As I stated before, the $31,000+ you all raised for Damon Fowler is now in a trust fund and will go toward his education when the time comes. Some people (including commenters on this site and the Support Damon Facebook page) are upset by this because it means Damon can’t use the money to buy a car or other things that’ll help him transition into life away from home. Reader Hannah set up a (separate) donation drive on Reddit to… Read more
The Miss USA Pageant was last night. (SPOILERS BELOW Oh, screw it, no one cares.) Before the competition took place, all 51 delegates were asked a series of questions… including: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” This is just full of fail…: Watch that thing. All 14:48 of it. I dare you. What you see are a lot of women who (at least in theory) are supposed to represent our country but who know jack shit about science. (Come to… Read more
Last week, I was part of a religious roundtable discussion for the Chicago Tribune — they wanted people representing different faiths (and no faith) to talk with some staffers about the paper’s religious coverage. At one point, we introduced ourselves, saying our name, who we represented, and the message we wanted to get across. One of the people representing a let’s-all-get-along organization said as one of her goals (I’m paraphrasing): As this election season gets underway, I want to make… Read more
The Idaho Atheists weren’t the only ones who did some highway cleanup over the weekend! The Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics did the same thing in New York: Things we learned today, as said on Facebook by Rick, the event’s organizer: Apparently, high proportions of the nation’s dwindling number of smokers are drawn, irresistibly, to Cohoes, NY, much in the way that visionaries flocked to Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Litterers exhibit a strong preference for… Read more
If you’re watching the U.S. Open championship (because you really like golf… or you lost the remote… dammit, where’s my remote?), then you might have caught a nice little surprise in NBC’s introduction, when they said the Pledge of Allegiance: “Under God” was just skipped over (so was “indivisible”), so it went like this: ONE NATION… [Soldier noises]… WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. Twitter’s currently in an uproar over this. (via Reddit/r/atheism) ***Update***: Apparently, the Pledge was said twice,… Read more
