If you’ve already got the free church gun and the free church steak dinner, why not go for the trifecta and get a tattoo to match? Head to Florida and get the logo of the Cross church in Mount Dora inked on your skin. No charge! Pastor Zach Zehnder loves the churchgoers who’ve done just that. “It speaks to their dedication of not just the church, but them following after Jesus,” Zehnder said. … “We touched on the idea of tattoos and I kind of flippantly… said I’m so not against tattoos that if anybody out there wants to get one, the church would find money for it.” Read more
Science junkies meet couch potatoes for a TV spectacle both should enjoy. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is a new, 13-episode documentary series hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson that kicks off tonight at 9:00p (ET) on Fox, National Geographic, and eight other cable networks. It will also be be shown in more than 175 countries across the globe, says the L.A. Times. The paper has an interview with executive producer Seth MacFarlane, who implies that he helped fund the project. I was crossing paths with [Tyson] … and I always thought to myself, I have a connection there to the scientific community and things are going well financially and I wanted to see what I could do to throw some of this extra money around in a positive way. Science is, in many ways, more and more underfunded. I was thinking in terms of research projects, I asked him if there were any research projects that need funding in any field of science. Tyson mentioned it would be wonderful to do a remake of Carl Sagan’s famous TV series from the 1980s, Fox TV signed on after MacFarlane brought the idea to them, and here we are. Read more
According to a recently-released report from the Pew Research Center, only 36% of Millennials (ages 18-33) feel like the description “religious person” describes them well: Read more
Over time, U.S. Christians have gotten a reputation for being terrible tippers. I’d wager that some of that has to do with the identifiability of the group. The worst of the Christian tipping behavior is perceived to take place on Sundays, when Christians are extra-visible as a group on account of their church clothes and/or their time of arrival (shortly after church services end). When these groups leave paltry tips, selective perception on the part of the staff may lead waiters to assign a pattern of behavior to them that could apply just as well to not-overtly-Christian groups, except that the latter don’t share any obvious characteristics. Read more
In case you missed last night’s “Saturday Night Live,” host Lena Dunham took us back to the Garden of Eden, where she played a “struggling twenty-something” version of Eve… Read more
This week, we saw a roadside cross taken down in Lake Elsinore, California. It was placed there nearly two years ago in honor of a young man who died in that location — and was kept there because 1) no one had the heart to tell the mother she had to remove it and 2) city officials appeared willing to bend their own rules about public signage for a Christian cross… After the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center sent the city council a letter warning them about the possible legal consequences for “selective enforcement of its signage ordinance,” the cross was finally taken down by the young man’s family. Almost immediately after the large cross was removed, in a sort of silent protest, two residents of the city, Emily Johnson and her father Doug, went to the scene to install several smaller crosses: Read more
Seen at PostSecret: It’s hard to comment since I don’t know the whole story, but at least anecdotally, I’ve found that people who do come out (as gay or atheist) tend to be much happier afterwards than those who keep it to themselves. Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses how Answers in Genesis’ Noah’s Ark Theme Park will be bad for the economy, no matter what Ken Ham says: 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! Read more
