If Catholics were to pray to Lesus Christ tonight, the Vatican ought to be forgiving: it first minted and then destroyed 6,000 papal medals with a Latin phrase that mangles the name of the savior, according to Spiegel Online. I guess it’s an easy mistake to make if you continue to conduct official church affairs in a dead language. Read more
You may have heard that the Republican Shutdown of the government halted funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). That’s a program that offers “food vouchers, nutrition education and health care referrals” to millions of poor women nationwide. While some states have found money to keep the program alive, WIC needs help. In North Carolina, they’ve found funding to last them through October, but the Western North Carolina Humanists intend to keep the program going even longer with their new initiative: Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses 8 reasons your religion may be harmful (it was inspired by this posting from Neil Carter): If you have additional items to add to the list, please leave them in the comments! 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
In an online-only clip, Bill Maher jokes about the Sunday Assembly (a.k.a. the Atheist Church), arguing that we don’t need it because there’s already something else that unites atheist on the Sabbath: Point taken. I smiled. But while the slam on the Sunday Assembly works for the joke, Maher falls into the same trap as many other atheists, which is that he’s taken in by the word “church.” Read more
Rev. Austin Miles is very unhappy that the Nobel Prize in Physics went to two of the scientists who theorized the existence of the Higgs Boson (a.k.a. the “God Particle”). His problem isn’t with the scientists, per se, or even the Nobel committee. It’s with the tool that allowed them to make their discovery: the Large Hadron Collider. Miles thinks it’s all a waste of space and (somehow) anti-Christian. Really. (Emphasis and sloppy grammar his.) And how did this “proof” [of the Higgs Boson] surface? First of all, the scientists involved managed to raise and spend $10 billion dollars to build a “Particle Collider.” which would be the world’s biggest atom smasher, built in a 17 mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border. That is 10 BILLION dollars, with a B. The goal was to find a subatomic particle that would be called, The Higgs Boson, but became better known as, The God Particle, from whence everything sprung. This, of course would mean that it was all spontaneous combustion, there was no higher intelligence involved….yep…God does not exist, and this settles it. Ten Billion Dollars spent in an effort to disprove the existence of God. Think how far that amount of money would go to improve education, communities, cities, libraries, museums, and the lives of so many. Read more
DarkMatters2525 puts to rest this absurd notion that atheists refuse to believe in God because we just want to sin: Read more
We’re a month away from the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in Town of Greece v. Galloway, a case that could decide the fate of invocation prayers at government meetings. While you can read a comprehensive overview of what the case is all about here, PBS’ Religion & Ethics Newsweekly recently ran an excellent segment on the case — interviewing some of the major players on both sides — and it’s now available online: Read more
Earlier this week, Answers in Genesis and its Creationist leader Ken Ham began a $200,000 ad campaign that included a sign in New York’s Times Square reading “Thank God You’re Wrong,” a message to their “atheist friends”: Today, the Freedom From Religion Foundation responded with a digital ad in the exact same space: Read more
The letters-to-the-editor page of any newspaper tends to be filled with kooks of all stripes, but the Los Angeles Times refuses to print letters with demonstrable lies, as one of its editors explained over the weekend: Regular readers of The Times’ Opinion pages will know that, among the few letters published over the last week that have blamed the Democrats for the government shutdown (a preponderance faulted House Republicans), none made the argument about Congress exempting itself from Obamacare. Why? Simply put, this objection to the president’s healthcare law is based on a falsehood, and letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there’s no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed. They won’t print things that aren’t true?! As you would expect, conservative bloggers weren’t taking the news so well: Read more
On Christian Right leader Bryan Fischer’s radio show yesterday, he spent plenty of time explaining how spanking kids was a good idea (“the bottom is just designed by God for that. It’s designed to receive the ‘board of education'”)… Which was just the prelude to him telling his public school teacher listeners — oh, I’m sure there are tons — that he empathized with them. He knows how hard it is to maintain order in the classroom. He knows the struggles we have to deal with. Which is why he supports bringing back corporal punishment: Read more
