Editor: Shirley Galdino 

The anonymous group of hackers attacked at dawn on Saturday several pages of the Government of Brasilia and the official website of singer Paula Fernandes, in protest against the closure of the site for downloads Megaupload by American justice.

Through its own Twitter page, the hacker group claimed responsibility for the raids that have continued throughout the early morning of Saturday, more than 100 pagesof Brasilia, with the domain ”df.gov.br”.

Also, the official website of Paula Fernandes, a most prestigious singer, was READ MORE…

Posted by: Shirley Galdino  
From: http://anadder.com/

The news are full of cases where very religious people do extremely ridiculous or cruel things. For example, there’s Javon Thompson, a 1 year old starved to death by his cult member family because he did not say “amen” during mealtime. Or more recently, a 7 year old girl who was killed during an exorcism by her priest and congregation members. If you want something less harmful to others, look no further than the man who spent his life savings on those Harold Camping apocalypse ads.

A response I’ve seen a few times is that it’s wrong to “blame” religion for these incidents. The reason given is that the people who perpetrate this “obviously” just have a mental illness and that’s all there is to it. It would be as disingenuous as to blame critics of Rupert Sheldrake (a biologist who’s a major proponent of telepathy and other “challenges to the orthodoxy”) for the man who stabbed him . A certain percentage of the population just have Issues. No movement or social group will be without such people as members. Should every movement be blamed for its kooks?

It’s clear that in some cases of hyperreligiosity combined with mental illness, it’s mental illness that’s the overwhelming force. Cases of mothers who kill all their children because they want them to “be with God” are the most blatant examples. But I think to divorce these acts from religion entirely (and say that the exorcist priest was “just crazy”) is to miss the point.

Firstly, I don’t think it’s obvious that all of these people have a mental illness. We have a strong interest in seeing them as READ MORE…

Posted by Shirley Galdino 
From:http://1minionsopinion.wordpress.com

While browsing through an editorial found at the Telegraph, I felt compelled to save the link so I could comment on some of the points made by the author, Christine Odone. She starts out by remarking on an attempt by “A Mr Clive Bone [who] was suing his former colleagues for opening council meetings with a prayer.”

The practice “embarrassed” him as an atheist and contravened Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of belief. Mr Bone and the National Secular Society, which is fighting his corner in the High Court, want to sever the link between religion and public duties.

Picture public life, if the humanists have their way: READ MORE…

By Alonzo Fyfe
Editor: Shirley Galdino 

It is an election year, and I am looking at the issue of creating political change.

In my first post I argued that to make political change you need to bring votes or money to the table. At this stage, evidence and sound reasoning are largely irrelevant. They are relevant elsewhere. I will get to that in a future post.

This is not a cynical complaint about a world gone corrupt. This is a fact, as morally neutral as gravity.

If I were a legislator and you came READ MORE…

By Hemant Mehta
Editor: Shirley Galdino

I listen to a lot of theological discussions and debates. Often, someone will mention the name of a common argument for God’s existence… but I can never seem to remember which argument is which. Maybe you’re in the same boat.

Accordingly, I’ve prepared the following guide for distinguishing five standard apologetics, along with my counterarguments. This isn’t a comprehensive list of arguments, nor does it cover the many nuances of arguments for or against God. Rather, it’s a guide READ MORE…

Posted by Shirley Galdino 
From: http://www.patheos.com/

There are plenty of atheists out there who choose to take their children to a church for a number of reasons: It sounds like the “right” thing to do, they want to raise their children with good morals (as if religion is the only route to doing that), their spouse wants to go to church and they don’t feel like arguing about it, etc.

Phil Ferguson used to be one of those fathers who took his kids to church despite being a closeted atheist. At least there’s a happy ending to his story:

I thought that it would be nice for [my kids] to know about religion and never thought that it would take over their minds. Everyone told them that the crazy was true and I kept silent. I was an atheist raising fundamentalist kids. Just a few short years after I stopped pretending they have both come out as atheists.

There are cases (and Phil highlights one of them) where the kids have already drank the Kool-Aid and it’s too late to do anything about it.

So how do you avoid that fate? How do you make sure your kids grow up free of religion — without “indoctrinating them into atheism” the same way preachers do with Christianity?

READ MORE…

By Shirley Galdino

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Dr. Carl Sagan called the best science educator in the world of the twentieth century. Has reached the minds of hundreds of millions of people and has inspired generations of young people to devote themselves to science.

Carl Sagan’s idea was to turn the camera on the Voyager back towards the planet that had launched the probe, to reveal to the inhabitants of that planet their “true circumstance and condition.” After much resistance, Dr. Sagan had the better of February 14, 1990, from a distance of 6.4 billion miles, Voyager 1 captured this image of our Earth. Here the entire world fills only 0.12 pixel and appears as a minute sliver of light. The rays of light rays of the sun are not apparent, but an effect of diffraction in the lens of the camera, the result of having bet so close to the Sun now one of our most famous photographs ever taken from space, we consider the humility of our beloved house is part of the immeasurable will of  Sagan. READ MORE…

By: Matthew Chapman

Hitch, Matthew Chapman and Dawkins

Christopher Hitchens is dead. Huge loss. I went to school about a mile from where he went to school, we met when I was in my twenties, and then again about six years ago and became friends after sharing 3 or 4 bottles of wine and several whiskeys one lunchtime in New York.

As a once heavy drinker, I could handle all this and was still lucid, but by around 5 o’clock I was beginning to have wild and dangerous thoughts about stumbling off into worse adventures, but cut with the equally appealing idea of going home and crashing out totally.

I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. It wasn’t that alcohol had affected my sight — I could see my surroundings clearly enough. No, my face was out of focus, the face itself, and there was an insane look in the eyes that did not bode well. Going home was really the only option. READ MORE…

Posted by Shirley Galdino

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