Whether people believe in invisible spirits or questionable pseudoscience, they’re tickling the same primitive spot in human brains that makes human beings overly susceptible to the miraculous over the probable. Indeed, we are a species that far too often tends to instinctively believe in least-likely hypotheses. It is the same tendency that makes us immediately sense a dangerous stranger in the shadows when things go bump in the night. …

The regular “Sermonette” column Saturday on my local newspaper’s “Religion+News” page subtly reflects a growing disinterest in Christian faith in the United States. Church pews are clearly emptying. In the Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic article, titled “Time and God are on your side,” local pastor Rev. John Short reminded readers of the 365 days and 8,760 hours that will comprise 2018, clearly a generous expanse of time. …

I recently shared a very interesting breakfast conversation about religious skepticism with a 40-something Gen-Xer. He grew up swaddled in Christian belief and had long enthusiastically embraced it (even eventually becoming a board trustee of his church), but he then lost his religious mojo completely somewhere along the long, winding road to maturity. Although belief […]

South Dakota’s quirky religious predilections are revealed in a fascinating study published in 2017 by the respected Pew Research Center. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that we South Dakotans are indeed largely Caucasian-Christian folks. In fact, along with North Dakota, we lead the country in the percentage of white Christians in our populations – 71 percent for our northern neighbor and …

Call me obsessive, but after researching this topic for several years I now tend to sense the heavy presence of Christian assumptions in virtually every sphere of American life. Lately, it was an overt government word-ban initiative related to official funding-request documents. The pertinent words “to be avoided” are: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and […]

In running across some old statements by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week, I was reminded that he—and the entire Trump administration—continue to disingenuously assert the spurious trope that the United States is fundamentally a “Christian nation.” As America’s top law-enforcement official, what Sessions says matters. Their respect for the office and whoever fills it causes people far too often to indiscriminately accept at face value …

Originally published December 18, 2017, as a guest post on Hemant Mehta’s popular The Friendly Atheist blog on Patheos hub’s “Nonreligious” channel.  The cover story for the December 2017 National Geographic reveals one of the major conundrums in discussing religious ideas rationally in America. “The Real Jesus: What Archaeology Reveals About His Life,” the cover reads. To a […]

When wrestling with the social issues of the day, too many of us instinctively look upward toward a divine template for explanations and direction when, in fact, the answers to all our questions—if they are to be found at all—are right here in the real world. The latest conflagration to ignite in the zeitgeist, the always-evolving spirit of the country, is the #metoo movement mainly fueled by women (but also many men) against …

In many ways, medieval superstition is still alive and well in the United States. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times brought that reality into sharp focus as it discussed how despite groundbreaking advances in science throughout 2017 willful ignorance remains rampant in our majority-Christian and predominantly faith-based land. In April, hundreds of thousands […]

A newly released Icelandic study starkly indicates that this increasingly irreligious, democratic island southeast of Greenland in the Atlantic may likely become mostly atheist in the not-too-distant future. Is it a religious unbelief harbinger for the United States, whose religiosity has been precipitously sliding for decades? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the writing does seem to be on the wall. The study by polling firm Maskína for The Icelandic Ethical …