At the Atheist Alliance International Convention last month, we were asked to pick an atheist symbol from a select list. That list had been shaped over several months of suggestions and revisions. The “winning” symbol is seen here: This process was started before the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s “Out Campaign” went public, so maybe the symbol is irrelevant now. It looks nifty. But I have the same issue with it that I have with the Scarlet A. It doesn’t actually say… Read more
You can’t lose with these, right…? Why the number 7? It would be well for the reader to always remember the SEVEN means COMPLETENESS or SPIRITUAL PERFECTION. Whenever you come to a SEVEN in the Word of God read the meaning and the message is plain. SEVEN is found 735 times in the Bible. SEVENFOLD is mentioned 6 times and SEVENTH is found 119 times. The full explanation is fairly lengthy. Try forcing yourself to see the number 7 everywhere… Read more
I’ll be speaking about the book at Harding University (a Christian college) in Searcy, Arkansas (about 50 miles north-east of Little Rock) this Sunday evening in the Heritage Building’s Cone Chapel at 7:00 p.m. (local time). The event is free to the public! More information can be found on Facebook. … On Monday, as previously noted, I’ll be back in downtown Chicago speaking at the Interfaith Youth Core conference alongside Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein. We will be discussing the… Read more
Britain’s National Secular Society gave it’s £5,000 Secularist of the Year prize to Mina Ahadi, “an Iranian exile now living in Germany.” Her story is pretty incredible: Mina Ahadi started her serious political activities when she was 16 [note: another site says she was 14] and living in Iran. She was at university in 1979 in Tabriz at the time of the Iranian revolution and she began immediately to organise demonstrations and meetings to oppose the compulsory veiling of women…. Read more
Yes, if we want to be taken seriously by Congress, says Secular Coalition for America lobbyist Lori Lipman Brown: You should have seen the U.S. senator’s eyes widen when I told him that there was a national atheist conference with 550 participants and a waiting list of 600 in DC last month (Atheist Alliance International). I’m often asked on lobby visits, “How many people do you represent?” During my first two years as director of the Secular Coalition for America,… Read more
Go as the Flying Spaghetti Monster! The instructions on how to make the costume from scratch are nicely laid out here. (via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) [tags]atheist, atheism, costume, FSM, Pastafarian[/tags] Read more
Lots of audience participation today 🙂 Next Monday, I will be speaking at the Interfaith Youth Core conference in Chicago alongside Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein. This is a “conference bringing together individuals and organizations from around the world who are building religious pluralism.” Regardless of how you feel about religion, this is a wonderful opportunity to talk about atheism and Humanism to a crowd sympathetic to the idea of working together with people from all faith/no-faith backgrounds. Greg and… Read more
Philadelphia has laws (PDF) against discrimination. You can’t get public funding if you want to exclude gays/atheists from your meetings. Which puts the Boy Scouts of America in a quandary. The Cradle of Liberty Council hosts about 64,000 scouts from surrounding areas. They “rent” a city-owned building on Logan Square for $1 a year. Fair-market price for renting the building: $200,000 a year. City officials have said they could not legally rent taxpayer-owned property for a dollar a year to… Read more
What suggestions do you have for this reader with a dilemma? I’m an 18 year old at a boarding school, and my parents don’t know that I’ an atheist; however, my brother just called to ask me if I’d be his sponsor for his confirmation. Telling them now that I’m an atheist would likely result in withdrawal from my school, and mid-senior year that could be a mess. Not telling them, and doing it, could result in (when-they-found-out) the accusation… Read more
He’s just on a decade-plus delay: ’95-’96 Prayers Finally AnsweredHEAVEN—Explaining that He had been "absolutely swamped," God announced yesterday that He was finally able to find time in His busy schedule… [tags]atheist, atheism, God, Jesus, prayer[/tags] Read more
