I already highlighted Penn Jillette’s Vanity Fair interview in which he praised Christians for being better at taking criticism than Muslims, but this quote from his new Las Vegas Weekly interview, which I found via Boing Boing and Reddit, conveys his feelings as much as his thoughts, and those feelings are both depressing on the one [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Because no legal or moral principles matter more to some fundamentalists than their drive to evangelize: “Every day, 55 million American children and their teachers show up for school. For the nearly 90% who attend a public school, the ACLU and other anti-Christian organizations have systematically stripped almost every vestige of Christianity from their schools. [...]
People For The American Way have an analysis of the process by which Texas’s textbook standards became tools for rewriting history according to a contemporary right wing religious political viewpoint. Here are just a few glimpses of the changes, both those merely proposed and those actually accepted by the school board, which I had not [...]
Naomi Phillips, the British Humanist Association’s Head of Public Affairs, argues “no”: The Labour government’s policy was actively to promote “faith-based interventions” in prisons and probation. This was not just to supplement state-provided secular services, but amounted to a policy of commissioning religious organisations to provide those services within the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). This [...]
(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art. Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]
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 [...]
Completely devoid of any principled conscience that would object to mixing church and state, a principal and a church partner to proselytize a public school, using a budget crisis as an excuse: When his budget for pencils, paper, and other essential supplies was cut by a third this school year, the principal of Combee Elementary [...]
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 [...]
That’s essentially what New York state senator Jeffrey Klein is arguing when he explains proposed legislation to make vandalizing a house of worship a felony. And I agree with him. Desecrating the grounds of institutions that represent specific subset communities is not simply attacking the specific owners of that property but sending a threatening message [...]
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 [...]
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter addressed to the United States Congress people opposing ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act For the sake of clarity, permit us first to state two basic tenets of Catholic Church teaching on this issue. First, persons with a homosexual inclination “must be accepted with respect, compassion, [...]
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 [...]
Keeping with the theme of the treatment of atheist service people, Matt posted this infuriating, 3 year old report, on the contemptuous treatment of Pat Tillman’s memory and family on account of his atheism by an army investigator: Your Thoughts?
Thanks to Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist, here is a portion of the inspiring speech from the valedictorian of Greenwood High School, where the school administration let the students vote that they could have a graduation prayer, only to have this plan challenged by the class valedictorian, with whom the courts sided: You may not [...]
Do American evangelical leaders really oppose Uganda’s “Kill The Gays Bill”? What exactly is the extent of their responsibility for the creation of this mercilessly unjust, religiously motivated law? Mariana van Zeller’s documentary Missionaries of Hate explores the question: Jim Burroway has more interview footage with Ugandan MP David Bahati, who introduced the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill”, including [...]
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 [...]