The ISHV Cyber Think Tank is a digest of articles, interviews, and other musings compiled by ISHV Board Member Robert B. Tapp.
Abdullah Al Masud. FFRF sent a $5,000 stipend this spring to Abdullah as part of its “secular underground railway.” ”A modern-day Islamic renaissance is about to take place in the Indian subcontinent and ground zero is Bangladesh…Voices from people like us must be heard while Islam metastasizes.”
Daniel C. Dennett: Clergy disbelief confessions come to life. “When my wife Susan read the final draft of Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, the book Linda LaScola and I wrote about the confidential interviews Linda had conducted with nearly 30 nonbelieving clergy, her immediate reaction was that this would make a stirring play. She was right. Linda and I joined forces with New York City playwright Marin Gazzaniga, who, supported by a grant from the Richard Dawkins Foundation, combed through the thousands of pages of transcripts and assembled a play drawn directly from their interviews.”
Salman Rushdie: ‘The lunatics are running the asylum” by the Freedom From, freethoughttoday. Rushdie received FFRF’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award, which is given to public or well-known personalities who “tell it like it is” about religion…..The gods were born because human beings did not understand the world. . . .We are no longer those ignorant people who had to tell ourselves those fables. Science has better stories, and many of them are verifiable. But what is even better is that science is willing to say that it doesn’t know everything”
James A. Haught: Religion fading as intelligence rises. “”Supernatural religion is a colossal system of falsehoods. Invisible gods, devils, heavens, hells, angels, demons and other magical church entities don’t actually exist. They’re just concoctions of the human imagination…..It’s fortunate that supernatural religion is fading as America grows more intelligent. Bring it on. The faster the better.”
America’s Functional Atheism. by James A. Haught, “These worshipers clearly believe supernatural dogmas. “These worshipers clearly believe supernatural dogmas. However, they’re a shrinking fringe, relentlessly retreating. Most of America is turning secular with amazing rapidity.”
‘The Jefferson Bible’: Miracle-free and bristling with reality. by Rick Snedeker
Diogenes and Cosmopolitanism. The Dream of a World Community has Ancient Origins. By Steven Gambardella. “Of what is known of Diogenes’s ideas, cosmopolitanism is the most powerful. It would have been an extraordinarily radical and even dangerous idea to hold at the time.”
The Wisdom to Know the Difference. by David Breeden, “One of the hallmarks of non-theist religions is their insistence that human life can be improved by cognitive means — by using our thoughts, our knowledge, and our perceptions. In these traditions, wisdom comes not from the gods but from a very human combination of acquired facts and controlled intuitions. Mind. Thought.”
On Justice, Trying, and How Much is Enough. by David Breeden
How to Celebrate Walt Whitman’s Two-Hundredth Birthday by Peter Schjeldahl. “That’s because your voice, if you are fluent in American, is anticipated, pre-wired into the declarative but intimate, easy-flowing lines. It’s as if you were a phonograph needle dropped into a vinyl groove.”
Public Religion Research by Ray Kirstein.
Thomas Jefferson was a man of reason, not faith. by Rick Snedeker “When secular people, like myself, hear people going on about how America is a “Christian nation,” we bristle because it’s manifestly untrue, a self-serving myth of the Christian Right. Indeed, most of the key Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Paine, were Enlightenment men passionately devoted to the empirical realities of science and reason, not religious men in thrall to divinities.”
The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine (Michael Shermer)
How Einstein Reconciled Religion to Science
Susan Jacoby, Stop Calling Politics Our New Religion
Jack Jenkins, Watching the rise of the religious left on 1970s TV.
William Reville, ‘Science does not try to undermine religion – religion is simply irrelevant to science’. Let’s not fool ourselves. I wish religion had been an ally of science – usually it was an opponent, and in most of the world it still is.
The builder of Noah’s Ark ‘replica’ thinks libraries are LGBTQ sewers by Rick Snedeker. “Medical and psychiatric professionals reject conservative Christian view that LGBTQ people are “abominations.” They’re completely normal, in fact.”
Can a Jew also be an atheist? Can a Muslim? A Christian? By Rick Snedeker. This a part of a translated Israeli podcast. Would it have changed if the discussants were U.S. citizens?
The Metaphorical Blindness of Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. By Ben Freeland. Reflecting on the recent reencounters of the two.
James A. Haught: Religion fading as intelligence rises
Jennifer Hancock on being “stumped by emotions”
Mark Dann (FFRF) on extending availability of secular recovery programs.
James Croft, Running From the Classroom
James Haught, Can We Avoid Insulting Believers? “Maybe polite questioning is the best course in dealing with religious believers who surround you. If that doesn’t work, we can just smile to ourselves and avoid debates.”