One Nation Indivisible

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 […]

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Lord Mayor Bans Lord Mayor Bans “Intrusive And Outdated” Christian Prayers Before Council Meetings

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 […]

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Obama Acknowledges Two Father Families In Father’s Day Proclamation, Christian Right Flips Out

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 […]

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Daily Hilarity: BP Putting People To Work! (Scrubbing Pelicans…)

Your Thoughts?

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McChrystal The Torturer

I have never liked General McChrystal being allowed to run our Afghanistan operations.  Long before his current foolish comments in Rolling Stone that have gotten him fired and replaced by General Petraeus, he should have been brought up on charges of war crimes: “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] […]

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Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

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 […]

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On The “Compassion” In The Catholic Bishops’ Letter To Congress Against Gay Rights

Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation.  Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that […]

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Workshop To Teach Public School Teachers How To Proselytize In School

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. […]

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Multicultural Human Rights

Johann Hari makes the argument that we have the right to stand up for the rights of those in other cultures without fear that we are not “multicultural” enough: Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don’t know, who have a different culture or colour […]

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Louisiana To Require Ultrasounds Before Abortions

It was a unanimous 79-0 vote: Women seeking abortions in Louisiana will be required to get an ultrasound first, even if they are a victim of rape or incest, under a bill that received final legislative passage Wednesday. The bill by Democratic state Sen. Sharon Broome of Baton Rouge was sent to the governor’s desk […]

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Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?

In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate.  He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking […]

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How The Texas Textbook Standards Got Corrupted

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 […]

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Bad Science In The Gulf

Rachel Maddow warns that the Obama Administration is ignoring scientific opinion about the way to rebuild the Gulf: Your Thoughts?

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North Carolinian Congressman Bob Etheridge Pushes Around Student

This is nuts: Your Thoughts?

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Olbermann And Matthews Rip Obama’s Oval Office Speech

Thanks to Terri Lee for the heads up. Your Thoughts?

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Nigerian Oil Spill Victims Fight Foreign Oil Companies

1.5 million tons of oil spilled in Nigeria over the last 50 years, with no accountability from foreign oil companies: Your Thoughts?

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Is Shari’a Law “Inevitable” For UK Muslims?

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims it is: Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4′s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social […]

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Cults Of Inerrant Leaders

Glenn Greenwald summarizes an atrocity of institutionalized injustice, whereby the executive branch of the United States has the power to abduct and torture innocent people with impunity: The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning […]

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How Science Inspired Democracy In The Modern World

Summary of the video and the contents of the whole lecture: Timothy Ferris, Former Editor of Rolling Stone and Professor Emeritus at U.C. Berkeley, makes the case that science inspired the spread of democracy. Just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger and disease, Ferris argues that the Enlightenment values it inspired […]

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Say The Pledge Of Allegiance With Porky Pig

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 […]

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What is fundamentalism?

A couple of days ago, I saw Dan’s post of a Ayaan Hirsi Ali video, in which she was explaining that the willingness of fundamentalists to kill people cannot be only blamed on their destitute situation (for two reasons: 1. not all of the fundamentalists who become terrorists are poor, 2. not all poor people […]

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Daily Hilarity: The Death Of Lying

Bill Maher in top form last week, covering all the ways you can get caught in a lie in the information age: Your Thoughts?

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22 Comments From Christopher Hitchens

In an effort to hype Hitch-22: A Memoir, they’ve put together a short video recapping classic Hitchens quips: Your Thoughts?

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Exit Polls Say Geert Wilders’s Anti-Islamic Party Doubles Its Seats In Dutch Parliament

The Guardian: The Netherlands’ anti-Islamic MP Geert Wilders appeared on course for major gains in a general election yesterday, more than doubling his party’s seats in the Dutch parliament and overtaking the incumbent ruling Christian Democrats, according to exit polls last night. Wilders’ Freedom party looked to have taken third place in a close-fought election […]

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Obama To Make Reassuring Eye Contact With Every Last American

Obama turns to his strength: ROCKLAND, ME—In an attempt to convince an anxious populace that his legislative agenda is working and that everything is going to be all right, President Barack Obama embarked on a 50-state, 30,000-town tour Monday during which he plans to gaze assuredly into the eyes of each American citizen, one at […]

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