Freethought Today
Vol. 26 No. 4 - Published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. -
May 2009
View the Table of Contents for this issue
Overheard
Really, nothing has changed. I mean, we have huge technological advances and medical advances, but in terms of people killing each other in the name of God, fundamentalism still abounds. And in certain cultures, women are still second-class citizens, and they're denied education.
Actress Rachel Weisz
Re: Playing Hypatia
In film “Agora”
Associated Press, May17, 2009
[W]e are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.
Author Susan Jacoby
“Keeping the Faith,
Ignoring the History”
New York Times, March 1, 2009
I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.
Author Joyce Carol Oates
New York Times Sunday Magazine
April 12, 2009
It turns out the religiously unaffiliated are the least likely (40 percent) to support torture, but that the more you attend church, the more likely you are to condone it. . . .
You’d think people who claim connection to a higher morality would be the ones most likely to take the lonely, principled stand. But you need only look at history to see how seldom that has been the case . . .
Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr
Miami Herald
May 5, 2009
. . . improved education, health care, existence above the poverty level–are too important to be left to the tender mercies of [religious] charity.
J.D. Trout “Dr. Feel It”
New York Times Sunday Magazine
Feb. 1, 2009
By far the largest slice of the roughly $300 billion dollars that Americans give to charity goes to religious organizations. I’m not religious, and I don’t see why people should pay less in taxes because they give to their church, synagogue or mosque.
Prof. Peter Singer
“When Charity Isn’t Charitable”
Forward, May 1, 2009
I am post-Catholic. I am probably more of a collapsed Catholic.
Christopher Buckley
New York Times Sunday Magazine
Oct. 26, 2008
In Their Own Words
[H]ow can you not reminisce about a childhood where you began each day with the Pledge of Allegiance as little kids lined up in the schoolyard and then marched in two by two with a flag and a crucifix in each classroom?
Today there is much focus on our rights. Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights. . .
I think that it [religious faith] really gives content to the oath that you took. You say, ‘So help me God.’
There are some cases that will drive you to your knees.
Clarence Thomas
Supreme Court Justice
Q&A with high school students
New York Times, April 14, 2009
[I hope my visit as pope will be] a tangible sign [that the Lord] is not deaf to the worried cry of so many families who lost everything: houses, savings, work and often even human lives.
Pope Benedict XVI statement
Onna, Italy
Touring wreckage where 300 died
New York Times, April 29, 2009
Leviticus 18:22 says, ‘You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a female. It is an abomination. They shall surely be put to death.’ We are taking sins and making them to be legally OK, and that is wrong.
State Rep. Dave Schultheis
R-Colorado Springs
Opposing same-sex benefits
Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 25, 2009
. . . the Freedom from Religion Foundation has filed two lawsuits to stop the dreaded . . . National Day of Prayer. . . . The gall, the blatant, unAmerican effort to extort and intimidate Christians into abandoning our very heritage and identify is nightmarish, to put it subtly.
Actor Pat Boone
WorldNetDaily Blog,
April 4, 2009
If a woman says no [to sex], the man has the right not to feed her.
Ayatollah Mohammed Asef Mohseni
Reuters, April 16, 2009
You can’t resolve it [AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, where 22 million are infected with HIV] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.
Pope Benedict XVI
Visiting Cameroon
Associated Press, March 28, 2009
Is the pope living in the 21st century? The people will not follow what the pope is saying. He lives in heaven and we are on earth.
Alian Fogue, MOCPAT
Cameroon AIDS group
allafrica.com, March 23, 2009
We believe to have ‘fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness’ [the GOP Log Cabins] . . . is to offend a holy God, from whom the blessings bestowed upon this country flow.
[The U.S. is an] inherently Christian [nation] . . . For that reason, sir, the Grand Prairie Republican Club holds strong to our Christian heritage and will take no part in knowingly excepting [sic] or promoting any immorality that may hasten the death of the American Government . . . ”
Cylynda Caviness
Pres. Grand Prairie Republican Club
E-mail to Rob Schlein, Log Cabin Republicans of Dallas
Dallas Voice, March 12, 2009
If God had decreed from all eternity that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul the decree by the trick of vaccination.
Timothy Dwight, Yale University President (1795 to 1817)
Grandson of preacher Jonathan Edwards
May 2009 Excerpts |
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News |
Articles Confronting the Anything Goes Red Herring by John CarverPowerless Prayer? by Brian BoltonReviewing Darwin Books for Children by Nan SinceroCartoons by Don Addis |