As I’ve mentioned before, I help coach a Speech Team at my high school. I was also on the team at the school I attended and it was probably the most influential part of my life at that time. A lot of people have no idea what that involves… do we just give speeches all day? No, not exactly. So you can imagine the pleasant surprise I got when I saw a front-page story about Speech in the Chicago Tribune… Read more
Reader Rachel has been having discussions with a religious friend over the founding of our nation. In an email, she says she’s currently at an impasse: The discussion now centers on our Founding Fathers’ intent concerning religion and the creation of our government. I’ve insisted over and over again that our country wasn’t founded on principles of Christianity (or any religion), but instead was founded as a free government for freedoms for all peoples. However, I’m having many problems researching…. Read more
A new study by the American Jewish Committee reports that Jews are less likely to switch faiths than Catholics or Protestants. With 76 percent retaining their faith, Jews are more “religiously stable” than Catholics (73 percent); and while eight in ten Protestants remain Protestant, specific denominations retain a much lower percentage of members — as low as 16 percent in one case. You can read the entire report here (PDF). Despite the “stability,” the overall trend is that more people… Read more
The other night, Rachel Maddow interviewed the authors of the Left Behind series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. You want to see an interview that will hurt your brain? Here you go (for more fun, try imitating Rachel and keeping a straight face as you watch): My favorite excerpt: Maddow: You think that Obama is a socialist and you think that a world socialist system is a… necessary precondition for the Rapture, and then after the Rapture, then there’s the… Read more
Glenn Beck of FOXNews wants to fix America and he needs your help. He wants all Americans to join together to watch his show next week, when he will explain how to take back the country: He says this: So, how do we show America what’s really behind the curtain? Below are nine simple principles. If you believe in at least seven of them, then we have something in common. One’s already out of the question for most of us:… Read more
Ray Comfort doesn’t just insult your intelligence. He insults the very creatures he’s distantly related to: Of course, Ray doesn’t believe he’s related to Bobo. This is his understanding of evolution: Yikes, that’s a lot of ignorance. (via Atheist Cartoons) Read more
Minnesota Atheists teamed up with Trinity United Methodist Church in Minneapolis to hold a Bible study for people who don’t believe in the Bible. It was only the first of what will be a weekly gathering. There were some ground rules — proselytizing is forbidden and disagreements are ok and encouraged. “We’ve discerned that people have lost or lack the skills to engage in constructive and respectful dialogue in the context of profound disagreement,” [Chester O’Gorman, community outreach director for… Read more
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason and Freethinkers, explains the history and problems with the faith-based initiatives in today’s edition of The New York Times. President Obama has only blurred the lines between church and state even more. The fact is that many people served by these projects — including children with absent fathers, addicts and prisoners — form a captive audience. It cannot be easy to say no to a proselytizer if saying yes means a… Read more
A new image based on the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey shows us the following: What can we learn from this…? (Thanks to Mike for the link!) Read more
It’s like you’re in an alternate universe in which Al Gore was president and Sanjaya won American Idol. Peter Steinfels writes all about it in The New York Times. Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn’t easy. Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives,… Read more