At the Secular Student Alliance website, Andrew Lovley (who delivered a secular message at an inauguration ceremony a couple months ago) argues that Humanists should continue to deliver invocations: Invocations delivered by humanists could stand out from most religious invocations by emphasizing human potential rather than human abasement. The standard religious invocation calls upon a god to have mercy and to offer strength, guidance, and wisdom that people are supposedly incapable of attaining on their own. Secular folks recognize that… Read more
A few notable atheists are commenting on the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad at the On Faith blog. Richard Dawkins makes me squirm with the start of his piece, but it gets better if you read the rest of it: I gather that Tim Tebow is extremely good at football. That’s just as well, for he certainly isn’t very good at thinking. Perhaps the fact that he was home schooled by missionary parents is to blame. … The sperm that… Read more
The “Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism” is given out by the Harvard Secular Society on behalf of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and the American Humanist Association. The first year, the award went to Salman Rushdie. The second award went to lead singer of Bad Religion, Greg Graffin. Last year, it was Joss Whedon. This year? The MythBusters -– special-effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman -– take on the task of separating truth from urban legend on… Read more
The whole story of Jeff and Marci Beagley and their son is tragic. They allowed their son to die of an inflammation of his urethra because they figured a god would cure him. Instead of taking him to a doctor for real help, they prayed… and sat back idly while he suffered. At least there’s some justice. A jury found them guilty of criminally negligent homicide. … The jury informed the Clackamas County Circuit Court of their decision Tuesday afternoon,… Read more
Last year, when President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, he gave a shout-out to Secular Americans: There is no doubt that the very nature of faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same. We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and where we’re going next — and some subscribe to no faith at all. … We know too that whatever… Read more
A whole bunch, says Richard Dawkins: As it happens, I have just been sent some recent figures for sales of The God Delusion in English:- North America 907,161 Rest of World 1,179,241 Total English language 2,086,402 Richard That’s impressive even for bestsellers. Though, to keep things in perspective, Rick Warren’s awful The Purpose Driven Life has sold 25 million copies. Or 30 million copies. Or 52 million copies. Whatever it is, it’s a hell of a lot more than Dawkins…. Read more
Richard Wade here. Let me take a moment of indulgence to boast about my daughter. She’s 24 and studying Sociology in college. Yesterday morning she texted me from class, and I got into a phone text conversation with her. Her entries are in italics and mine are in regular font, just as we typed them in textese: I’m really annoyed and upset right now cuz my english teacher is discussing god and how the philosopher nichee is wrong and all… Read more
One way to celebrate Darwin Day is by having a “Phylum Feast” — that is, a potluck dinner where the items are as biologically diverse as possible. Hugh Kramer has an example of a menu used for such a feast: Mammalia: Minke Whale meat Aves: Smoked Turkey slices Teleostoma: Pickled Herring Bivalvia: Mya (clams) from mouth of the Honna River Gastropoda: commercial escargot Malacostraca: commercial shrimp Pteridophyta: commercial fern fiddleheads Monocots: Onions, rice Dicots: Pecans, spinach Fungi: commercial Agaricus (mushrooms)… Read more
R. Joseph Hoffmann explains the problem with Humanism. Contemporary humanism is a mess because it doesn’t know what it believes, so much so that it doesn’t know what “it” stands for. Humanism has become the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules. It has ignored or rejected its renaissance origins (too religious?) in favor of a free-base approach to whatever grabs its attention on a… Read more
If you’re near Minnesota (or, hell, even if you’re not) and you’d like to spend a couple weeks of your summer helping out at Camp Quest, the camp for children of atheist parents, they’re in need of volunteer counselors! For more information, just send them an email 🙂 Read more
