Zach Weiner offers us an effective way to get kids to learn science: (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) Read more
Dante Shepherd explains: No one should be wasting their time putting salt shakers everywhere. Remember that the next time a Christian says, “But you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” Even with god, though, it’s not like Christians keep “salt shakers” everywhere either. How many church sermons urge Christians to be more like Christ? How many fall short of the bar they seem to set? Maybe it’s because, as Mark Twain once said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”… Read more
Note: Letter writers’ names are changed to protect their privacy. Dear Richard, I have currently been in a relationship with my girlfriend for a little over a year. We both are still in high school so we both live with our parents. When we started dating I was an atheist and I still am. My girlfriend was a Christian but now she is an atheist also. Her parents are very Christian and only support her dating white Christian males. Well… Read more
Some Mormon Fundamentalists have been instilling the “fear of authority” into babies through the use of water torture. “It’s quite common,” Carolyn Blackmore Jessop said. She was a witness for the B.C. government in the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is valid. “They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until… Read more
If you caught the ending of the Golden Globes tonights, then you heard an amusing closing line from host Ricky Gervais: “… And thank you to god for making me an atheist.” I wonder how many god jokes he had planned for the rest of the broadcast that they made him cut out… 🙂 I like the line, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Kathy Griffin’s acceptance speech a couple years ago. Gervais, of course, wrote a very popular… Read more
Yeah, it’s likely just a coincidence, but this “Cross Road” deserves a caption, too: Make us laugh! (Thanks to Sam for the picture!) Read more
The Irish Census will take place in April and Atheist Ireland wants atheists to admit they’re not religious when the question comes up: All they’re asking for is some honesty: Atheist Ireland wants to see accurate answers to the question on religion. The last Census showed 3.7 million Roman Catholics (that’s about 87% of the population) and 186,000 people with no religion (that’s about 4% of the population). We believe the true figure for Roman Catholics is much lower than… Read more
After hearing a megachurch pastor treat his congregation like “a group of nine-year olds,” popular Christian writer Don Miller discovered that church is not the place to go if you want to hear anything intelligent: To say evangelicals are dumb is to say too much. It’s hard to imagine a greater academic culture than evangelicals enjoy. We literally have thousands of schools and even more annoyingly combative scholars, always at each others throats over whether the anti-christ will enter the… Read more
There’s been a lot of talk this week about a list of the “25 Most Influential Living Atheists” from SuperScholar.org. To make it on SuperScholar’s list of influential living atheists, an atheist can’t merely disbelieve in God but also must actively encourage others to disbelieve in God… … to make it on our list, an atheist needs not only to be actively promoting atheism but also to do so as scholars in scholarly forums… The list has a few people… Read more
Apparently, mandatory Silent Reflection and Student Prayer time is coming back to Illinois. Which puts me in an somewhat-awkward position as a high school teacher in Illinois who prefers using class time to teach my students. First, a quick recap of the story: The Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act was approved by Illinois lawmakers in 2007. But a U.S. District judge overturned the law in 2009 after an outspoken atheist and his daughter from Chicago challenged it. A federal… Read more