Whether she is elected president or not, Hillary Clinton is and will remain for some time a leading figure in the Democratic Party. Her views on matters like religion, the role of religion in government and public life, church/state separation, secularism, faith-based initiatives, reproductive choice, atheists and atheism, religion in public school, and related issues should matter to atheists. Secular atheists need to know where she really stands on religious and secular issues.

 

Read More: Hillary Clinton on Religion, Religious Faith, Secularism, Atheism, Church/State Separation

There seems to be an increasing number of people responding to atheist critiques of religion or theism by labeling the person a "fundamentalist" atheist. The label is problematic because there are no essential or "fundamental" beliefs for an atheist to be "fundamentalist" about. So why do people use the label? Why do so many people feel that the label is appropriate? This seems to be mostly due to misunderstandings about and prejudice against fundamentalism.

 

Read Article: Myth: Militant Atheists are Atheist Fundamentalists, a New Atheism

Tax-exempt organizations all have to follow the same rule when it comes to political activity: they aren't allowed to do it. Being tax-exempt isn't a right that any organization has, be they religious or secular; instead, it's a privilege created by Congress. Some don't like the strings that come attached to that privilege, especially the condition of staying out of partisan politics. Actually, it's mostly just conservative, evangelical churches that don't like it.

They don't have to refrain from speaking out on political issues, they just can't take sides in political campaigns and that's what they really want. Now the Alliance Defense Fund is trying to organize theocatic-minded ministers to make partisan, political sermons shortly before the next presidential election. The intent is to create test cases so a sympathetic judge can declare it unconstitutional that churches aren't allowed to use tax-exempt money to interfere in political campaigns. Read more...

Should religious organizations and religious materials be exempt from all taxes? Most sales and other taxes tend to be "generally applicable" — that is, they are applied to all parties, regardless of what it is they are doing or selling. Some people believe, however, that even if everyone else has to pay such taxes, religions should be totally exempt because the collection of such taxes violates both the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment.

 

Read Article: Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. California (1990)

A popular myth for the Christian Right is the idea that atheists forced God, prayer, and Bible reading out of public schools, leading to social, moral, and educational disasters which continue to plague America. By promoting such beliefs, the Christian Right encourages people to think that atheists are a threat to both religious liberty as well as social order, that America is worse off than it once was, and that proper Christianity is the solution to everything troubling us.

 

Read Article: Don't Take God Out of Schools

There are many tactics used by opponents of church/state separation aside from denying that such separation is valid at all. One popular choice is to argue that every possible alternative to their religion is equally "religious" and therefore it's not possible to truly separate church from state. This requires arguing, in part, that very concept of non-religious ("secular") doesn't exist at all. Read more...

Most atheists and agnostics were not raised that way, especially in America where secular atheism remains a minority. Instead, most atheists were raised in religious households and among them, most were raised in Christian environments: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal — the entire spectrum of Christianity. Even if the family didn't go to church regularly, the type of Christianity preferred tended to affect the overall religious and familial environment. If you were Christian once, what sort was it?

I've seen it suggested that the type of Christianity a person was raised with can have a strong effect on their atheism later on. A person with a fundamentalist background, for example, might become an atheist who is far more inflexible than a person who had a more liberal Catholic upbringing. Do you suppose this might be true? After all, we can't even always identify the ways in which our upbringing affects our attitudes, methods of thinking, and personal inclinations.

Given this, it's not hard to imagine that some aspects of our religious background — especially if the religion was indoctrinated into us from a very young age — will continue to influence our habits of thinking and attitudes even when we have long since abandoned the outward trappings of that religion. Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to say that we have "given up" religion unless we have spent some time looking how the unconscious ways in which a religion might continue to affect the way we approach questions about politics, philosophy, and of course religion itself.

 

 

 

 

 

Most tend to think of theology in the context of modern religions traditions, but the concept dates back to ancient Greece. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle used it in to reference the study of the Olympian gods and the writings of authors like Homer. The earliest theological works in Christianity were written by church fathers who attempted to construct coherent frameworks through which people could better understand the nature of God’s revelations to humanity through Jesus.

 

Read Article: Origins of Theology

Contraception and abortion are fundamental to women’s rights and equality because denying women a choice in such matters means placing a woman's body in the service of another — and one who arguably isn't fully a person or deserving of the rights which a woman should have. The conflict here is made most clear, perhaps, when we emphasize the fact that criminalizing contraception or abortion means using the state to force women to carry pregnancies to term — or in other words, forcing women to turn their bodies over to a fetus and serve as an incubation chamber. Read more...

Atheists are a minority in American society, so it's harder for them to find dates or potential spouses who are also nonbelievers than it is for atheists in other nations. This makes the question of dating or marrying a believer much more of an issue for Americans than it is for others: if you are inclined against it, then the dating pool for you is quite small. If you are willing to date or marry a believer, though, you may be opening the door for a lot more stress than you would otherwise have. Read more...