By Valerie Tarico ~ D id the Catholic Bishops wince last week when their leader, anti-contraception Cardinal Timothy Dolan, was exposed for paying pedophiles to disappear? One can only hope. After all, these are men who claim to speak for God. They have direct access to the White House, where they regularly weigh in on issues ranging from military policy to bioethics, and they expect us all to listen – not because of relevant expertise or elected standing or even money, but because of their moral authority. Ahem. If pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you that this “moral” authority is anything but moral, take a look at some of their other sins against compassion and basic decency. Punishing doctors and nuns for saving lives. In 2009, a 27-year-old mom, pregnant with her fifth child, was rushed to a Phoenix hospital, St. Josephs, where her doctors said she would almost certainly die unless her pregnancy was aborted immediately. The nun in charge approved the emergen...

By Klym ~ R egular readers on this site probably know that I attend a Unitarian Universalist "church" where I fellowship with atheists, agnostics, humanists, deists, former Jews and Christians, Buddhists , and other interesting people. I love this place and the people there. It has been so liberating to me to gather with others who don't claim to have all the answers to the questions in life and who encourage me to pursue my own individual path to truth and knowledge. I came to this church late in life, still a recovering fundamentalist and it has been a long, hard road away from the cross of Christianity. Buddhism (Photo credit: shapour bahrami ) Our minister is on a six month sabbatical so we are having all kinds of interesting guests in the pulpit--rabbis, Muslims , Buddhists---you get the picture. This past Sunday we had a retired minister who, in his youth, was a Catholic; in early adulthood he was a Baptist minister , and is now an agnostic\atheist. Anyway,...

By Paul So ~ T his may sound surprising to most of you but from my experience I came to the conclusion that Christianity, including many Christians, really do not care about the truth: what they do care about is that their beliefs are true. There is a difference between caring about the truth and caring that your personal beliefs are true. Caring about the truth involves practices and qualities that helps people uphold intellectual integrity and honesty to the standard or procedure of finding out the truth. When I say “finding out the truth” I am not saying we should reach absolute certainty or absolute knowledge, what I am trying to say is that we come to the produce reliable beliefs about the world as best as we can. We use logic, evidence, argumentation, mathematics, and other methods because they have played an indispensable role in helping us to produce reliable beliefs about the world. We know that “reliable” does not mean “absolutely true”, we just know that reliable means “mo...

By Incongruous Circumspection ~ A good friend of mine leaned back in his chair and said the following profound statement: "[God] made an appearance for 'Doubting Thomas', why not me?" Francesco de' Rossi's painting 'The Doubting of St. Thomas' (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Recently, I have been engaging friends and strangers in conversations about proof of the existence of the god of the Bible. Of course, nobody I have spoken to has ever seen him and thus have to resort to axiomatic arguments. "The Bible proves that God exists because he said he wrote it and thus, he did." My counter to that is simple. Many holy books and religious leaders say the exact same thing. They state that their religion is true, even exclusive to other religions. Sometimes, they even go as far as the writers of the Bible and say that you're a fool if you don't agree with them. I find these written statements to be quite presumptuous on the writ...

By the Religious Antagonist ~

By Cestlavie ~ I am thrilled to have stumbled upon this website! I've been looking for a community like this, and it is wonderful to read all of your stories. So, here is mine... M y mother converted to Christianity when I was a baby. My father had returned from his army tour in Okinawa and they moved far away from her very large family. Things changed in their relationship and she was alone much of the time. She found a Southern Baptist church and a new extended family to fill the void. Consequently, the church was our second home and we were there whenever the doors were open. I remember getting "saved" when I was about 12. It was Easter Sunday and the preacher gave a heart-rending sermon about what horrible sinners we were and how God sacrificed his son, Jesus for our sins, and what a horrible, painful death it was and it was all my fault for being such a miserable sinner. I cried with the horror and shame of it and ran to the front of the church begging fo...

By Michael Sherlock ~ T he worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis spanned thousands of years, both in Egypt and abroad, travelling as far as Britain.(1) Throughout the vast expanse of both time and space, Isis collected and shed many qualities and attributes. Along the way, prior to the Common Era , Isis was given the title virgin on several occasions, and this article, which will present the works of both ancient and modern scholars, is an attempt to demonstrate this fact. The main reason Isis’ virginity has become a contended issue in relatively recent times, is largely due to the fact that, mythicists have used the virginity of Isis, to present arguments from similarity, against the historical Jesus Christ. They argue that, since Isis was depicted as the great virgin-mother of Horus, whose father was the Sun-god, Osiris, (the first recorded god to die and be resurrected), prior to the Christian era, then the similarity between these two myths, indicates that the later myth ...

By Valerie Tarico ~ C atholic, Born-Again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist . . . . Religions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward “infidels” is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are. They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human. They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves. For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communica...