Reading Time: 4 minutes I have written previously about the “psychics” so popular in our culture, whose pretense of being able to speak to the dead and otherwise gain knowledge through supernatural powers wins them wealth and accolades from a credulous public and a shallow, sensationalist media, despite the total lack of convincing evidence to date that any of […]
Law
Posted inGeneral
Kent Hovind Is Sentenced
Reading Time: 3 minutes After a nearly three-month wait, the wheels of our legal system have turned, and justice has been done at last: Kent Hovind, tax protestor and creationist con man extraordinaire, has been sentenced to ten years in federal prison for tax evasion. Hovind’s wife Jo, who was also convicted on the same slate of charges, will […]
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A Disturbing Experience
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the several years I have been writing for Ebon Musings, I have received a great quantity of reader feedback. I read it all and, with a very few exceptions, respond to it all, and I am pleased to report that the large majority of it has been thoughtful, sincere and polite, regardless of whether […]
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The System Works!
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m not normally one to indulge in schadenfreude, but here’s a piece of news I cannot restrain my glee over hearing: Kent Hovind and his wife have been convicted of tax fraud – and it couldn’t have happened to two nicer people. The Hovinds were charged in July with twelve counts of willful failure to […]
Posted inGeneral
Tax the Churches
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the United States of America today, churches and religious groups are treated with enormous sensitivity and deference by politicians and the media, a deference they have not earned. Far too often, the government and society in general bends over backwards to accommodate and encourage religious beliefs even when there is no rational reason why […]
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A Religious Fugitive is Captured
Reading Time: 4 minutes A few weeks ago, I read Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, a chilling account of the persistence of fundamentalist Mormon sects in the Utah desert that still practice polygamy, often forcing girls as young as 12 or 13 to marry older men who already have dozens of wives. (As Krakauer documents, this […]
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A Call for Truth in Advertising Laws
Reading Time: 4 minutes I was in New York City the other week, near Penn Station, when I was accosted by a well-dressed man in a business suit attempting to hand out fliers to passers-by. I did not take one, but inside the train station, I noticed one cast aside and lying on the ground. Out of curiosity, this […]
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It's Your First Amendment Too
Reading Time: 5 minutes An important fact that the modern-day religious right does not grasp is that the principle of church-state separation, which they revile so bitterly, was enacted for their benefit. It is probably not a coincidence that in Europe, where many nations still have established churches that are a legacy of earlier ages, church attendance is dropping […]
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Theocracy Watch II: Judicial Tyranny Edition
Reading Time: 4 minutes The forces of theocracy are on the march, and Daylight Atheism is keeping a close eye on them. First, an article from the March 3 Legal Times, Alabama Judge Declares War on U.S. Supreme Court: Sitting calmly in his impeccably neat office at Alabama’s Justice Building, state Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker does not look […]
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The Fallacy of Free Speech
Reading Time: 4 minutes In August 2005, according to a December article in the San Francisco Examiner, the private Calvary Chapel Christian School sued the University of California. The UC’s offense, according to Calvary Chapel’s lawsuit, was in not granting college credit for several courses taught from an explicitly Christian viewpoint; doing so, they claim, constitutes discrimination against the […]