Posts Tagged ‘atheism’

December 5th, 2012

Funding for atheists

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Recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison gave the student organization, Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics (AHA) $69,000, the largest amount of grant money ever given to a non-theistic, student-led organization by a college or university.

August 28th, 2012

A hard road for an atheist preacher

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In an article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Robert F. Worth writes about the four days he spent with Pentecostal preacher turned itinerant atheist speaker Jerry DeWitt.

July 30th, 2012

Voting for an atheist?

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In a recent article, Religion News Service discusses a Gallup poll survey, in which a majority of Americans said they would vote for a “well-qualified” atheist for President.

July 19th, 2012

The “New New Atheists”

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Christopher R. Beha discusses a recent article he had written for Harper’s Magazine in which he considers three publications, written by authors he classifies as the “New New Atheists.”

April 9th, 2012

Harmful prayer?

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On April 2nd, Dallas District  Court Judge Martin Hoffman ruled that it is legal to pray for God to harm someone as long as no one is actually threatened or harmed.

February 2nd, 2012

Religion and state secularization

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In discussing secularization, it has become conventional to note that the concept refers to various processes, of which three are particularly prominent. First, the gradual delegitimation of natural and revealed religion’s truth-claims in the face of rational critique. We can call this intellectual secularization. Second, the process by which some states have constitutionally disengaged from their citizens’ religious beliefs and institutions. We can call this state secularization. Third, the increase across society of knowledge, activities, values, tastes, and activities which lack religious content, as well as the extent to which, increasingly, people involve themselves with these non-religious forms. We can call this social secularization.

December 9th, 2011

Beyond reductive naturalism

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Future histories may report that the public discourse on religion was dominated by reductive naturalism until Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution appeared in 2011. One of the most distinctive features of Bellah’s book is his extensive use of the latest developments in the natural sciences, such as biology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and developmental and child psychology. One of his purposes is, as he puts it, “to show how deeply we are shaped by a very long biological history.” This might give the wrong impression that Bellah’s approach is similar to the New Naturalist approach. However, Bellah’s is better characterized as a non-reductive humanistic naturalism, which is a synthesis of the humanistic (interpretative, social, and historical) understanding of religion and the naturalist approach.

December 8th, 2011

Why some atheist scientists participate in religious institutions

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A curious finding in sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund’s national study on the religious beliefs and practices of American scientists is that nearly one in five atheist parents participate in religious institutions.

November 10th, 2011

Trending atheism

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Nona Willis Aronowitz at GOOD Magazine asks what changes might occur when “1 in 4 millennials don’t identify with any religion.”

October 3rd, 2011

Atheism and religious art

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The Guardian has been hosting a series of posts on the question of whether faith is necessary in order to appreciate religious art. A post by Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin highlights the recent work of atheist artist David Mach to contest the assumption that religious art is necessarily made by believers