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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 […]

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 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 …

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 …