The “Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism” is given out by the Humanist Community at Harvard, the American Humanist Association, and the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics. The first year, the award went to Salman Rushdie. In the years to follow, it went to Greg Graffin (lead singer of Bad Religion), Joss Whedon, Mythbusters’ Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, and Stephen Fry. Last year, author Mary Roach received the honor. And this year, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism will go to comedian and actor Eddie Izzard: Read more
Last month, Justin Vacula put up the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Winter Solstice banner in Wilkes-Barre’s Public Square (Pennsylvania): That banner was hung high above the ground specifically so it wouldn’t get vandalized… but within a day, the banner was cut down and replaced with an American flag. Not only did someone confess to the crime — there was videotaped evidence of it! Read more
Back in November, Charlie Jane Anders posted at io9 that atheists needed to read more science fiction because we were smug, arrogant people who have no respect for viewpoints other than our own. Needless to say, I didn’t care much for those comments. Read more
Last we heard from atheist activist Rob Sherman, he had filed a lawsuit after Illinois legislators gave $20,000 to the Friends of the Cross organization “for the purchase and installation of new exterior panels for the cross to replace existing panels that are missing, worn or rusted.” In other words, Sherman was opposed to the state giving thousands of dollars to repair this: Read more
In case you want to have nightmares tonight, watch Roger Ross Williams’ brief documentary on how evangelical Christianity is creating a “Gospel of Intolerance” in Uganda: Read more
Catholic hospitals have a bad reputation among people who understand how they work — and they deserve it. They don’t perform abortions (even to save the life of the mother, as we saw in the case of Savita Halappanavar), they’re awful about dealing with ectopic pregnancies (PDF), they don’t perform tubal ligations or vasectomies… it makes you wonder why they want to be in the health care field in the first place. But the overriding idea behind those things I just mentioned is that every sperm is sacred and a fertilized egg is treated just like an actual child. However, a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital has pushed the hospital to go against its own beliefs and say that fetuses aren’t children. Read more
Last June, I gave a talk at the FreeOK Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma about The Young Atheist’s Survival Guide (before the book had a title). It’s an expanded version of some of my similar talks online and Seth Andrews and his team did a great job of putting the video together. Hope you like it! Read more
