A couple weeks ago, I wrote about an interview between Gary Gutting, a former professor of philosophy at University of Notre Dame, and Christian philosophy professor Alvin Plantinga. I did not enjoy that interview. There were many atheist straw men and terrible arguments and it was frustrating. For the second installment of Gutting’s interview series about religion, he spoke to Louise Antony, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and editor of an essay collection entitled Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. Okay, this woman is a little more up my alley. And the interview starts well — from her end, anyway: Read more
What would you do if you saw someone wrapped in a blanket, sleeping on a bench outside a church? For Cindy Castano Swannack, who drove by St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina the other day, the answer was “call the police.” When informed that it was a sculpture depicting Jesus (with stigmata on his bare feet that poke out from under the blanket), Swannack seemed taken aback. She told the local NBC affiliate that “Jesus is not a vagrant, Jesus is not a helpless person who needs our help. We need someone who is capable of meeting our needs, not someone who is also needy.” Read more
Years after initially being proposed and after scores of funding snags, the Creation Museum says it can now begin building Ark Encounter, it’s Noah’s Ark-themed amusement park. Exactly how much money they’ve raised is unclear, though, since Answers in Genesis’ Ken Ham spent much of yesterday’s question-less press conference railing against bloggers and other members of the media for criticizing his plans: Read more
Via Politico: Touting the latest White House Obamacare benchmark, President Barack Obama told his political base not to be discouraged by partisan attacks and stressed that their cause is divine. The president spoke those remarkable words at an Organizing for Action event in Washington. “We’re going to make a big push these last few weeks,” Obama told OFA volunteers and officials. “I can talk, my team can talk here in Washington, but it’s not going to make as much of a difference as if you are out there making the case. The work you’re doing is God’s work.” Read more
Akbar Rezaie’s praying robot could easily pass for a playful yet thought-provoking postmodern art project, a masterpiece of irony and social critique. But the metal-and-silicon creature that the 27-year-old Iranian built in his home won’t be showing up in museums anytime soon. It is destined to be purely a prayer instruction device. Rezaie, you see, teaches the Qur’an at an elementary school in Varamin, 20 miles outside the capital of Tehran. Read more
Dozens of ex-residents of the Irish Catholic children’s home Termonbacca have recently come forward with accounts of sexual and physical abuse that they say occurred there decades ago. Some of them reported slave-like conditions for the kids, referring to nuns kicking or caning residents considered not to be enthusiastic enough about scrubbing floors. One witness testified that a nun hit him so hard and so often in the head when he was a child that he suffered permanent hearing loss. Another… Read more
Egyptian military leaders have found the cure for AIDS. And Hepatitis C. Or so they say… “I defeated AIDS with the grace of my God at the rate of 100 percent. And I defeated hepatitis C,” said Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, the head of the Cancer Treatment and Screening Center, in CNN. The C-Fast devices that are doing all the “curing” supposedly work by detecting infections without the use of blood samples. How does it do that? Short answer: Electromagnetism. Long answer: No one knows… Read more
Last summer, 64-year-old Margaret Doughty was denied citizenship in America because she was an atheist. The issue involved the part of the citizenship application that asked if she would “take up arms in defense of the United States.” Doughty had answered: … The truth is that I would not be willing to bear arms. Since my youth I have had a firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or in the bearing of arms. I deeply and sincerely believe that it is not moral or ethical to take another person’s life, and my lifelong spiritual/religious beliefs impose on me a duty of conscience not to contribute to warfare by taking up arms… my beliefs are as strong and deeply held as those who possess traditional religious beliefs and who believe in God… This was basically a conscientious objection to fighting based on her moral beliefs. But the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) told her that “conscientious objections” had to be made on religious grounds, not moral ones. After a lot of media attention, and with the help of Congressman Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Doughty’s status was quickly changed: “This Service hereby withdraws the request for evidence (RFE) issued on June 7, 2013. This Service accepts your detailed statement in satisfaction of the information requested by the RFE. Your application for naturalization has been approved.” You’d think, after all that, that this sort of story wouldn’t happen again. Unfortunately, it has, this time in California. Read more
Dr. Anthony Pinn, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, has long been an advocate of the need for more racial diversity in our movement and I’m thrilled that his memoir is finally available. It’s called Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist (Prometheus Books, 2014). In the excerpt below, Pinn writes about the aftermath of an interview with a local newspaper, in which he came out publicly as an atheist: Read more
First-Amendment attorney Marc Randazza is a fellow atheist. I’ve known him for roughly seven years, and in that time I’ve seen and heard him say things that leave little doubt on the fucks he doesn’t give about Christianity. When he sees someone file a lawsuit to remove a huge cross from public land, he cheers. But not today. In American Humanist Ass’n v. Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Comm’n, the Humanists are seeking to tear down a huge concrete crucifix [the Bladensburg cross] from public land in the DC suburbs. Fundraising for the cross began in 1918, and it was formally dedicated in 1925. The purpose of it was to honor WWI casualties, with a distinctly christian message. Read more
