Bill Nye Video Riles Creationists
Really? Are we having this discussion?
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A Seminary for Nonbelievers: Is A. C. Grayling Creating His Own Religion?
Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.
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Where Do “Sacred” Values Live in the Brain?
For the research subjects’ sacred values, the ones they wouldn’t give up on for any amount of money (they could ‘auction off their value’ for up to $100), what lit up in the brain were areas known to be involved in right-wrong decisions, not in cost-benefit/utilitarian parts of the brain. That is, we naturally go to right-wrong thinking in making sacred value decisions.
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Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth
If atheist Richard Dawkins believes he is right, as a recent Times profile once again suggests, why is he so afraid of passing it on to our kids?
Read MoreIt’s Unanimous: No “Moderates” in GOP Field
Last night’s debate revealed just how far the Republican Party has edged toward the religious right goal of abolishing public education.
Read MoreA Short Goodbye
It is with a bit of sadness that I write this…
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Coming Out on a Christian Campus, Then and Now
People kept asking, “Why would you go to a Christian school if you’re gay?” The question is unfair. So many factors—funding, family, a deep connection to the religious culture—could place a student at Harding. While more and more students may show up their first year of college with self-awareness about sexual identity, as they do at the public university where I teach, I know it is difficult to come to terms with yourself if you grow up in fundamentalist Christian culture. Many of us come out while in college; at Harding finding ourselves in a world in which something fundamental about ourselves is a category of silence at best, more likely a category of condemnation and stigmatization.
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Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe
The issue is not Christian conservatives advocating their views in the public square. The problem, rather, is their claim (at least in places such as The Daily Show or the New York Times) that their Providentialist beliefs and readings of documents from the past represent a kind of legitimate scholarship that should have its place in the public “debate.”
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First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin
About twenty miles outside of Green Bay and over a mile from even the smallest town, a tiny sign at a remote intersection points visitors toward Chapel Drive, site of the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, site of the only approved site of a Marian apparition in the U.S.
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Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church
The church, in its ignorance of and hostility to evolution, is passing up one of its greatest opportunities to apprehend the very God it claims to represent. This irony is due to a terrible case of what may be called “small-god-ism” and is, unfortunately, encouraged by much popular theology. This theology makes claims about scripture and church practice that reduce God to a cheerleader, or a cosmic vending machine, or some domesticated and pale image of our own confused selves.
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