired of it and thanks to the internet thanks to the communication that the internet provides nobody in this country the atheists in this country no longer feel like they're alone we can connect with each other much more easily in fact effortlessly and as a result we can organize much more easily and that's where we got the reason rally and that is why atheism is the fastest growing religious segment in all of the

fifty states which is something very encouraging to all of us david let's talk about the internet for a little bit i mean you talk about it isn't growing so rapidly you guys are finding and reaching out to each other on the internet i mean religion is primarily culture based and as the internet allows the homogenization of culture worldwide would you say that you know religions will be. be involved in or that more aid or you know more atheists will find out or or abandon their religion and discover it isn't and what do you think about that. well religion has always been evolving christianity itself is just the latest incarnation of the mythologies that have been. with with the human race since we evolved. religion always evolves and it splinters and that's why there are more factions of christianity than there are sentences in the bible but yes as people

get more and more educated as p. as more information is is presented to the american public they will be able to understand just how wrong their religion is and just how normal and reasonable it is to throw all that mythology aside and actually deal with what is now and what is real in the human in the human condition today david can you say that atheism is a form of religion in the sense that you do claim to know that there is no god i mean could you can you identify what is the difference between agnosticism and atheism really quickly and that's a really good question gnosticism and atheism are actually not on the same continuum continuum and you just misspoke we do not specifically say that there is definitely no god some atheists do but the definition of atheism is just the absence of a belief in god so you can be absent of

a belief in god and be fully aware that we don't know everything in which case you'd be an agnostic atheist agnostic system is simply the realization that we don't know everything which kind of means that agnosticism how is very little meaning because nobody knows everything but what we do. you know is that we have a complete absence of evidence for the existence of anything supernatural and that is a an absolute statement that i just made in the history of mankind there has been no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the supernatural just like there's been no scientific evidence for this support of the existence of leprechauns or any other mist mythological creatures so david and yet it isn't it quiets pretty much to critical thinking and is what you're saying in a critical and ism is the direct result of critical thinking that's what we say

atheism is the direct result of critical thinking that nobody can really look at a mythology at a religion and think critically about it as far as we're concerned and come up with yeah that makes sense to me and invisible magic man in the sky yeah that that that stands up to critical thinking no it doesn't if evidence comes forward ever and supports it i'll listen but until then i'm an atheist let's hear a little bit from what people thought on the streets back up how this is a growing trend let's play a quick. or so i mean that's a part of everyone's life it's it's sort of hard to not have a religion because that's what you grow up with religion or most of the time and if you're raised with it that's how you base your ideas off i think i'll always be around i don't think that we can ever really. move away from people's you know their personal opinion in and then i think that they use their personal opinion to

stand behind their religion or the use their religion to stand behind their personal opinion i think church and state is really something meant for the institutional processes of government as opposed to the decision making process is inside the minds of the policymakers who are human just like anyone else atheism is still small enough a number where there is not a significant degree of votes to be picked up by specifically reaching out to that group on the other token i think there are a lot of groups in this country that they are still not comfortable with atheist so i would say that the risk is probably more than the reward if he has a religious preference where morals are standards that i agree with coincide with mine that i know he's not going to push the agenda is that are different from what i what i go with the role of religion in politics in our country today is pretty big and i think people associate a good president or a kinder person with someone who is christian so i think at this point. romney and

obama are probably going for the i'm the better candidate i'm a better person than he is so i think that's probably why they're not going the atheist group at this point. you know as these people stated it religion is plays such a huge role in the political spectrum and you know it seems like they're correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like as every political cycle happens you have people who are even more extreme michele bachmann these people who are saying you're bringing up these wedge issues like birth control borson gay marriage it just seems like it continues to get more out there what do you think that this turns people off i mean what do you what do you see happening politically with the extreme this extreme rhetoric. well the religious right really has no leg to stand on when it comes to politics ok and what they do is they lean on religion because it gets them votes and it does work that's how george w. bush got elected not on issues but on religion and when you look at how this

affects the public what it doesn't especially with this political cycle is that it really highlighted just how ridiculous religion is and how bad it would be if these people were put into a power position contraception regulation this is something that's that's fifty years old and backwards what revie to realize and what americans need to realize is two things number one atheism is not out there to try and eliminate religion all we're looking for is equality all we're looking for is respect all we're looking for is a place at the table that we deserve number two most important is that the separation of church and state benefits every american citizen except the preachers and the politicians in their pockets and if you look at the people who are who are against the separation of church and state who actually are for oppose the merger. these are preachers who are going to financially benefit from that merger and the

politicians and the people who follow those preachers david and what david just just arriving to say i just want to ask you you know as times get more tough you know there's a recession looming over us globally do you think that more people will turn to religion to try to find answers. well what i hope people will do is turn to the government and say hey it's time to start taxing religion because as times get tougher people need to realize that these huge mega churches take approximately seventy nine billion dollars out of the american public's pockets every year just so they can pray to a god that doesn't exist and i am sick of it and i hope that the people who are facing financial hard times realize that we can help this country dramatically if the church just pays their fair share it's an interesting point you bring up david thanks for joining us i was dating for help me on that was david solomon president of american atheists you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is not guilty of it

downloading songs on the internet illegally when the music industry comes down on a person guilty they come down hard boston university student joel tenenbaum downloaded thirty songs at the internet and shared them on peer to peer networks he was sued by the recording industry association of america in two thousand and nine a jury ordered him to pay twenty two thousand five hundred dollars for each song he downloaded the total of six hundred seventy five thousand dollars even though the penalty was called unconstitutionally excessive by a federal judge it was upheld by the u.s. circuit of appeals at the request of the monolithic record label industries represented by the our. earlier spoke with the man in the center of this classic david versus goliath struggle joel tenenbaum himself i asked him why he thought he was targeted take a response take a listen to this response well it was me in addition to a tens of thousands of other people out of the millions that were doing it and so it was basically just

a bad chance. why do you think that you were i mean how does it feel to be a scapegoat for the record industry. it doesn't feel good. i mean they're spending tens of millions of dollars to rain down on my life make it as difficult as possible i'm not happy about that but the fight goes on and the case continues it's nice to have the support that i have from friends family. and joe why do you think that they target and vigils when everyone does this. you know is it just to cause a chilling effect to send a message as the site is saying this could happen to you well you know that's basically the idea there are there are some interesting news articles out and there is. an analyst in the field who says that basically this is a remnant of an earlier age when they just didn't know what to do and they got desperate and started suing now they don't have any fresh lawsuits to me out of this but this remnant still continues because they want to be rhetorical power of

that urban legend of that to make an example out of somebody that they can frighten people out of doing it the idea is instead of some kind of regular enforcement of parking what you do is you just pick someone at random and give them you know the death penalty for a parking ticket and then maybe no one will ever think about doing that again and it is a clear example of the punishment definitely not fitting the crime joel talk a little bit about your case what is happening right now. so the reason this is in the news right now is that the supreme court had denied our. petition for certain requests to hear the case and it is continuing at the at the federal level locally. which is in the first circuit court the first circuit court of appeals overruled judge girders reduction of the damages amount and demanded there remanded that the first circuit district court now go through the military process which

ironically was probably what judge burton was trying to avoid the first place because when you branch or medicare which is this common law kind of reduction of things you have to offer the option of a new trial jamie thomas ras it the case out in minnesota which is very similar to mine has now been through three trials and that's exactly what happened every minute changes offered the or i turned it down and now she has a new trial a new trial a new trial it's groundhog day for her why do you think i mean why do you think that the court overturned this federal judge's ruling i mean it was clearly unconstitutional excessive i said the sun sells what do you think this shows about the lobbying and history of the hour i. well i don't know exactly mean i hope i'm not one to it to cast aspersions at the judicial system and i imagine the reasoning is rather complicated it does make me lose a certain amount of faith in the legal system that we're continuing to get these

kind of nonsense answers but in fairness the r.i. a has a has much more resources. at their at their disposal they have a much more expensive and much more a talent pool a talented legal team but many many more people. and they do have really the best copyright lawyers in the world they've spent tens of millions of dollars. prosecuting the on this so it's a matter of just finding little pieces in the law and arguing them effectively in court which enabled us basically to not release to to mount a defense they were able to strip away all of our expert witnesses and basically all of our testimony when it came time for us to finally present because they're just much better at this than we are joe when you first got target and were you sent a letter and you have the option to settle or did you just choose and we going to fight back against all the charges well they sent a letter in i think it was two thousand and four it was a very kind of big notice that just says we think you're violating our copyrights

it was name unclear who was from they said pass money. but we didn't know that it wasn't a scam we didn't know what it was and there was certainly no evidence presented so we didn't know what exactly to make of this i did call them up i did offer them a money order i sent them a money order which they turned down and i applied to them i said i can't pay this and they say ok we'll try our financial hardship program and that turned out to be nonsense and we stopped hearing from them and then one day in the building was august two thousand and seven there was a really large stack of papers that appeared at my apartment doorstep and that was the formal complaint itself. you know why do you think that the record industry companies do not go after the actual facilitators of this piracy networks and these peer to peer training networks i mean these people who run these and yet they target people who are the users why do you think that they don't go after the big wigs here. just one more thing i want to finish our coverage of the previous point

was that the initial complaint was the amount of fifty to fifty in the pretrial stages i did offer that much money to them by which time they said no you need to pay is twelve thousand plus so i did offer one of their talking points they have a whole list of campaign they have a paid spokesperson whose job it is to basically take shots at me and that's one of their lines but i did offer to pay. it just wasn't enough for them now is your comment about why don't they go after the main distributors well they did initially there was napster was shut down because dog's been shut down line where there are a lot of you know very notable cases like this but i think the issue is that every time that one got shut down the another one team or one papa that sort of the nature of the internet is that information kind of wants to be free and so you have a very hard problem very hard time trying to prevent you from doing so so this hasn't really stopped any kind of file sharing at all it's just driven it further

underground now everyone i know just torrents instead of using these big file sharing programs that are more traceable. that was physicist joel tenenbaum one time to check in with our web team and see what they're working on our web producer andrew blake is in the newsroom what have you got cookin man a whole lot cooking and really busy really busy really busy so really best first we go over this weekend back in illinois we had some terrible weight on white hate crime a bunch of anti-racist did out with some white supremacists at a restaurant there we'll show you how that whole crazy thing is escalating over the internet also speaking of the web makers up in new york state trying to propose a ban on speaking on the internet anonymously so anyone that wants to leave it on and on a message board yeah it's pretty pretty pretty pretty crazy so we got a whole bunch of stuff today on the internet on hate crimes when i go to our dot com slash usa you can see we've been working on i'll be here the rest of the night make it some crazy story so go check them out or follow us on twitter r t

underscore america thanks andrew the problem now is our two web producer and your blake with a preview of what's trending today on our web site still ahead on our team the white house is heading to hollywood taking the secret mission of the seal team six to the silver screen this one big p.r. move to boost president obama's support that story next. a lot of american power continue. things are. might actually be time for revolution. and it turns out that a particular drink at starbucks is a surprising him really here. thank . you very much i really really. love in the alone until you get to the real headlines with none of them or see the

problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and from what actually matters. for those of us and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to

break through it's already been made can you trust no one. is your view with the global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called fascism when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question morning. is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. all right folks we all know that the obama administration is no stranger to going hollywood and neither is the pentagon so it wasn't long before directors came

knocking on the white house door looking to capture the heroic efforts of the seal team six. in the next great hollywood blockbuster however the details of what exactly happened that night were kept tight lipped for the sake of national security until now it appears the white house granted hollywood filmmaker oscar winner kathryn bigelow access to those involved in planning the raid and some of the methods they used to do it that's according to newly released government documents so much for national security and we've seen a huge boost president obama received after announcing the death of osama bin laden so is this just a big p.r. move by the obama administration to generate votes come november and when did hollywood get all the access to our national security secrets to answer that and more political white house reporter josh gerstein joins me now josh what was the point of saying you know this is all national security let's keep this all secret if they're just going to grant it to hollywood and they're going to put on a movie well it is reason really puzzling you may remember there was

a big burst to publish that he had day or two after the seal team raid that killed osama bin laden and then all of a sudden at least publicly the administration put the brakes on and said look there's been too much talk about this it's getting out of hand no more information should be put out we're troubled by what's come out already well it turns out behind the scenes they continue to meet with these hollywood filmmakers and to give them at least some sort of pretty interesting special access not just to the decision makers involved but even to some of the secret places that the cia used to get ready for this raid what do you think this says about the relationship between hollywood and government i mean is this an unprecedented thing or have they done this before maybe in the flight ninety three movie or is this kind of unprecedented . i don't think it's totally unprecedented i mean hollywood there are whole units at the defense department that are set up to just interact with hollywood and the kinds of war related movies that are made what's unique here i think is to have the

government coming out and saying we can't release this information for national security reasons and then have private meetings where they're at least cooperating with hollywood and the interesting thing is they told the hollywood people they needed to keep this on the q.t. because they feared the bathtub list that he that came in the last twenty four hours when all this became public. josh you know it is interesting that hollywood is getting us exclusive access after they said they can't release any details in the public i mean first they said that they had live feeds going on all the the helmets of all the seal team six and they haven't really provided any evidence put forward to solidify their story do you think that this movie is just going to be kind of put segmenting this unfounded fantastical story that the government has put forward. well i don't i don't really think it's a fantastical story i think the story has come out in dribs and drabs in different places in new yorker magazine articles in t.v. stories right after the raid happened you're right there was quite

a bit of discrepancies in the early accounts of what happened in this raid but there's no question that the reason that the pentagon and the cia cooperated with these filmmakers was because they thought it was going to be a positive portrayal of what had gone on here they really trusted bigelow because of the hurt locker movie and they decided that these were people who were worth collaborating with in order to make a very positive movie at least until this became controversial and now they seem to have backed away from the whole deal. joe you know you don't think it's fantastic i mean that the story changed so many times i lost track first using the wives as human shields i mean i don't even really know what the final story is i mean has the press been given is the press privy to information that i don't maybe know about that that solidifies what the government says to be true. i mean as you say it did this story did change i think some of the initial reports a lot of them come out based on anonymous sources so you don't really know if those

are people who actually know what happened and or not or if they know what happened in our telling something that's not true the story did change pretty dramatically the public one that the white house offered from day one to day two on issues like the human shield and so forth but i don't think there's anybody really disputing the basic idea that u.s. commandos went in there and killed osama bin laden i think it's pretty evident that that happened and it seems like overall save for a helicopter that went down a pretty successful mission and that's basically why the administration cooperated of course one side bonus here was that this movie was supposed to come out just before president obama would be up for reelection and some of those involved have now gone on to work in the president's election campaign i still i still find it interesting i mean you might say it's undisputed but it is interesting that they did not provide any evidence even d.n.a. evidence i mean why not but josh let's talk a little bit about the timing like you just said i mean this is coming out right in

the midst of this reelection cycle you know they did postpone the date to december but i mean there's probably going to be trailers playing over and over again around the time of the election. there's no question this is a story that the white house wanted to tout in fact i think some of the confusion you saw in the early accounts wasn't actually because the white house deliberately wanted to put out information they were just so eager to get this story out because they thought it was such a beneficial story for president obama and helped change the narrative from sort of democrats being weak on national security and can't be trusted on issues like went on to triumph and president. you know killed bin laden something that his predecessor had not been able to do so there's no question this is a very politically potent story so whenever you hear about secret deals being made to give certain people information in a way that might benefit the public narrative you do have to wonder if there's some political motivation here do you think that it will be historically accurate or do you think this will just be kind of you know like i mean just putting obama on this

amazing. this hero. right you can i can argue about historically accurate and i guess it depends on what your thoughts on a hero he is i mean eating carry out the raid himself you made a decision that others may or may not have made there's already been a debate with mitt romney about who would or wouldn't have made this quote gutsy call you do see that in the papers that were released in the last few days that the pentagon and the cia were pushing the line that the president had made a gutsy decision but whether it's historically accurate there's no particular reason to think that it will be because the pentagon when this became controversial apparently last summer seems to have cut off the filmmakers access to information so they may now have to rely on sort of second hand and retired officials to try to figure out what happened it is also interesting that you know when hillary clinton was was addressing the specifics about the raid she said this isn't really unusual i mean we do this kind of we've probably done this kind of thing about

a thousand times and you have to ask yourself when night raids just going in there just and discriminately you know taking people out i mean it was a very interesting statement so yeah you could you could argue the hero card or not but it is interesting that this is apparently happens all the time and you know only when they have this kind of person to put up in the limelight which is the bin laden thing that's when we hear about and it's really pressed on us josh really quickly though i mean how long do you think that obama is really going to use this spend a lot in killing i mean we just saw him do the victory lap at baghran. how long could this really be used for all the way up until israel action i mean doing this is really going to get him re-elected. i don't think this alone will get him reelected although i think it does underscore sort of a theme of competency that the white house is hoping will spill over from the national security arena into the economic arena but if you think about what foreign power.