I have a confession to make: I have never read the Bible. I read Genesis for a lit class in college, but when I tried to power through some more, I nearly died of boredom. Jacob Fortin of TheGoodAtheist.net feels our pain and has a solution. It’s called Bible Stories, and he is translating the Good Book into something a bit more entertaining and a little funnier… and he will not be glossing over the insane crap that gets dropped from… Read more
The Supreme Court’s decision this morning declaring the Affordable Care Act constitutional, was the right one. One of the bright spots of the decision is that women will now be able to have access to birth control without needing a co-pay. It’s bad for Christian groups who want to take away that access from women, like Liberty Counsel, a group that doesn’t understand that the ACA doesn’t fund abortions…: ObamaCare is the largest funding of abortion in history. It will… Read more
The Republican Party of Texas recently adopted their 2012 platform (PDF)… it’s full of all sorts of horrible ideas (faith-based drug rehab, repealing the minimum wage, no gay people in the military), but one portion of it really sticks out if you care about educating children: “We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification… Read more
Today marks the launch of a new national organization called Secular Women, “dedicated exclusively to advancing the interests of atheist, humanist and other non-religious women.” Through strategic partnerships, Secular Woman will also advocate for equal pay, reproductive choice, and marriage equality, addressing political trends the group sees as ideologically-motivated threats to its members’ freedom of conscience. “The ‘War on Women’ dovetailing with the rise of secular activism showed us the time had come for secular women to form our own… Read more
This is a guest post by Todd Stiefel. He is the President and founder of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation. … I write today regarding an important and timely topic. I have read an enormous volume of dialogue online about how to make skeptic/freethought conferences safer and more welcoming, especially for women. There is a call for all conferences to have anti-harassment policies in place, mostly to address sexual harassment. I agree and feel we need policies to discourage such behavior… Read more
I missed this when it first appeared, but it’s too entertaining not to post: Tim Minchin sings a 3-minute song on Conan: (via Skeptic Money) Read more
I saw this article by Mark Mellman in The Hill got very excited. It references how Obama can win a greater percentage of the atheist vote: Atheists are alienated. Four years ago, they saw an erudite former law professor from an elite university and assumed he must be one of them. Moreover, he was running in the wake of a Republican who constantly injected his religious beliefs into the public dialogue. For obvious reasons, Romney is downplaying his religiosity, while… Read more
There’s a beautiful story at the Chattanooga Times Free Press by Joan Garrett about a Southern Baptist minister/father, his dying gay son, and the church that got in their way: Matt thought about the stories his son had told him in the hospital that weekend — stories of friends turned out of their families and churches, stories about bullying by people who knew their secret, stories of double lives and failed marriages — he couldn’t help but wonder who would… Read more
