atheism

Debaptism – making it official

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In the US, The Freedom from Religion foundation offers a “Debaptism Certificate”. The picture is too small to see, so to help you out, the text reads …

I, having been subjected to a Christian baptism before reaching an age of consent, or having submitted to baptism before embracing freethought and reason, hereby officially renounce that primitive rite and the Church that imposed it. I categorically reject the creeds, dogmas, and superstitions of my former religion, particularly the pernicious doctrines of ‘Original Sin’ and damnation.
“I further denounce as an affront and defamation to humanity the false and demeaning belief that any baby is born with ‘Original Sin’ and must be cleansed of it by baptism. From this day forward, I wish to be excluded from any claims of religious affiliation or membership based on baptismal records.

Why would you take this step? Well, perhaps one good reason is to remove yourself from the statistics that are used by the churches to demand more privileges, and perhaps also to break the formal connection with institutions that are counterproductive to peace, harmony and common sense. Another thought is to simply “come out” within your community, or to initiate a public debate. Evangelical noises are getting louder and louder, so its a way to push back and take a stand.

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Creationism, Holocaust Denial and The ID Crowd

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Guest Post
Creeping Creationism or Galloping Intolerance at the Edinburgh Science Festival?

Creationism, Holocaust Denial and The ID Crowd

by Keith Gilmour

On Wednesday 20th April, I spoke at an event organised, by the Humanist Society of Scotland, for the Edinburgh International Science Festival. The topic was “The Threat of Creeping Creationism in Scottish Schools.” This took place in the University of Edinburgh’s Informatics Forum.

As a secondary school RME/RMPS teacher, I began my contribution with a summary of my school’s RME/RMPS curriculum before going on to highlight some of the unsolicited ID and creationist literature (books, DVDs, etc) that have been sent out to our school. Some had been addressed to the Head Teacher, some to the Science department, and some to my own.

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UK, an evolving post-christian secular nation

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Social researchers have been looking into the attitudes of the growing numbers of non-religious young Britons. Its an important question to ask because if the recent polls are correct, then the majority of the population in the UK are not religious. Let me spell that out for you … if you take every possible form of religious belief, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu and lots more, add up all the followers in the population, you find that together they are a minority.

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Why do atheists exist?

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A question some often ask is “Why do rational sane people believe utterly irrational things?”. However, a far more interesting question to ask is to wonder why skeptics and non-believers exist. Think about it now, every culture we know has embraced some form of belief in the supernatural, so why do we have non-believers? There … Read more

How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously – AC Grayling

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The philosopher, AC Grayling, was interviewed in last Sunday’s  Guardian about his new book, “The Good Book: A Secular Bible”.  You really should read both the interview, and of course the book itself. To temp you, here is a small extract from the interview:

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The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.

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