The Foundation Beyond Belief has just announced its five beneficiaries for the new quarter — each charity will likely receive several thousands of dollars, courtesy of atheist donors: Read more
Flower Mound, Texas Mayor Tom Hayden proclaimed 2014 the “Year of the Bible” at the December 16 City Council meeting and the depths with which this government official is using his title and office to promote Christianity is unbelievable. Check out his official announcement at the meeting: Read more
The Interfaith Youth Core, a group that supports religious pluralism and promotes dialogue about faith and service projects on college campuses, has long had a reputation for being antagonistic to atheists. While their staff and membership always included some people without religious faith and there’s nothing wrong with promoting cooperation and dialogue and service, IFYC would ignore the simple fact that many religious beliefs are simply harmful — in addition to being just plain wrong. While everyone supports respecting religious people, many atheists cannot, for good reason, get behind respecting certain religious ideas. IFYC prefers singing “Kumbaya” than face the reality of what religion has wrought. It didn’t help that IFYC’s founder, Eboo Patel, compared drawing stick figures of Muhammad (an act of free speech) to screaming “Nigger” in the middle of Harlem, or strawmanned the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris by suggesting they were incapable of performing an “intimate act of mercy” for a dying religious person, or argued that Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins were primarily interested in “offending religious people” and not pointing out that religious beliefs often have no basis in evidence-based truth. Despite the tone-deaf Patel’s obvious ignorance of the intentions of the atheist authors and his desire to slam notable atheists whenever he gets a chance (with the exception of the few he’s worked with on a regular basis, myself included), IFYC as an organization has done better in recent years with including atheists in their projects. They’ve even partnered with the Secular Student Alliance on occasion. In a recent survey of its alumni — not a scientific poll, by any means, but a reflection of the people who graduated from their programs — IFYC revealed something astonishing: Nearly a quarter of the respondents were non-religious: Read more
To all those Christians who are planning to rally behind Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson on “Chick-Phil-A” Day and beyond, let’s remind everybody what exactly you’re supporting so that we have a(nother) record of how truly awful you are. We already know about Robertson’s homophobia and how he believes it’s on par with bestiality when it comes to sin: Read more
A couple of months ago, Philosophy professor Peter Boghossian released a book with a very blunt title: A Manual for Creating Atheists. Phil Vischer, the Christian creator of the popular VeggieTales series, discussed the book (with his faith-filled colleagues) on his podcast recently and the discussion around the 40:15 mark is striking for how honest it is regarding the intersection of Christianity and critical thinking: Read more
Did two Australian Mormons decide they’d had enough of their religion’s squeaky-clean image? What we know is that the duo, Amanaki Kaufusi, 21 (see image below), and Onesi Taufui, 18, had signed up to attend a Latter-Day Saints conference in Tallebudgera (Queensland) over the weekend. Not content with the program, they soon began looking for a little divertissement, and found it in the person of an unsuspecting passerby, 24-year-old tourist Onyekachi Okoye. Read more
When you consider that the Supreme Court has six Catholics on the bench, maybe this news isn’t too surprising: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, just before heading to Times Square to help drop the ball and ring in the new year, blocked the part of the Affordable Care Act that would have mandated certain religiously-affiliated organizations provide comprehensive health care to their employees. Her ruling means that, for now, certain religiously-affiliated businesses will not have to provide health insurance that includes birth control to their workers. The government has until Friday to respond. Here’s a little more information about what’s going on: [This post is still being updated] Read more
For weeks now, New York State Senator Andrew Lanza has been complaining about the American Atheists ad in Times Square. He said the digital billboard, images of which are below, was “religious persecution of the kind that similarly lead to the Holocaust.” Recently, he altered his original press release to remove some of the most offensive statement along with his call for the IRS to revoke American Atheists’ non-profit status. Meanwhile, the bit about the Holocaust remained in place. … If you go to Lanza’s site now, there’s a completely new press release where the old one used to be. So let’s go through some of these new revisions, shall we…? Read more
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is clearly run by a bunch of people who failed the Analogy section of the old SATs. Case in point: The legal defense group just bestowed its annual “Ebenezer Award” (awarded to the “most ridiculous affront to Christmas or Hanukkah celebrations”) to the state of Wisconsin for allowing non-Christian displays in their state capitol building. Because you can’t have Christmas without Christ. (Or Jews, I guess, just to give off the vibe of not being complete assholes.) They’re referring to the fact that the state capitol has a Flying Spaghetti Monster display (along with other atheist signs) right alongside a Nativity scene. Here’s what the Becket people write: Read more
