You knew the folks at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church wouldn’t rest for long after a fire burned down the fence and garage of their church. They made plans to go to Canada to “protest the funeral of a man beheaded on a Greyhound bus.” The daughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Ka., told CTV.ca she and several other church members [would] go to Winnipeg on Saturday to demonstrate against what she described as… Read more
Matthew Nisbet recently wrote about the two images of atheism: Hate vs. Community. Atheists have a major image problem. There’s a reason that when people ask me what I believe I have to say with a smile: “I’m an atheist…but a friendly atheist.” For sure, atheists for a long time have been unfairly stereotyped in the mainstream media and in popular culture. But we also have a lot of lousy self-proclaimed spokespeople who do damage to our public image. They’re… Read more
Have fun with this argument from one Christian: Every Atheist I’ve ever known has been some sort of loser. They may have used drugs. They may have been really overweight. They may have been whiney or sketchy. Whatever the case, I’ve never known an Atheist I could exactly qualify as “normal.” It doesn’t mean they were mean or overly negative, on the contrary many of them were very nice. But they weren’t the kids who scored the goals, who got… Read more
There’s clearly some miscategorizing going on at this bookstore… In the section for Rastafarians, we see copies of The God Delusion and The Portable Atheist. Maybe they meant to label them as Pastafarians…? (And why is Jon Stewart in the “Western Philosophy” section?) (via nobleIgnoble) Read more
Back when Ben Stein’s joke of a movie called Expelled was being made, people like PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott were duped into being interviewed for the movie. Ben Stein’s name was never mentioned as an interviewer until the last second. Producer Mark Mathis lied about the production company making the film (“Rampant Films” doesn’t really exist.) Mathis lied about the title of the film (It was never going to be called Crossroads). Mathis lied about the nature of the… Read more
Reader Alyssa wrote a fine piece at Feministing about her journey from Jew to feminist to atheist. I am a feminist atheist, but for most of my adult life I was a practicing Jew. Ironically, if it wasn’t for my Jewish upbringing, I probably wouldn’t be such an ardent feminist, but if it wasn’t for my feminism, there’s little chance I would be identifying as an atheist today. … As I got older and more well-read, however, I started to… Read more
Next week, I’ll be moving into my first roommate-less apartment! Woo! How can I atheify the place? Besides, of course, painting the walls a somber shade of black (the color of an atheist’s soul…) and buying a large pot for my dinner: For some reason, I’m a bit hesitant to hang the 2009 Skepdudes calendar in my bedroom. I think it may give off the wrong impression… Read more
From reader Darryl: As atheists are quick to remind anyone who makes the mistake of referring to atheism as a religion, atheists unite around the disbelief in a god or gods. They are, quite literally, negative: they affirm what they do not believe rather than what they do. Their reasons for not believing may be varied, but they are in agreement on their disbelief. Since there is no positive intellectual content necessarily shared by atheists, they may differ widely among… Read more
Here’s one more article on last week’s De-baptism ceremony, this one from Columbus’ alternative newspaper The Other Paper. The article by Lyndsey Teter starts out nicely. We get a quick mention of baby-eating. Twice: “People think that because we don’t believe in God, we’re immoral, or that we’ll eat your babies,” said Ashley Paramore, board member of OSU’s chapter of the Secular Student Alliance. Not only do atheists refrain from munching on infants, Paramore said, but they’re pretty regular —… Read more