I live close to Amish country, with its people who reject electricity and the automobile and live lifestyles largely unchanged from well over a century ago. Drive for a little over half an hour or so, and you enter a world of horses and buggies, men with beards and hats, women with blue dresses and bonnets, and neat, well-maintained houses and barns set in a picture-postcard countryside. [Read more…]
This coming Sunday is Easter which commemorates the day when Jesus rose from the dead. Or so I’m told.
Looked at dispassionately, the whole Easter thing is a bit over the top. The idea of vicarious atonement when it comes to things like sacrificing children and virgins to assuage the gods who unleash natural disasters is something we are now horrified about and yet the idea of Jesus having to die to save the rest of us from sin does not seem odd. In fact, many Christians seem to positively relish all the gory details of Jesus’s suffering and death, as can be seen in the commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which I did not see since I am not a fan of gratuitous violence. [Read more…]
Via The Digital Cuttlefish I found a video that Bill O’Reilly’s show shot of the Reason Rally. It is a bit disjointed with some weird cross-cutting but not too bad. The people they interviewed were pretty articulate and gave a good account of themselves. This means that either O’Reilly’s team did not go too far out of its way to selectively edit the footage to make the rallyers look bad or that they simply were not able to get video to allow them to portray atheists as crazy people.
If someone says to you “I am a Christian”, where do you think they are likely to fall on the political and social spectrum?
It used to be that people who called themselves Christians could not be that easily pinned down as to their social and political and moral attitudes because they could span a wide range of viewpoints, from extremely liberal to rigidly conservative. But in an article in The New Republic, Timothy Noah argues that things have changed, and that the label Christian has been increasingly co-opted by one narrow faction, and the media is going along with it. [Read more…]
Thanks to Rev. El Mundo, I learned that on Up with Chris Hayes on the day after the Reason Rally, the host talked about the impact of atheism on public life with a variety of people, some of whom had been speakers at the rally. Hayes also casually let it be known that he was an atheist too. I hope that this may encourage other prominent figures to also casually mention it. [Read more…]
Every Friday, many Muslims around the world will attend their mosques. The next day, Jews will follow suit into synagogues, and on Sunday many Christians will attend church. We know that some of the people in these houses of worship will be those trying to hold on to their belief in a god despite their increasing doubts. Some of them will be people who are fighting to prevent the voices of doubt entering their minds while for others that battle has already been lost and now the only thing that keeps them returning is because they do not know how to make a clean break without alienating their family and friends and perhaps the only real sense of community that they have known. But even they may not suspect that leader of the congregation is also one of them, a doubter or even an outright nonbeliever. [Read more…]
On the eve of his visit to Cuba, the pope said that “It is evident today that Marxist ideology as it had been conceived no longer responds to reality.”
Should we really be getting lectures on what constitutes reality from someone who worships an imaginary figure who supposedly tells him what to do? It would be as absurd as a supposedly lifelong celibate laying down rules on contraception and sexuality. Hey, wait a minute…
I attended a portion of the Reason Rally yesterday in Washington DC. It drizzled or rained gently most of the time, which cast a bit of a damper on the proceedings but people were in good spirits. The crowd that attended should dispel the notion that the nonbelievers movement consist of old, white guys. It was gratifyingly diverse in all categories (gender, age, and ethnicity) with the large majority being young people. I felt like an old fogey and that was great, just as it should be. [Read more…]
I will be attending part of the Reason Rally on the National Mall in Washington DC tomorrow and so blogging will be light over the weekend. The national media have started covering the event. (See here and here and here.) [Read more…]