BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 29, 2021 Church attendance is at an all time low and the pandemic doesn’t deserve the blame. (Congratulations, everyone. We did it. Extra cookies for everyone at the next meeting.) According to a new Gallup poll, only 47% of Americans say they belong to a house of worship, marking the first time […]
MARCH 26, 2021 BY FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION We at the Freedom From Religion Foundation spent a lot of time this week trying to steer elected officials and institutions on the right path. We urged the junior senator from Mississippi to recant Christian nationalist comments she made in defense of a voter suppression bill. “Sen. Cindy […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 26, 2021 I posted last week about a disturbing recording that a West Virginia middle school student had made of her health teacher. The teacher told kids they should avoid sex before marriage because the Bible said so, that students needed to believe in God, that God would help them “make better decisions” […]
MARCH 22, 2021 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! I’ve always been interested in astronomy, and some of the news from that end of the science-o-sphere has been getting my attention of late. A recent paper in Science discusses how a team of astronomers have detected the precursors to known life in space — and in greater […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 23, 2021 There’s a sex scandal involving Australia’s Parliament that’s getting a lot of attention mostly because of how lurid the stories are. In addition to separate claims of sexual abuse, there are images circulating of a government staffer masturbating on a female lawmaker’s desk (with a Parliamentary rule book in the background), […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 23, 2021 Two of the people who escaped the King Soopers grocery store yesterday shortly after a shooter came inside — and eventually murdered ten people — spoke to news reporters afterwards about their experience. They said they ran out of the store through an emergency exit in the back and […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 15, 2021 Matt Powell, the hate-preacher and Creationist who appears to have dedicated his life to making atheists look smart, has done it again. Fresh off of his humiliating video claiming scientists believe in surfing monkeys, he’s now pretending dinosaurs farted themselves into extinction. I know this because his latest video is called […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 15, 2021 The pandemic hasn’t been great for theme parks in general, but it’s been especially bad for Christian theme parks. Those venues certainly attract some people, but when you mix COVID, the decreasing number of Christians in the U.S., and the fact that those venues (like much of Christian entertainment) are often […]
MARCH 15, 2021 BY JAMES A. HAUGHT By James A. Haught By now, it’s clear that religion is fading in America, as it has done in most advanced Western democracies. Dozens of surveys find identical evidence: fewer American adults, especially those under 30, attend church — or even belong to a church. They tell interviewers their […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 15, 2021 Given the chance to do the right thing — the obvious thing — the Catholic Church has, once again, failed. The Vatican issued a formal response today to the question of whether Catholic priests can “bless” same-sex unions. The answer up to this point has always been no. After all, the Catechism […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 15, 2021 When John* was only eight years old and in second grade, a staffer at Bishop Kelley Catholic School in Michigan “drugged and raped [him] in the teacher’s lounge.” Specifically, Aloysius “Father Al” Volskis gave the boy two blue pills which he thought were going to help his cold symptoms. Instead, in a […]
MARCH 19, 2021 BY KEITH GILES After reading and re-reading the New Testament, I’m now fully convinced that our view of salvation isn’t what the authors of the Gospels or the Epistles had in mind when they used this term. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, the phrase “He saved others but he cannot save […]
MARCH 17, 2021 BY ADAM LEE We got very lucky in our quest for a coronavirus vaccine. The mRNA approach, untried in humans until now, worked spectacularly well. It yielded two vaccines with 95% efficacy on the first try – like hitting a home run in your first at-bat. Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines were soon joined by a […]
FEBRUARY 23, 2021 BY JONATHAN MS PEARCE Time to get back to some philosophy. Today we will be briefly looking at the position of idealism as developed by many German philosophers, but including the famous Bishop Berkeley and then taken on by Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl and other Continental philosophers. Defining our terms Here are some […]
MARCH 1, 2021 BY FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION By Barbara AlvarezAnne Nicol Gaylor Reproductive Rights InternFreedom From Religion Foundation The Freedom From Religion Foundation applauds a recent move by the New Mexico Legislature to annul a 1969 state statute criminalizing abortion. On Friday, Feb. 26, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law Senate Bill 10, […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA MARCH 1, 2021 Here’s some free relationship advice for you: Never listen to Pastor Stewart-Allen Clark of First General Baptist Church in Malden, Missouri. During a sermon he delivered on February 21 — which has since been deleted from the church’s website and YouTube/Vimeo — Clark gave a sermon on how to keep your marriage strong. […]
MARCH 1, 2021 BY BOB SEIDENSTICKER See also: “A Defense of Abortion Rights: The Spectrum Argument”[Mother Teresa] preached that poverty was a gift from God.And she believed that womenshould not be given control over the reproductive cycle.Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure thatthe one cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented.— Christopher […]