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 …

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 …

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.”

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 […]