Well, that was fast. Yesterday, American Atheists President Dave Silverman tweeted this: Terry Firma gave more details on what happened on this site earlier today. Today, Silverman posted his letter to appeal the decision on AA’s website. And just moments ago, he tweeted this: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Remember the infamous fourth grade “science” quiz that was circulating online? … Turns out God isn’t a big fan of their school. While they ended up raising about $15,000, it was a long way from the $200,000 or so that they needed to keep the place open. This month, Blue Ridge Christian Academy announced that they would be closed for the school year. [Click headline for more…] Read more
In the past few years, even though surveys have shown that more young people are losing their religion, there are still many young atheists who choose to remain in the closet. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to lose their friends, or they want to hide the secret from their parents, or they’re worried about getting bullied and harassed by other students (it’s happened before). In any case, it has a chilling effect. Students are afraid to start secular groups where they can meet other atheists and explore their own (non-)religious identities. Students stay silent even as they see illegal promotion of Christianity around them because they don’t want to rock the boat and draw any negative attention. Students stop themselves from thinking too critically about religion out of fear that they may not like where the answers lead them. Students are unable to help fix the untrue and unfair stereotypes about atheists — that we’re not trustworthy or electable. While things are getting better overall, there are still many pockets of America where it’s neither easy nor safe to publicly proclaim your atheism. So taking a page from the LGBT playbook, the Secular Student Alliance has launched a project intended to help curb that problem. It’s called the Secular Safe Zone: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The September, 2013 issue of Washingtonian has a long feature on Edwina Rogers, Executive Director of the Secular Coalition for America: Reporter Libby Copeland writes: During one of several interviews for the job, the room was packed with staff and advisers who were, in the words of coalition bigwig Woody Kaplan, “flabbergasted” and “incredulous” at Rogers’s presence. “My purpose was not to interview Edwina to see if she was right for the job,” recalls Kaplan, an adviser to the coalition, “but to destroy her.” Yet Rogers “turned the entire room around,” Kaplan says. He’s been a civil-liberties lobbyist and donor for decades, school in the art of political sausage-making — but he’s still slightly awed by Rogers’s powers of persuasion: “She walked out and we voted 100 percent for her.” Most of the information wasn’t new or revealing to me, though, until I came across this passage: [Click headline for more…] Read more
If you ever come across a passenger car with New Jersey plates that spell ATHE1ST (with a number 1 instead of the letter I), chances are that the driver is David Silverman, the president of American Atheists. Give him a friendly wave. Silverman will have earned it, because he will have prevailed in his current feud with New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission. You see, the other day, the MVC’s powers-that-be decided to reject rather than rubber-stamp Silverman’s application, on the grounds that a license plate that says ATHE1ST is “offensive.” [Click headline for more…] Read more
Earlier this year, Asif Mohiuddin, a 29-year-old Bangladeshi man, was violently attacked for being an outspoken atheist blogger in his country. The other day, after a month-old email request, I finally heard back from him. [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses rituals people do over gravestones after a person is dead: You can read more about the Pink Mass over Fred Phelps’ mother’s gravestone here. 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
On his daily online show today, Ray Comfort explained how Miley Cyrus’ provocative dance at the MTV Video Music Awards was the result of her godlessness. Eric Dolan at Ray Story has the clip: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Remember Kmart’s not-bad-for-Kmart “Ship My Pants” commercial? It was a play on words that angered the Christian group Few Hundred Moms. You knew there was a church just waiting to make their own Christian version of it. So when Church by the Glades in Coral Springs, FL wanted volunteers to switch from attending the more popular weekend services to the services with fewer people, they knew it was time… [Click headline for more…] Read more
As the Dallas Observer noted last week, Eagle Mountain International Church’s pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons told her North Texas congregation last week that there had been a measles outbreak… and it stemmed from a member of her church. What made that story particularly newsworthy was the fact that Pearsons’ father, celebrity televangelist Kenneth Copeland, had been a member of the Jenny McCarthy School of Bullshit, promoting the theory that there was a link between vaccines and autism even though no scientific testing had shown that to be true. [Click headline for more…] Read more
