If your local atheist group has done something positive in the past year, you could win up to $600 from Atheist Alliance International as part of their 2008 Community Cooperation Award (CCA)! You do have to be listed in the Freethought Directory, though. If your group is not listed, just send an email here (and CC this address while you’re at it). The object of the CCA is to encourage cooperation, ethical awareness and positive images of and within the… Read more
Tonight episode of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly on PBS will feature a segment on “Atheist Baby Naming.” Margaret Downey, president of Atheist Alliance International, will talk about how atheists celebrate the birth of a child. I didn’t know it took a full segment to explain the proper placement of newborns in a microwave, but that’s why I don’t work in TV. If you miss it, audio/video podcasts will be available after the airing. Congrats in advance to Margaret, who is… Read more
Webster Cook, the University of Central Florida student who didn’t eat a communion wafer and seemingly opened the gates of hell in the process, was facing threats of expulsion from his school as a result. Webster’s friend Ben was also facing that penalty. Thankfully, the school found some sense: On Tuesday, a panel of four students and two administrators, voted unanimously to dismiss all charges against Webster Cook and his friend Ben Collard, saying there was no hard evidence that… Read more
Looks like we’re winning the poll! Now if only surveys like this actually mattered, we’d be getting somewhere. Read more
The Affable Atheist store is always good for some entertaining atheist swag — at least atheist girls think so: If you’re Christian, don’t feel left out. This one by David Hayward has a bit of self-deprecating humor: What atheist gear are you wearing this year? Read more
From a reader (emphasis is mine): I have a serious question, even though it’s from an atheist to a believer: why do Christian groups segregate by race? I have friends who respectively go to multiple Asian Bible studies — that is, it seems to be a completely regular Bible study, but all the participants are of Asian descent (sometimes it’s even specific to Chinese or Koreans). I’ve heard of them for other ethnic groups, too. And this is on a… Read more
We talk about Friendly Atheism and Positive Atheism and Angry Atheism and Militant Atheism… You never hear any of those adjectives preceding “Humanist.” What can be learned from this…? (Thanks to Bjorn for the question!) Read more
Cartoonist Kelly Ferdinando gives us a little more backstory on her Pagan character Ivy (below, on the left) and how she is trying to get a job: On a side note, I was once interviewed for a Biology teaching job at a Catholic school. This was before I got certified and before I discovered you could get paid more than minimum wage for teaching. The interview went well. Then, I’m pretty sure they Googled my name. I never heard back… Read more
PZ’s out of town! Someone must direct the atheists to the polls we need to crash! Like this one at MSNBC: So far, we’re losing! Go vote yes! Read more
You’ve heard that setup a number of times. But in Arturo Vivante’s short story, written just before his death earlier this year and published in the most recent Freethought Today, it’s never been quite so poetic: I was slowly walking down the main street of the Vermont town where I taught when a man aggressively came up to me and asked me point-blank: “Are you a Christian?” “No,” I said, unwilling to be pigeonholed, “I am a heathen.” “Who made… Read more
