It's my annual posting of my summary of the History Channel's Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas. Part of our American Christmas tradition is for people to throw around the phrase "the true meaning of Christmas." What that phrase usually refers to is an...
The phrase "spiritual but not religious" isn't new. It's been around for decades and when I first encountered it, I considered myself spiritual but not religious. It was the late 1990's and I was part of Unity in Chicago. The Unity Church was co-founded by Charles...
It's my annual posting of my summary of the History Channel's Christmas Unwrapped: The History of Christmas. Part of our American Christmas tradition is for people to throw around the phrase "the true meaning of Christmas." What that usually means is...
Holy Easter cake in the shape of The Lamb. I never know what to do with Easter, so I think this year I will finally do absolutely nothing and feel fine about it. I was raised Catholic, but always found this holiday disappointing and sad compared to my favorite,...
I added HBO to my cable package just to see the original documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. I had braced myself for the children's stories of sexual abuse, their nightmare of growing up with this paralyzing secret and the descriptions of...
ArkansasMatters.com ran this article on November 19th: "Charlie Brown Christmas Show Causes Church and State Controversy." It reports that a Little Rock church was performing matinees of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" for local schools. The schools sent permission slips...
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, What's God Got to Do with It? Michael Shermer reports that last week the House of Representatives voted to keep "In God We Trust" as the national motto. He writes that Congress originally adopted the phrase in 1956 when many Americans...
Ozzie, the four-year-old pitbull mix we adopted from a shelter, has now been with us for three and a half weeks. He's fit into our household smoothly with no housetraining, chewing or barking problems. He doesn't get anxious when left alone and is always affectionate...
So on September 8th, Kathy Griffin accepted an Emmy Award with the words, "Suck it, Jesus. This award is my God, now." And that event has caused believers, free speech supporters and atheists alike to respond to each other's responses. At www.suckitjesus.com [NOTE: no...
These rough two weeks after being fired have made me grateful for one thing: that I don't believe in a god. Growing up I believed in a Catholic god, but had no clear idea of what that god was like. At the age of 19, as I put it in one of my songs, I gave Catholicism...
I have always found Easter depressing. It’s like the pale, listless cousin of Christmas. I don’t understand it because Jesus being born was certainly a big deal, but wasn’t him rising from the dead an even more impressive event? Christmas was the day this baby god was...
It's admirable that people want to include the entire planet in their holiday greeting without leaving anyone out, but the phrase "Happy Holidays" is starting to sound euphemistic to me. It almost sounds to me like a fearful phrase, said to appease the anger of those...
Hey, now we atheists have a lobbyist in Washington D.C. too! From a USA Today article "Non-believers raising voice in capital": "Lori Lipman Brown starts Monday as executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. Her two goals: keep religion out of government...
Funny how my 4/19/05 post on the pope ("Benedict XVI") was all of two and a half lines long, but received quite a bit of commentary. I'd like to consider Lon's in particular. He wrote, in part: Why do so many people cling to Catholicism when they don't really try to...
The March 21 issue of Newsweek carries the article, “The Battle for Latino Souls”, which describes the current push of Protestant churches to get Hispanics to leave our traditional Catholic faith and join them. I didn’t realize the trend was in that direction, but...