Just a couple of days ago, I wrote about how Georgia Republican State Rep. Dustin Hightower (below) was introducing legislation that would legalize student-led, administration-supported proselytizing at football games, during morning announcements, graduation ceremonies, and anywhere else where students had a public forum. The same law was passed last year in Mississippi, as well as Texas and Tennessee. And the same kind of bill is currently going through the state legislature in Virginia. Read more
11 months ago, there was a clash in Bangladesh over the writing of atheist bloggers that left at least two people dead, including blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider. No one was charged with the crime. The country’s 12 Islamic parties called the protests after Friday prayers in nearly half a million mosques nationwide, demanding the execution of bloggers whom they say blasphemed Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Tensions have risen in the Muslim-majority nation over allegedly anti-Islamic blog posts by Ahmed Rajib Haider, who was hacked to death last week near his home in Dhaka. In recent weeks Haider and fellow bloggers had launched huge protests demanding a ban on the largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami, and the execution of its leaders for alleged war crimes in the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan. Since Haider’s death, Bangladeshi social media has been flooded with his alleged blog posts and with those by other bloggers mocking Islam, triggering protests by a number of Islamic groups and clerics. Yesterday, we saw the first step toward some semblance of justice. Read more
Bob Larson, a televangelist and the pastor of the Spiritual Freedom Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, wants to rid you of evil spirits. He’s an experienced demon-slayer who says he’s cast out 20,000 of them — but it’s a big job he’ll never finish, because as much as half of the world’s population is possessed. Who knew? There’s good news, though: If a demon lurks inside you, and you procure Pastor Bob’s services, no need to get up from your La-Z-Boy; you can Skype the demon extractor nowadays. CNN has the story: Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, offers 11 pieces of advice to Bill Nye in anticipation of his upcoming debate against Creationist Ken Ham: 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
Over the past two weeks, a political and media storm has been brewing in England — a tempest over a single-panel religious cartoon that is about as inoffensive as it gets. This one: The anonymous creator of Jesus and Mo typically presents the Muslim prophet and his Christian nemesis/sidekick in four-panel dialogs. Those dialogs are often sharp, the jokes tend toward the blasphemous (as befits an atheist comic strip), and some of the pictures could raise eyebrows as Jesus and Mo appear to be housemates who sleep in very close proximity. It beggars belief that, with all that potentially contentious material for people to get upset over, the almost bland drawing above became a huge flashpoint. But it did, thanks to Muslims’ insistence that Mohammed may not be depicted at all, and thanks to Maajid Nawaz’s innocuous tweet: Read more
With a few days to go before the Super Bowl, American Atheists is hoping to capitalize on the guaranteed media blitz by putting up a new digital billboard just outside of Metlife Stadium: The ad, which will go up tomorrow, reads: “A ‘Hail Mary’ only works in football. Enjoy the game!” Read more
If you saw the official Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight, then you heard the pleasant-sounding Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) talk about her vision of America, her son with Down Syndrome, and her uplifting personal story. I thought the speech was pretty well done — heavy on emotion, light on substance, free of gaffes. It was kind of like what Republicans expected, but never got, out of Sarah Palin. But the most interesting thing you may not know about Rodgers is that she attended Pensacola Christian College. Why is that a big deal? PCC may be the most fundamentalist Christian schools in the country, rivaling places like Patrick Henry College and Liberty University. Read more
Gay Clark Jennings, writing for Faith Street, draws a line connecting Christian missionaries to the rampant homophobia taking place in some African countries: Read more
A few days ago, several Facebook groups for Romanian atheists and agnostics, including two that were parody pages about God and Jesus Christ, were shut down without warning to any of their administrators. Some of them are simply inaccessible to Romanians while available in other countries — it’s unclear whether that’s Facebook’s doing or that of Romanian Internet service providers. Combined, these pages had upwards of 100,000 Likes/followers. There’s reason to believe the censorship stems from Patriarch Daniel, the leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who may have been upset about this image posted to the “God” parody page: Read more
A prominent Spanish cardinal doesn’t think my marriage is legit. And I’m not even gay! Fernando Sebastián, the retired archbishop of Pamplona, Spain, who was recently elevated to cardinal status by Pope Francis, has suggested that homosexuality is akin to “bodily deficiencies,” such as his own high blood pressure, and that it can be cured. “Homosexuality is a defective manner of expressing sexuality, because [sex] has a structure and a purpose, which is procreation. A homosexual who can’t achieve this is failing,” Sebastián told the Spanish newspaper Diaro Sur Monday. The Monsignor’s reverence for procreation is nothing new. About four years ago, after I wrote a pro-marriage-equality op-ed for a local paper, I received this response from a reader: Read more
