religion

Barney Frank could not talk about his atheism while in Congress – why?

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Barney Frank is a Democrat who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives fromMassachusetts from 1981 to 2013. In 1987 he came out as gay, and to the great credit of the majority of the public this had little impact on his electoral prospects, and so he was returned to office again and again as the most prominent gay … Read more

Sometimes Satire really is the best form of criticism

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Lurking out there are people who hold some very extreme and completely insane views. This ranges right across the diversity of belief and includes weirdness such as: Westboro Baptist church protesting outside a department store in their home town because it just happened to sell Swedish made vacuum cleaners. Apparently the Swedish government had rebuked … Read more

Does religious belief imply stupidity?

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Does being religious justify being labelled “stupid?”. The short simple answer is – No, there are plenty of very smart highly intelligent humans who are also religious, in fact some of the most famous thinkers, philosophers, and scientists in history have been religious. Ah, so that might imply some truth then? Actually no, not at … Read more

Meriam Ibrahim not being released

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News has been circulating in the media that Meriam Ibrahim, the woman under sentence of death in Sudan for marrying a Christian, is to be released. For example … BBC here Guardian here Sadly this is not true, her lawyer has advised Channel 4 as follows … Ms Ibrahim’s lawyer Elshareef Ali Elshareef Mohammed told Channel 4 … Read more

Religion will thrive and sceptics may die out – Is this really true?

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Beliefs that are rather obviously not true at all thrive, and so we should perhaps ponder over the question – why it is like this? The geneticist Steve Jones (pictured above) makes a rather interesting observation regarding beliefs and identifies one good reason. While speaking about this at the Hay Literary Festival, a reporter thought, “Hey … Read more

Weird: “Westboro Baptist Church To Protest Fred Phelps’ Funeral, Says Daughter”

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Claim: Westboro Baptist church plans to picket the funeral of their founder Fred Phelps Status: False … the Twitter account @MargieJPhelps once really did belong to the daughter of the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., but no, the tweets were created by @Grampscramps as satire If you had previously seen the claim, then you  might indeed have been tempted … Read more