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Penn Jillette’s Signs You May Already Be an Atheist

By Steve A. Wiggins

…hick enough to make a Pharisee proud: “Be there for your family. Love your parents, your partner, and your children. (Love is deeper than honor, and parents matter, but so do spouses and children.)” In what may raise frustration for religious critics, his ideas here come very close to the traditional words of Jesus. An academic critic might say this book is not what it seems; it is not just another media figure giving us reasons to hang our pious…

What’s More Frightening Than Snakes on a Plane?

By Devin Kuhn-Choi

…in an airplane aisle knows there will be some sort of contact as you move past; the space just isn’t big enough for most people to avoid that. If your goal is sincerely to avoid contact, it seems to me that remaining in your own seat, lowering your eyes and simply relinquishing your claim to the armrest would be a more effective means of not touching a woman. It seems hard to believe that “hundreds” of men wound up in the same situation and found…

How the Right’s War on ‘Critical Race Theory’ Taps into the Powerful Religion of American Innocence

By Peter Laarman

…nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps… Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart. The GOP senators go on to fulminate over what they call the “infamous” 1619 Project, created by the New York Times, which was mentioned in the Education Dept.’s announcement of its pro…

French Theologian Urges Islam to Self-Critique, Fails to Notice Log in Own Eye

By Daniel J. Schultz

…epublic, forms of punishment whose goal is to integrate through community service, specific forms of “moral and civic education,” and, as a centerpiece of this state pedagogy, a secularism day [une journée de la laïcité] on December 9th which will commemorate the 1905 separation of church and state and include a celebration of symbols of the Republic (like the tricolore flag and La Marseillaise national hymn). The presumption in all of this is tha…

Challenging Both Homophobia in Islam and Populist Bogeyman of ‘The Homophobic Muslim’; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…’ Vice published a 16-minute video documentary, “Being LGBT in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” Here’s how it describes it: Pakistan is one of the world’s least tolerant countries when it comes to homosexuality. Being gay is illegal in the Islamic republic and carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Gay men are often accused of bringing shame to their families and commonly face violence — sometimes even murder. Gay-focused apps like Grin…

Q Shaman’s New Age-Radical Right Blend Hints at the Blurring of Seemingly Disparate Categories

By Susannah Crockford

…trology; and so on. He advertises his now-defunct website starseedacademy.space, and promotes Life-Wave patches, a multi-level marketing scheme that he claims cured his father of cancer and liver disease. A starseed is a person who believes they have an alien consciousness intertwined with their human physical form. Within New Age spirituality, terms like starseed, galactic, and multidimensional being are often used interchangeably. There are mult…

Pence’s Religious Freedom Policy Made ‘LGBQ’ Hoosiers Sick—Literally

By Sunnivie Brydum

…vioral Risk Factor Surveillance System does include a question that allows participants to identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming, but states are not required to include that question in their surveys. In the first quarter of 2015, over 24% of LGBQ Hoosiers reported that they had 14 or more “unhealthy days” each month. By the end of the year, that number had jumped to nearly 60%. Heterosexual people in Indiana did not report any significa…

The Benedict Opt-Out: Why Christian Self-Isolation Won’t Work

By Kaya Oakes

…wal as a reaction to what feels like a shift toward the secular in public space. One Catholic parent says that while she feels God has called her to take the formation of her children’s “minds and hearts” seriously, she is still open to sending them to school eventually. She adds, however, that when secular education “cannot speak of God, wonder about Him, see His Hand in the world, in history, in our individual lives, something beautiful in us is…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…uding a girl from my high school whose mother supplied enough acid to Dead parking lots to pay her kids’ private school tuition. In other words, being a Dead fan, for someone like me, would have been the easiest thing in the world. There was just one problem: I hated the Dead. I hated their noodly, shuffling music; hated, in my nascent angry young feminist way, the glazed-eyed girls who swayed through those parking lots asking for change, and the…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…igion doesn’t have to prove itself true,” she says, and her frustration is palpable. And, she adds, believers have never encouraged atheists to be more vocal or to express themselves more wholly. (See the aforementioned astronomer with his idea that there might be more than one sun. And that dude was no doubt a Christian.) “Anger can misfire badly. When we express anger, we get angrier,” she says. “But anger is the chief reason we know something…