When reading news stories in the media, the devil is often hidden in the details, if they are not spelled out. Read carefully.

For Christian evangelicals, brainwashing children is perpetually a primary endeavor, as several news stories in recent weeks reiterated. One article posted Monday in Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog—“No, a Mother Isn’t in Jail Right Now Because She Baptized Her Daughter”—updates a continuing story showing how desperately impatient believers are to indoctrinate the innocent, even when legally prohibited.

Divorce used to be effectively illegal in the United States and could be again in a heartbeat if reactionary Christians gained the same political power that Republicans now hold, along with a death-grip on the Supreme Court. How? The lack of divorce in the Philippines offers insight. The Philippines’ Legislature is again considering a bill […]

Quick, when was the last time you personally experienced dismembered bodies randomly strewn across a roadway after a high-speed, head-on car crash? The bloody ravage left behind after a gruesome murder fueled by rage? The soul-emptying silence after a suicide by hanging? The bullet-shredded corpses of children and uncomprehending pleas of the wounded moments after yet another mindless school massacre mercifully ends?

Even though Americans unaffiliated with any religion now make up nearly a quarter of the United States’ population, our political influence is disproportionately slight and likely could remain underpowered for a good while. The problem is that “Nones,” as demographers call us, are a surprisingly disparate group whose fragmented nature undermines developing the unity and interconnectivity necessary for an effective national political base.

What do skydivers and mystics, for example, have in common? Their thrilling payoffs are completely psychological and essentially identical. This fascinating nexus between fear and faith—and their close cousin, pain—is investigated in a thoughtful recent essay by Guy Claxton in the e-zine Aeon, which calls itself an online “sanctuary for serious thinking.” The gist of the essay is that skydivers, self-harming teens, people paralyzed …

A March 7 post in Patheos Nonreligious hub’s Progressive Secular Humanist blog says it all about how Christian dogma embedded in American society insidiously perpetuates the faith. Titled “Trump Administration Goes All In For Abstinence-Only Sex Education,” the post by Michael Stone focuses on White House policy changes that have empowered Valerie Huber, an abstinence-only sex-education restrictionist, to control the $286 billion federal …

Why Does American Christianity Perpetuate? Reason #1: Skeptics Inadvertently          Enable It By Rick Snedeker, published by Patheos Nonreligious Channel’s Secular Spectrum blog, March 7, 2018. As I read the new March 2018 edition of Church & State, the monthly magazine of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I was reminded of one important reason […]

Last week, “America’s pastor” Billy Graham became the first religious leader ever to lie in honor at the US Capitol Rotunda, a precedent criticized by secular groups and others as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution. Graham’s treatment was hardly the first time Christianity has been notably elevated inside the Capitol Building. During National Bible Week late last year, I was frankly stunned to hear a speech of …

Contrary to what ancient Christian theologians hypothesized, the universe was not necessarily created from a pre-existing something. I was recently reminded of this while watching a captivating two-hour British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) documentary, Everything and Nothing: The Amazing Science of Empty Space, first released in 2011. Program host Jim Al-Khalili, an Iraq-born British theoretical physicist, University of Surrey professor …