In Lady Lake, Florida, there’s another city council reciting another “pre-meeting” prayer. One atheist, Bill Calhoun, is rightfully complaining about it, but he may be alone in the fight: Commissioner Paul Hannan questioned why Calhoun would even bring the issue up. “It confuses me and others why you would want to burden Lady Lake taxpayers with this,” Hannan said. … “Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you have the right,” said Pamela Dahl of Lady Lake, president of the Tri-County… Read more
There are so many Christians out there who get easily offended by people who criticize their faith or even make jokes about it that we ought to commend a church that takes the jokes and spits them right back. St Matthew-in-the-City church in Auckland, New Zealand is responsible for these memorable ads: They’re GLBT friendly, too: I bring them up because, recently, local eatery Hell Pizza put up this billboard: But St Matthew-in-the-City came back with a billboard of its… Read more
Senator Chuck Grassley has formed a “Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations” to keep a watchful eye “on the financial practices of high-profile religious organizations.” After releasing the findings of his three-year inquiry of six media-based Christian ministries, the senator asked [Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability] to spearhead an independent national effort to review and provide input on major accountability and policy issues affecting such organizations. Fantastic! We need a group like that — An independent watchdog that… Read more
This chart comes via OkCupid Trends. So many questions… Is this evidence that non-theists are more honest than some religious counterparts? Is this evidence that a small percentage of atheists and agnostics are liars? 🙂 What’s the difference between the Protestants and the Catholics? Evangelicals and merely cultural Christians? Right now, they’re all lumped together… How many users were “surveyed” in each category? (When a Jewish friend saw the chart, her reaction was that the number of Jewish women surveyed… Read more
I was reading (newly-named Pulitzer Prize winner) Siddhartha Mukherjee’s excellent article about whether or not cell phones cause cancer in the New York Times and one passage caught my eye… To give you some background, Mukherjee is talking about how rare cancers sometimes become associated with things we’re all exposed to (like cell phones), and he offers another example of a dubious link between problem and cause: … when patients with brain tumors happen to share a common exposure –… Read more
