Bruce Bawer: Multiculturalism, Freedom of Speech and Appeasing Islam

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 [...]

The Rise Of Islamo-Erotica

(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 [...]

Confronting Conservative Christians With The Consequences Of Their Homophobia

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 [...]

Thank God For The New Atheists?

Reverend Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World thinks that the New Atheists are really the new prophets.  The Infidel Guy Show interviewed him a couple weeks ago for an hour. In the audio, he argues that God is not [...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Don’t Blame Islamic Terrorism on Economic Woes

Here is the complete talk from which this clip derives. Ayaan’s books are Infidel, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, and, her newest, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. Your Thoughts?

Angry Atheist Debate About A Mosque Near Ground Zerosts

Saturday I put together a large post highlighting a spectrum of thoughtful and/or provocative opinions on the recently approved plan to build a mosque a couple of blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York.  That day, for the sake of balance, I wanted to find someone who could [...]

A Mosque At Ground Zero?

New York City has approved a plan to build a 13 story mosque and community center near the site of the former World Trade Center as part of the area’s proposed revitalization. I decided to group all the most interesting and relevant videos and editorials I could find into one large post in order to [...]

Muhammad’s Worst Enemy

Below is an intense and stark video from the usually much more sardonically off the wall DarkMatter2525, as his contribution to last week’s “Everybody Draw Muhammad” protest: Your Thoughts?

52% Of Americans Now Judge Gay Relationships Morally Acceptable

Not that moral correctness requires popular approval, but moral admirableness of the populace does require morally correct opinions, and so this is a heartening development which sees America finally starting to get it right, with its first ever clear majority (52%) judging gay relationships “morally acceptable”: Andrew Sullivan analyzes the data: A large part of [...]

Women’s Ordination: Another Route To Automatic Excommunication

Not only does approving an abortion necessary to save a woman’s life in a case where her fetus would die in either case get you automatically excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, but so does seeking ordination while being female.  Lifelong Catholic Janine Denomme this week was denied a Roman Catholic burial for having the [...]

Freethinking Islamic Scholars

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 [...]

Bill Maher Defends Contemporary Western Religion?

Compared to the alternative… Some thoughts of my own on the pros and cons of religious moderates. Your Thoughts?

Muhammad’s Treatment Of Women

In an insightful video, which can be found here, Wafa Sultan, a Syrian born psychiatrist and theauthor of A God Who Hates, debates historian of Islam Daniel Pipes about whether there can be a moderate Islam which can be embraced or whether Islam is an inherently illiberal religion which should be opposed wholesale. In particular [...]

120 New Jersey Clergy Petition In Favor Of Marriage Equality

via Rosi Efthim, Pam’s House Blend, and Friendly Atheist: 120 Clergy from 19 Faiths in the State of New Jersey Monday, January 4, 2010Senate President Richard J. Codey Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr. The State House Trenton, New Jersey 08625 Dear Governor Codey and Speaker Roberts: We are 120 clergy members across New Jersey from [...]

A Challenge To Christians To Unqualifiedly Condemn Genocide

Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God [...]

The Belief In God Doesn’t Cause Violence, Only Particular Beliefs About God Do

In discussing the response to Nidal Malik Hasan, Alonzo Fyfe draws the distinctions just right when he accuses atheists who leap from the act of one kind of theist to associate theism in general with violence as an instance of “The Bigot’s Fallacy”: Many of the people who embrace the Bigot’s Fallacy in this case [...]

Bishop Spong Releases Manifesto Resolving Not To Legitimize Homophobia By Debating It

Bishop John Shelby Spong holds nothing back in criticizing Christianity’s awful legacy on the treatment of minorities, women, gays, and “heretics”: I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians [...]

Gay Marriage = Religious Freedom

Another great video from before the inception of Camels With Hammers worth catching up on in case you missed it.  This one is from robtish, who has other terrific videos on his youtube channel. It’s not just a cheerleading or general argument video but an in-depth information video with a bunch of important facts refuting some [...]

“Reason As Memetic Immune Disorder”

Phil Goetz has one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read and it deserves to be read in its entirety. Here are the main points and a couple of key points of application to whet your appetite: You may have noticed that people who convert to religion after the age of 20 or so [...]

The Value Of Religious Moderates And The Danger Of Isolating Religious And Political Fundamentalists

Recently Karen Armstrong is coming out with a book arguing for an extremely apophatic conception of God that rejects all manner of biblical literalism but still insists on some important reference to God and is critical of the New Atheists.  Recently she and Richard Dawkins both responded to a Wall Street Journal solicitation for their [...]

The Responsibility Of Religious Leaders For The Ignorance Of Religious Laypeople

A teaser excerpt from Richard Dawkins’s upcoming defense of evolution is up online. His boldest claim—evolution deniers are as bad as Holocaust deniers. This book is necessary. I shall be using the name “historydeniers” for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world’s age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of [...]

Religion As A Morally and Politically Ambivalent Force

Two weeks ago, I profiled various remarks from Jerry Coyne for the incisive way they challenged assumptions that (1) religion is indispensable for moral progress, (2) that religion is even on balance usually an aid to moral progress, and (3) that moral progress is even something observable over the course of history.  Coyne’s remarks were written [...]

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Faith is a form of loyalty. But more than that, faith is a form of trust which does not calibrate itself to objective standards of trustworthiness but trusts people despite their limitations as provably trustworthy people or even despite counter-evidence to the notion that they are worthy of trust at all. Even more than that, however, faith [...]

In What Sense Religious Scientists “Shouldn’t” Exist

Unqualified Offerings lives up to its moniker with this post: I often hear people explain that it is simply impossible to be a scientist and religious. They have eloquent arguments for why there shouldn’t be any people who are religious and also accomplished scientists. It’s a great, well-argued, self-consistent theory with impeccable logical foundations. There’s [...]

Sex Change In Iran

Strangely, in a country with a government that outlaws homosexuality, transsexuals are allowed to change their sex.  A documentary on the subject: Thanks to The Daily Dish.