A paper presented at a conference looked at the emergence of the New Atheist movement and argued that it has used humor quite effectively in creating its public image, and that humor is in general quite effective in creating greater acceptance of marginalized groups.
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There is no reason to think that the level of unbelief among elected officials in the US is much less than it is in the general public so it is really quite embarrassing that there are no openly atheist members of the US Congress. Compare that with the UK where they actually have a state religion of which the Queen is the head but where their All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group has 150 members, most of them elected atheists.
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Nonbelievers in the US are only too aware of the ubiquity of religion. Churches and religious billboards are everywhere, Christian broadcasters fill the radio and TV, and public prayer and other forms of pandering to religion by politicians and other public figures is commonplace and even required if they are to be elected to office. So it is a little disconcerting to discover that some Christian conservatives see themselves as a persecuted minority.
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We know that the Catholic church takes its consecrated wafers, which they believe have been transformed into the body of Jesus, very, very seriously, as PZ Myers (among many others) can attest when they treated it as just another wafer and triggered a massive outcry.
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Once in a while, especially at times when people are fighting and killing over religion more than usual, I like to link to this audio of a rant by British comedian Marcus Brigstocke. The whole thing is worth listening to but especially the part where he talks about how while the violence is committed by a few extremists, the undoubtedly much larger number of religious people who are peaceful cannot completely escape responsibility for what is done.
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You would think that those religious people who insist on inserting religion into government would have been satisfied with the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Greece v. Galloway case that said that it was not unconstitutional for governmental entities to open their meetings with prayers.
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The new Common Core standards for K-12 education has become the latest battleground for people who are trying to hold back the tide of good education because of fears that it will not support religious dogma, anti-science ideology, and conservative political history. In Ohio, A Republican state legislator Andy Thompson is introducing legislation to do this.
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The brutal murder of a journalist James Foley by the ISIS militants has rightly been widely condemned. But in doing so, president Obama was being disingenuous when he said that “No faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day.”
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As travel becomes easier and local communities across the world become increasingly diverse, the chances of marriages between people of different religions also increases. In the US alone, interfaith marriages have increased from 20% in 1950 to 45% today. For people in such marriages seeking common ground, values matter more than beliefs.
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A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
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