The Root has been doing a marvelous job lately of giving voice to black atheists. In this article, Harvard professor Tommie Shelby talks about how he never “lost his faith”; he just flat-out rejected it: Though Harvard is often said to have ruined more good Negroes than bathtub gin, it was actually at Florida A&M University, a historically black university, that I went from being a devout Christian to being an atheist. … Many black people with whom I’ve talked… Read more
The Freedom From Religion Foundation just put up four billboards (rather, two basic images in four locations) in Salt Lake City to mark the holiday season — it marks their first billboard campaign in Utah: FFRF has more than 17,000 nonreligious members nationwide, but its Utah membership, at 102 persons, is on the slim side. FFRF hopes its billboard campaign will change that. “We want the nonreligious — freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and other skeptics — in Utah to know they… Read more
When that much money is raised by godless heathens, the media pays attention: (Reuters) – Atheist bloggers have shown their charitable side by swarming to donate money to Doctors Without Borders, in what turned into the humanitarian agency’s biggest online fundraiser. … Thousands more clicked through from the atheism sub-reddit, a site normally given over to finding holes in religions and picking fights with creationists, and headed for a dedicated site at firstgiving.com, where they have so far given $180,000…. Read more
Is there anything Christian about Christmas? TheThinkingAtheist takes us through a history of the holiday in To XMAS and Beyond!: Read more
To quote XKCD, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.” With that in mind, here’s Tony Piro with a chart that reflects your inner suspicions: Keep in mind that poverty, education, ability to obtain an education, the type of IQ test used, and about 2842324 other factors play a role in how this data plays out. And before you use this as any sort of argument against religion,… Read more
If Phil Plait can appear in Zach Weiner cartoons, then I’m just going to pretend this little boy is me when I was younger 🙂 (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) Read more
It’s always a touchy subject when atheists go after Islam. Not because we shouldn’t — Islam has the same level of credibility every other religion does: none. It’s the same type of superstition and nonsense you find in other faiths, mixed in with a few nuggets of wisdom that its proponents love to promote. Islamic extremists have obviously taken their interpretation of the Koran to horrific lengths, but extremists in any faith or dogma are capable of atrocities. So of… Read more
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on. These verses served as the introduction to the 112th playing of the Army-Navy Game. In case you aren’t familiar, make no mistake: This game is considered one… Read more
This is a guest post by Juhem Navarro-Rivera. Juhem is a political scientist and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture (ISSSC) and blogs about Latinos, Politics and Secularism at The LatiNone … Latinos are considered to be a very religious and socially conservative group. While the assumption is that most Latinos are Catholic, every once in a while there are reports of waves of Latino immigrants abandoning their traditional Catholicism as they… Read more
