How many times do I have to tell you all? Don’t sell yourself online. Ari Mandel is an atheist veteran raising money for Chai Lifeline, an organization that helps Jewish children with life threatening illness. In an attempt to raise at least $4,500, one of his Twitter followers, Isaac Mavorah, made an interesting offer: A $10 donation if Mandel kept the Sabbath. Mandel said it wasn’t enough… so Mavorah upped the offer. To $1,000. Read more
Cyanide & Happiness is a web comic (also available in book form) that gets pretty dark at times — as the name implies. Abortion, religion, death, and suicide are among the topics tackled by the four-man black-comedy team. Yesterday, co-creator Rob DenBleyker found out he had been banned from Facebook for 12 hours. His offense? This comic (I can’t say I even understood the joke at first), which had been on his personal Facebook page for four months. Out of the blue, someone decided that such heresy must be reported and punished. Read more
Penn Jillette appeared on Chicago’s WGN-TV yesterday morning and pushed back hard when anchor Robin Baumgarten suggested that the title of his book, Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!, had a negative undertone to it: Read more
Seen in today’s newspaper: Thy name. It’s Thy name. Oh, whatever. Typo aside, Joshua Fruhlinger, as always, has the best analysis of the comic: Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses 11 gruesome Bible stories: 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
According to the 2013 American Values Survey just released by the Public Religion Research Institute, 27% of Libertarians have no religious affiliation. That makes sense, I guess — there are plenty of non-religious people who want smaller government and more individual freedoms. But who the hell are these 9% of “unaffiliated” Tea Party members? (More to the point, most of the people in that group — 6% of the Tea Party overall — don’t believe in God!) Read more
Earlier this month, Curtis Penfold was a student at Brigham Young University hiding his doubts about faith. But last week, he submitted his resignation letter to the Mormon church (and therefore BYU) and posted it publicly for all to see. It all began when Curtis’ stake (kind of like the head of a local Catholic diocese) summoned him into his office after receiving, from an anonymous source, a collection of Curtis’ online writings — like a post he wrote claiming the LDS church was sexist: Read more
Last month, the University of North Georgia Skeptics Society created a “Graveyard of the Gods.” It featured the tombstones of a number of ancient gods we now consider mythological. It also raised an important question: What’s stopping Allah and Yahweh from joining the mix? Yesterday, the Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison took that concept a step further. They placed 200 tombstones on a well-traveled part of campus and implored students to think about when their particular god was going to join the mix: Read more
Earlier today, Terry Firma posted about the new Christian Science church in Dixon, Illinois. The church takes on a rather unfortunate shape when viewed from above… It now appears that the church staff has caught on to what everyone’s laughing about. On Facebook, they indicated that they were onto the joke and that a giant fig leaf (a la Adam in the Garden of Eden) would be coming, whatever that meant… Read more
