Fact Check: Are There 42 Bible Verses In the Constitution?

This week, a Christian Nationalist preacher at the Abundant Life Church in Lee's Summit, Missouri declared that "There’s forty-two bible verses in the Constitution, and when you look at the Amendments for the Bill of Rights and you read through them it’s almost all right out of the bible.”

The statement was delivered so directly, so authoritatively, that we…

U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who represents the 5th district of the state of Washington in Congress, has introduced H. Res. 874, a resolution that would provide official federal government support to the designation of a National Year of Humiliation.

The National Year of Humiliation resolution would, if passed,…

If US Senator Josh Hawley is known for one thing, it's his fist raised in the air in solidarity with the mob of Christian Nationalists on January 6, 2021, just before they stormed the US Capitol building in an attempt to assassinate members of Congress and overthrow the federal government of the United States.

The Christian Nationalism of Josh Hawley wasn't confined to just that one moment, however. His extremist Christian Nationalist ideology isn't just a flash in the pan. It's a…

I thought I'd better introduce myself in case anyone looks at my profile. I'm an artist, unpublished writer and poet, and disability worker who worked with individuals with severe mental health conditions and challenging behaviours. I was studying psychology at the time of this job with the view of becoming a researcher specialising in the development of ethical reasoning. My goal was to find the optimal, educational strategy/strategies to improve ethical reasoning in children through to…

What if we, for a second, suspend disbelief and agree that the Christian god is real?

So, there's this superpowerful magical being that nobody but his special friends can see, and he wants to take over the United States and unleash a bloody apocalypse that will pretty much kill everybody so that he can rule forever and…

Almost six years ago, my former husband broke her cupboard and came out as a woman. To that day we had not understood why she had suffered so long and so very much from anxiety and depression. The situation called for change, and things started at an increasing rate. In the next months we  started to find her clothes and she went to her job in a dress, wearing a wig until her hair grew longer. Intake at the gender clinic started and a year later she started hormones and hair removal. In the…

We all are familiar with the threat to American democracy from Donald Trump and his Christian Nationalist followers. Trump has converted the GOP into a party that’s centered around Christian Nationalism.

Many Christian Nationalists are Republican, and so it’s easy to…

The sailor does not pray for wind, he learns to sail.

-- Gustaf Lindborg



The above is a wonderfully succinct expression of the kind of pragmatism I prefer to have in my life and which I wish that more people could embrace.  When I interact with the world, there is a natural desire to be effective in my actions, to achieve what I desire and enjoy the fruits of that accomplishment.  If any of that is going to happen, though, my actions must conform to the laws of physics…

It is estimated that the age of the earth is 4.54 billion years +/- 0.05 billion years.

First life began (scientific guestimate) at 3.8 billion years ago. That is it took only 0.75 billion years for life to appear on the new world.

In universal terms that would be just an instant.

Let’s speculate how life started. We have an ocean called the primordial soup ( a sea of serendipitous synchronicity and coincidences) into which one day falls and asteroid bringing with it…

It’s finally happened.  The smoking gun has been discovered in unique, utterly new evidence, the data has been verified, all the tests confirm it … THERE IS A GOD.  Now what?  For me, beyond a shrug and a bit of bemusement, little or no change.



Oh, but aren’t you excited or thrilled?  You see, we were right all along!  Wassamatta, eating too much crow?  Those sour grapes turning in your stomach?



Nope, don’t like grapes and crow isn’t on my…

The biggest problem religion faces in hawking its wares is that its primary product – “god” – is unavailable for examination, mostly because it doesn’t exist.  Yet religions continue to insist with zealous ferocity that their god is out there and that it must be acknowledged, worshiped, and obeyed.  As a primary result of this, the game of religion necessarily becomes a shell game, which has its deity hidden behind mysteries and obtuse dogma and holy books which require interpretation for…

This is just a quick idea out of left field. The root of this idea is in part based on a prior blog post I wrote about how there's no resurrection in the Biblical resurrection story. Briefly, Jesus dies and goes to the afterlife, then goes to a different part of the afterlife, then appears occasionally as a ghost. It's a missing body story, but at no point is it a resurrection story.

What I'd like to do is throw out one more conspiratorial influence behind some of this story. In the…

I wrote the following a LONG time ago, long before Atheist Universe or Atheist Nexus or even before there were websites and browsers to read them with.  It was originally posted on Jim Maxey's Event Horizon BBS, back in the early 90s, and I thought that, considering the overturning of Roe v Wade, it would be appropriate to put it up here once again [with slight modifications] and remind people just how specious and poorly thought-out the reasons that evangelicals and other abortion…

Scripture says — Jill and I have talked about this in different contexts, in other contexts: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”  So many crushed spirits.



So, tonight, I ask the nation to pray for them, to give the parents and siblings the strength in the darkness they feel right now.



As a nation, we have to ask: When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?  When in God’s name will we do what we…

Ceremonial deism is a legal term used in the United States to designate governmental religious references and practices deemed to be mere ritual and non-religious through long customary usage.

-- Wikipedia



Again, referring to Wikipedia, the term, “ceremonial deism” was first coined in 1962, by the then-dean of the Yale Law School, Eugene Rostrow, and subsequently used by the Supreme Court in…

Hello, everyone just wanted to make a quick update on my life, If anyone cares. lol. Lot has happened since the last time I posted. I published three books. I changed my name. I came out as a pansexual transgender and changed my gender marker to female. I helped start a local LGBTQ activist group in my area. It's been fulfilling! 

He sees you when you're sleeping.

He knows when you're awake.

He knows if you've been bad or good.

So be good for goodness sake……

There is a school of thought which says that atheism offers no comfort to those who hurt, who mourn the unfairness of life, the proverbial “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and cling to religion on the chance that the next life will be a marked improvement on this one.  I submit that this is a mistaken concept, that there can be comfort in the absence of a deity and indeed, a demonstrably better existence in the one life we have.  The four points listed below give some expression to…

Blaise Pascal (the 17th century French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, writer, and Catholic theologian) is world famous for his little "wager". Most atheists are painfully aware of it.

Pascal was inspired to write it in 1654, in one of his most famous works Pensées, after having a "religious experience". This unlikely state of mind puzzles me, since Pascal was an…

The Christian crucifix actually represents a condemnation of human rights and morality. After all, this religion’s imaginary God boasts about drowning nearly the entire population of humans on Earth—including…