The most harmful aspects of religion are those that arise from a holy book of some kind, because those books are the sources of rules and dogmas and create insider-outsider conflicts. When people lose their commitment to a text, then they are more likely to be accepting of diverse views. [Read more…]

This map shows the results of a survey of 40 countries that measures the percentage of atheists in each. [Read more…]

So the Boy Scouts of America voted quite overwhelmingly (61-39% of the 1400 member national council) to allow gay students to be members. Of course, the Boy Scouts still ban participation by gay adults as scout leaders. But that change will come, sooner rather than later. This kind of backing and filling towards a goal is how religious institutions operate. [Read more…]

We are taught to think of polytheistic societies as primitive and intellectually shallow and that the introduction of the idea of monotheism, that there is only one god, was a generally good thing, a sign of increased sophistication as civilization progressed. But an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reviewing the work of Egyptologist Jan Assmann says that his view is that this may not be true, and that the shift to monotheism was actually a bad thing and the likely cause of violence spawned by religions over millennia. [Read more…]

I am pretty sure that everyone has seen the video clip that has gone viral of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asking Rebecca Vitsum who, with her husband Brian and infant son Anders, narrowly escaped the tornado though their home was destroyed, whether she ‘thanked the Lord’ for her narrow escape. When she mumbles her reply, he presses her to answer at which point she says that she is an atheist. For the two people who haven’t seen the clip yet, here it is. [Read more…]