Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1741

A Wiccan Priestess Delivered the Invocation in the Iowa State House This Morning

***Update***: I spoke too soon. There was a protest, albeit a silent one:

What would Jesus do?

If he were a member of the Iowa Legislature, Rep. Rob Taylor believes he would peacefully protest the morning prayer being offered by a Wiccan priestess. So the West Des Moines Republican turned his back Thursday and prayed silently as Cedar Rapids Cabot witch Deborah Maynard prayed from the speaker’s podium to “god, goddess, universe, that which is greater than ourselves.”

Many of his colleagues chose...

After an Eighth Grader Stayed Seated During the Pledge of Allegiance, the School Nurse Refused to Treat Her

An eighth grader from Wilson Middle School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania was sitting in the nurse’s office last Thursday, waiting to be treated, when the Pledge of Allegiance was recited over the intercom.

The student chose not to stand for personal reasons… which apparently infuriated the nurse to the point that she refused to help the student. According to a letter sent to the District by the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center,

The school nurse ordered everyone presen...

Having a Vasectomy, Sexting, and Several Other Things That’ll Get You Fired from Cleveland Catholic Schools

The Cleveland Catholic diocese, which oversees five high schools, will have teachers sign a contract next year that includes an expanded “morality clause.”

The teachers voted to adopt the wording — it’s the same contract elementary school teachers in the diocese had to sign last year — but it’s just amazing to see what’s on this list of offenses that will get you fired from these Catholic schools:

Publicly supporting or having an abortionHelping someone obtain an abortionPublicly supporting eut...

Georgia Principal Defends Inviting Creationist Eric Hovind to Speak to High School Students

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how Creationist Eric Hovind had managed to obtain access to Troup County Comprehensive High School, where he gave a presentation promoting Creationism (even though he explicitly avoided saying that word or any religious term association with it) to a debate class. He claimed it was all about teaching “critical thinking” when, in reality, Creationism is all about accepting nonsense and avoiding evidence to the contrary.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation’...

Turkey’s Government is Building Mosques on College Campuses, So Students Are Demanding Jedi Temples, Too

Last month, Istanbul Technical University announced it would build a mosque on campus to accommodate Muslim students. But now non-Muslims are speaking out and it’s glorious

One Change.org petition called for a Buddhist temple to go up at the school:

“I can’t fulfill my religious needs because the closest Buddhist temple is 2,000 kilometres away, and I can’t go there during lunch break,” a petitioner named Utku Gürçağ Borataç said on the website.

Nearly 20,000 people have signed that petition at...

If Scientology Ever Needs a New Celebrity Spokesperson…

Last night, Daniel Tosh made his pitch to become Scientology’s next pitchman:

What’s scary is that he’s imitating Tom Cruise from the Going Clear HBO documentary, and the information isn’t much of a stretch from the actual clips featured in the doc.

How Do Our Behaviors Evolve Into Instincts?

For Darwin Day, Richard Dawkins answered questions about evolution for his viewers. The latest one discusses how learned behavior evolves into inherited instinct:

(via RDFRS)

A Helpful Guide to Coming Out as an Atheist When You’re African-American

A few months ago, Openly Secular released a guide to surviving the holidays as an atheist. Now they’ve followed that up with a helpful guide to coming out as an atheist when you’re African-American.

Why is that resource any different from a more generic “coming out” manual? Because there are challenges inherent to being black (or part of any minority group, really) that makes coming out as an atheist even harder. For example, saying no to religion when you’re black is often interpreted as a sl...

Atheist Ireland “Publicly Dissociates” from Blogger PZ Myers

Well, this is different.

Atheist Ireland, a group that’s best known (to me, anyway) for working to repeal the nation’s blasphemy law, has issued a formal denouncement of blogger PZ Myers.

Atheist Ireland is publicly dissociating itself from the hurtful and dehumanising, hateful and violent, unjust and defamatory rhetoric of the atheist blogger PZ Myers. The final of many, many straws were his latest smear that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is ‘happily exploiting atrocities’, and his subsequent description of...

What Did Atheism Look Like in Early U.S. History?

We’re all familiar with the impact of the New Atheists, but what did non-belief look like in the early years of the United States?

Peter Manseau, the religion scholar who co-authored Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, has written a book about our country’s spiritual history that doesn’t just focus on the usual Christian voices.

It’s called One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History.

In the adapted excerpt below, Manseau talks about what atheism looked like more than two centuries ago:

Lon...