States that are embracing modernity tend to be moving in the direction of greater acceptance of equal rights for the LGBT community. But Russia is clearly going in the other direction. By a vote of 436-0, the Russian Duma has passed an anti-gay bill that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”. It seems likely that it will pass the upper house and be signed into law by Russian president Vladimir Putin. [Read more…]
One of the reasons for my view that religion is a bad thing that I would like to see disappear is because it encourages people to believe in magical thinking and thus makes them easy prey to all manner of charlatans who take advantage of their gullibility. [Read more…]
Why can’t Jews and Muslims get along politically in the Middle East when the two religions clearly have so much in common when it comes to trampling on the rights of women? [Read more…]
There is more information on the atheist monument to be placed in the courthouse grounds in Bradford County in Florida that I wrote about earlier. [Read more…]
The American Muslim Advisory Council in the town of Manchester, Tennessee invited the US attorney Bill Killian and the special agent for the FBI in charge of that region Kenneth Moore to talk about hate crimes, in order to foster a “public discourse in a diverse society, with a particular focus on the Muslim religion.” [Read more…]
I wrote recently about the children in some Ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools who spend most of their time studying the Torah and other religious materials and very little time on regular secular education, leaving them woefully unprepared to work in the modern world. As a result of that post, I became interested in the question of to what extent religious groups can deny access to secular education for their children. [Read more…]
American Atheists are putting up the country’s first atheist monument on the grounds of a Florida Courthouse where the Ten Commandments on June 29th. It will consist of a 1,500 lbs granite bench with atheist quotations. They have invited anyone who can to attend the dedication ceremony that AA president David Silverman will conduct. [Read more…]
Radiolab had a show on the thin line that separates certainty and doubt. The first segment dealt with someone named Jeff who began with a solid conviction that there is a god and what happened to him and his god-believing fiancée. [Read more…]
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…]
It is hard for people to get their minds around small probabilities, very long times, the very small, and the very large, which is why people have a hard time accepting the theories of evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology, which depend crucially on them. [Read more…]