If there was a Venn diagram of religious claims and pseudoscientific claims, this would be the intersection: A pastor in Christchurch, New Zealand has been handing out a magical “health juice” to cure people. Instead of taking their medication. For $60 a pop. Registered social worker and trauma counsellor To’alepai Louella Thomsen-Inder said the minister had described the juice as “a cure for everything”. “The minister claimed this magic water heals the soul and fixes everything, but the water is… Read more
Science is a tremendous human universal. The discovery of the Higgs boson(-like particle) was a win for scientists everywhere and will lead to the continuation of awesome physics in the future. Physicists in Canada aren’t rejecting the discovery just because it happened in Switzerland or was theorized in America, because that would be ridiculous. But apparently not too ridiculous for Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim extremists. Adbus Salam, a Pakistani Muslim, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 along with Sheldon… Read more
Those crazy awesome folks at Ask An Atheist are devoting themselves to a 24-hour video blogathon starting today at 12:00p (PST) and running into Saturday. All proceeds will go to Washington United for Marriage, the organization working to fight for marriage equality in Washington State. And that battle is going to be an expensive one! The National Organization for Marriage’s executive director Christopher Plante predicts each side will be spending millions on this campaign. That’s why this and every other… Read more
The is the banner at the center of the whole Jessica Ahlquist saga: This is the space where the banner used to be (taken in March): So we have to ask: Where is the banner now? It’s gone the way of the Coca-Cola formula. Only a few people actually know… It’s not just the banner’s future that’s unknown, it’s current location is also a mystery. School committee member Frank Lombard couldn’t tell us where it’s being stored and says its… Read more
Now this is how you do marketing. Forget billboards. The Minnesota Atheists and American Atheists are promoting their groups via a minor league baseball team, the St. Paul Saints: Our banners will hang in the stadium and we will rename the team the “Mr. Paul Aints.” The team will wear Mr. Paul Aints jerseys during the game, which will be auctioned off as a fundraiser for us. You may also order in advance a custom Mr. Paul Aints jersey with… Read more
There’s a Midwest Freethought Conference taking place in Omaha, Nebraska next month and conservative radio host Scott Voorhees wanted to talk about it on his show this week (MP3). (You can assume this won’t end well.) Among other things, Voorhees was mad that the University of Nebraska – Omaha was hosting the event — how dare taxpayer money support this event?! But then it got worse. The host invited Luke Hoffman, the former president of the UNO Secular Student Alliance,… Read more
How much confidence do you have in the church/organized religion? That’s the question Gallup recently asked people. Then they grouped together the people who had a “Great Deal” or “Quite a Lot” of confidence in the church. Even combined, the resulting trend has a beautiful downward slope: In 1973, “the church or organized religion” was the most highly rated institution in Gallup’s confidence in institutions measure, and it continued to rank first in most years through 1985, outranking the military… Read more
Sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, a vandal (or maybe more than one of them) spray-painted the following messages on the property of Shady Grove United Methodist Church in Irmo, South Carolina: But that wasn’t enough. The vandal(s) came back Sunday night to graffiti this on the side of the building: I don’t know who committed the crime — and I don’t even know if they were really atheists or people pretending to be atheists — but this is… Read more
