Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Andrew Brown on a particular kind of ‘faith’ in politics

    You can’t have large-scale voluntary action without faith: a combination of self-discipline and hope in an uncertain future state.

  • Jon Stewart is like Media Matters, but funnier

    He criticizes Fox News a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

  • Suspended sentence and Asbo for mocking religion

    Harry Taylor was convicted of “religiously aggravated harassment” for putting religion-teasing leaflets in an airport “prayer room.”

  • Susan Jacoby on Dorothy Height

    She didn’t choose to be out of the limelight, she was shoved there.

  • Teacher Oluwatoyin Oluseesin murdered by students

    She confiscated some books to prevent cheating, and was beaten to death because one was the Koran.

  • Akwa-Ibom Child Witches

    Yemi Ademowo Johnson would like to be able to close down refuges for children accused of witchcraft. Alas, not yet.

  • The law simply acknowledges

    And what business does the Obama administration have appealing the ruling that the “National Prayer Day” is unconstitutional? Yes I know they are under pressure from Fox News, but that’s going to be the case no matter what they do, and they weren’t elected to jump when Fox says jump.

    Crabb ruled the government could not use its authority to try to influence when and whether individuals pray, writing: “In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience.”…

    The administration had argued the law simply acknowledges the role of religion in the United States.

    What is that supposed to mean? And how can a law merely “acknowledge” something? And even if it could why should even that be the president’s business? Even if the law ordered the president to announce once a year that religion has a role in the United States, that would still be the state pushing religion on people instead of keeping its mouth shut on the subject. The state saying that religion has a role in the United States carries a wealth of implication with it, and that’s why it shouldn’t do it; and National Prayer Day mandates a good deal more than merely announcing religion’s “role” anyway.
    I’m aware that religion has a role in the United States, and I’m tired of that role, and I’m tired of having it forced on my attention, and I would like it to withdraw a considerable distance and mind its own business.

    The Justice Department signaled it would appeal not only Crabb’s decision on the merits of the case but also her ruling last month that the defendants had the standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.

    Well, I hope you lose, Justice Department. You piss me off and I hope you lose.

  • Secular Coalition for America Calls Upon Pentagon to Cancel ‘Christian-Themed’ Event

    The Pentagon should respect the constitutional separation of church and state and cancel a planned National Day of Prayer event, particularly in light of its recent labeling as a “Christian-themed event” by an Army spokesman, the Secular Coalition for America said today. The Pentagon should also sever all operational ties to the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a radical right wing organization headed by the wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and housed in Focus on the Family’s headquarters.

    “It is bad enough that the administration is going ahead with an observance of the National Day of Prayer, correctly ruled unconstitutional by the courts only last week. But for the Pentagon to hold an explicitly ‘Christian-themed event’ around the day of prayer is brazenly out of all reasonable bounds, and explicitly exclusionary to U.S. service members of all non-Christian faiths and of no faith,” said Secular Coalition for America Executive Director Sean Faircloth, referring to a characterization of the event by Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins, as reported by the Associated Press yesterday. “This event should be cancelled, and the Department of Defense should apologize to all non-Christians who are being rendered second-class by this ill-advised program.”

    Faircloth also called upon the Pentagon’s chaplain’s office to end its working relationship with the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a right-wing, theocratic group headed by Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson. “It is difficult to imagine a less wise alliance than one between Pentagon officials and anyone working under the Dobson umbrella. The already-dubious military chaplaincy should end once and for all its connections to Mrs. Dobson’s radical group.”

    On Fox News on April 4, Chaplain Terry Brewly asserted that it was “very true” that there is “no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole,” a direct affront to the brave men and women of the military who identify as nontheists. The Secular Coalition for America has advocated strongly for an end to religious proselytizing and coercion in the U.S. military. The group pressed its case for equal rights for nontheist military personnel in its historic meeting with administration officials in February, and its founding director, Lori Lipman Brown, appears in a new documentary on the military chaplaincy, Chaplains Under Fire, premiering at the Newseum in D.C. on April 30.

    About the Author

    The Secular Coalition for America is the national lobby for atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheistic Americans. From our office in the nation’s capital, our lobbyists and support staff engage public policy makers and the media on issues ranging from religion’s influence on education and medical research to the privileging of faith groups by government. We are the first and only cooperative venture of ten member organizations coming together to improve the political situation of a previously unrepresented constituency: the tens of millions of atheists and agnostics in the United States. Contact: Paul Fidalgo, 202-299-1091 / press(at)secular.org

  • Obama admin will appeal Prayer Day ruling

    “I would have expected something better from a legal scholar,” FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said.

  • God we beseech thee bless this bullet

    Okay, I give up – what is the Pentagon doing having a “special Pentagon prayer service”? Even before we ask what is it doing having Franklin Graham appearing at such a thing, what is it doing having such a thing in the first place?

    And yet people wonder why atheists “proselytize” to the extent of pointing out that there are no genuinely good reasons to believe the things that make a “National Prayer Day” seem like something that an entity called God expects us to have once a year.

  • Franklin Graham uninvited to Pentagon ‘Prayer Day’

    What is the Pentagon doing having a ‘Prayer Day’?

  • Cristina Odone offers theocratic bullying nonsense

    Dr Death, abortion, euthanasia, faith schools, all life precious.

  • The terrible case of Lucia de Berk

    A Dutch nurse who has spent 6 years in jail on a life sentence for murdering 7 people, in a killing spree that never happened.

  • A spectacular reputational car crash for the BCA

    Until they sued, most people thought chiropractors just did backs, Ben Goldacre notes.

  • Pope named in Milwaukee abuse lawsuit

    His lawyers want the Church to release any files it has on abuse cases involving priests.

  • A gentle tactful loving reminder

    Use the formatting tools at the top of the comment box, willya! Half of you are typing in html, after Josh went to all the trouble of giving us tools, and you’re doing the wrong ones so they’re showing up and it looks stupid and bad. Whatsa matta wichoo?

    I don’t mean it; you know I love you; but pull yourselves together.

    (No I know, it’s not really half. It’s just a few. But we don’t want to embarrass The Few, so let’s say it’s half.)

  • 50 Voices of Disbelief Review in First Things

    New atheism, pooh pooh, new atheists, yawn, new atheism, sheer banality, new atheists, will go away soon, new atheism, we all hates it.

  • Your mission, should you choose to accept it

    “New” atheism is often accused of proselytizing, but I don’t think that’s right.

    It’s not really proselytizing. We don’t have the explicit goal of turning everyone atheist. We don’t even really have the implicit goal of doing that. We know it’s vanishingly unlikely, and not necessarily desirable (most of us know that – maybe all of us do – it probably depends on exactly what is meant). Our goals are short of that – speaking broadly.

    The most basic is probably to humble the claims somewhat – to chip away at the public assumption that there is nothing dubious about theism – that it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about God as one would talk about Gordon Brown or Sarah Palin. It is to remind everyone that belief is not necessarily the default option – that there are reasons not to believe – that the reasons not to believe are better than the reasons to believe – that it is better to restrict belief to claims that can be tested and investigated and that any claims that are officially beyond the competence of science are thereby rendered at least less reliable.

    So, related to that and stemming from it, another goal is to push back against all this incessant public goddy talk and “faith”-mongering. It is, frankly, to discredit public goddy talk – to make it more obvious that it is not likely to be true – in an effort to reduce it. It is an effort to get all this god stuff out of our faces.

    Now that perhaps does look like proselytizing in the sense meant. But I don’t care. We’ve had years of this nonsense, and we’re tired of it. We’re not raiding churches – but we’re arguing with the Washington Post and the BBC and the Guardian and National Prayer Day. Should we stop doing that because it may be true that on average religion makes people happy? No.

    Another, overlapping goal is to make more space for atheists – to de-delegitimize atheism – to de-other it – to point out there are lots of us and we have the better case so stop trying to bully us. It is also to point out and rebuke the lies people tell about us – unblushing brazen hardened lies.

    The very presence and energy of the lies is a sign that this goal, at the very least, is hard to gainsay. Atheism is neither criminal nor immoral, yet it is steadily and noisily demonized. That points to something poisonous about theism. We do get to resist – we do get to call out the lies – we do get to defend ourselves.

  • Uncredible Hallq disputes Pigliucci

    Why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up?

  • Herr Bischof, the tan suits you and I love the brooch

    A really nice touch – it’s not just that Bishop Walter Mixa has now admitted that he used to beat the children in a Bavarian orphanage –

    Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation.

    A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board, from 1975 to 1996, while he was a priest in the town of Schrobenhausen.

    Isn’t that just typical. The Irish Catholic church sent a lot of the money the government gave it for the care of children in its prisons to Rome while the children slept in the cold and wore rags and ate crap and got next to no schooling. It’s interesting to see that the Bavarian Catholic church apparently used its money-intended-for-child-prisoners on luxury items for itself – at least one supposes it wasn’t hanging the art in the children’s dormitories and giving them pretty bracelets for their birthdays and serving them wine at dinner and letting them use the tanning bed when they were looking a little pallid.