A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism.
Check out this article in the LA Times about Secular Family Values and how great they are. It’s a few months old, but worth reading and relevant to many conversations held here. The conclusion will reassure many MSP readers: Being a secular parent and something of an expert on secular culture, I know well the […]
Continue ReadingThe Swiss post-mo club had a fantastic party yesterday — thanks friends!! — and the subject of the recent Mormon Stories interview with my brother (John Hamer) came up. I had linked to it for about a week in the “Exmo Radio” widget (until replacing it with a discussion of SCOTUS, DOMA, etc), but I […]
Continue ReadingIn my last SiOB, I highlighted a list of “things that both atheists and Mormons can largely affirm together” by Aaron Shafovaloff. Then Andrew S picked up the discussion and even attracted Aaron Shafovaloff himself to attempt to explain it. I had highlighted the list mostly because many of the items were so hilariously off. […]
Continue ReadingIn the Fall 2011 issue of Dialogue (44:3), Gregory Prince interviews Shaun A. Casey about religion and presidential politics in light of his recently published book, “The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960.” Just one page in is this exchange: Prince: When was the religion of the candidate first an issue? Was […]
Continue ReadingThe following is an article I wrote for the October / November 2011 issue of Free Inquiry (the magazine of the Council for Secular Humanism), reposted here with permission from the editors. The Oct/Nov issue is a special issue on Mormonism, and one other MSP regular also contributed to it. I am an atheist, but […]
Continue ReadingOriginally published at the USU SHAFT site. Ive enjoyed several of the videos produced by The Thinking Atheist. This video, however, should make them reconsider their (already rather smarmy) name. In the video, several atheists relate their Christian upbringing, which they now not-so-fondly remember as brainwashing. Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim […]
Continue ReadingI’ve read a number of articles and book chapters over the last month or so that have started to change the way I think about religion. After leaving Mormonism and becoming a secular humanist and atheist, I thought the superiority of my new views would be self-evident to anyone who took the time to consider […]
Continue ReadingI just finished reading a two-volume set on atheism and secularity. There were a number of interesting findings in the books. I’ll probably post about a few more of them. But I’ll start with this one from p. 98: Whereas 62 percent of heterosexual respondents are believers, only 42 percent of LGB respondents are believers. […]
Continue ReadingYou get arguments like Lane Williams’s in the MormonTimes this morning. Williams begins by lamenting the fact that atheists occasionally receive media attention: Reporters have provided a great deal of attention to these atheists, stoking the controversy over the existence of God. Even if reporters had no purpose to question religious faith, doubts have become […]
Continue ReadingI was very sick when I converted to Mormonism. I like to joke that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to the brain, but the more mundane truth is that I was confronted with the reality of my mortality, and like many people, I panicked. I couldn’t really die, right? I’m too solid, too complex to […]
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