I need to start attending The City Church in Washington (a.k.a. Mark Driscoll-ville). It sounds like they know how to have a good time: Forget that fact that they’re making a more-than-five-year-old pop culture reference. How exactly is Jesus “bringing sexy back”? Let’s look at the sermon description… This Easter message… discusses the word TORMENT, and how Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection give us freedom in every aspect of our lives, including our sexuality. Hm. I guess Jesus was involved… Read more
Just push play, turn the volume up, and then go back to whatever you were doing: So, what’s it like being an atheist now? Go to the 8:07 mark 🙂 (Thanks to jrbutterfly31 for the link!) Read more
Chuck Colson is dead. He was 80. He died of a brain hemorrhage (cue inevitable comments from people shocked that he had a brain in the first place). A lot of the obituaries you’re going to see about him over the next day or two will focus on his connection to Richard Nixon and Watergate. Or the prison ministry he began. They’ll talk about how Colson redeemed himself after a fall from grace. How he made lemonade out of lemons…. Read more
This is an article by James Croft. It appears in the May/June 2012 issue of The Humanist. You can read other articles from this issue and subscribe to the magazine by going to their website. … Let me begin by confessing that I am predisposed to love Religion for Atheists. The project that Swiss popular philosopher Alain de Botton has embarked upon — to salvage practices from religions that might be valuable to the nonreligious — is close to the… Read more
Bishop Daniel R. Jenky said the following during a Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral for the Diocese of Peoria (Illinois): Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama — with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path. …… Read more
The Religious News Service headline makes it sound like it’s a bad thing…: Young ‘Millennials’ losing faith in record numbers A new study put out by the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs explains what’s happening (PDF) to 18-24-year-olds. When it comes to how their faith is changing, the numbers favor the unaffiliated. Red has never looked so good: Not only are Catholicism and Christianity losing ground, the study says that “one-quarter (25%)… Read more
This freakishly old penny from 1792 (which never even went into circulation) was just sold for $1,150,000: The best part? The inscription: Todd Imhof at Heritage Auctions told ABC that unlike today’s legal tender which bears the inscription, “In God We Trust,” the copper-silver penny reads “Liberty Parent of Science & Industry.” “At the time, industry and science reflected an enlightenment mindset,” Imhof said. “People believed freedom of thought and industrial growth would bind and unify the new country, not… Read more
There are two conferences I’ll do anything in my power not to miss: Skepticon (which I went to last year for the first time and have no plans of missing ever again) and the Secular Student Alliance national conference. Drew Pruitt of the Secular Student Alliance at UNLV explains why he’s making sure his group’s members attend the SSA event in Ohio this year: We networked with leaders of other groups around the country. We had lunch with them, we… Read more
If you’re watching Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on PBS this weekend, you’ll catch this fantastic piece from correspondent Lucky Severson on Rock Beyond Belief. The segment covers the need for secular chaplains as well as the problems with the military’s “spiritual fitness” tests: Justin Griffith: It went on and on telling me that I need to improve my spiritual fitness. But if I need help, I call this 1-800 number. So I called that 1-800 number, and I was basically… Read more
