This story has been all over the Internet today: A gay man was arrested at a hospital for refusing to leave his sick partner because he wasn’t recognized as a “family member.” What you may not know is that Roger Gorley, the man arrested, is the father of Amanda Brown, one of the founders of WeAreAtheism.com and coordinator of the Reasonfest conference: Amanda wrote a much more detailed and personal version of the story on her website and it’s the version you’ll want to start passing around to people in your social circles: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Author A.C. Grayling is the author, most recently, of The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism and he recently filmed a segment for Chris Johnson’s multimedia book about atheists and what gives them joy and meaning in life. In the segment below, Grayling talks about how we must make the most of the (approximately) 1,000 months we have to live — especially those golden 300: (via The Atheist Book) Read more
In a social climate where more than half of American Catholics support equal marriage rights for gay couples, yet another high-level cleric made it crystal clear that the Church will not tolerate differences of opinion in matters of human sexuality. In a statement to the Detroit Free Press on Sunday, Archbishop Allen Vigneron condemned Catholics who support gay marriage while participating in the Eucharistic ritual at the heart of Catholic Mass: [Click headline for more…] Read more
Alan Keyes might be the most entertaining man ever to run for president. Always running on the fringes of what is already a very fringe-y GOP, he never ekes out more support than the what could be confused for the margin of error, but he instills a fervency of devotion from those who have gone cuckoo for Keyes. Ambassador Keyes (and yes, he was Reagan’s Ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council) recently spoke at an event at Spring Arbor University in Michigan and did not fail to bring the crazy, saying that the United States was near death, because we are currently violating “the premise of the existence of our country as a political entity.” The premise, of course, is that God Did It. [Click headline for more…] Read more
Finally, we get a sensible answer to the question everyone’s been wondering: You can read the rest of the comic here 🙂 And then nod your head slowly… Read more
As I posted a couple of days ago, Kentucky recently passed House Bill 279, allowing for discrimination in the workplace, housing, and even public facilities if the justification involves “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Governor Steve Beshear vetoed the bill, but the state’s other elected official had the numbers to override the veto. So discrimination against gays, lesbians, atheists, Muslims, and everyone else who doesn’t believe what the Christian majority does is about to become commonplace in the state. As tragic as that is, I have to appreciate this letter from a local Unitarian pastor in response to the bill: [Click headline for more…] Read more
This is a guest post by Marcus Mann. Marcus is a graduate student in Religion at Duke University. He studies contemporary atheist and secular humanist social movements and has contributed to the blog NonProphet Status. You can follow him on Twitter at @mannmarcus. *** Near the end of his book Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, Chris Stedman urges us, the readers, “to step boldly and defiantly across dividing lines of religious and nonreligious identity and share our experiences in hope that we might build understanding through relationships of commitment and cooperation.” Rather than write a review for this important and affective book or take part in the controversy that it has engendered, I want to take this cue from Stedman and share a bit of my own story and of how both atheism and religious pluralism became values central to my worldview. In doing so, I hope to contribute in some small way to the broader exercise of building the kind of understanding Stedman writes about. [Click on headline for more…] Read more
Religious students at Texas A&M University have spent the last few weeks coming up with creative ways to scare off GLBT students once and for all. Earlier this month, they nearly succeeded. As a sneaky way to eliminate any and all support for gay life on campus, some students authored a measure that would allow anyone with “sincerely held religious beliefs” to opt out of paying the portion of their student fees allotted toward the school’s GLBT Resource Center, used by more than a thousand Aggies each semester. Of course, the bill’s language was altered at the last minute to make it appear less discriminatory and more oriented toward “religious freedom.” [Click headline for more…] Read more
