Comedian Ricky Gervais has an entertaining bit about what constitutes an “Act of God” in his latest stand-up special “Science”: Read more
I got an email recently from an atheist who attended an evangelical campus ministry “training camp” program. The things they said really disturbed her — not because she is an atheist but because it was unbelievable the amount of brainwashing they were doing to these students. I’m not posting the email because I don’t want her to be identified, but her story makes me want to ask the questions: Have any of you ever belonged to (or attended) an evangelical… Read more
This may not mean much to those of you who don’t visit Reddit, but the Atheism subreddit just surpassed 100,000 users 🙂 It’s definitely one of the best places to find amusing/serious/random discussions and links about atheism. (via Ecstathy) Read more
Did you miss the Christopher Hitchens/William Dembski debate yesterday? Reader Chuck was nice enough to make an MP3 audio recording from the live video feed, and you can download it here. There are a few “breaks” in the audio thanks to the poor feed, but it’s pretty decent quality. The “official” recording should be on the church’s website sometime next week. Read more
Jeff Stahler tells the truth in his comic strip Moderately Confused: Reader Dan, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, adds: The cartoonist is local. It’s surprising to see something like this in a town as preachy and Jesus-y as C’bus. Maybe I’m not the only godless infidel in town after all! (Dan, you live near the Students for Freethought at OSU and the Humanist Community of Central Ohio, not to mention the headquarters of the Secular Student Alliance! There are heathens… Read more
I posted a story yesterday about Benilde-St. Margaret’s School in Minnesota. High school senior Sean Simonson had written an article about the difficulty of life as a gay teen — it was published on the paper’s website, but then removed by administration because the comments were creating an “unsafe environment” for children. (They could’ve just removed the comments while leaving the article intact, but that’d make too much sense…) Anyway, I received an email from a graduate of that school… Read more
One of these days, I want to start a blogosphere flame war. Maybe I’ll accuse PZ Myers of being a secret evangelical or something. Until then, I’ll watch this one from a distance. JT Eberhard is organizing Skepticon 3 this weekend in Springfield, Missouri. (If it wasn’t for the big Speech Team tournament this weekend, I’d be there in a heartbeat.) Of the speakers, a small handful will be talking about religion. Jeff Wagg (formerly of JREF) says that the… Read more
We’re being outbred. Big time. Here’s a serious problem with that theory: today’s strongly religious people tend to have a relatively large number of children, whereas secularists increasingly have few, if they have them at all. If you believe in evolution (and what secularist doesn’t?), then you have to take this thoroughly naturalistic explanation for God’s comeback into account. … In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And… Read more
High school senior Sean Simonson wrote an article about the difficulty of life as a gay teen for the student newspaper at Benilde-St. Margaret’s School in Minnesota. The piece was also published on the paper’s website… but after people started to comment on it, the administration couldn’t deal with it and removed the piece from the site: After Simonson’s essay ran in the Knight Errant, 93 comments poured into its website. Many of them praised Simonson for what they said… Read more
