The Princeton Review just came out with its annual college rankings in a variety of categories, including religion. Here’s where the schools rank: The Least Religious Schools: 1 Lewis & Clark College Portland, OR 2 Eugene Lang College — The New School for Liberal Arts New York, NY 3 Reed College Portland, OR 4 Bennington College Bennington, VT 5 Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson Hudson, NY 6 Emerson College Boston, MA 7 Bard College at Simon’s Rock Great Barrington, MA 8 Sarah… Read more
For once, I must take issue with one of Jessica Hagy’s notecards: She completely ignored the Jesus that was found in cat fur! And we all know Cat Fur Jesus is the real Jesus. (Thanks to beltranpr for the link!) [tags]atheist, atheism, Jesus, Indexed[/tags] Read more
This is a bit lengthy but please read it. From the FAForums: I believe I have been fired from my job due to being an atheist. I don’t know if I can prove it. I really don’t think I have any legal protection from what happened but if I do I want to know about it. I am/was a high school English teacher at a high school in central Florida. I have been with the school for 3 years. I… Read more
And I keep getting more disturbed: A number of thoughts immediately come to mind: This makes more sense than what many adult pastors say. This isn’t brainwashing because the baby doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is brainwashing because the baby doesn’t know what he’s doing. I wonder what role the parents had in making this happen… I have $5. Can I keep the baby? It’s cute. What else are you thinking? (via NoGodBlog) Read more
From FAForumite kungfu: I’m getting hitched in a few months. I come from a largely fundamentalist baptist background but I’ve been an atheist for a number of years. My bride-to-be was raised Lutheran and while she has some fundies on her side, her immediate family is pretty laid back. She still holds onto her religion, but is very liberal and caught between worlds (as in, she just wants to make people happy and believe in a transcendant meaning to things)…. Read more
I want to offer an explanation for my last post a few days ago, “In God’s Name.” It was an experiment to see if an implicit message can be more powerful than an explicit one, if it works at all. Clearly it didn’t and it was completely misunderstood. Oh well, that’s how experiments often go. Most of the atheist readers missed the point. That’s not their fault because the story was not intended for them. The target audience was those… Read more
All you have to do is have this banner flown over a large city: On a recently filmed episode of the show Kenny vs. Spenny, where the two guys attempt to beat each other in random competitions, the battle was over who could piss off the most people. Kenneth Joel Hotz (Kenny) went with the banner above. Here’s the story (Q = The National Post, A = Kenny): A: … I decided I’d just rather piss off large groups of… Read more
From The Daily Mail: The findings were described by researchers at the Centre for Social Cohesion think tank, which commissioned the poll, as ‘deeply alarming’. But a prominent Muslim student group called the report ‘weak and unrepresentative’ and said it undermined ‘positive work carried out by Islamic societies’. The Centre for Social Cohesion, founded last year to study religion and tolerance, has drawn attention to the extremist influence of Islamic societies and study centres at British universities. The survey was… Read more
If a baby is born, it seems obvious to me that it would be an atheist — at least in the sense that it has not yet been taught the concept of God, so it can’t possibly believe in a God. It’s the very reason Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, says it would be tantamount to abuse to give a small child a religious label (like Christian or Catholic). How can it be religious when it doesn’t even understand… Read more
I’m no expert on the Bible or anything… but I’m pretty sure this depiction of Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus is just a bit inaccurate: Barefoot and wearing a sari, with a bindi on her forehead and a naked baby on her shoulder, the woman in the picture is unmistakably Indian. So is the man behind her, clad in a loincloth and turban. It’s the Bible for Indian people, created by the Society of St. Paul, in an effort to… Read more