By Jennifer ~ L ooking back on my upbringing, I can relate to the movie, The Truman Show because I lived my life on earth in a bubble - this weird, unnatural “God” world. I was taught to shun the world and the things of the world. This world was not my home because “Heaven is better than this, oh, what joy and bliss. Walking on the streets that are paved with gold; living in a land where you’ll never grow old…” Another of those inane choruses hardwired in my cranium. When I look over my journals dating back to the 80s, while I’m now filled with self-compassion at my suffering, I also cringe at just how brain-washed I was. I wasn’t even speaking English. My native language was Christianese. Boy, did I ever know the jargon and could I quote Scripture! My role models were all ancient bearded old dudes with weird names that slid off my tongue with ease – Jeremiah, Obadiah – puff, puff puff! That was a childhood rhyme. I was an “on fire” ambassador for Christ. I prayed regularly a...

By Ben Love ~ L et’s think about in these terms. The known Universe is approximately 545,509,728,000,000,000,000,000 miles in diameter. No one alive can comprehend that. It’s just a meaningless number that happens to astound us, but we cannot really fathom something of that size. All we know is that the Universe is so vast it might as well be infinite (and perhaps it is---though this author does not think so). Somewhere in that immeasurable gulf of incalculability, a tiny little speck of nothing is hurling through space. This speck is so small and so inconsequential that it doesn’t even register against the backdrop of the Cosmos , no more than one human cell matters in the grand scheme all humanity. This little speck is merely one among the countless billion other such specks that populate the Universe, and yet to us it is the only home we will ever know. We call it   Earth , and everyone we’ve ever known, heard of, or learned of has lived his or her insignificant life on ...

By Valerie Tarico ~ After months of verbal assault against Planned Parenthood and against women more broadly, Republican Christianists have gotten what they were asking for—bloodshed . O n November 27, a mass shooting left three dead and nine wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic just miles from the headquarters of the Religious Right flagship, Focus on the Family. Was the shooting exactly what conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress wanted? Maybe, maybe not. But it is what they asked for. Republican members of the Religious Right incited violence as predictably as if they had issued a call for Christian abortion foes to take up arms. Inciting violence this way is called stochastic terrorism : “ Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.” In an incident of stoc...

By Jennifer ~ I grew up under South Africa’s apartheid government whose leaders were Fascists as well as fiercely religious. This white minority group called themselves Afrikaners, likening themselves to “modern day” Israelites of the Old Testament to whom God had given the Promised Land. White people were naturally superior to non-white people because it said so in the bible, according to the Afrikaner clergy of the time. See, after the flood when the ark finally landed on dry land after forty days and forty nights’ rain, Noah had planted himself some vineyards. One day he had too much to drink and passed out naked in his tent. Noah’s son, Ham, saw his old man in the buff. Giggling, he joined his brothers outside relaying what he had just seen. Next day, Noah now sober, found out that Ham had seen him “nekked,” cursed him and sent him to Africa where he sired black people! (I'll reserve my objections to biblical racism for another blog.) Funny how nudity always pisses off ...

By Carl S ~ F irst of all, here's a great comment from a BBC series: "Being a vicar doesn't make him right. It just means others assume he's right." To which we might add: All houses of worship with their pastors and apologists are encyclopedias of assumptions. Now, I am not making this up. It's Christian dogma : "that unless you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven." Got that? You must become a trusting, gullible, unquestioning, obedient child. (Too bad that these adults forgo being the kinds of children of curiosity and questioning who become the scientists who keep their childhood sense of discovery and wonder.) Which leaves me, as a curious, questioning, rebellious, free thinking and skeptical mature adult, ineligible for entrance. As such, I'm not only barred from any future "heaven," but from all churches. This child/adult difference explains some previously mysterious but now obvious questions...

By Klym ~ D ear Ex-C, I write this article with a heavy heart. I posted a comment on FaceBook that I knew would be controversial, but I never expected one of the replies I received. The reply was not posted on my FB page---my "friend" sent me a personal email this morning. I should have expected it---I don't know why I am so surprised and so deeply hurt. This friend was, after all, a Baptist missionary for many years in China. In our twenties, we were best friends---soulmates, really. He was the nearest thing to a brother that I ever had and he helped me through some horrible times in my life. I have a great deal of love and respect for this man, but his email made me cry. It seriously hurt me in the deepest part of my soul. So, I post it here and welcome your insights; in fact, I need your insights. And keep in mind that my "friend" is not a bad guy---he just honestly believes that my post was "dangerous" to the message of Jesus. ME and my tho...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ My letter-to-the-editor, which follows, was published recently in our local weekly newspaper here in midcoast Maine. I had titled it “Religion and Moral Development ,” but apparently the editors didn’t like that title. C’est la vie. Anyway, I thought I would offer it here, too, since it shows the non-religious in such a positive light. Challenging the View I f you want your kids to grow up to be moral, altruistic , and tolerant of others’ missteps, you get them to church and Sunday school. Right? This belief is so widely accepted in our culture that it’s generally taken as simple “common sense.” As Christian teaching puts it, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” ( Matthew 22:39 ) Hold the presses! A new study just published in Current Biology turns this “standard wisdom” upside down. Those scientists get up to some silly stuff, don’t they? The lead author of the study, Dr. Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, collaborated with othe...

By Ben Love ~ E verywhere you look, people are being killed. Raped. Cheated. Everytime you turn on the news, or click on Yahoo, you see more war, more carnage, more tragedy…more death. To die is natural, but to die at the hands of blind rage is unnatural. The world is dark, and brutal, and cold. And yet, according to recent polls, there are at least 2.4 billion practicing Christians on this planet. Most of them, we must presume, spend a portion of their life praying. Praying for what? For peace. For goodwill. For the intervention of their God. Most of these Christians, we must presume, have petitioned their God about the current situation on Earth (as they have presumably been doing for at least 2,000 years). And their God (who allegedly said that when his believers ask anything in his name, it will be done) either doesn’t listen, or doesn’t care. But that wouldn’t make any sense. If he doesn’t care, then these believers are wrong about his love anyway and the whole point is moot...

By Ben Love ~ “How can something come from nothing?” T his is the statement made to me time and time again when I discuss the possibility of a godless Cosmos with believers. They speak this statement as though it is the end-all, be-all trump card of all time. But is it? Usually, this statement is made in reference to the fact that it is difficult to imagine, even for the staunchest of atheists, that the Universe came from nothing, that   [nothing]   +   [time]   =   [everything] . I get that. I am an atheist, and this   is   a difficult concept for me to accept. I don’t deny that. But grappling with difficult concepts as opposed to easy concepts is not the measuring stick for how unlikely a given idea is. And yet I do concede that while I subscribe to a godless Cosmos, I am at a loss to sufficiently explain it. (But at least I don’t deny that.) Having said all of this, why should it be that attaching the “God solution” to the problem makes...

By Eric G. ~ Constant State of Self-Indoctrination L ately I've been asking myself, "What exactly made me believe anyway?". Besides the emotions, there were intellectual arguments that I used to convince myself (see list below). After a Methodist childhood and Atheist college years, I began my adult life as a discontented spiritual seeker. There was also some naivete and gullibility at work. Enter a Christian friend who seemed to have some wisdom and peace of mind. After interrogating him, I decided to read the Gospels for myself "with an open mind". It was all downhill from there. I started visiting every church in town and found one that seemed cool and progressive. For someone who wasn't a Christian for very long - I went deep. I was baptized (full immersion) in front of my new congregation. I signed up for every group, class, and Bible study. On my own I became determined to read the entire Bible and read for hours every night. I spent forever on...

By Steve Dustcircle ~ T he problem with being a Christian, especially involved with a leadership position like pastor or minister, is you have to be everything to everyone. This is encouraged by the Apostle Paul , being all things to all people so that you can reach them for Jesus. To non-Christians, you have to be able to discuss matters of all types: science, history, theology, counseling, et al. And within these subjects, you have to know an array of topics. In science, you have to know about creationism, evolution, cosmology, archeology, environment, biology. In history, you have to know about the various eras, continents, and people groups, religious and cultural. In theology, you have to know about the various Bible translations, the understanding of why and to whom it was written, and the application of the text, whether it's literal or figurative. In counseling, you have to know about disorders, personality issues, development, relationship boundaries, single-hood m...