Remember when officials in Santa Monica, California decided to use a lottery to determine who would get to put up a holiday display in the 21 available spots? Atheists won 18 of the spaces (though they only used 3 of them): (I know it looks freaky with the chain-link fencing and all that but that had nothing to do with the atheist displays — the fencing was standard for everybody.) Anyway, a bunch of Christians were really angry about all… Read more
This war against women is just going from bad to worse. Click on the image for the full strip: (via This Modern World) Read more
About a month from now, on March 31st (a week after the Reason Rally), there is going to be a huge event for military atheists at Fort Bragg, North Carolina called Rock Beyond Belief: I was fortunate enough to be invited as a speaker there and I’m wondering what messages you’d like me to deliver to the Foxhole Atheists who will be in attendance. Any suggestions would be appreciated! Read more
This makes just as much sense as [insert the faith of your choice here]: Though a watering can is directly responsible for giving plants the nourishment they need to grow… so it’s actually pretty damn powerful… Hm. I need to go rethink my atheism now. Read more
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how atheist Justin Vacula was planning to put up this ad on buses in the County of Lackawanna Transit System (COLTS) in Pennsylvania: That ad was inspired by our own Richard Wade. The goal was to see how offended religious people would get by a billboard that’s so obviously inoffensive. Looks like we found the answer to the experiment. The ad is apparently so offensive, they rejected it outright! Jim Smith, the advertising contact… Read more
Greg Perreault, a doctoral student from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, is getting some publicity for a recent presentation he made at the Center for Media Religion and Culture Conference on Digital Religion. (Yep. That’s a thing.) His finding: “… Many newer-generation video games equate religion with violence in the game narratives.” Perreault examined five recent video games that incorporate religion heavily into the storyline. The video games he studied were “Mass Effect 2,” “Final Fantasy 13,” “Assassin’s… Read more
So, this is a real billboard that the Equippers Church in New Zealand just put up: You can’t see it in that picture, but there are currently six lines on it, representing the six people who have been “healed” from cancer by Jesus… even though the six people are using modern medicine to treat their illness… At least there’s some uproar over the fact that the church is trying to capitalize on peoples’ misery, making claims that it can’t possibly… Read more
Rick Santorum doesn’t believe in church/state separation and that should frighten everybody, religious and non-religious. Here’s the relevant excerpt from his interview on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, regarding the speech President John F. Kennedy made in which he spoke out in favor of church/state separation: STEPHANOPOULOS: That speech has been read, as you know, by millions of Americans. Its themes were echoed in part by Mitt Romney in the last campaign. Why did it make you throw up?… Read more
Gotta give religious groups credit where it’s due. An interfaith coalition has put out a statement asking political candidates to keep their faith out of politics: There is a point… where an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours. Appealing to voters along religious lines is divisive. It is contrary to the American ideal of including all Americans in the political process, regardless of whether they are… Read more
This article by Christina Feist-Heilmeier was brought to my attention over the weekend, though I’m not sure how old it is. How many lies can you spot? Of all the hundreds of nurses I have known, I have never known one who is an atheist. Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, there are no atheists in nursing. It doesn’t get any better from there. You can try to leave a comment at the website but there’s no… Read more