Reading Time: 4 minutes I have my own convictions about what happens after we die. As a person with a terminal illness, I’ve had good reason to explore the topic. But do I have to insist that others join me in that conviction?
religion
Posted inPinn Drop with Anthony Pinn
Why is your Jesus white? | Jeremiah Camara
Filmmaker JEREMIAH CAMARA: [Christians] have to realize that nobody made them special. Once we have that conversation, we can start to mend other fences. There’s no God that smiled upon you. Here in Cincinnati, I was at a restaurant. In this restaurant, there was this huge mural with a white Moses and white biblical characters. […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Are religious hospitals inappropriate for secular kids?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I have been very fortunate that my son hasn’t had to make too many trips to the emergency room— a fact that an ER physician pointed out while he was stitching up my son’s eyebrow after a tumble on some bleachers. He was around ten years old, and we had been exercising at a local […]
Posted inThe Future
Could the rise of the nonreligious defuse the population bomb?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Fifty-four years ago, in 1968, American biologist Paul Ehrlich warned that a human “population bomb” threatened global catastrophe. The world’s population at the time was 3.54 billion.
On November 15, 2022, the UN estimate of Earth’s human population flew past eight billion.
Religious beliefs and practices are a major part of the problem. Increasing secularism can only help.
Posted inSatire
Oops! Everything you love funds a cult!
Reading Time: 3 minutes As it turns out, quite a few businesses just happen to funnel your money from innocuous purchases into horrifying, sexually abusive cults. If you’re reading this, you may be sipping on a warm tea. If that tea is a Yogi tea, immediately toss it to the floor with disdain. The parent company that owns Yogi […]
Posted inSexuality
On bikinis and hijab
Reading Time: 5 minutes For Americans, as in most of the West, the meaning of the Arabic word “hijab” is as opaque as the term “bikinis” is clear. But the ancient misogynistic traditions that spawned both are still very much alive in the United States as elsewhere where Christianity still reigns. The recent movement to ban abortion in the […]
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
‘What if your child becomes religious?’
‘What if your child becomes religious?’ is almost as meaningless a question as ‘What if your child becomes political?’
Posted inReligious News
Survey: How authentic are Christian evangelicals? Not very
Reading Time: 2 minutes “American evangelicals, it turns out, have a Jesus problem.” This quote by self-described evangelical Christian Republican David French came in a September 23 post of his newsletter, “The Third Rail” in The Atlantic. Referencing a report released last week on a biannual survey by conservative Christian organizations LifeWay Research and Ligonier Ministries, French notes that the […]
Posted inReligious News
The murder of Mahsa Amini: Is this what happens when religion rules?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Last week, Mahsa Amini died from an alleged “heart attack” while in police custody during a visit to Tehran, the capital of Iran. Her crime? Showing her hair. Amini’s murder has sparked mass protests and at least 17 deaths across Iran as well as global outrage in the days since. For Americans, it is all […]
Posted inHistory
The 2,500 days of Mikhail Gorbachev
Reading Time: 9 minutes On March 10, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to the premiership of the Soviet Union. By the time he resigned in December 1991, roughly 2,500 days later, the geopolitical map of the world had been redrawn, including a reunified Germany and a wave of democracy in Eastern Europe. The Soviets’ longest conventional war ended; a 45-year unconventional conflict that brought the world to the brink of annihilation wound down peacefully; and his own nation lay in pieces around his feet.