Every three months, Foundation Beyond Belief picks charities in nine different categories and encourages atheists to donate money to them. Since we “opened shop” at the beginning of 2010, we’ve raised over $38,000. It’s really incredible the amount of support we’ve received from the Humanist community. This quarter, we asked ourselves a question: Would atheists be willing to donate money to a Peace advocacy group if that group was religious in nature? The religion is Quakerism — about as liberal… Read more
Reza Aslan — a guy I normally liked watching when he appeared on The Daily Show and The Rachel Maddow Show — has a horrible piece up at the Washington Post website regurgitating every nasty atheist stereotype you can think of. He starts off with a plain old mistake when he explains the London Atheist Bus Campaign: … a friend informed me that the driving force behind the London bus ads was none other than the dean of the so-called… Read more
I hate Nightline. I used to have big hopes for them — like when they said they would air a debate between atheists and Christians, but ended up airing nothing that was useful for further dialogue. Now, they’re doing a piece on American Atheists’ former legal director Edwin Kagin. Edwin grows on you over time and he may come off brash at first, so I’m worried how this will go. They posted an article about the segment earlier today. The… Read more
Crispian Jago has created a wonderful Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense: See? I *told* you Buddhism was woo. Read more
by Jesse Galef – Rowan Atkinson had such a great sketch as the devil, I went looking for more. And lo and behold, I found another hilarious bit of him as a vicar extolling the amazing entertainment of this Jesus character: Wouldn’t it be fun to perform this? (By the way, if you didn’t get the ending, don’t feel bad – neither did I. But it made more sense after checking out the wikipedia page.) Enjoy your Friday! Read more
During The Amazing Meeting 8, Robin Ferguson and I sat down to talk with Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy. I had planned to transcribe it, but there’s so much interesting stuff Phil discussed — ranging from his “super secret project” to PepsiGate to not being a dick — that it was much easier to upload the audio and just put it out there. (Speaking of not being a dick, here’s a a decent transcript of Phil’s TAM8 talk.) You can… Read more
by Jesse Galef – Yesterday I asked how you would react to someone praying for you. Your reactions spanned the gamut, as I expected. There’s one type of response I wanted to specifically address, because I think it’s a common one: why would I possibly object to someone trying to be nice? I was originally motivated to write yesterday’s post after Chris Stedman of the Interfaith Youth Core tweeted the question. I’ve met Chris in person a few times -… Read more
The night before I left for The Amazing Meeting, I saw this segment on The Daily Show and cracked up. The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10c Read more
M.C. Escher would have been proud. Mark Dow created a tessellation featuring the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Wow. Colorful and gorgeous. The enlarged version looks even better. If you really want to geek out, here’s the math behind how he created it. When I buy a house, I know how I’m tiling my floors now. (via Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) Read more
When one man in the Maldives confessed that he was no longer a Muslim, all hell broke loose. That’s what you would expect in a country that requires its citizens to be Sunni Muslims. That man, Mohamed Nazim, eventually recanted. Of course, he was still a Muslim. That’s what it took to stay alive. Ismail Mohamed Didi couldn’t deal with that. In an email, he had written that he was an atheist. A news website got ahold of it and… Read more
