Earlier this week, the Pew Forum released a survey on religious affiliation and found that a number of people raised without religion became religious later in life — in higher percentages than Protestants/Catholics who later became unaffiliated. The main reason the non-religious said they later became religious was that “spiritual needs were not being met.” In Saturday’s New York Times, op-ed columnist Charles Blow analyzes this study. He points out what so many of us have known for a while… Read more
A couple months ago, I engaged in a public dialogue with Christian pastor Jay Gamelin at The Ohio State University. It wasn’t a debate; there was no winner. It was just a chance for two people with different beliefs to discuss religious questions — many of them posed by audience members. You can see video of that dialogue here. There’s some good news to report since that meeting: Students for Freethought and Jacob’s Porch — the groups that made the… Read more
Do you see Jesus in this picture? I don’t. I’m trying. I think they’re just playing a trick on us. The pareidolia is working overtime. Those ladies say they see him: Judith Ellen and Judith Lynn “Judy” Lanier, mother and daughter, have handed out hundreds of photographs of a plum-colored armchair in their Irvine living room. On the backrest, they perceive something holy, something they can’t keep to themselves: the face of an open-eyed, resurrected Jesus Christ. “Everybody has a… Read more
This disturbing email comes courtesy of a reader who is also a teacher: I teach public school at the 8th grade level in Tacoma, WA. Yesterday after school, I noticed a number of older men outside the school handing out Bibles to my 10 to 14-year-old students as they left the building, many of the men were standing in the Bus Zone where a good number of our children had to walk to get on the buses. Ironically enough, I… Read more
Not trying to feed the troll, but this is too funny to pass up. Below is a video of a birthing simulation. The dummy delivers a baby in a variety of situations (like breech birth) and midwives and obstetricians-in-training can practice their skills. Apparently, this Christian conservative doesn’t understand childbirth: I am absolutely disgusted by this following video. It is meant to be a teaching tool to some nurses but they are using improper anatomical models and not telling their… Read more
For some reason, white evangelical Christians are more likely to support torture than the rest of us: More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. White evangelical Protestants were the religious… Read more
It’s two of your favorite things in one place: Liberty University and Miss California Carrie Prejean. Prejean talks about her “persecution” at the 3:10 mark: I liked how she says she’s not sure if the whole Perez Hilton question was a setup… Then later says she had to choose his name from a jar. That’s called “randomness,” not a “setup.” Hilton didn’t know who his question would be directed to. And you have to love one of Prejean’s final lines…. Read more
This is just awe-inspiring and it comes from the Friendly Atheist Forums. Click on this link, really take some time and look at those images. Understand the scales of magnitude as best you can. It’s amazing how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of the universe. Forumite Chal quoted the extremely relevant Carl Sagan: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every… Read more
This letter to Salon’s advice columnist Cary Tennis will be familiar to a lot of readers: I am an African-American male who, after several years of being a conservative, evangelical Christian, now considers myself to be a “Jesus-admiring, agnostic humanist” who also attends weekly church services at a predominantly African-American Missionary Baptist congregation with my conservative Christian wife. In light of this, I have long agonized over the idea of announcing my philosophical position to my Christian spouse, family and… Read more
Martin Cizmar of the Phoenix New Times has a feature article on atheist rapper Greydon Square: Without a doubt, Greydon Square is as contradictory and complex a figure as you’ll find making music in Phoenix. Not that most people know all that stuff. Internationally — and this ASU student you’ve probably never heard of has an international fan base — he’s known chiefly as “that atheist rapper.” Thanks to name-checking by Richard Dawkins (for organized atheists, the equivalent of an… Read more
