CJ Werleman wrote a piece for Alternet about how atheists should learn a lesson from Pope Francis when it comes to dealing with poverty — and since it slams atheists, Salon was eager to reprint it: When the Pope washes the feet of convicts while calling for greater efforts to lift up the world’s poor, he makes it possible to establish meaningful partnerships with other moral communities, secular and religious. Of course, when Francis speaks about the “idolatry of money” and “growing income inequality,” you know, the things Jesus spoke about, you can set your watch in waiting for someone on the Right to accuse him of being a Marxist. Hello, Rush Limbaugh. Atheists like to talk about building a better world, one that is absent of religiosity in the public square, but where is the atheist movement, as defined by the some 2,000 atheist groups and organizations in the U.S., when it comes to dealing with our third-world levels of poverty? Not only is the atheist movement absent on this issue, it is spending thousands of dollars on billboards that make atheists look like assholes, at the same time Catholicism is looking hip again. The Pope has changed the perception of the Church in the minds of millions while the atheist movement has been sucked into the Right’s fictitious “war on christmas.” I’ll give him that Pope Francis walks the walk on poverty, saying no to the Papal palace and making outreach to the poor and criticism of capitalism run amok an important part of his legacy. But what’s with trashing atheist groups for not dealing with the same issues? Read more
The epic game Cards Against Humanity is currently in the middle of a holiday promotion in which they asked customers to send them $12… in return for 12 items over the course of 12 days. What items? Who knows. You were just supposed to trust them. Trust random people online asking for my credit card information in exchange for untold rewards? Hell yeah! I was in. Yesterday, a small stack of CAH cards arrived in the mail inside a red package reading “Interfaith circle jerk”… I think they may be the most awesomely offensive booster cards yet: I don’t think anyone will notice if I play these cards in our next game… Read more
On Thursday, a familiar sign returned to the town of Pitman, New Jersey: The Freedom From Religion Foundation explains: “Keep Saturn in Saturnalia” is the message that went up Dec. 12 on the billboard located off West Holly Avenue a mile east of Lambs Road in Pitman, about 20 miles southeast of Philadelphia. The billboard will be up for a month and is meant to counter the “Keep Christ in Christmas” display by the Knights of Columbus that the borough seems to think is appreciated by persons of non-Christian religions and those who follow no creed at all. Read more
5th grader Zachary Golob-Drake was supposed to deliver a speech to his fellow 4th and 5th grade classmates yesterday morning. It wasn’t just any speech. It was a speech that was chosen to be the best in his class and Thursday morning was his chance to win a spot as one of the representatives to the regional 4-H Tropicana Public Speech contest. That glory came to a sudden halt on Wednesday when the assistant principal at USF/Patel Partnership Elementary School in Tampa, Florida pulled Zachary aside to tell him he would have to rewrite his speech or drop out of the contest. Why? Because Zachary’s speech was all about how religious extremism has hurt humanity and how we’d all be better off following the Golden Rule (like Jesus and Muhammad wanted, he added): Read more
In his inimitable way, Jon Stewart takes on Fox News’ obsession with keeping Santa and Jesus as white as the driven snow. The best line is by Jessica Williams, the Daily Show’s “Senior Christmas Historical Accuracy Correspondent”: Santa is white. That’s just a fact. It’s Miracle on 34th Street, not Miracle on 134th Street. Can’t argue with that. Merry White Christmas, everyone! Read more
Thanks to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the mythical War on Christmas has some soldiers helping out this year. Last week at Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina, a nativity scene was taken down after complaints, just before the annual tree lighting. Mikey Weinstein, president of the MRFF, said they got complaints from Air Force personnel and contacted the Pentagon. After the call from the Pentagon, the display was removed in two hours and fifteen minutes. He cited Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.11 as reason for the removal: Read more
I don’t think Megyn Kelly, on her show yesterday, did Christianity any favors by jumping from the topic of Santa to the subject of Jesus. You have to wonder how that even worked in her mind. “And speaking of feelgood fictional characters, let’s look at Jesus” — something like that? Is she a closet atheist? “Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact — as is Santa.” (I think she meant that Santa and Jesus are both white, not that they’re both historical figures. But you never know with Fox News employees.) Watch, starting at 1:45: Read more
I almost feel bad for Creationists. They try so hard to be credible but their explanations too often hit a wall of reality and they’re forced to find a way around it without sounding like crazy people. It never works, of course. Just take a look at this new “research” paper put out by Nathaniel T. Jeanson of the Institute for Creation Research. Jeanson is a Harvard Medical School graduate who seems to knows how evolution works… but actively denies its truth. What’s shocking is that he acknowledges the strength of evolution (with references to published scientific papers)… and then tosses in references to the Bible to make his paper worthless. The evolutionary model is so robust that it leads to predictions of molecular function. Under the assumptions of this model, species will grow more and more distant molecularly over time, unless some natural force constrains random variation. For proteins that have evolved differences rapidly, evolutionists predict that these proteins have fewer functional constraints than proteins which have evolved differences slowly (Futuyma 2009). … This conundrum intensifies when considering hierarchical sequence patterns. For example, different species of Drosophila are more genetically distant from one another (Drosophila 12 Genomes Consortium 2007) than humans and chimpanzees are from one another (again, debates over the precise sequence identity notwithstanding [Bergman and Tomkins 2012; The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005; Tomkins 2011; Tomkins 2013; Tomkins and Bergman 2012; Wood 2006a]). Yet, the Drosophila species likely share a common ancestor since they belong to the same biological family (Wood 2006a), whereas humans and chimpanzees clearly have separate ancestries (Genesis 1:26–28). Why would differences between the related species exceed differences between unrelated ones? Ah, yes. Genesis. That peer-reviewed publication cited by real scientists everywhere. Read more
