In writing the earlier post about the Freedom From Religions Foundation’s lawsuit, I happened to browse their site and looked up the Honorary Board of that organization and came across this photograph of them, along with their names: Jerry Coyne, Robin Morgan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Ernie Harburg, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Susan Jacoby, Mike Newdow, Katha Pollitt, Steven Pinker, Ron Reagan, Oliver Sacks, M.D., Robert Sapolsky, Edward Sorel, and Julia Sweeney. [Read more…]

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sued the government saying that a controversial tax break that allows ‘ministers of the gospel’ to clam part of their salary as a tax-free housing allowance gave undue privileges for religion that was denied to leaders of non-religious organizations, and thus violated the neutrality requirement of the Establishment Clause. [Read more…]

Commenter Reginald Selkirk alerted me to this news report in which ex-pope Benedict says that god told him to resign.

“God told me to do it,” the Zenith agency quoted Benedict as saying to a visitor to the convent in the Vatican gardens where he is living out his retirement in near isolation. [Read more…]

Those who have never been really involved in religion sometimes do not realize how intense discussions can be about what seems (to outsiders) like trivial matters over the meaning of words. A recent example is the controversy over the decision of the Presbyterian church to reject a popular new hymn for inclusion in its official hymnal because the song’s authors objected to a change in the wording. [Read more…]

Those who have lived in majority Buddhist countries know that being a follower of that religion does not make one more peaceful. But people in the west have this image of Buddhists as meditative and contemplative people who do not resort to violence. But the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand seem determined to destroy that image and it looks like they are succeeding, as this NPR report suggests. [Read more…]

Here is a video of an event. What do you think it was for? The answer is below the fold.

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There are two difficult issues that an atheist in a religious family or community faces: whether and how to tell your parents that you no longer believe and how to answer your young children when they ask you whether god is real. [Read more…]

Religious people who claim that their holy books contain prophecies that have been fulfilled have a hard time explaining how it does not say anything about the internet, smartphones, planes and other revolutionary current technologies. Everything in those books, even the prophecies, is consistent with just the knowledge that people had in those times. [Read more…]

The evangelical Christian movement, like all large movements, is not monolithic. A new study from Baylor University finds that there is what it calls a ‘messy middle’ that is splitting from orthodoxy while still staying within the evangelical movement. And the issue that is creating this split is the attitude towards gays. [Read more…]