Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1802

Years After Their Bus Ad Alienated an Unexpected Group of People, Two Atheists Explain What They Learned

A few years ago, the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason launched an ad campaign on the side of local buses. It was a mashup of the faces of dozens of local atheists/agnostics made to look like an American flag, with the message “Millions of Americans are good without God.”

The billboard received the usual share of outrage from Christians who felt this was somehow an affront to their beliefs. (Not surprising. By now, we’ve just come to expect that.) But it also prompted backlash from the loc...

Celebrating Darwin: Not Just for Scientists Anymore

This is a guest post by Seráh Blain.

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On this day last year, a friend of mine was finally getting a kidney transplant after years on dialysis. Visiting him in the hospital was a very emotional experience — especially the part where he signed the paperwork to officially begin his campaign for U.S. Congress. James Woods, a blind atheist progressive from one of the most conservative districts in the country, decided 2014 was going to be a year of going big, brave, and honest.

(from L to R) Evan Cl...

Meanwhile, at the Springfield Vatican…

The Seven Words You Can Never Say in a Fundamentalist Christian School

Jonny Scaramanga attended a fundamentalist Christian school where there were certain words he wasn’t allowed to say.

Not curse words, mind you. Not George Carlin-esque words that would get bleeped on television. We’re talking normal, everyday words he was punished for uttering.

Like the word “lucky”:

Certain preachers we knew claimed that ‘luck’ came from the same root word as ‘Lucifer’, which, according to tradition, was Satan’s name before he fell from heaven. So when you wished someone good l...

ISIS Burned Its Latest Hostage Alive

When beheadings turna little too run-of-the-mill, the so-called Islamic State hasother ways toprove what an irredeemably atavistic bunch of barbariansthey are — all “in the name of God, most merciful, most compassionate,” of course.

Via MSNBC:

ISIS militants released a video on Tuesday purporting to show a captive Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage, just days after the militants beheaded a Japanese journalist.

A 22-minute video released by the al-Furqan Media Foundation — one of the of...

I Guess Church/State Separation Advocates Are Extremists Now

My friend Anu Garg runs the popular website Wordsmith.org, where he teaches you a Word of the Day complete with pronunciation, etymology, etc.

This week’s theme is “Words from the Bible” and Garg introduces the theme with some thoughts on religion and politics:

In the last election for the US president, no fewer than three presidential hopefuls received the backing of god. Clearly god likes to hedge his bets. Not sure why he changed his mind later on and dumped all three endorsees.

…

Why not vote...

The Gods That Won’t Die: For the First Time In a Millennium, Iceland Will Build a Shrine To Norse Deities

Some ancient gods have remarkable resilience. They may fade away for a while, only to be rediscovered and re-worshiped. For instance, more than 16 centuries afterGreek godslikeZeus, Apollo, and Herawere replaced by Christianity, the so-called New Hellenes dusted them off and venerated them anew. Today, several hundred thousand Greeks are said to be followers of the classic dodecatheon. I wrote about themhere.

Next up: A revival ofThor, Odin, Freya, Loki, Heimdall,and other Norse deities?

Via th...

Does It Matter Whether People of Faith Do Awful Things For “Cultural” Rather Than Religious Reasons?

When someone whosubscribes toa dubiousbelief systemcommits an act of savagery, can the true motivationbe pinpointed as that person’s faith orcreed? What if it’s the person’s culture? Can we tease those things apart? Is itrelevant?

The question of the prime motivator frequently comes up when the topic is theconcept of honor and shame that drives so many atrocities against (especially) women in Islamic communities.

PBS, for instance, is happy to tell us (not very convincingly, as far as I’m conce...

Jesus Will Be Pissed If Christian Women Go See Fifty Shades of Grey

Carmen Miller, who co-founded the “God Over Porn” ministry, is shocked — shocked! — that Christian women are getting excited about the upcoming Fifty Shades of Grey movie. She wants them all to know how upset God will be if they choose to watch it:

… I have an honest question to ask you “godly” women. Would you watch this movie with Jesus sitting next to you? Seriously. Would it be just a movie then?…

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Pornography is considered to be more addictive than crack cocaine, because cocaine can be exc...

Republican Leader: Ending Mandatory Prayers in Public Schools Has Led to “Assault, Rape, Murder”

On the “View from a Pew” show recently, Iowa Republican National Committee member Tamara Scott echoed the nasty (and completely off-base) conservative talking point that, when mandatory prayer in public school was deemed unconstitutional, it opened the door to all sorts of horrors:

“When the prayer came out in the ‘70s, and that’s one of the things that I prayed for last week in Louisiana with 6,000 people, repentance, because we as a church should never have let that happen, we should never h...