St-Matthew-in-the-City is the Auckland, New Zealand church known for performing civil union ceremonies and putting up the best billboards ever. They’re now pushing for a marriage equality bill to pass through Parliament and they’ve put up a new ad in its honor: “It should be of no surprise that St Matthew’s with its long history of supporting the full inclusion of the LGBTQ community in both the church and society endorses the bill. Our question is why would any church… Read more
Mark Mariakis is the public high school football coach who uses his position to proselytize to his players and bring them to Jesus. There’s now a Support Coach Mariakis Facebook event page, encouraging his supporters to attend Ridgeland High School’s first home football game on September 14th. I guess the people of Rossville, Georgia are going to hold up signs telling atheists and Hindus and Jews and Muslims that they’re not welcome at the school and if they don’t accept… Read more
Zachary Tennen, a sophomore at Michigan State University, is recovering after he was physically beaten and his mouth was stapled shut in what his family says was a hate crime. According to CBS Detroit: He was at a house party on the 500 block of Spartan Avenue early Sunday morning when two men approached him and asked if he was Jewish. When he responded “Yes,” the two men raised their arms into a Nazi salute and said “Heil Hitler” before knocking him unconscious, according to Tennen’s… Read more
Carlos Maza, a 24-year-old gay blogger and recent Wake Forest University graduate, spends much of his time chronicling the abhorrent anti-gay initiatives of the hyper-conservative National Organization for Marriage. When he applied to take part in an “Emerging Leaders” program as part of the organization’s weekend-long It Takes A Family To Raise A Village (ITAF) conference in San Diego, CA, he wasn’t expecting the organization to take him seriously. But somehow, Maza was accepted to ITAF. He spent four days… Read more
Just a week ago, John Banks was known to me only as New Zealand’s Creationism-believing Associate Education Minister. But there’s reason to applaud him this week. There’s a marriage equality bill going through the NZ Parliament and Banks has voiced his enthusiastic support for it! When asked why he was supporting the bill, he said “because I am”. YEAH!!!… I mean, ok, he’s not all that excited for it, it seems, but that’s hardly a problem. He’s come around to… Read more
At South Dakota State University, the Skeptics Atheists Agnostics Freethinkers and Empiricists (SAAFE) celebrated their first fall organization fair yesterday with a Fiction 4 Fiction drive. Students could turn in their holy books and get classic (better written) works of literature in return 🙂 There were 21 Christian groups at the fair, but SAAFE was the sole freethinking group present. That must have pissed off the Gideons, though, since they were handing out mini-Bibles not too far away… Ultimately, SAAFE… Read more
Ron Lindsay has spoken for me regarding reasons to like and criticize Atheism+, so I’ll just post a link to him here. I’ll add this, though. Over the past several years, I’ve heard people criticize the term “Bright” (to describe people who are naturalistic and free of superstition) for a number of reasons. I like the word. It’s not the first word I use for myself, but I’m an Enthusiastic Bright on their website. Whenever I defend the term, I… Read more
When it comes to the 100% pro-life position regarding rape/incest exceptions, here’s an argument against allowing them that I can understand: If the product of conception between two humans is a human, and if human life — including inchoate human life — is deserving of protection, then the manner of a baby’s conception is irrelevant to a determination of whether that inchoate life has the right to continued existence. I don’t agree with that… but I understand that. If the… Read more
Here’s something that won’t be controversial. The American Academy of Pediatrics announced yesterday that “the health benefits of [circumcision] clearly outweigh any risks.” The policy statement can be read here. “The health benefits of male circumcision include a drop in the risk of urinary tract infection in the first year of life by up to 90 percent,” [Dr. Susan Blank] says. But there’s a much bigger reason to do it, Blank said. Circumcised males are far less likely to get… Read more
