There are plenty of Bible-related iPhone applications out there, but this one is slightly different. Shake up your phone and a new Bible verse appears. An amusing, possibly-graphic, potentially-obscene, and/or violent Bible verse. Good times. The designer of the app, Francis Dierick, took this project personally. In an email, he writes: Selecting those quotes was actually a very interesting personal experience that renewed my atheist ardour. The app was developed with tongue firmly planted in cheek: e.g. it has a… Read more
Are you sitting down? You may want to be sitting down for this. It looks like your money will continue to have “In God We Trust” written on it. The lawsuit filed by atheist Carlos Kidd against President Obama and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to remove the motto from the currency was dismissed by a judge earlier this week. The brief ruling by the judge said that there was no Establishment Clause conflict based on previous church/state separation… Read more
My friend Jim Henderson, a.k.a. “He Who Bought My Soul on eBay,” is going to be featured on an episode of This American Life this weekend! The subject: Bait and Switch. This week the theme is Bait and Switch and of course they thought about Christians. So they found Off The Map because we are in the business of helping Christians learn how to not be jerks which means we hear a lot of jerky stories (some of which are… Read more
Sunsara Taylor has responded (in three parts) to the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago’s letter that I posted earlier today. First, we have her personal response, titled “Why I Was Dis-Invited, Why I Did Not Just Shut Up And Go Away, and Why It Still Matters”: … All of this is informed by my worldview as a communist. At the same time, because this communist worldview is rooted in confronting the world as it actually is and as it actually… Read more
This post is by Jesse Galef — I just started my day with a dose of outrage. The notion of hell exists in many religions and denominations. If a person believed it to be torture and that his friends or family members would suffer eternally unless they converted, it makes sense for them to evangelize. What a powerfully successful meme. What a sick, twisted, and fucked up belief system. I almost blew a blood vessel watching the following bullshit. It’s… Read more
Hi Richard, This is something that i’ve been wracking my brain about lately. I live in Lynchburg, Virginia (yes, THAT Lynchburg) and there’s this one house on this one street that happens to be on my route to work. This guy has his own personal little church sign board you can put lettering on, and boy does he wear his beliefs on his sleeve. For the longest time most of his messages and statements have been pretty benign. Standard stuff… Read more
I posted the other day about friction that evolved into chaos between Sunsara Taylor and the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago. In short, as I reported it, Sunsara was invited to speak to the group on the topic of “Morality Without Gods,” then later uninvited when her other political/social views became known (and it was understoof that some of those views would work their way into her talk). Sunsara got quite a bit of support from individuals (including me) who… Read more
Earlier this week, a billboard went up in Nashville for a group called Secular Life. An offensive, hateful, evil billboard. One so awful, a number of people denounced it! Which makes sense, I guess… just look at all the blasphemy: You can imagine what happens when you put a phone number on an atheist billboard. There were a lot of phone calls in support of the ad… and a handful against it. My first thought: How could anyone be offended… Read more
This post is by Jesse Galef — Even for those who don’t believe in luck, we know that some people feel luckier than others. Some people stumble across good jobs, good dates, and good opportunities for no discernible reason. What can you do to become luckier? According to this 2003 article I just came across, you listen to Richard Wiseman (who, by the way, has a great blog). I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them… Read more
This post is by Jesse Galef — The late senator Kennedy used to be quite good on separation of church and state issues, but he had a weakness for helping Christian Science. Call me cynical if you like, but it might have to do with the fact that the Church of Christ, Scientist is based in Boston and has political clout. Now that John Kerry is the senior senator in Massachusetts, he’s taking over where Kennedy left off. The LATimes… Read more
