As my wife would gladly tell you, I am no libertine hedonist, wild-eyed radical or utopian free spirit, but I do subscribe to one core impulse for all of those: people’s need to privately figure out what parts of reality work best for them—without bowing mindlessly to hidebound tradition or mystical received wisdom. For me, accepting a universe where supernatural beings simply don’t exist is what works best. And this philosophy has …

During the decades I lived in Saudi Arabia, I eventually stopped noticing the dense black veils that hid the faces of local Muslim women. It was just the way it was, like the endless sandy sabkha (salt flats) in every direction. Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Saudi women generally accepted their veils as a religious obligation, …

About a year ago, three neighboring Protestant congregations—two Lutheran, one Methodist—merged into one in Woonsocket, a small South Dakota farming community near where I live. This interesting faith innovation was reported Feb. 12 in Sioux Falls’ Argus Leader, the state’s largest-circulation metro newspaper. The merger may …

By Rick Snedeker, guest article published in Patheos Unreligious Channel’s Secular Spectrum group blog, February 12, 2018. A double tragedy occurred in January on South Dakota’s iconic Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, two among many serial catastrophes fueled by the often harsh realities of life on the “rez.” At least one reservation resident fears that belief […]

Blogger’s note: Although most of my blog posts have been relatively long to this point, I’m going to start submitting occasional shorter posts, starting with this one, about topics that just require a quick introduction and not extensive discussion. As always, comments are welcome. We Americans tend to be inward-looking as a nation, not fully […]

A recent post in Hemant Mehta’s The Friendly Atheist blog about a lawsuit against a school district that allowed Christian indoctrination only hinted at why targeting of schoolchildren by faith-based organizations has been so successful —and why it is so subversive, and dishonest. The post reports on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s suit against the Kouts (Indiana) Middle/High School, which charges that two youth pastors …

For long centuries, the Christian establishment has promoted the conceit that reason and religion are intimately conjoined. But it’s a self-delusion. In fact, supernatural theology of any kind versus the material actualities of the cosmos that undergird philosophy are “non-overlapping magisteria,” as so elegantly phrased by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). The former is almost entirely based on airy wishfulness …

When people think of faith, I suspect technology is not usually their first thought. But perhaps it should be. Indeed, the technology of written language—a technical process invented to enhance human communication and memory—succeeded in widely spreading shared religions among humankind, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In fact, Islam specifically refers to the adherents of these religions as “people of the book.” …

A Florida man says he was tortured in middle school in the early 2000s during so-called conversion therapy to “cure” his homosexuality. It didn’t work. Sam Brinton recalled being forced to undergo the deeply traumatic sessions because his devout Southern Baptist missionary parents “wanted to erase my existence as a newly out …

The fundamentalist Christian Right movement has changed its strategy but not its stripes as it continues aggressively trying to insinuate faith-based dogma into American voucher schools and children, an excellent New York Times article this week by columnist Michelle Goldberg illustrates. Southern states circumvented the constitutional civil-rights of freed slaves during Reconstruction after the Civil War by terrorizing blacks and constructing a rigidly apartheid …