For those of you living in (or wanting to visit) Manchester, UK, here’s a conference you’ll want to attend: QED is a two-day science and skepticism conference taking place in the Piccadilly Hotel, Manchester on the 10th-11th March 2012. Fantastic speakers from the worlds of science and entertainment will be joining us for a weekend celebration of science, reason and critical thinking. They have a nice lineup of speakers, too. If anyone has a spare overseas plane ticket lying around,… Read more
Cynthia Carle is a singer/songwriter who’s working on an album called Songs For Nonbelievers. (The title is pretty self-explanatory.) Cynthia needs some help, though, so she’s raising funds on Kickstarter. Need some motivation to donate? Listen to the lyrics in one of the album’s first tracks, “Sunday in Reality”: She has no invisible means of support so if you think her project is worthwhile, pitch in a few bucks! We could always use more atheist musicians 🙂 Read more
Reader Dennis and his wife Holly got married in July. The ceremony was secular — and from what you’re about to see, everything about it was awesome 🙂 You want to see how a non-religious wedding works from start to finish? Keep reading. First, Dennis explains their story: A longtime friend of mine performed our ceremony while his wife was our maid of honor. The two of them helped to write and personalize our ceremony; one that we were very… Read more
One question a lot of people are asking in the wake of the Penn State scandal is: Why didn’t anyone who knew about Jerry Sandusky’s crimes go to the police? Mark P. McKenna has a theory about it — and it connects to the Catholic Church: … I have significant doubts about what an associate at a law firm (or a junior person at Goldman Sachs, or an intern in Congress) would do if he witnessed a sexual assault. Because… Read more
The folks at Penny Arcade, the Series just released some bonus content from their Season 2 DVD and it involves an interesting discussion about how much (if any) religion you should teach your children: Just to be clear, the argument isn’t about teaching your children that religious beliefs are true — we know that’s absurd and no one should be advocating that. This is about religious education. Kids should know the basics about faith — the stories referenced in pop… Read more
Al Vernacchio teaches the best high school sex education class you’ll find anywhere — it’s honest, frank, and doesn’t shy away from answering the questions kids really want answered. My favorite excerpt from this New York Times article is the part where Vernacchio wonderfully links up sex and food: “So let’s think about pizza,” Vernacchio said to his students after they’d deconstructed baseball. The class for that day was just about over. “Why do you have pizza?” “You’re hungry,” a… Read more
Iowa Caucus voters are still very divided over which Republican candidate to vote for this January, and when you separate them by religious beliefs, the differences are even more striking: “That’s more the story than who’s ahead,” said Jim McCormick, chairman of the ISU Political Science Department, who coordinated the poll. “The number of people who are firmly committed to a candidate is really only 16.5 percent,” McCormick said. “A majority of them, 52-plus, are undecided and 30 percent are… Read more
The Denver-based alternative paper Westword has a cover story on Patheos and it provides a lot of insight into how the site began and where it’s going: Creating Patheos’s second layer involved bringing in established bloggers from multiple religions — and their readers. Site staffers identified the ten to twenty most-read bloggers in various traditions, starting with Catholic and evangelical and progressive Christians, but soon branching out to pagans and humanists (a catch-all for atheists, agnostics and other forms of… Read more
Sometimes, people in leadership positions just assume everyone believes in God. It’s not that they’re trying to force their religion onto you; they just don’t know any better — like a teacher who tells every student to stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, not understanding that it’s perfectly fine if a student doesn’t want to say that we’re living in a nation “Under God.” It’s even worse in the military — when commanding officers tell you to pray… Read more
I have nothing to add. I just love that this was up on a university’s event calendar: Incidentally, the Wayne State Secular Student Alliance has been organizing a great week of events for church/state separation supporters. If you’re in the area, there’s still an event on Monday! Read more
