Reading Time: 7 minutes Taxonomically, my family is Freethinker (including atheists, skeptics, agnostics), my genus is Humanist (including the religion-based), and my species is Secular.” — John Rafferty ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford. Amrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary Economics is understandably a […]
Politics
Posted inSecularism
Why the Kennedy v. Bremerton SCOTUS ruling empowers secular defenders of religious liberty
Reading Time: 3 minutes As the recent Supreme Court ruling Kennedy v. Bremerton allows football coaches to kneel with students in prayer on the fifty-yard line, it also opens the door for more teachers, coaches, and other public officials to practice their religion in public. This seems like an unhappy entanglement between religion and the state, but could secular […]
Posted inViolence
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway of Agony, Mechanized Death, and Red Asphalt were meant to terrify teenagers into driving safely. […]
Posted inEducation
Florida civics teachers are being indoctrinated with Christian nationalism
Reading Time: 4 minutes Florida wants to indoctrinate public school teachers with Christian nationalism in the hopes that they’ll spread the misinformation to their students in the upcoming school year. That’s the clear takeaway based on how teachers are being trained under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ multi-million-dollar “Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative.” Over the summer, ten voluntary three-day training seminars are […]
Posted inSecularism
America? We need to talk.
Reading Time: 2 minutes I want to start by saying I will always love you. You’ve been here my whole life. You gave me MTV. And let’s face it, without Madonna or Tawny Kitaen, I might have ended up a DMV clerk or some other horrendous thing. We’ve had a lot of good times together. Remember when we thought […]
Posted inPolitics
A new Republican lie: Biden’s State Dept. wants to ‘promote atheism worldwide’
Reading Time: 5 minutes Today, in a letter addressed to President Joe Biden and the State Department, 15 Congress members on the “Republican Study Committee” claimed the U.S. government is using taxpayer dollars to “promote atheism worldwide.” If that sounds bizarre to you, you’d be right, because that’s not even close to what’s actually happening. Here’s the backstory: In […]
Posted inReligion
Dear Christians: Please stop using Jesus to spread hate
Reading Time: 3 minutes I am tired of people advocating for the rights of the “unborn” at the expense of the living, especially when those affected are predominantly women, those socialized as women, and people with uteruses. Statistic after statistic of the real implications and harms of anti-choice restrictions continues to be ignored, not to mention the disproportionate effect […]
Posted inLaw
The Supreme Court rewarded religious schools. Maine lawmakers fought back.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that taxpayers in Maine had to cover the costs of private religious education even when Christian indoctrination was front and center. It was a horrible decision loudly derided by church/state separation advocates. But state lawmakers may have found a way to nullify its effects. Carson v. Makin involved a […]
Posted inLaw
Supreme Court needs a new motto: First, do no harm
Reading Time: 10 minutes American conservativism was on alarming display in two U.S. Supreme Court rulings announced last week on abortion and guns. With these new decisions the strongly conservative Court majority, in effect, insisted that the text of the U.S. Constitution and the reactionary justices’ divining of the Founding Fathers’ original constitutional intent is far more important than […]
Posted inPolitics
Will faith in a ‘divinely-inspired’ Constitution save us?
Reading Time: 3 minutes During a recent hearing of the House January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) stated that the U.S. Constitution is “divinely inspired.” She was referring to testimony from Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of Arizona’s House. In his testimony, Bowers said, “it is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired.” Bowers was […]