One of the reasons church-state separation groups go after bills and resolutions that contain even a bit of religion-promotion is that they know they can’t let anything slide. They let the word “God” appear on our currency, which seems like no big deal… until decades later, when Christians use that as evidence that we’re a “Christian nation,” whatever that means. On March 31st, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring April 30th of that year a “Day of Fasting and Prayer”: [Click headline for more…] Read more
One of the many reasons to start a local atheist group? When surveys say your city is one of the least religious in the country, reporters know exactly where to go for insight. A Gallup poll recently declared Bremerton-Silverdale, Washington one of the least religious areas in the country. (They were ranked 7th in terms of highest non-religious population, getting just above 50%.) So the Kitsap Sun, covering that exact region, wanted to know what’s going on: [Click headline for more…] Read more
If you’ve never heard the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Dan Barker tell the story of how he went from preacher to atheist — also detailed in his book Godless — you’ll want to check out this video of a talk he gave at the 2010 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia: (via The Clergy Project) Read more
Yesterday, I posted about a Dan Savage book review in today’s New York Times that criticized the Marin Foundation. Andrew Marin’s goal is to bridge the gap between the LGBT and Christian communities, but along the way, he strategically chooses not to answer questions like “Do you think homosexuality is a sin?” “Do you think that gays and lesbians are born that way?” and “Can an LGBT person ‘change’?” While I don’t care about the answer to the first one, the other two are non-negotiable to me. There are right and wrong answers to those questions and to not answer them so as to straddle the fence is a cop-out. [Click headline for more…] Read more
The best part about letters-to-the-editor is that crazy views get published for the world to see… and the more local the paper, the wackier they get. Case in point: This letter from Raphael Sealey to the Contra Costa Times in California: [Click headline for more…] Read more
The video below features Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Ira Flatow, Neal Stephenson, Tracy Day, and Lawrence Krauss — all on the same stage! (Do I need to say any more than that to get you to watch it?!) If any parts stand out to you, please leave them in the comments! Read more
Historian Dr. Richard Carrier recently spoke to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Atheists, Agnostics, and Skeptics group about why he believes Jesus did not exist: I haven’t had a chance to watch the video, but please leave any notable timestamps/summaries in the comments! (Thanks to Phillip for the link!) Read more
I said yesterday that the “New Atheists” helped revive a movement that has since grown in both size and scope. Here’s even more evidence of that: The number of books being written about atheism are coming out of the fire hose at full blast. And far from being more “arguments against faith,” they’re covering a wider range of material than ever before. Kimberly Winston wrote about the trend in Publishers Weekly: [Click headline for more…] Read more
This weekend’s edition of the New York Times Book Review has a piece by Dan Savage, talking about Jeff Chu’s new book Does Jesus Really Love Me? In the book, Chu, a gay Christian, writes about how he and others like him are working to reconcile their sexuality with their faith — and how it doesn’t always work out. Along the way, he offers a “sympathetic portrait” of the Westboro Baptist Church, visits a gay-welcoming church, and profiles a man who is gay but refuses to have a boyfriend because he believes doing so would keep him out of heaven. (How’s that for depressing?) While it’s a valiant endeavor to cover the church’s spectrum of views of homosexuality from the inside, Savage really gets irate at the way Chu often lets certain Christians off the hook: [Click headline for more…] Read more
It seems a bit out of place at The Economist, but the rise of interfaith marriages is a fascinating subject for discussion: Yet American rates of inter-faith and inter-denominational marriage are rising, to the point where 45% of marriages in the past decade have involved either two religions or Christian doctrines that clash seriously… There are a lot of reasons for this, as the article points out: People are marrying later in life so family traditions no longer weigh as heavily on their minds. Marrying someone of a different faith is no longer as taboo as it used to be. I wonder, though, if atheists break those trends. [Click headline for more…] Read more
