What were administrators at Richardson High School thinking? Yesterday, the Dallas, Texas-based school brought in motivational speaker Justin Lookadoo to speak to the students. His topic? Well, let’s just say his website reminds us that he’s a self-proclaimed expert in telling girls and boys how to become “dateable”… which really means being straight, Christian, and just like him: So how do we become more dateable? Check out some of his advice for girls: Read more
The San Diego Museum Council is a coalition of local museums that work together to “increase awareness of and attendance at the diverse museums in the region.” The coalition includes the likes of the La Jolla Historical Society, Lux Art Institute, and the San Diego Air and Space. And they were thisclose to bringing the Museum of Creation and Earth — a pro-Creationism “museum” — into the mix. There are so many problems with this story: Read more
You know what would look good at the foot of my Festivus pole? This limited-edition dark-chocolate Jesus-on-a-cross, sprinkled with sea salt — a new project on Kickstarter: Read more
This Saturday, a group of Chicagoland atheists will be volunteering (once again) at the Greater Chicago Food Depository from 9:00a-12:00p: We will be packing food shipments to send out to soup kitchens all over Chicagoland. Big companies send bulk containers of food like oranges or pasta to the food bank. Volunteers are needed to sort out the spoiled food and then repack the good food into smaller family size amounts. There will be socializing afterwards, too! If you can help out (or you just want to join everyone for lunch), please sign up here! Read more
Share your favorite epitaph. This, for now, is mine: Damn good thing I have Jesus on my ‘blocked’ list. (via Dangerous Minds) Read more
SkeptiSketch’s latest video takes a lovely excerpt from one of Sean Faircloth’s speeches and makes it visually appealing, too: Read more
Urban violence in Detroit is out of control, and one woman won’t take it anymore. In the aftermath of a shooting in a Detroit barbershop that killed three people and wounded six on Nov. 6, Pastor Ovella Andreas mobilized other church leaders to figure out how to respond. “This is an emergency; this is a crisis, and we have to come together now to do what we can,” she told WWJ. “I truly know if we do what we can, God will do what we cannot; but we’re not doing all that we can.” So what did pastor Andreas and her task force decide to do? Simple. They will … bombard Detroit with “Thou Shalt Not Kill” banners and signs around the city with the hopes that seeing the sixth commandment everywhere will serve as a wake-up call to the community. “Our goal now is to infiltrate and saturate our communities with this commandment, via buses, via billboards,” Andreas said. Read more
Five years ago, abortion became legal in Victoria, Australia. The law is carefully written to allow women to undergo the procedure without compelling doctors to perform it. Medical professionals who are morally opposed to abortion may refuse (except, as I understand it, in exceedingly rare circumstances where the patient’s life is imminently at risk). They are obligated, under the law, to advise women where to go instead, and the answer can’t be “to hell.” The patient has to be referred to another doctor who can help her. In the words of Daniel Mathews, a pro-choice mathematics lecturer and blogger Down Under, The law thus balances rights of women, on the one hand — rights to autonomous control of their own bodies, self-determination of their own lives, freedom of conscience, and religion — with the rights of doctors to freedom of conscience and religion, on the other. And as a practical matter, physicians certainly need not engage patients in uncomfortable, unwelcome discussions: [They] can simply notify patients of any objection in advance, through a notice in the waiting room or on their website. The Australian Medical Association has even provided templates for this purpose. In 2011, Dan Mathews’ Facebook feed lit up with a discussion that got his attention. The most strident participant was a suburban Australian medical doctor he didn’t even know, a fervent Christian named Jereth Kok. Read more
How likely is it that preachers’ kids will lose their faith? Is it any different from the general population? The Barna Group, a Christian polling organization, just published the results of its study of pastors’ children to see whether it was true that “those who’ve grown up closest to the church are the quickest to leave it.” Here’s the big takeaway: Two out of every five pastors (40%) say their child, age 15 or older, went through a period where they significantly doubted their faith… Overall, one–third of pastors (33%) say their child is no longer actively involved in church. Yet when it comes to the rejection of Christian identity altogether, the occurrences are even less. When pastors were asked if their children no longer consider themselves to be Christians, only 7% said this was “accurate” of their kids — that’s less than one in 10. This compares to the nationwide prodigal rate of about 9% among Millennials. I think it’s important to point out here that all of these results came from telephone conversations with pastors, not their children. It’s not that the pastors were lying, but I suspect you would’ve gotten some very different responses if you talked to their children. If 40% of children seriously doubted their faith, according to their fathers, how many more went through a period of doubt without their parents even knowing about it? How many still go to church now despite being an atheist? Read more
Back in July, I wrote: In the world of Judaism alone, news reports of child abuse are so numerous that the admirably tenacious and prolific writer Shmarya Rosenberg, who runs the Failed Messiah blog, has a hard time keeping up. There’s actually another Rosenberg who has made it his laser-focused mission to expose this evil — and who’s suffered the consequences. Vice has an interview with Nuchem Rosenberg, a rabbi who throws out an eye-popping guesstimate: Read more
