Every Independence Day since 2008, the Christian chain Hobby Lobby has run newspaper ads celebrating the “Christianity” of our Founding Fathers and how they supposedly wanted this to be a “Christian Nation.” This year, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is taking a page from their book and running a counter-ad-campaign celebrating our “godless Constitution” and how our Founding Fathers actually supported separation of church and state. The ad also says “In Reason We Trust”: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Austrian priest Helmut Schüller is an Unruhestifter — a troublemaker, but the kind you have to admire. He’s trying to reform the deeply ossified Catholic Church with his Call to Disobedience, leading a movement that … recognizes the Holy Spirit among the laity and calls for inclusive and transparent changes to Church governance, including women, LGBT persons, and married priests. He also wants the Mother Church to relax its stand against divorce. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Earlier this year, I posted a live clip of the hilarious duo Garfunkel and Oates singing about a loophole to abstinence that Jesus would undoubtedly approve of… Well, the official video is out today (needless to say, the lyrics and video are NSFW): [Click headline for more…] Read more
A couple of days ago, I posted about the cover story in this week’s TIME magazine, written by Joe Klein: … there was an occupying army of relief workers, led by local first responders, exhausted but still humping it a week after the storm, church groups from all over the country — funny how you don’t see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals — and there in the middle of it all, with a purposeful military swagger, were the volunteers from Team Rubicon. I argued that that statement was not just a lie; it perpetuated a nasty stereotype often leveled against atheists: that we’re immoral people, incapable of doing good things for other people. … After I posted about the article, a *lot* of you wrote letters to TIME magazine and sent tweets to the magazine and Klein. No word yet on whether TIME will issue an apology or retraction, but today, Klein issued a statement of his own. In short, he tries to get off on a technicality… and still gets it wrong: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Christianity Today has a nice graphic about the various Noah’s Ark exhibits around the world — at least the attempted exhibits — and whether they’re funded or not. Here’s just a part of it (PDF): [Click headline for more…] Read more
I’ve known for a while that the percentage of people who pray doesn’t necessarily make sense given the percentage of people who are non-religious, but I always reconciled that discrepancy by reminding myself that a lot of non-religious people still believe in a higher power. Now, the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein profiles an atheist who prays to a fictional deity: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Last November, the voters of New Jersey agreed to spend $750,000,000 (PDF) on construction projects at the state’s institutions of higher learning. Combined with other technology and infrastructure funds, that number later jumped to $1,300,000,000. What we didn’t know was which schools would get how much money. Last month, Governor Chris Christie’s administration proposed a list of 176 projects at 46 different universities. The problem was that two of the universities, slated to receive $11,000,000 in taxpayer-approved money in total, were religious: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, answers the question: Can you be moral without 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
The other day, I posted about how the Kansas City Atheist Coalition would complete against members of the Abundant Life Baptist Church over the weekend in a volleyball match (with all proceeds going to a worthy cause): Well, Sally Morrow of the Religion News Service was there for the event and captured this great video: [Click headline for more…] Read more
In yesterday’s New York Times, the Freedom From Religion Foundation ran a quarter-page ad opposing the exclusion of atheists by the Boy Scouts of America: [Click headline for more…] Read more
