The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses the 15 things you should never say to an atheist: 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
Are you prepared for the onslaught of atheist babies who go around murdering other people? That’s the doomsday scenario sketched in an apparently dead-serious anti-atheism editorial that just got published in as many as seven Bugle newspapers, all small-town Illinois weeklies. The writer fantasizes about two “atheist babies” (an oxymoron: all babies are atheists) who get marooned on opposite sides of an island. One infant is found and raised by kindly Christians. The other child is reared by the Christians’ godless counterparts: a pack of wolves. Wait — what? [Click headline for more…] Read more
Since 2008, the Christian-owned chain Hobby Lobby has run full-page ads in newspapers across the country on Independence Day. The ad features quotations from our Founding Fathers and others discussing our country’s “Christian heritage”… and, as you might expect, it takes all sorts of liberties in the process: Now, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Andrew Seidel and Chuck Roslof have done what Hobby Lobby refuses to do: Tell the truth about what all those people actually meant and, in some cases, said. The quotes are meant to give the false impression that the U.S. is a Christian nation and that our nation “trusts in God.” But, just like Hobby Lobby’s god, the quotes aren’t very trustworthy. They are wildly inaccurate in some cases. They have created a beautiful website that picks apart all of the quotations used in the Hobby Lobby ad — they explain how distorted or irrelevant the statements are, what the actual quotations were (in context), and offer links so you can check it all out for yourself. For example, Hobby Lobby quoted the French observer Achille Murat in 2009 this way: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Here’s a simple rule: When you work at a retail store, you’re not supposed to be a walking billboard for your faith. At a CVS (pharmacy) store in Orange, Virginia over the weekend, a woman went to go pick up her medication and realized that her pharmacist was no longer wearing his usual Bible-verse-patterned tie. She asked him why he wasn’t wearing it and he told her his superiors had told him he couldn’t promote his religion that way during work hours. She flipped out, called corporate offices, and then left this Facebook note that has racked up more than 129,000 shares since Friday night: [Click headline for more…] Read more
At the Atheist Alliance of America 2013 National Convention this past weekend, Dr. Steven Pinker received the annual Richard Dawkins Award. Below is Dawkins’ introduction to the award presentation along with Pinker’s acceptance speech (with admittedly awful sound quality): Can anyone explain the unusual animal heads behind Dawkins…? Read more
Herb Silverman of the Secular Coalition for America writes an always-entertaining weekly column for the On Faith section of the Washington Post. Today’s piece focuses on whether atheists, as a group, are as arrogant as many believers like to say we are. His argument isn’t new, but it’s very effectively stated: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Until this year, all state schools in Israel used the same science books. Heading into the new school year, however, that will no longer be the case, as the government has decided that religious schools deserve their own science books, which will be dumbed down for students’ spiritual protection. In the United States, the state censorship of textbooks has focused mostly on suppressing political ideas and boosting the unintelligent notion of Intelligent Design. In Israel, it’s mostly the human body — the female human body, in particular — that has caused a case of cooties at the highest levels, such that a chapter on reproduction will be deleted, along with references to menstruation. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona wants to make sure we’re ashamed of the right things: On his list? Nakedness (9:55 mark). But really, only when it involves women: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Today’s edition of the New York Times features a wonderful profile of Dr. Eugenie Scott, the long-time executive director of the National Center for Science Education: Eugenie C. Scott’s journey to the front lines of the evolution wars began in 1974, when James Gavan, a physical anthropologist at the University of Missouri, accepted an invitation to debate Duane Gish, a biochemist and a leader in the creationist movement. At the time, Dr. Scott was a newly minted professor of physical anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Gavan had been her mentor at the University of Missouri, where she earned her doctorate, so she took a few of her students to Missouri to hear the debate. “We were greatly dismayed,” Dr. Scott recalled in an interview. “The scientist talked science, and the creationist connected to the audience and told good jokes and was really personable. And presented a lot of really bad science.” The most controversial passage in the piece has nothing to do with evolution, but with the age-old question of overlapping magisteria: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Back in June, Professor Linda Brunton of Columbia State Community College in Tennessee did something to upset some of the conservative Christian students in her psychology class: She made them think. Here’s how the Religious Right group how Alliance Defending Freedom explained the incident in a letter to the college president: [Click headline for more…] Read more
