This case is remarkable in different ways. A couple were jailed on Friday for glorifying the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in videos posted on YouTube that were “offensive in the extreme.” Royal Barnes, 23, and his wife Rebekah Dawson, 22, of Hackney, north-east London, recorded and uploaded three videos shortly after the murder in Woolwich, south-east London, last May. Barnes was jailed for five years and four months at the Old Bailey after admitting three counts of disseminating a terrorist publication and one of inciting murder. Dawson admitted disseminating a terrorist publication and was jailed for 20 months. … Before sentencing, Judge Brian Barker QC asked Dawson’s lawyer to confirm the defendant was the woman in the dock in the full veil. Earlier this year, Dawson admitted an unrelated charge of witness intimidation, after she waived her right to give evidence in her defense, arguing it was against her religious views to remove her veil. Barnes has previous convictions for using threatening words or behavior, and one for assault on a security guard at a mosque. He also has a five-year antisocial behavior order for taking part in vigilante patrols of east London promoting sharia law, the court was told. Read more
There’s a measles outbreak in parts of Canada, leading government officials to urge citizens to get vaccinated. I wonder why people aren’t vaccinated… wanna take a wild guess? Read more
Apparently there is talk of some turnabout-is-fair-play picketing of Fred Phelps’ funeral when he finally dies. I think that’s a pretty ridiculous idea on its face. What would be the point? “That’ll show ‘em?” He’ll be dead, guys. And if he was looking down (or up) on the whole proceeding, can you imagine anything that would please him more than to see a throng of angry protestors at his funeral? There’s another idea being floated that, yes, the funeral should be picketed, but “with love,” with a healing kind of demonstration in which Phelps would even be forgiven. Look, doing any kind of pro-love and pro-forgiveness demonstration is well-intended, unlike the first option, which is just spite and emulating the very thing you’d be protesting. I get it; I applaud the motivation and the capacity for forgiveness, but in my opinion it’s still misguided. Let’s take a step back. Read more
Perhaps the New York Daily News needed to fill its daily quota of oy-I’m-kvelling human-interest stories. How else to explain this opening paragraph? It was a gift from above, miraculously recovered from the ruins below. A decades-old Bible from the ravaged Spanish Christian Church was pulled from the East Harlem gas blast rubble by firefighters, an incredible find amid the carnage on Park Avenue. “The Word was preserved,” said the Rev. Rick Del Rio of Abounding Grace Ministries, who turned out for a Saturday prayer service on 116th St. That’s fantastic. A copy of the most common book in the world was saved (although I can appreciate that this specimen was special to the congregation, dating back to the church’s founding some eighty years earlier) — but eight people lost their lives, more than sixty residents got injured in the explosion, and more than a hundred other people were displaced. Praise God! Oh, the Almighty almost killed another person — after the good book was found in the rubble. Read more
On Facebook, Lauren Drain, a former Westboro Baptist Church member who escaped and wrote a book about her experiences, issued a statement regarding how church founder Fred Phelps appears to be on the “edge of death: Read more
Chris Stedman interviewed Carl Sagan’s son, Nick Sagan, and I thought his remarks about why his father was such an icon in the non-theist community was spot-on: Read more
A day after we heard that Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps may be on the “edge of death,” the church has responded to a number of the questions people are asking… by pretty much evading everything. Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses the Christian knockoff of the Boy Scouts that bans gay members: You can read more about this group here. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and we’d also appreciate your suggestions as to which questions we ought to tackle next! And if you like what you’re seeing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon. Read more
In the just-posted Gwen Shamblin compilation below, the nineties diet guru from Tennessee talks (in multiple inadvertent double entendres) about “how to transfer a relationship with food over to a loving relationship toward God.” My favorite line: “He is not a wimpy lover; He is a passionate, jealous god!” Also: “Let him feel you as you have never been feeled before.” That’s hawt. Read more
Bill Gates (1995, in an (unconfirmed) PBS interview): I’m not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I’m a huge believer in. There’s a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very very positive impact… In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid. Bill Gates (1997, in TIME magazine): Melinda is Catholic, goes to church and wants to raise Jennifer that way. “But she offered me a deal,” Gates says. “If I start going to church — my family was Congregationalist — then Jennifer could be raised in whatever religion I choose.” Gates admits that he is tempted, because he would prefer she have a religion that “has less theology and all” than Catholicism, but he has not yet taken up the offer. “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient,” he explains. “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” Bill Gates (2010, as seen in Illini Secular Student Alliance’s billboard): Bill Gates (2014, in Rolling Stone magazine): Read more
