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BY HEMANT MEHTA FEBRUARY 9, 2020 In 2015, Tennessee State Rep. Jerry Sexton filed a bill to make the Holy Bible the official state book. It didn’t work. While the bill passed in the House, the Senate did nothing with it, in part because even Attorney General Herbert Slatery said it was unconstitutional. In 2016, Sexton’s GOP colleague State Sen. Steve […]
FEBRUARY 10, 2020 BY COURTNEY HEARD Yesterday morning I got this note in my inbox: Hello Godless, I saw you speak of your non-profit work on Instagram. I just thought I would write to you to tell you that you’re the sort of person Jesus would want to befriend. If you open your heart and accept […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA FEBRUARY 9, 2020 An 80-year-old retired professor has given the University of Texas a $1 million endowment to study Secular Americans. Brian Bolton gave the money to UT — a school he has no formal connection to — in the hopes that a professor would study the ever-growing segment of non-religious people in the country. […]
FEBRUARY 10, 2020 BY JAMES A. HAUGHT By James A. Haught Billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey helped create a four-season television series – “Greenleaf” – about a black megachurch where worshipers whoop, sway, dance, wave arms, squeal, shout and shell out truckloads of money. Some commentators say the series “shows the best and worst of Christianity,” […]
BY HEMANT MEHTA FEBRUARY 10, 2020 For more than a decade now, we’ve been seeing stories about how younger people were becoming increasingly non-religious. Each new generation seemed to include a larger segment of “Nones.” That may finally be changing. It’s not that people are suddenly finding God or anything, but the percentage of Nones may […]
JANUARY 24, 2020 BY BARRY DUKE IT’S an all-too-familiar tale; an individual owes his or her life to the skills of first-aiders and medics, but Team Jesus takes most of the credit. This week both the religious and secular media went into “miracle” overdrive after Christopher Wickland, 47, pastor of Living Word Pentecostal Church in Fareham, […]
JANUARY 27, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE Banned in Liverpool: Christian hate preacher Franklin Graham has been banned from appearing at a venue in Liverpool because he promotes anti-gay Christian hate. BBC reports: A conference venue in Liverpool has cancelled an event featuring American evangelist Franklin Graham. Mr Graham, the eldest son of the late preacher Billy […]
JANUARY 27, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE Doing the Lords’s work: The Satanic Temple responds after President Trump’s spiritual adviser, Pastor Paula White, calls for an end to “satanic pregnancies.” In an open letter to White, Lucien Greaves, Co-founder and spokesperson for The Satanic Temple, expressed their pleasure with the fact that White recently declared: We command any satanic pregnancies […]
JANUARY 3, 2019 BY KEITH GILES We hear this all the time: “Jesus is the only way to heaven” or “No one will be saved without knowing Jesus.” But is that true? Well, not quite. At least, that’s not what Jesus meant when he said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the […]
JANUARY 23, 2020 BY ED BRAYTON Media Matters points out the rather obvious, that Fox News host Sean Hannity is also am important political operative for Donald Trump. He acts as an adviser on the phone with Trump on an apparent near-nightly basis, appears and speaks at his campaign rallies, acts as a go-between for Trump and […]
BY DAVID GEE JANUARY 23, 2020 At long last, Utah has banned the use of bigoted and discredited “conversion therapy” on LGBTQ children, making it the 19th state to do so. State lawmakers and activists went back and forth for months as they fought to create a law that satisfied the largest constituencies, including the […]
JANUARY 10, 2019 BY JOSH DAFFERN Every Sunday tens of millions of people go to church on Sunday, but it is by no means a uniform experience. Churches come in all shapes and sizes, depending on geographic region, ethnicity, denominational background. But there’s one type of church that too many Christians are going to, and that’s […]
JANUARY 23, 2020 BY BARRY DUKE IN the wake of a Wall Street Journal exposé last December that claimed that Peter’s Pence, the Pope’s principal charity, gave only ten percent of the millions raised from the Catholic faithful to the needy, comes news that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is being sued for taking donations under false pretenses. […]
JANUARY 24, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE Religion poisons everything: Evidence shows that executives from the NFL’s New Orleans Saints football team conspired with the Catholic church to protect pedophile priests. ESPN reports: The New Orleans Saints are going to court to keep the public from seeing hundreds of emails that allegedly show team executives doing public […]
JANUARY 26, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE What happened to “Pro-Life”? President Trump’s spiritual adviser, Pastor Paula White, wants to put an end to “satanic pregnancies.” In a bizarre rant captured by Right Wing Watch, White “takes authority over the marine kingdom, the animal kingdom, and all ‘satanic pregnancies’ that seek to harm Trump or the church.” […]
JANUARY 20, 2020 BY JAMES A. HAUGHT By James A. Haught When people accept supernatural claims of a religion, their lives are altered. They commit themselves to belief in miracles, prophecies and similar magic, which orients their view of reality. It confines them, hindering their ability to consider other possibilities. This narrowed lifestyle can be called […]
JANUARY 21, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE Theocracy Alert: The White House YouTube account is streaming a vile anti-gay church sermon attended by Vice President Mike Pence. Newsweek reports: Vice President Mike Pence called for people to remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr. “in these divided times” while attending a church where a bishop described how “the devil” […]
By Rebekah Riess, CNN Updated 10:42 PM ET, Tue January 14, 2020 John William Kirby Kelley (CNN)The Justice Department has charged a Virginia man with conspiracy to make threats over “swatting” calls he made as part of an online network that targeted African Americans and Jewish people, according to an FBI affidavit.“Swatting” is a prank call […]
JANUARY 21, 2020 BY BARRY DUKE DONALD Trump, according to his certifiably insane ‘spiritual advisor‘ Paul White, above, will shortly be in the vanguard of a battle that will lead to ‘The Rapture.’ She knows this because Him Upstairs recently told her so. God came to me last night and showed me a vision of Trump riding […]
JANUARY 21, 2020 BY JAMES F. MCGRATH I don’t know how I missed coming across this term until now, but I’m so incredibly happy to have added it to my vocabulary. Sarahbeth Caplin referred to “narcegesis” in the context of her comments on Anne Graham Lotz’s remarks about Donald Trump’s removal of troops from Syria perhaps being […]