This guest post is by Jesse Galef, who works for the American Humanist Association. He usually blogs at Rant & Reason. You almost feel sorry for Rick Warren. As Hemant among others has pointed out, he was recently caught making statements that could charitably be called misleading and uncharitably called bald-faced lies. He claimed to have never endorsed Proposition 8 but everyone found a video that showed him doing just that. As far as I can understand, his excuse is… Read more
The Duggar family — mom, dad, 18 children — is about to get one person larger. A grandchild is entering the mix. Josh Duggar said he and his wife haven’t yet picked out a name, but are leaning toward establishing a theme with the future children’s names. “We’re pretty sure we’re not going to go with J,” Josh Duggar said. … … He said he and his new wife are frequently asked whether they’ll have a large family. “We have… Read more
Joss Whedon — the man behind the shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly — recently received the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism award from Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy. Here’s a fantastic excerpt from his acceptance speech: The ending is fantastic, where Whedon talks about the true enemy of Humanism. Reader Alycia transcribed the last bit of it: The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker… Read more
Flickr user jaynedemarco is back with more of her nifty artwork. The theme is: “This is what an atheist looks like.” Previous editions can be found here, here and here. Among the new additions: Janeane Garofalo: Lance Armstrong: James Randi: You can see the entire collection here. (via Jayne DeMarco) Read more
I’ve posted before about atheists in relationships and dating someone religious. It doesn’t always end well. You date someone who is religious and says she’s fine with your atheism… then, later on, it blows up in your face. At least that’s the case for this reader, who just ended things with her girlfriend: There were several incompatibility issues, so it was inevitable, but the final reason is what turned my initial relief into anger — she started lecturing me on… Read more
You know that feeling of irony and amusement you get when you open a bottle of beer with a bottle-opener from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University? No? Well, you might be able to experience it if you enter Kevin Roose’s LU swag giveaway and win a prize. All the info is here. (And if you don’t win the LU pennant or sweater, you might at least get an iPod Shuffle out of it.) Read more
This is a question all of us get asked: If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in? There are also a lot of similar answer most of us tend to give: I believe in the goodness of people, I believe in nature, I believe we all find different ways to answer that question, I believe in the Golden Rule, etc. It’s really just a bad question. Just because we don’t believe in a God doesn’t mean we… Read more
Personally, it would’ve been funnier if the last word was “party”… but I’ll eat this nonetheless. The cake was made by Seanna Watson of the Humanist Association of Ottawa. (via Atheist Bus Canada) Read more
A deadly earthquake hit Italy this past week. In the aftermath, 272 people have been confirmed dead. 20-year-old Giulio Colangeli was thankfully pulled from the rubble and survived. One headline about this: Divine intervention helped Antonello Colangeli find his son The grateful dad comments: The Times found Dr Colangeli, a lung specialist at San Salvatore hospital, itself badly damaged by the earthquake, at his son’s bedside in Rome. “I am a doctor. I am a rational man. But I can… Read more
Pastor Rick Warren is already trying to put out the flames that arose when his hypocrisy was pointed out a few days ago. He canceled his appearance today on This Week citing “exhaustion.” George Stephanopoulos: Happy Easter and Happy Passover. For those of you tuning in this morning expecting to hear from Pastor Rick Warren, we were too, but the pastor’s representatives canceled moments before the scheduled interview, saying that Mr. Warren is sick from exhaustion. We hope he recovers… Read more