Atheism

By Anne B. Mitchell The agreement on prayer at school graduations had everything Greenville County’s school district wanted. Students could lead prayers. Employees could bow their heads out of respect and utter a discreet “Amen” at the prayer’s conclusion. But when faced with also paying the bills for a seven-year legal battle that the American …

By Hemant Mehta A group of researchers say that public school principals in the U.S. discriminate against atheist and Muslim families, and the way they made this claim is fascinating. The new paper was published in the journal Public Administration Review, and it’s the work of Steven Pfaff (University of Washington), Charles Crabtree (Dartmouth College), Holger L. Kern (Florida State University), and John B. Holbein (University …

By Brittany A. Roston Religion may offer some people comfort, but that apparently doesn’t translate to improved sleep quality, at least according to a new study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The organization recommends that adults get at least seven hours of sleep every night, but found that Baptists and Catholics are far …

By Harriet Sherwood Prof. Alice Roberts, the broadcaster, scientist and author, has been filming this week for the third series of Channel 4’s Britain’s Most Historic Towns, after a five-month gap. “The last time we were out, back in March, people were pulling the shutters down around us. We felt very nervous. I drove home …

By Ruth Maclean Amina Ahmed knew her atheist husband was taking enormous risks with some of his Facebook posts criticizing Christianity and Islam in Nigeria, a deeply religious country. She wanted him to be free to believe whatever he wanted. But she worried that if he kept up his commentary, the staunchly Muslim community he …

By Charles Lane In the United States, one of the most consequential cultural changes of our time may be the swift and seemingly accelerating decline of religious commitment. Historically, Americans have recorded relatively high levels of worship-service attendance and belief in God, as compared with their peers in advanced industrial societies such as Europe or …

By Hemant Mehta A couple of summers ago, I spent a wonderful week working with a group of policy experts, computer programmers, and sociologists and discussing what conditions would create communities with more thoughtful, charitable, and connected atheists. It wasn’t merely some long thought experiment. There was plenty of historical data available that allowed us to gauge …

By Hemant Mehta The Center for Freethought Equality (the advocacy wing of the American Humanist Association) has publicly released its scorecard for the 116th Congress, grading House members for how they voted on a variety of resolutions and bills dealing with issues like church/state separation, blasphemy laws, faith-based discrimination, science, and more. (They shared the list with members earlier this month.) You …

By Sarah Levin After releasing its final draft last month, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has now officially approved its 2020 platform. Thanks to Secular Democrats of America’s advocacy, the platform acknowledges the non-religious, commits to ending broad religious exemptions, and recognizes the paramount importance of separation between church and state. Take a look at these passages (which go …

By Hemant Mehta Here’s something you don’t see every day… or every four years, even. A new group called the Secular Democrats of America will hold its inaugural event next week (during the Democratic Convention). Their aim is to bring together everyone who cares about state/church separation, ending faith-based neglect of children, promoting civil rights that don’t permit religious …

By Hemant Mehta For four years, from 2009-2013, Kelda Roys was a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, serving in a variety of leadership roles. She only left that otherwise-safe seat to run for Congress, in 2012, but lost her primary to the eventual winner (and current member of the Congressional Freethought Caucus) Mark Pocan. Roys took a …

By Alison Flood The Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who was held as a political prisoner in Nigeria in the 1960s, has written a letter of solidarity to the detained Nigerian humanist Mubarak Bala on his 100th day in detention. Bala, the president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, was arrested on 28 April at his home in …