We know how bad things get when Christian Science practitioners fail to take their children to doctors because they believe God will heal them. Curable problems become death sentences. Now, according to BBC News, we have a new problem to deal with: Pentecostal preachers who tell HIV patients to stop taking anti-retroviral drugs. The Children’s HIV Association surveyed 19 doctors and health professionals who work with children and babies and what they heard was shocking: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Michael Moynihan went to The Amazing Meeting and wrote a long feature in Newsweek on James Randi, skepticism, and the movement’s overlap (or not) with atheism: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Mitch Kahle, founder of the Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church, has been a successful activist for a few years now: In 2010, he protested an invocation prayer in the Hawaii State Legislature and won a lawsuit after being roughed up and arrested by police for “disorderly conduct.” Last year, after a public school partnered up with a local church to raise money for a Christian charity, he wrote a letter to the Department of Education and stopped the Constitutional violation. This is a guy who knows how to stand up for his principles, even if they’re unpopular. Now, along with his partner Holly Huber, he’s tackling his biggest case yet. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Daniel is back with another montage of some of the awful things done in the name of God over the past month: (via ConversationWithA) Read more
This is a guest post by Sean McGuire. Sean lives in Montreal with his wife and young son. He blogs under the pseudonym Godless Poutine at My Secret Atheist Blog, which is becoming less and less a secret every day. … Some readers of this blog may recall Cathleen O’Grady’s excellent guest post The Less Than 1%: How Uganda’s Atheists Are Fighting Back. It’s about how atheists and secular-minded people, a tiny minority in the African country, are striving to make things better for their community: In many countries around the world, religious groups are pushing for conservative social policies and retaining their grip on society by dominating the public discourse and provision of social services. In Uganda, an extraordinarily religious country, the small but vocal atheist movement is pushing back — hard. Uganda is at a crucial crossroads now as a society. American Christian fundamentalist churches and other organizations have sent waves of evangelists to this country. To some degree, they have brought about rampant and violent persecution of gays and lesbians. It is now unsafe to be publicly gay in this country — people have been killed. This is, of course, the home of the Kill the Gays legislation. [Click headline for more…] Read more
***Update***: We’ve posted this in the past. If you’ve already responded, there’s no need to do it again. Thanks! … Every now and then, the writers on this site will be working on a post about, say, Creationism being taught in a high school biology class… and we realize it would be great if we could talk to an atheist who teaches high school biology! Maybe we want to quote you in the post. Or (more likely) we just need to ask you a question about high school science curriculums in general. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Joshua Kelly, like so many of us, has a problem with religion — especially organized religion. He has written a series of essays on the subject for his excellent new book Oh, Your god!: The Evil Idea That is Religion (Dangerous Little Books, 2013): In the excerpt below, Kelly (who blogs at An Unbelieving Voice) discusses religious attitudes toward sex (Keep reading afterwards for your chance to win a copy of the book!): [Click headline for more…] Read more
This October, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Town of Greece v. Galloway, a case that could change the way we deal with, among other things, invocation prayers at city council meetings. It’s the first time in 30 years that the Supreme Court will consider a case dealing with legislative prayers. There are a lot of details to the case, leading to some underreporting and some misreporting, so I’m hoping this post offers a thorough, easy-to-understand summary of what’s going on so we know what’s at stake and why this is such an important case. [Click headline for more…] Read more
The Upstate Atheists from Spartanburg, South Carolina have worked with Adopt-A-Highway, Habitat for Humanity, and the Generous Garden Project, and they made plans this past spring to volunteer at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen: As one of the members told me, though, that didn’t work out too well: We asked the director… whether or not it would be permissible for us to wear t-shirts with our organization’s logo on them. She told us that we were not welcome to volunteer at the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen because they are a “place of God,” and she knew “our motivations.” Even after the group promised not to wear shirts with their logos — that they just wanted to help — the soup kitchen still refused to let them in. So the atheists have come up with an alternative plan: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, answers the question: What would it take to make me believe in God? 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
