There’s a furious argument going on between Tom Flynn, who hates Christmas and thinks no right-minded atheist should have any truck with a religious holiday, and Beth Presswood, a confirmed atheist who loves the Christmas holiday. I agree with Flynn that the day is thoroughly tainted with ongoing religious garbage, but I also agree with Presswood that the season is in the process of being totally secularized, and that we ought as atheists to keep up the pressure to strip away the superstition and reconstruct the day to serve our completely human needs.

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SGU is still an excellent podcast, of course (and by the way, they’re being sued by a quack and could use your support), but Rebecca Watson has amicably left the show. It was a smart move on her part — she has an identity that isn’t defined by SGU, so she didn’t need it anymore.

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Like rice paper, I guess. Neil deGrasse Tyson made a couple of light-hearted tweets on Christmas that prompted an awful lot of whining. From the reaction, you’d think he’d posted this joke:

I don’t even think that’s particularly offensive, but Tyson’s jokes were tame, even compared to that.

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Several years ago, I attended one of Kent Hovind’s seminars in St Cloud — it was genuinely the worst talk I’ve ever heard. It was over-long, it was shallow, it was a succession of lies, and it was full of really bad cornpone jokes — some of which were anti-semitic or marginally racist. It was terrible.

It seems the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. Kent Hovind’s son, Eric, was affiliated with a pair of clowns spawned from Creation Science Evangelism, in something called The T.R.U.T.H. Group. They put out YouTube videos, including this one from several years ago. These are really bad YouTube videos. Prepare yourself for some astonishing trash.

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Oh, joy. David Brooks has blessed us with a Christmas column this week, titled The Subtle Sensations of Faith. You can tell already that it’s going to be a lump of drivel in your stocking, can’t you?

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The godless have been praised by Rachel Maddow for being one of the few American subgroups that recognize torture for what it is, and oppose it.

While many might assume that the faithful would be morally repulsed by torture, the reality is the opposite. When poll respondents were asked, “Do you personally think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists amounted to torture, or not?” most Americans said the abuses did not constitute torture. But it was non-religious Americans who were easily the most convinced that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, in fact, torture.

The results in response to this question were even more striking: “All in all, do you think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists was justified or unjustified?” For most Americans, the answer, even after recent revelations, was yes. For most Christians, it’s also yes. But for the non-religious, as the above chart makes clear, the torture was not justified.

In fact, looking through the poll’s crosstabs, non-religious Americans were one of the few subsets that opposed the torture techniques – and that includes breakdowns across racial, gender, age, economic, educational, and regional lines. The non-religious are effectively alone in their opposition to torture.

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William Saletan takes a look at this chart and says creationism isn’t as bad as it could be; I look at it and see no good news, no consolation, at all.

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