Denying evolution like denying Holocaust? Atheist gets 'censor award' for ...
OneNewsNow
Discovery Institute Vice President John West says Coyne, an atheist, "makes it a point to not just proclaim his own views, which of course he has every right to do, but to shut down other people." Within the past year, Coyne verbally attacked physicist ...

and more »

Atheist group in Longview grows, expands vision
Longview News-Journal
After traveling for many months to Tyler to join with the East Texas Freethinkers group, Rumfield and a few others began meeting as the Longview Atheist Society in and around Longview. “I was going to East Texas Freethinkers any chance I got, and ...

Feminist and Atheist-Friendly Sites Go Down During Weekend DDoS Attacks ...
Motherboard (blog)
Free Thought Blogs, skepchick.org, and Feminist Frequency—three prominent sites in the atheist, science, and feminist-sphere—have been under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack since last night, meaning the sites are being flooded with fake ...

Christian Post
Atheist service meets needs of the 'nones'
USA TODAY
NASHVILLE — East Nashville's places of worship get moving mid-morning on Sundays, a suit-wearing man arranging traffic cones outside Liberty Christian Bible Church, the doors of Woodland Presbyterian flung wide to reveal a banner bearing a cross ...
Tenn 'Atheist Church' Grows to 2 Services in 3 MonthsChristian Post
Atheist congregation Sunday Assembly grows in NashvilleThe Tennessean

all 9 news articles »

Is Atheism Irrational?
New York Times (blog)
Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the ...

Sunday Assembly's atheist gathering looks a lot like church
The Tennessean
Participants sing along with the band as Sunday Assembly founder Sanderson Jones, the atheist church founder, right, follows along at The Building Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014 in East Nashville, TN. / Sanford Myers / The Tennessean. British comedians Sanderson ...

Atheist gathering looks a lot like church
The Tennessean
Participants sing along with the band as Sunday Assembly founder Sanderson Jones, the atheist church founder, right, follows along at The Building Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014 in East Nashville, TN. / Sanford Myers / The Tennessean. British comedians Sanderson ...

What I’ve seen over and over again is that there’s nothing creative about creationism — they repeat the same old arguments, and they’re all (except for the weird twist of Intelligent Design creationism) derived from American publications in the 1960s. And even ID is an American confabulation! So I tend to give my own country a share of the blame when I see an Australian like Ken Ham, or a Turk like Adnan Oktar.

I may have been too quick to accept guilt, though. I’m going to have to blame Australia more.

The recent revelation that creationism-teaching schools in at least nine states were receiving over $11 million of taxpayers’ money per year might have startled Americans. But that is tiny compared to the taxpayer funds pushing creationism in Australia.

Since the 1970s, Australia has ratcheted up public funding to private schools, such that, in 2013, more than 34 percent of all school students attend them. More than 90 percent of these private schools are Christian. These include a large Catholic sector, and some old, establishment schools, which parents choose more for lavish facilities and old-school-tie networks than any religious content.

Nonetheless, the fastest growth is in more strictly religious schools such as the 91 affiliated with Australian Association of Christian Schools, whose members must assent to a Statement of Faith declaring “the supreme authority of the Bible,” meaning that “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are God’s infallible and inerrant revelation to man” and “the supreme standard by which all things are to be judged.” The Statement also affirms that, “in pursuit of their task, Christian schools only employ Christian teachers and Christian non-teaching staff who are able to subscribe to this Statement.”

To proponents of “inerrant revelation,” the Genesis six days of creation are a touchstone.

In 2010 (the most recent figures available), AACS schools received over $357 million from state and federal governments.

Whoa. So Australia is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into propping up creationism? I’m not buying beer for any Australians ever again, until you stop.

I am blown away by this ad from the American Life League, a fanatically Catholic organization dedicated to opposing contraception, abortion, and euthanasia.

Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.

They do realize that “passion of Jesus Christ” is a euphemism for prolonged torture, right? “Hey, grandma, we love you so much, we’ve decided to hire a couple of thugs to whip you within an inch of your life, and then to strangle you slowly.”

Maybe this would be a good excuse if you had a couple of Catholic relatives who you really, really hated. I don’t know anyone I’d want to “grace” with that kind of opportunity.

Christian Post
Tenn 'Atheist Church' Grows to 2 Services in 3 Months
Christian Post
A "godless congregation" in Nashville, Tenn., has expanded to two services to accommodate growth in just three months. To celebrate the progress, services this weekend will be led by the co-founder of the London-based Sunday Assembly, Sanderson Jones ...
Atheist service meets needs of the 'nones'USA TODAY
Atheist congregation Sunday Assembly grows in NashvilleThe Tennessean

all 9 news articles »

From Catholic to atheist to Catholic scholar
RenewAmerica
I was raised Catholic, and in my late teens, through the writings of atheists and agnostics as diverse as bodybuilder Mike Mentzer, psychologist Albert Ellis, and philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and Ayn Rand, I was persuaded to ...

New York Daily News
Florida county rejects atheist monument
New York Daily News
... the Ten Commandments. The Levy County Commissioners in Florida rejected a proposal by the Williston Atheist to build a structure outside of the county's Courthouse where monuments of the Ten Commandments and a veterans memorial are currently.
Atheists vow to fight monument rejection in Levy County, Fla.Washington Post
Atheists Vow to Continue Fighting for Florida MonumentCharisma News
Florida county says no to atheist monument next to Ten CommandmentsThe Global Dispatch
Opposing Views
all 12 news articles »

If you’re wondering what happened to FtB, starting at about a quarter to eight tonight, we got hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. Also, at the same time, Skepchick got DDOSed. Also, at the same time, Feminist Frequency got DDOSed.

I can’t imagine what those three sites have in common, or what they would be promoting that would rouse the furious ire of some tedious nerd somewhere.

Confessions of a Pakistani Atheist
Daily News & Analysis
After staying in the group for a few months and talking to different people online, I finally realised that I was an agnostic-atheist, which means I don't know for sure whether a god(s) exists, but given the scarcity of evidence, I'm inclined to ...

I read Woody Allen’s defense yesterday, and was disgusted — seriously, it was nothing but ‘Mia Farrow was out to get me, me, me, me’. I was wondering whether he’d bothered to get an objective source to review it first, because all it did was convince me that he hasn’t got a speck of humanity left in him.

Now Ashley Miller has dissected Allen’s letter in detail, and not only was my impression correct, but Allen is lying throughout. Bleh. Gotta go take a shower now.

Is America losing faith? Atheism on the rise but still in the shadows
Telegraph.co.uk
The Virginia Tech group contains a broad spectrum, from life-long atheists who grew up in sceptical families to home-schooled Baptists, evangelical Catholics and even a young man who was brought up in a Dominionist cult dedicated to establishing a ...

and more »

Paige West has some excellent examples of mansplaining in 2013. She’s an expert in New Guinea culture, and it’s amazing how many men take the time to explain to her how New Guinea works.

But the best part, I think, is that the very first comment, from someone signing himself “Male Academic”, takes pains to explain at length that maybe this isn’t actually sexism. He’s obliviously mansplaining!

Let me just say that I, a man, have given a great many lectures in the past year, and I have had people disagree with me, sometimes vigorously, and I have had people add informed perspectives from their own expertise, but I have never had anyone treat me as a callow, infantile know-nothing who needed remedial instruction in my own field of expertise.

That would only happen if I had breasts sucking all the intelligence out of my skull, apparently.

That title is the mildest phrase that ran through my mind listening to billionaire real estate investor whining about how the rich are so fucking persecuted.

The one percent work harder, the one percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society

Good god. I’d like to introduce Sam Zell to my father, who spent most of his life living well below the poverty line, working overtime just to bring in enough money to feed his kids. He spent his years working with heavy machinery all day long (or sometime all night long, when he was stuck on a night shift); he would come home with hands caked with grease and oil, his back aching, often barely able to move until he had to rise for the next shift. He didn’t have a nice suit. He didn’t get to go out to expensive restaurants for over-priced meals. He didn’t fly first class everywhere — he didn’t fly anywhere, period.

And this smug asshole declares that he works so much harder than everyone else; that my father earned $10,000/year while Sam Zell gets billions because that’s what they deserve.

I’d like to introduce him to my father, but I can’t, because years of hard labor as a blue-collar grunt had their toll, and he’s dead.

Keep opening your mouths, you privileged coddled rich fuckwads. Marie Antoinette had nothing on the American upper class. If there is a revolution, what’s going to drive it is the arrogance of these parasites.

Yay! I’m a gateway drug!

By the way, The Happy Atheist will be coming out in paperback in May, and I’m already working out a couple of places to visit on a mini-book-tour — it looks like I’ll be in Connecticut and Seattle that month. Probably. Still working on details.

Man, Todd Friel is painful to listen to — so many grating rhetorical tics. Can someone tell me where this weird habit of carefully voicing every vowel and adding extra vowels to the ends of words come from? When he calls Bill Nye unreasonable and lying, it comes out UN-REEE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH and LIE-ING-UH. It makes him irritating to listen to before I even think about the content.

Here, you can suffer too.

If you don’t want to listen — and I don’t blame you — I’ll give you instead his two stupid arguments against Bill Nye’s points in the recent creation debate. They are focused entirely on the bogus distinction Ken Ham makes between observational and historical science. I can tell I am going to have to spend a lot of time in the future slapping down idiots who triumphantly march up to me and declare that evolution is a historical science, and therefore I made it up.

His first case is an example of the two kinds of science. He has a bug on a piece of paper; he declares that he’s about to do “observational science”, and he merely describes it. It’s got spots, it’s got eight [???] legs, it’s some kind of ladybug or stinkbug. Already I can tell he’s not very good at this, but he announces that this is the only true science.

What would historical science be? Then he provides a couple of scenarios, that someone carried it in their pocket and put it there for him to find, or that it flew in through a window. But we can’t know! Nothing in the past can ever be tested scientifically! In Todd Friel’s world, he could have been snorting cocaine off a rent-boy’s butt yesterday, and because it isn’t happening right now in front of you, it didn’t happen. Awfully convenient for Todd.

But actually, we can test hypotheses about the past. Did it just fly in? If his recording studio were in Minnesota right now, we could definitively say no — a small beetle would last for milliseconds at -20°C. Did someone carry it in? Much more likely — we could check who has access to agricultural supply houses, we could talk to people, we can even be pretty confident that Friel set this all up in advance. Did God just poof it into existence on that piece of paper? That’s the least likely possibility. We can examine similar and prior conditions and determine the relative probability of whole sets of causal events in the past, and even make tests. For instance, Darwin hypothesized that Pacific islands were colonized by seeds that drifted across the ocean, and he did experiments, soaking seeds in salt water for varying lengths of time to test how long they could survive and germinate. To claim that you can’t do tests of ideas about the past is simply nonsense.

Friel was also LIE-ING-UH. He tried to rebut Nye’s claim of trees that are 9550 years old, older than the Earth in the creationists’ myth, by saying flat out that they were NOT dated by counting tree rings. Actually, yes, they were, and the ice cores were dated by counting layers. It actually is that straight-forward. Then Friel announced that their age was determined by radiocarbon dating…which is proved, PROVED, not to be reliable. Carbon dating is reliable within its boundary conditions. My car is reliable as well, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work if I dropped it through a hole in the ice over Lake Minnewaska and then tried to start it as it was sitting on the lake floor. Does that PROVE that I cannot use it to drive from Morris to Minneapolis? Especially in the face of evidence that I do exactly that fairly regularly?

His second big example of Nye being an UN-REE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH man is that Nye pointed out that no wooden boat has been built that was the size of the ark, and that past efforts to build very large wooden ships failed because the material is not adequate to handle the stresses of the sea — they twisted and leaked and were a pain to maintain. I’d say that that’s pretty good observational science: build something, test it, and see if it’s possible. Then we can apply those observations to the past; is it likely that 8 Mesopotamian farmers could build a boat that exceeded the physical properties of the material, with techniques far greater in reliability than those developed by thousands of skilled shipwrights with centuries of shipbuilding expertise? Friel says yes. He waves his hands and said maybe Noah and friends figured out a better way to construct wooden boats.

Then, right after that, he floors me by announcing that we can’t convince Nye because Nye doesn’t care about the evidence.

Holy crap.

Hey, where did this giant palm print in the middle of my face come from? I guess I’ll never know, because it happened two minutes ago, and that’s historical science.