According to Fox News, that respected source, marriage died in 2013.

Marriage is over.  

It was always at least a little funny that a huge percentage of people swore to stay together until death, then divorced and remarried.  

But, now, it is, officially, judicially, a joke.  

If two men can marry, and three men can marry, and five women and a man can marry, and three men and two women can marry, then marriage has no meaning.  

It’s over. Go get rings, go get lawyers, go rent a nice hall, but City Hall should bow out.

I really wasn’t looking for a divorce, but I guess Mary and I will just have to live in sin from now on. Hmm. Maybe it will add a little thrill of the forbidden.

On eBay: Leader of Upstate Atheists says she'll attend church service of ...
Spartanburg Herald Journal
Eve Brannon, president of Upstate Atheists, has posted an item called "Take an Atheist Leader to Church" for bid on eBay. Brannon said she will attend the highest bidder's church service one Sunday morning with her 4-year-old daughter. She said members ...
Atheist leader auctioning off chance to go to churchWHNS Greenville
Utahns grace Mormon-inspired 'We're Atheists' billboardSalt Lake Tribune

all 3 news articles »

Bora Zivkovic is back, and he’s tweeting and blogging as if nothing happened…which rankles. I have to wonder what he has done or better yet, could do to make amends for the violations of trust, but a few months’ hiatus doesn’t quite seem adequate. I’m not a judge to levy a penalty, either, so I don’t know what to say, and it seems to me we lack any means of determining what is a sufficient price to pay.

Loss of widespread respect and of a good job does seem to be a substantial cost, but you’d think he’d come back with a little more humility…

Gay, Atheist, Millionaire Robert W. Wilson, Who Committed Suicide Gave ...
Christian Post
Philanthropist Robert W. Wilson. Although he was openly gay and atheist, retired millionaire hedge-fund founder and philanthropist, Robert W. Wilson, who committed suicide in New York City just over a week ago, gave millions to the Catholic Church.

and more »

Not that I was ever much of a booster, but this behind-the-scenes look at how team management operates by Chris Kluwe is disappointing. He was fired from his position as a punter after he’d achieved some notoriety for his progressive positions and lack of religiosity — and he now explains that it’s likely that it was because of those positions. And man, it sounds like he was working in an ugly environment.

Throughout the months of September, October, and November, Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer would use homophobic language in my presence. He had not done so during minicamps or fall camp that year, nor had he done so during the 2011 season. He would ask me if I had written any letters defending "the gays" recently and denounce as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss, and he would constantly belittle or demean any idea of acceptance or tolerance. I tried to laugh these off while also responding with the notion that perhaps they were human beings who deserved to be treated as human beings. Mike Priefer also said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays, and that the only truth was Jesus Christ and the Bible. He said all this in a semi-joking tone, and I responded in kind, as I felt a yelling match with my coach over human rights would greatly diminish my chances of remaining employed. I felt uncomfortable each time Mike Priefer said these things. After all, he was directly responsible for reviewing my job performance, but I hoped that after the vote concluded in Minnesota his behavior would taper off and eventually stop.

My limited experience with football coaches suggests that this isn’t an unusual attitude they take. Kluwe also stirred up concern because he said a few harsh things about the Catholic Church — I can relate.

On Feb. 11, I received a message saying, “Please fly under radar please,” from a phone number I would later learn belonged to Rick Spielman. The text message presumably concerned several things I had tweeted that day regarding Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to step down. Spielman later called me and asked me to stop tweeting about the pope because angry people were ringing up team headquarters in Winter Park, Minn. It should be noted that my tweets concerned the lack of transparency and endemic institutional corruption of the Catholic Church, which among other things allowed child abuse to flourish. I also pointed out how that applied equally to financial and government institutions, and reiterated that I had nothing against anyone’s religion, only against the abuses of power that institutions allow. Nonetheless, I complied with Spielman’s request and did not tweet anything else about the pope that day, or in the future.

Now I’m really looking forward to the American Atheists convention in Salt Lake this April — Kluwe is the keynote speaker. I hope I can meet him there, and shake his hand.

But then there are a lot of good people who will be speaking there: Barry Lynn, Maryam Namazie, Matt Dillahunty, Greta Christina, Sikivu Hutchinson, Vyckie Garrison…you should register now!

I think that it would be useful or me to take notes on the papers I’m reading, and I figured it might be useful to share them online because, open science and all. These papers will be in my area of study: sex chromosome evolution and sex-biased processes. If you’re interested, please go read the paper, and we can have a discussion in the comments. The link to the paper and full citation are found... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

Mediaite
Atheist activist scoffs at Texas mayor's declaration that 2014 is 'Year of the ...
Raw Story
Dave Muscato, communications director for the group American Atheists, Inc. told Raw Story in an interview, “I think it's unlikely that he's unaware that this is unconstitutional. This is just speculation, but I think this is something he's doing ...
Flower Mound mayor's Bible proclamation draws mixed reactionFort Worth Star Telegram
Texas mayor declares 2014 'Year of the Bible'DigitalJournal.com

all 44 news articles »

Salon
To the Pastor Giving Atheism a Shot for a Year: You're Doing It Wrong
Patheos (blog)
I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ...
10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going downSalon

all 3 news articles »

Raw Story
Doug Stanhope Raised Over $125000 For Oklahoma Atheist After Notorious ...
Huffington Post
Stand-up comedian Doug Stanhope has drawn a philosophical line in the sand by proclaiming that, contrary to popular belief, "hate can help." The outspoken atheist set out to prove his theory by raising over $125,000 for a woman who identified as an ...
Comedian Raised $125K for Atheist Tornado Survivor Just to Piss Off Her 'Okie ...Mediaite
Doug Stanhope on raising money for atheist tornado survivor: I did it simply ...Raw Story
Comedian Raised $126k for Atheist Tornado Victim to Piss Off ChristiansGawker
TheWrap -Tucson Weekly -Newser
all 10 news articles »

Six of nine is too many, I think, especially when their religion is beginning to shape court decisions. Even the judge we’d hoped would be a little more progressive, Justice Sotomayor, bent over backwards to pander to weird Catholic views on contraception. It’s even worse than that: she granted an injunction to allow Catholic employers to not fill out a form stating that they were not providing coverage for contraception.

Late on New Year’s Eve, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a small number of religiously affiliated groups a temporary injunction from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows them not to cover contraception in their health care plans if they fill out a form that states that they want an exemption from the law for religious reasons. Go ahead and read that sentence again. These Catholic non-profits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be). 

Those wicked people! Their bosses told them that they weren’t paying for their condoms, so it’s perfectly reasonable for the bosses to also dictate that they can’t go anywhere else to get support for contraception.

That church really is an evil and controlling organization, through and through.

I brought up that 2012 Gallup poll on evolution that showed we’ve been in the doldrums on educating the public about the subject — poll after poll for decades has shown that only about 50% of the American public accept the science.

The latest Pew poll for 2013 has a slight surprised for us: that number has reached 60%. It’s slow, but we’re getting there.

Now the bad news (there’s always bad news). Of that 60% who accept that humans evolved, how many get it right? 24% still babble about it being guided by a god, which is wrong, but at least that’s less than half of the evolution-accepters.

And there’s mixed news. There’s a big partisan divide: Democrats have been getting slightly better, but Republicans have been getting significantly more stupid.

Of course, that probably doesn’t mean individual Republicans are getting more ignorant: it may be a sign of something much better, that the kind of rational citizens who can recognize the facts of a science are increasingly unlikely to identify as Republicans. I’m hoping it’s a sign that the Stupid Party is shrinking.

Of course, I could be wrong. It could also mean that the party is solidifying its ideology and more people are flocking to the Know-Nothing banner and they’re all rallying around their dogma. I hope that’s not the case; everything else I’ve seen says they’re busily marginalizing themselves.

Once-atheist Kejriwal thanks Supreme Father, Ishwar, Allah, Waheguru for 'miracle'
Hindustan Times
Delhi's newly sworn-in chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday showed his secular side when he invoked gods of all four major religions— Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism — thanking them for the "miracle" that brought him and his party to ...

NEWS.com.au
Is the Pope a closet atheist?
Times of Malta
But there is – besides the atheistic horrific scenario – another scenario which needs consideration. Of course, I have no knowledge of things connected to divinity and theology but I do not think the Vatican, the cardinals or the faithful could have ...
A Jewish Atheist Responds to the Pope's Call for PeaceTruth-Out
Pope Has Not Abolished Sin, Says VaticanCharisma News

all 631 news articles »

Let us hope not, but a reader just sent me the following from Mr. Ham’s Facebook page: Well the big news for 2014 as we begin this new year is that in February, at the Creation Museum, I will be debating the well known Bill Nye The Science Guy! In the next day or so we will post more details including how you can buy tickets to this event. It’s quite rare these days for... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

favhdimages

This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.

Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread

While we’ve sucked in some libertarians nattering away in another thread, maybe they’d like to take a moment to explain the unrepentant evil of the American banking industry? Here are some lovely pointed questions.

“Someone at JP Morgan said, “Let’s ask the American public what they’d like to say to one of our top bankers on Twitter.” Turns out that wasn’t such a great idea. The tweets generated from #AskJPM range from funny to down-right nasty. So someone at CNBC said, “Let’s have award-winning actor, Stacy Keach…the voice from American Greed read them verbatim.” Almost a brilliant idea. Then they had the good sense to add me… the blue puppet. And BOOM now it’s brilliant. “

Wasn’t it exciting? Not as exciting as that year when all four digits changed at once.

I think we should change the system and base the calendar on an arbitrary event that occurred 999,999,999 years ago so that we can all explode in paroxyms of joy next January. And once precedent has been set, we can start rerooting the calendar on any thing we want, any time we want, and get that thrill all the time. And remember, it doesn’t have to be based on a real event: we could have the year when the dating system reflected the long, long ago of the Star Wars universe, or on when Bilbo met some trolls in the woods.

The War on Atheists
Patheos (blog)
There's a recent essay making the rounds in my part of the Facebook world, where the author reveals that atheists are educated elites who can afford to indulge their belief, or, probably its more accurate to say non-belief, and are absolute jerks for ...

2013: Atheism's 10 defining moments
Religion News Service
To highlight some of atheism's defining moments and trends from the last year, I worked with a panel of ten writers, scholars, and activists to come up with ten major moments or currents in American atheism from 2013. Their contributions are below ...