Just Monday morning I was riding along a Florida Highway staring with irritation at a giant billboard looking just like the one below except it had the giant word “GOD” in the middle contributing to three phrases. Atop and to the left of the word God it said “One Nation Under”, on the left [...]
You’re Not Helping responds to my defense of the Freedom From Religion Foundation: Camels with Hammers has posted a bit of commentary on the Do Nothings. First and foremost, they cry foul on us for unjustly misrepresenting the goals of the FFRF Wait, no, first and foremost, I agreed with You’re Not Helping that it is unfair to accuse [...]
Some atheists online have mocked calls for prayer made by Obama and legislators. You’re Not Helping argues that while there is clearly something awful about treating prayer as a substitute for practical action (such as when true believers in “faith healing” forgo actual medical treatment for prayer) not all those who turn to prayer are [...]
From the Telegraph: Colin Hall said religion had no role to play in the conduct of council business. Mr Hall, who has just taken over the mayorship in Leicester, said the “majority” of councillors and city council staff were not practising Christians therefore there was little point in having the prayers, which were introduced in [...]
Secular News Daily reports: As part of his Sunday proclamation, Obama included a reference to “two fathers”: Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian. Tim Wildmon, president of the far-right American Family Association, responded [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand. Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]
Bruce Bawer is a gay liberal and the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. And below is a powerful speech. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, at least make time for the first part: The description of the video [...]
Last month there was a day of silence in schools to promote awareness of schools about the dangers gay students experience. In solidarity with their gay peers who are frequently bullied into silence, students were encouraged (by outside activist groups, not by schools themselves) to voluntarily refrain from speaking in school all day. Unsurprisingly, for [...]
Without any reference to God. In honor of Flag Day in America, here is a clip from “Old Glory”, a 1939 Porky Pig cartoon which features a godless pledge in both print and recitation: Of course, Porky was not an atheist activist trying to prove a point, he just lived in that pre-1954 America that [...]
Janet Porter recently lost her radio program for her increasingly dominionist theology, which aims to further politicize Christianity and Christianize the United States government. It was Christians who opposed her and then Christians who fired her. In a new article comparing secularists to Nazis, she argues that her Christian enemies who oppose dominionism are the [...]
Canterbury Atheist points out that the world’s top ten peaceful nations on the 2010 Global Peace Index are among the world’s least religious nations. CORRECTION: I should have written, among the world’s top ten peaceful nations are a high percentage of the world’s least religious countries, measured in terms of personal religiosity metrics (like reports [...]
Recently, Greenboro, South Carolina’s mayor, Bill Knight decided city council meetings will open with prayer: “I think this adds a very distinctly America quality and a very necessary element,” he said. “We all believe in something. This is an opportunity to exercise that without infringing on the government-religion prohibition.” In the video below, Phillip Drum [...]
If you missed Ayaan Hirsi Ali on The Colbert Report last night, make time to watch it now: The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Ayaan Hirsi Ali www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News And in either case I also recommend from March 15, 2007, in which he hardly knows [...]
Christopher Hitchens is concerned that the majority Catholic and secularist-free Supreme Court may have a conflict of interests when it answers the question of whether the Vatican should have sovereign immunity protections to shield it from lawsuits over the sexual abuse carried out within American parishes. He also is suspicious of Elena Kagan for her [...]
Encouraging news via Paliban Daily: The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s challenge of “parish exemptions” has made it through a significant hurdle, with a federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., firmly turning back the Obama administration’s attempt to dismiss FFRF’s historic challenge of Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 107 says that “In the case [...]
ProfMTH explores the issue with a wealth of information, siding against such exemptions: The second video is chock full of legal information. The most interesting bit in here is where he discusses Antonin Scalia’s strong case against religious exemptions and Sonia Sotomayor’s general support for them. 1. Regarding Christian Legal Society v. Martinez– –the decision [...]
Out of solidarity with the recently threatened South Park creators, tomorrow will be “Draw Mohammed Day”, an international day of defiance and protest by secularists against religious extremists’ attempts to silence free expression through death threats. A Facebook group was created advertising this event. Pakistan considers Facebook‘s willingness to allow such free speech so inappropriate [...]
Amira Nowaira laments that well over a thousand years ago, Islamic scholarship had more room for rationalists than it seems to have today: Although many of those thinkers, according to Badawi, did not attempt to disprove the existence of God, they lashed out against the notion of prophethood and argued against the privileged position occupied [...]
Now in Australia, a senator is making this argument: Tasneem Chopra comes off most impressive. Your Thoughts?
This video of a speech Obama made during his presidential campaign which is making the rounds among my atheist Facebook friends today: When the speech was made I commented on James Dobson’s faulty reaction to Obama. As I implied in that post, in the part not addressing Dobson, I think this speech is a spectacular [...]
Keith Olbermann compares the two great American leaders’ views of God and state: Your Thoughts?
The Center For Inquiry pays tribute to retiring Justice John Paul Stevens for his record of affirming the necessity of a wall between church and state: He was a stalwart defender of church-state separation, and through his persuasive powers he was often able to garner a Court majority to support a proper reading of the [...]
In this post I want to address Chris’s problems with the tactics and arguments of internet atheists. In two previous posts I have rejected his assumption that not liking the tactics or particular arguments that particular atheists use is somehow a reason to reject the essential atheist position that there are no gods, and I have challenged [...]
Maurice Clemmons, the murderer shot and killed in Seattle today years ago had his sentence famously commuted by Governor Mike Huckabee, who we all know makes no bones about his desire to base U.S. law on his perception of God’s law. Here’s some of his Christian judgment about who deserves mercy under such laws: Clemmons [...]
Do New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry turn off more people than they persuade? I always emphatically argue no and the video below is solid evidence that I’m right. Before this debate the audience was polled on whether they wanted to support the motion, “The Catholic church is a force for good in the [...]