I think I’m going to observe lent this year. I remember hating Lent as a kid: I was forced to “give up” something I liked for reasons not well explained to me. That is, until I did the math and discovered that Sundays don’t count in Lent and Sundays are never days of fasting, so [...]

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I feel compelled to continue the Streisand effect that the Life Legal Defense Foundation’s opposition to one Tyson Anderson’s poem has caused. Apparently, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine sponsored a contest soliciting poems about stem cell research. They did this last year (you can find the winners here) and again this year, in honor of [...]

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I heard about Agora from Jason over at the Wild Hunt. He first mentioned it in ’08, where he extolled it as likely to be a Pagan-friendly work. Well, that was enough for me, so I waited for it to come out. And waited some more. Meanwhile, Jason was giving occasional tidbits: the movie was [...]

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Hi. My name is John, and I’m a spiritual atheist. Like “God,” the word “spirituality,” is a conveniently ambiguous term. That said, it’s not so vague as to be totally meaningless. I think it captures an area of concern better than any other term out there. I especially like Wikipedia’s definition: Spirituality can refer to [...]

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A friend of mine just started a Free Thought group on Facebook. It’s secret, so it doesn’t show up on any of our pages. While I’m dismayed that he thinks it’s necessary to meet in secret (rather than meet in a room at the school, an undisclosed location in public is noted on the group [...]

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This is how our president defined our country yesterday. Explicitly denying that it was a “Christian nation” and explicitly stating that this fact is one of our “great strengths”. It’s nice to be reminded of this—and by someone so high in the administration! It is vogue for politicians to exclaim “God bless America!” Whether or [...]

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It’s got it all: atheism, spirituality, god, scifi, and good music!! Hulu’s got the first four eps up right now (and it doesn’t keep them forever), so go catch up. It’s too smart and too well written to stay on the air for long. It’s the story of Kings David and Saul transposed into a [...]

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Texas is reviewing its science standards, specifically with the desire to remove them altogether. Skepchick has a great discussion of exactly what this means, but here’s the short version: Texas and California’s choices for scientific textbooks drives the availability of textbooks nationwide because of their massive marketshare the Texas State Board of Education (TSBE) has [...]

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Late to the party on this one, I know, sorry. It turns out that conservative (read: religious) states have the highest porn rates in the country. Probably because they’re not allowed to have deviant (read: fun) sex at home. Meanwhile, people living in enlightened areas of the country have other outlets for their sexual urges, [...]

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I told a professor here (who was running a forum on the Question of God) that my religious background is ex-Catholic but that I am an active blogger in the ex-Mormon part of the Bloggernacle; that my husband is humanist, my father-in-law is Buddhist, and my mother-in-law is First Nations/Pagan. I got an awesome look [...]

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