A spokesman for failed Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, speaking to cable news network CNN just before the loss, simultaneously reassured liberals that all Southerners are know-nothing morons and embarrassed Southerners who know better. The awkward incident is recounted in an unflinching Dec. 14 article on the American Humanist Association’s Humanist.com e-zine by Matthew Bolger, the AHA’s legislative director, …

The Bible and government constitutions share an important reality: Conservative proponents consider them sacred. “Holy-book” purists labor mightily to block any new interpretation or alteration deviating from the original. Such as the South Dakota Senate State Affairs Committee, which seeks to make it harder for citizens to amend the state’s Constitution via ballot measures. Proposed amendments now require a simple majority at the …

This is the kind of thing that gives Humanists hives. While distributing communion wafers at a morning Mass on Saturday in Honolulu, Hawaii, Rev. Mark Gantley was interrupted by a deacon who showed him an incoming-missile alert on his phone. The all-caps alert, which was sent to all phones on the island, read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

In a curious recent New York Times op-ed, “Can We Teach Ourselves to Believe,” a Midwest philosophy teacher repeated one of history’s most absurd (if common) proposals regarding religious belief: “Pascal’s wager.” Agnes Callard, an associate professor at University of Chicago, suggests in her article a variation on the “wager”—fake it ’til you make it, essentially—first posed by Enlightenment philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). Pascal’s …

The Trump administration has unleashed turbo-charged rules providing greater legal protection for American health workers who refuse to perform services that they object to on moral or religious grounds. The bottom line is that the rules allow discrimination against Americans not for evidence-based actualities (e.g., gender expression is not a binary—boy/girl—reality but exists along a normal and broad continuum) but strictly for spiritual …

A standard “From the Pulpit”-type article in a recent edition of the Sioux Falls (SD) Argus Leader newspaper illustrates one reason why Christianity has so robustly perpetuated for several centuries in the United States.
Written by Christina O’Hara, rector of the city’s episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, the article—“If you’re called to new life, something may have to …

What do opposition to GMOs (genetically modified organisms), vaccinations and homosexuality have in common?
They’re considered unnatural and, thus, against God’s laws by evangelical Christians, a majority of whom instinctively reject their validity, often on biblical grounds. After all, clinging to traditional received wisdom and groupthink, religious conservatives are innately prone …

A 22-year-old Nepalese woman named Gauri Kumari Bayak recently died alone in a windowless hut on a freezing cold night because she was menstruating. She didn’t die because someone forced her to sleep outside her warm home, but because, after centuries — perhaps millennia — of dominant Hindu religious traditions in her homeland, she believed she had to. In her culture, women are seen as unclean …

Apparently, would-be Muslim refugees to the United States and mainly-Christian interfaith proponents already here are now allies in a war against American Christianity. That’s the curious view of South Dakota state Sen. Neal Tapio, a Republican from Watertown, who tried to explain his position to reporters Thursday morning in a scrum at the state Capitol in Pierre. …

No wonder we human beings chronically believe in unbelievable things, such as the existence of gods and demons and “love at first sight.” Indeed, science has repeatedly demonstrated that such willful credulity may be as much a natural function of our humanity as the compulsion to join social clubs. In fact, the tendencies are related.
Several new books speak to this cautionary fact, as discussed in a fascinating piece by Elizabeth Kolbert …