On Sunday, Syracuse.com published this letter-to-the-editor from Anita Ciannilli: To the Editor: I am a Catholic, and I support insurance coverage of contraception. I believe that I should be free to follow my faith and my conscience, and make the health care decisions that are best for me. Some people are saying that it’s an attack on conscience or religious freedom if people who work for a Catholic hospital or university can get contraception through their insurance without a co-payment…. Read more
Reddit user zulaikha_idris makes a good point: Dear Atheists, we ex-muslims are waiting for you guys to get over Christianity and start waging war against Islam for a change. Yeah, sure it’s really fun and all bashing the Bible, fundies, priests, young earthers, the pope, etc, but really don’t you guys think that it’s time to shift at least some attention to Islam? We ex-muslims are a very small minority, and there’s really nothing we can we really do to… Read more
Earlier tonight, American Atheists’ Dave Silverman appeared on The O’Reilly Factor (with guest host Laura Ingraham) to discuss how religion has influenced Obama’s policies as well as the latest Gallup poll showing how only about half of Americans would vote for a qualified atheist for President. Mediaite has the clip: Silverman called the trend “a progression towards tolerance,” or “the de-bigoting of America.” It doesn’t mean we’re going to become an anti-religious nation, he said. “But you would prefer that,”… Read more
Katherine Stewart, author of the frightening and important book The Good News Club, recently did a couple of interviews with folks from the Richard Dawkins Foundation. The first, with Elisabeth Cornwell, talks about what Stewart discovered about the group’s parent organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship: The second, a shorter video with Sean Faircloth, explores more of the legal issues with letting Christian groups into public schools: If any of the parts stand out to you, please leave a timestamp and… Read more
Just when you think you’ve heard it all. I want everyone reading this to take a moment to compose yourself. This is going to be an extremely serious discussion topic. Because the Fundamentalists have seized the Loch Ness Monster. We’re all familiar with this photo of Nessie, right? Here she is in all of her glory. Totally not fake. Totally not a piece of plastic wood attached to a toy submarine. Sure, some people think that the confession was falsified…. Read more
The Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers (MAAF) has posted two articles regarding premarital counseling in the military. The concern is that chaplains 1) don’t understand or accept nontheists enough to provide proper counseling and 2) may be prone to religious bias in counseling programs that should be secular. The Army, for example, has Strong Bonds, its family counseling program, as $100 million foundational program of the chaplaincy and the Army. Family counseling for deployment stress (FOCUS) and other resources outside the… Read more
Note: Letter writers’ names and some details might be changed to protect their privacy. Dear Richard, You may not have gotten a letter from someone quite in my situation. I’m a 39-year-old, ex-Catholic (now atheist), gay Lebanese man living in the West. I have resolved to come out either as gay and/or atheist to my religious and conservative parents. My parents are divorced and my siblings and their spouses live outside of Lebanon. My mom is born-again evangelical Christian (of… Read more
Finally, some welcome news from the Supreme Court: The Mount Soledad cross in San Diego — a huge cross on public land — is still unconstitutional. The controversy has been going on since 1989 and it’s finally over now that the Court declined to hear a challenge to its unconstitutionality: It’s been a long wait for justice. Steve [Trunk] won his legal challenge before the appeals court in January 2011. The lawsuit actually began in 1989, when Philip Paulson, a… Read more
Last week, I mentioned that the results of the 2011 Australian census had come out and the percentage of people marking “No religion” had shot up to 22.3% of the population, making them the second largest demographic group. Sounded pretty awesome. But there may be good reason to doubt those numbers. In fact, non-religious Australians may be the largest demographic. The bloggers at Humans in Design have a great explanation as to why that could be the case. Here’s the… Read more
