Bouncing off some of the issues about seculars and the need (or lack thereof) for religion and church-like ritual I and others have been posting about over the past couple of days, I tweeted this yesterday: I thought seculars already had “transcendent” rituals and places. They’re called TED talks and Apple Stores.— Paul Fidalgo (@PaulFidalgo) December 30, 2013 Ha ha ha, right? If you’ve read more than a handful of my work, you’ve already seen me go on and on about how I half-jokingly consider Apple my “religion” and The Steve (peace be upon him) my prophet. Ha ha ha. Old news. But when I made that tweet, I had no idea that this piece by Benjamin Bratton in The Guardian would go up hours later (thereby confirming my psychic powers). The subject? How TED talks have become, as Bratton describes them, “middlebrow megachurch infotainment.” Read more
The Illinois Family Institute, like most non-profits, wants to get those end-of-the-year donations, so they’re doing it in typical fashion: by scaring other Christians and reminding them the sky is falling. And who’s responsible for all their troubles? You know it: those awful, awful teachers: The first educational institutions to succumb to censorship, indoctrination, and oppression were our colleges and universities. Then Leftist sexuality dogmatists came for our high school students, and now they’re taking aim at our littlest ones through “bullying prevention” activities, “comprehensive” sex ed, and discussions of “family diversity.” Only a right-wing group like IFI would put scare-quotes around topics like bullying prevention, diversity, and realistic sex education that doesn’t end with abstinence. As if discussing those topics are problems instead of solutions. But they’re not done yet. Since the number of teachers who push anti-Christian views in the classroom is approximately zero, they decided to go after me because I’m a teacher who also shares his opinions outside the classroom (*gasp*): Read more
When Gallup released its 2012 data on Americans’ acceptance of evolution, we learned that 46% of Americans were Creationists, believing that God created us in our present forms within the past 10,000 years. (An additional 32% believed in God-guided evolution while only 15% accept natural evolution.) Now, the Pew Research Center has released its own data on the matter and they appear to have slightly better news: Only 33% of Americans are Creationists! According to Pew’s data, 24% of Americans believe in God-guided evolution while only 32% offer the response that all the evidence points to. So why are those responses so different from Gallup? Mostly, I would think, because the phrasing of the question is slightly different in the two instances. But here’s where it gets really weird… yet completely predictable. Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, reveals my Top Ten Stories of the year for atheists: The full list (with links!) is after the jump. Read more
The new issue of American Atheist Magazine (1st Quarter, 2014) is now available at Barnes & Noble bookstores around the country (all four of them that remain, anyway): Two reasons you should check it out: Read more
Human Rights Without Frontiers International, a Brussels-based nonprofit, has released a rather comprehensive report on those who have been imprisoned for religious dissent around the world, and the countries who imprison them. Of particular note to this audience is the report’s acknowledgment of the nonreligious. This year, a specific section has been created for prisoners whose freedom of expression related to religious issues was violated on the basis of laws against blasphemy, defamation of religion or the Prophet and similar issues: Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, Tunisia and Turkey. Read more
When a Jewish circumcision makes the news or stirs discussion, it’s usually a metzitzah b’peh, wherein …mohels, after cutting away the child’s foreskin and tearing the membrane with their fingernails, place their mouths on the boy’s penis to suck away the blood. Read more
According to new research, the act of prayer can strengthen one’s will and refuel an exhausted brain. This comes to us from a post at Scientific American by Piercarlo Valdesolo, where we learn that Prof. Malt Friese and Michaela Wanke put participants through some emotionally and cognitively draining tasks — suppressing emotion and laughter while watching a funny video followed by identifying the colors of words that spell different colors as they flash by rapidly. Then the participants were told to pray for 5 minutes, and what happened? Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the [color identifying task] after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not. Read more
He may have gathered enough liberal credibility to snag Time’s Person of the Year award, and even a citation from an LGBT magazine, but apparently Pope Francis draws a line in the sand when it comes to supporting some gay couples’ desire to adopt and raise children. The pontiff reported himself “shocked” that the Civil Unions bill in Malta, which allows for two men or two women to marry, also allows for these couples to adopt children. At the encouragement of a pope widely touted as pro-gay enough to change the direction of the Catholic Church, Bishop Charles Scicluna delivered a heated sermon on the subject that stirred up some controversy within the Maltese congregation and around the world. Read more
Residents of Safed, a city of 35,000 in Israel’s Upper Galilee, are unhappy with the presence of Israeli Arabs in their midst. So unhappy, in fact, that they’ve started a campaign, led by Shmuel Eliyahu, the town’s head rabbi, to make it a crime to rent rooms to their Arab fellow countrymen. That makes Eli Tzavieli a potential lawbreaker. Read more
