- Poetry Sunday: Stopping by Woods
The Foyer • December 30, 2007
There's just enough time for one final Poetry Sunday in 2007, and this one will feature another famous American poet with skeptical leanings: Robert Frost, the New Englander and national Poet Laureate whose work has become so iconic of the American experience.
Frost's views on God are complex. In some of his letters, he calls himself [...]
- How to Think Critically V
The Observatory • December 29, 2007
Double-Blind Tests
In a post back in October, I dissected the claims of a spam e-mail that landed in my inbox to promote the "Detox Box", an expensive piece of snake oil claimed to be able to cure any disease through the power of pseudoscience. As is usual in these matters, an offended true believer showed [...]
- On the Morality Of: Cloning
The Library • December 28, 2007
In today's post on atheist morality, I'll consider the permissibility of two types of human cloning, therapeutic and reproductive. Both types involve implanting a person's genes into an egg cell and stimulating it to grow. If the resulting embryo is allowed to grow to maturity and be born as a person, that is reproductive cloning; [...]
- Do You Really Believe That? (IV)
The Observatory • December 26, 2007
The Zombie Saints
According to all three of the New Testament's Synoptic gospels, miracles attended Jesus' death: a mysterious midday darkness over all the land and the veil of the Jewish temple torn in half. (The Gospel of John omits these miracles, differing with the Synoptics in this point as in others.) However, there's one miracle [...]
- How Not to Fight the War on Christmas
The Rotunda • December 24, 2007
Lately, there have been some encouraging signs that believers of conscience are more willing to stand up to the religious right than they once were. But this effort, though well-intentioned, is not the right way to do it.
It's time for a ceasefire in the Christmas culture wars.
...We invite Messrs. O'Reilly, Gibson and Donohue to join [...]
- A Solstice Sermon
The Garden • December 22, 2007
Today is - at least to my northern hemisphere readers - the winter solstice, shortest day of the year. For three months now, we've seen the sun set and the night fall progressively earlier each day. But this date marks the terminus of that trend, and though the heart of winter still lies ahead, from [...]
- The Default
The Loft • December 21, 2007
Back in March, I commented on a Beliefnet debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. In part 4 of that debate, Andrew Sullivan made what I thought was an astonishing concession:
But I can say that [this experience] represented for me a revelation of God's love and forgiveness, the improbable notion that the force behind all [...]
- The Real Enemies of Christmas
The Library • December 19, 2007
As the holiday season approaches, the partisans of the religious right are ramping up their annual "war on Christmas" rhetoric, which seems to grow more disproportionate with every passing year. The latest example is this absurdly ignorant column, whose author apparently has never heard of separation of church and state (she wonders if the reason [...]
- Open Thread: The Internet Infidels Situation
The Foyer • December 18, 2007
In light of the continuing, and in fact worsening, fiasco at the IIDB discussion forum, I'm creating an open thread to document the continuing misuses of power. The Internet Infidels Board of Directors is now engaged in a full-scale effort to rewrite history, shuttering feedback forums, deleting countless threads on IIDB that have been critical [...]
- The Witch Children of Nigeria
The Rotunda • December 17, 2007
I've written on several past occasions about how belief in malignant supernatural forces causes real harm to real people. There are examples of this from every region of the world, but some of the most wrenching are from Africa, where Biblical beliefs about demons and evil spirits still run rampant.
In January, I wrote about [...]
- Poetry Sunday: The Snowstorm
The Foyer • December 16, 2007
Compliments of the season, today's Poetry Sunday brings you "The Snowstorm" by the famous American transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, son of a Unitarian minister, and at first looked set to follow in his father's footsteps. But before he was 30, he walked away from even that liberal [...]
- Movie Review: The Golden Compass
The Library • December 15, 2007
Last night I saw The Golden Compass, the movie adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman's acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. The movie, like the book, is set in a fantastic and richly imagined parallel universe, similar to our own world but different in many important ways. In Pullman's steampunk world, human beings' [...]
- Pro-Life and Pro-Family
The Garden • December 14, 2007
Inspired by an interview on a recent episode of Freethought Radio, I want to talk about a term that greatly annoys me: "values voters". This term is used by American religious conservatives to describe themselves, and all too often, we see the media playing along and using it to describe this voting bloc as well.
"Values [...]
- Season of Division: The Episcopal Church Splits Up
The Rotunda • December 12, 2007
There's at least one Christian denomination that won't be singing "peace on earth" this holiday season. A diocese of the Episcopal Church has seceded and plans to align with a South American branch of the Anglican Church, the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. (For readers unfamiliar with the tedious details of church hierarchy, the [...]
- The Rules Don't Apply to Me
The Rotunda • December 10, 2007
Last month, Senator Chuck Grassley asked six notorious preachers of the prosperity gospel to account for some highly questionable expenditures, in light of their ministries' non-profit status. So far, it seems that only one of the six, Joyce Meyer, has complied. Three others - Benny Hinn, Paula White, and Kenneth Copeland - have yet to [...]
- Mitt Romney's Kennedy Moment?
The Rotunda • December 9, 2007
Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a speech in which he argued that his Mormon religious beliefs should not prevent Americans from voting for him.
I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.
Let [...]
- Instruction Manual or Chronicle?
The Loft • December 7, 2007
A few days ago, I had an epiphany that I think sheds considerable light on the difference between liberal and fundamentalist believers. This principle seems to me to be underappreciated, and if it was more widely understood, I think it might head off some of the misunderstandings which I've seen atheists commit. Here it is:
Fundamentalist [...]
- Theocracy Watch XIII: Fighting Prison Theocracy
The Rotunda • December 6, 2007
Last year, in a previous installment of Theocracy Watch, I wrote about unconstitutional government-supported prison ministries which target a literal captive audience. Many Christian evangelists view these ministries as a great opportunity to preach to those who can't escape, as if the prisons were their own personal factories for churning out converts. Worse, the Bush [...]
- Building a Secular Community
The Garden • December 5, 2007
A recent column by Katha Pollitt, The Atheist's Dilemma, laments how atheists would like to take away what people value and offer nothing in return:
But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion—which also often means their community, their family, their support system and their identity—you're not going to have many [...]
- The Rise and Fall of the James Ossuary
The Observatory • December 3, 2007
In October 2002, a dramatic find exploded onto the scene in the field of Biblical archaeology. At a Washington press conference, Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review, presented a large audience with what he called "the first ever archaeological discovery to corroborate Biblical references to Jesus." The find was an ossuary [...]
- On Atheism and Hope
The Rotunda • December 2, 2007
Pope Benedict has released the second encyclical of his papacy, a 75-page missive titled "Spe Salvi" (Latin for "in hope we are saved"). As was widely reported, this statement attacks atheism and calls people to convert to Roman Catholicism as the only hope for humankind. (Here's the text of the statement itself, if anyone's interested.) [...]
