There’s still time to sign up for Camp Quest (the summer camp for children of atheist parents) at any one of their six locations — Ohio, Smoky Mountains, Minnesota, Ontario, Michigan, and California. For many of the sites, early registration — and the cheaper rates that go with it — ends this week. So if you’re pondering about sending your kids there, make a decision soon! (And it’s not a hard decision. You definitely want your kids to go.) Read more
This is an interesting little meme that began on the Friendly Atheist Forums. Highlight the important parts of your religious deconversion, grouping it by age. Here’s one example from happycynic: 6-8: Didn’t buy Noah’s Ark or Jonah and the Whale 9-10: Read Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy. It got me thinking about religion, and I didn’t like my conclusions. 10-12: Shoved the questions to a corner of my mind because questioning religion was bad, of course. 12-14: Told myself that… Read more
I hate it when someone steals my idea for a book… Actually, How to Raise Your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children is a real book by satirist Lewis Frumkes and he wrote it nearly a decade ago. It should be noted that eating skinny children does not help you lose weight. I learned this the hard way. (via FAIL Blog — Thanks to everyone for the link!) Read more
Mojoey can’t figure this out. I can’t either. Why is the new pastor at Manhattan’s Riverside Church, Rev. Brad Braxton, as good and popular as he may be, getting paid $600,000 a year? And that’s in addition to that includes the following perks: $250,000 in salary. $11,500 monthly housing allowance. Private school tuition for his child. A full-time maid. Entertainment, travel and “professional development” allowances. Pension and life insurance benefits. An equity allowance for Braxton to save up to buy… Read more
Nate Phelps, a son of infamous homophobe Fred Phelps, spoke at the recent American Atheists convention. A transcript of his talk is now online. At the age of 7, I could recite all 66 books of the Bible in 19 seconds. My father insisted on this because he was frustrated at waiting as his children flipped back and forth trying to find the verses he was preaching from. Afterwards, if one of us took to long my father would stop… Read more
SarahH began this list on the Friendly Atheist Forums and many others have contributed to it. It’s a list of the Top Ten Tips for Christian Evangelists. The purpose is not to make the conversion of atheists easier. Rather, it’s to make the Christians who do this sort of thing more tolerable (since we have to deal with them on a regular basis). 1. Don’t start using the person’s name, as if you are a close personal friend, unless you… Read more
Genesis I and II are now up in story form on Facebook, courtesy of Carl Elkin. You don’t have to believe it. It’s still funny 🙂 I like the random insertion of Sarah Palin. Read more
Leave it to Landover Baptist Church to offer deals on salvation while the rest of us are in a recession. Love the fine print, too 🙂 Read more
This American Life aired a story this past weekend you’ll enjoy hearing. The theme of the show was “This I Used to Believe” and one of the stories revolved around a Christian high school football coach and a woman who was in email correspondence with him: This past Christmas a story swept the internet about a football coach at a Christian high school in Texas who inspired his team’s fans to root for the opposition: a team from the local… Read more
Dan Brown’s new book, The Lost Symbol, is now available for pre-order on Amazon! It’ll be released in September. That gives us all five months to hear religious groups rekindle their contempt for Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. I don’t even think this new book deals with God, but I’m sure religious groups will find a way to complain about it… Read more
