• The Hunger Games: Does God Hate the Bible Belt?

    A new study by Gallup indicates that nearly one in five Americans say they don’t have enough money for food. At the risk if being dismissed as a socialist, I express my deepst sorrow at this level of poverty and inequality that is affecting us collectively.
    But what is striking in the following graph is the solid band of dark green spanning the entire South. It is like God is deliberately trying to make matters worse where Southern Baptists live.

    Of course I do not believe that people living in the South are being punished for worshipping the wrong god, or that god is acting in mysterious ways and is somehow showing his love for them. On the other hand there is plenty of evidence suggesting that excess religiosity can be secondary to societal dysfunction: religion grows when things are bad, and this is just one example. I hope to make this a central theme of my future writings.

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    Article by: No Such Thing As Blasphemy

    I was raised in the Islamic world. By accident of history, the plague that is entanglement of religion and government affects most Muslim majority nations a lot worse the many Christian majority (or post-Christian majority) nations. Hence, I am quite familiar with this plague. I started doubting the faith I was raised in during my teen years. After becoming familiar with the works of enlightenment philosophers, I identified myself as a deist. But it was not until a long time later, after I learned about evolutionary science, that I came to identify myself as an atheist. And only then, I came to know the religious right in the US. No need to say, that made me much more passionate about what I believe in and what I stand for. Read more...