If you’re driving around McAlester, Oklahoma, you might see street signs topped with images like these: In fact there are about 150 of those silhouettes atop street signs in the city — illegal government endorsements of Christianity, all of them. To their credit, the McAlester City Council is considering taking pre-emptive action and removing the silhouettes before a lawsuit comes their way. It’d be a smart move on their part. The residents, who don’t seem to care about how their… Read more
Bill Nye recently made a wonderful video for Big Think in which he talked about why it was so important to accept evolution: That video has received over 2,400,000 views as of this writing. Now, the Creation Museum has made a response video. Ken Ham prefaces it like this: We are [responding to Nye] today with a video rebuttal featuring our “science guys” — Dr. David Menton and Dr. Georgia Purdom of our AiG and Creation Museum staff. These two… Read more
Banana-man Ray Comfort says that homeschooled kids miss out on so many of the things public schools students experience… By not being educated by the public system, their kids will miss out on learning how to communicate using filthy language. They will also miss out on the use of illegal drugs. According to a survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, “Millions of U.S. teens attend ‘drug-infested schools’ where students routinely see drugs used,… Read more
For some reason, Pastor Michael Mohr and University of Kentucky adjunct professor Kenneth D. Royal surveyed 170 self-professed exorcists (PDF) to get an idea of what they believe. (Had they asked me, I could’ve just said “in bullshit” and saved them all this trouble…) Anyway, here’s what they found: … today’s self-professed exorcists don’t see [“casting out demons”] as special or complicated. That is, most believe any mature Christian can cast out demons, and that no special items — water,… Read more
Guys, watch out. One Million Moms is angry again! This time it’s about a Skittles commercial! For those of you who can’t watch videos or are too afraid of the moral repercussions of subjecting yourself to something so depraved that One Million Moms finally had to speak up, I shall break it down for you. By the way, it’s a weird commercial. White Girl #1: [On the couch smooching a walrus. A giant, huge walrus.] White Girl #2: [Enters apartment.] What are you doing?!… Read more
Last month, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Elmbrook School District in Brookfield, Wisconsin violated the First Amendment when it held its graduation ceremonies in a church. You can read a summary of the case here. At the time, I wrote this: The district’s last option now is to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. I would hope, after all this unnecessary fighting (and waste of taxpayer money), they just accept the loss and… Read more
In Toronto, the Gideons want to distribute Bibles to fifth grade students. The District School Board of Niagara is letting them do it, too. But Rene and Anna Chouinard, who have three kids in the district, are fighting back. They’re making an appeal of their own to the school board: If the Gideons are allowed to distribute the Bible to children, then they want to distribute copies of Dan Barker’s Just Pretend: A Free Thought Book for Children and Losing… Read more
On Thursday night, atheist (and a founder of the Humanist Association of Tulsa) Dan Nerren will deliver the opening invocation at the Tulsa City Council meeting: “As far as I know, I’ll be the first to offer a secular invocation,” said Dan Nerren… … He said several atheist groups have been petitioning the council for several years to halt sectarian prayers without success, but the council did agree to allow an invocation by a nontheist group. “I’ll be invoking the council,… Read more
***Update 1***: Sinema has won the primary! More updates below. If you want to support her, donate to her campaign! … Arizona State Senator Kyrsten Sinema — an openly bisexual nontheist — appears to be winning her Democratic primary in the state’s 9th Congressional district: Sinema has received an award from the Center for Inquiry for the Advancement of Science and Reason in Public Policy and she was present at the opening of the Secular Coalition for Arizona. … ***Update… Read more
