Richard Wade here. (Not exactly atheist-related.) All the news about same-sex marriage making headway in more states got me thinking. Maybe some of the legal eagles out there could answer this hypothetical question, or maybe someone knows of some actual related case, or anybody who has seen how fairness and law sometimes mesh and sometimes collide can share their thoughts. I think this may eventually happen if it hasn’t already: Imagine a state that has overtly banned same-sex marriage, and… Read more
Imagine you come from a deeply religious family. You’ve just told them you’re an atheist. There are tears and shouts and slammed doors. It’s to be expected, really. But what if, after all that, your family didn’t try to argue with you? What if they just let it go? What if they didn’t try to “save” you? Would you be upset? Insulted? Would you still feel loved? Kinzer raised the question on the Friendly Atheist Forums: … The fact that… Read more
I’ve been reading Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull and several passages scare the living $#!& out of me. Like this one, describing little girls teaching other little girls how to properly act like a woman: On stage, the sisters explained to an audience of fathers and daughters, young women to very young girls, the ways in which daughters should go beyond a lukewarm acceptance of biblical femininity to a full-on embrace of a deliberately countercultural girlhood. They should be modest servants who… Read more
Canadians can be optimistic about this statistic (hey, I rhyme!): Teens who said they definitely believed in God, or a higher power, went from 54% to 37%, from 1984 to 2008, while the number of atheists rose from 6% to 16%. The number of teens that remained uncertain about God stayed at 31%. In an earlier study, from 1985 to 2005, the number of adults who said they definitely believe in God went from 61% to 49%, while the number… Read more
Europe is definitely more secular than America… but they’re not immune from religious nonsense interfering with the government. Case in point: today, on Good Friday, there is a ban on dancing in many parts of Germany. It’s called Tanzverbot. I found a lot of poorly translated articles on it in German, so maybe a reader can shed more light on the matter. But I did find this reference to it in a book called Hitler’s Dancers: The mechanisms of an… Read more
This is up on my Twitter account but I wanted to share it here. Complete the analogy: Straight people : Hurt by gay marriage :: ________ : ________ My favorite response so far: Straight people : Hurt by gay marriage :: Meat-eaters : Hurt by vegetarians 🙂 (Thanks, Andrea!) (via Brett) Read more
I really enjoyed watching this interaction between Larry King and Joel Osteen/Victoria Osteen for one reason: It’s awkward as hell. Just like Rick Warren, Joel just can’t bring himself to say he absolutely opposes gay marriage. So he tries to work around it and he fails. Here’s what journalists need to do: keep questioning Christian leaders on their position on this issue. Don’t let them hedge around it. They obviously have an opinion. They can’t have the best of both… Read more
You know you have no other plans for Good Friday. So come see me speak in Pittsburgh! (Plus, it’s a free talk and you get pasta!) It’s the best Friday night *ever* Date: Friday, April 10 School: Carnegie Mellon University Sponsoring group: Carnegie Mellon AHA: Atheists, Humanists & Agnostics Time/place: 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. in UC McConomy (Reception in UC Dowd) Facebook Event page! Hope to see you there. Read more
I’ve been reading Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull and several passages scare the living $#!& out of me. Like this one, describing a patriarch’s long-term plans for his family: One of Geoffrey Botkin’s catchiest contributions to patriarchy is his branding of the dominion vision in his “two-hundred-year plan for multigenerational faithfulness”: a concept that started as an Excel spreadsheet he put together stretching from his marriage in 1980 to his projected death, in 2038, to the culmination of his vision in 2180…. Read more
