Bill Donohue Mocks Rape Victims on TV

When can a man openly mock rape victims in the national media and get away with it? Not only get away with it, but still be seen as a honorable man to look up to? Simple, this man just needs to be Bill Donohue and all kinds of unbelievably vile crap can come out of [...]

The Wolverton Bible

Preview image from Basil Wolverton’s graphic Bible.

Jephthah (Judges 11)

One of the “quirkier” stories in the Bible.

The Ark, Yahweh’s Throne

The Ark of the Covenant is more than just a prop from an Indiana Jones film, it’s in the Bible! What is it, you ask? Well, we know it was an important story in Judah, but not in northern Israel, since it is never mentioned in the E source, and that it was the claim [...]

Hitchens and Blackwell on Hardball

Pre-Christian Christianity

An ancient tablet found in the West Bank (the one in Israel, not Minneapolis) and dating to 100BC mentions a messiah dying and being resurrected after 3 days. Was the central tenant of Christianity a popular Jewish tradition at the time? Of course it was, why even ask. If you don’t think so, you’ve been [...]

The Sacrifice of Isaac

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac is a controversial one; often held up as being a story of great devotion by Believers and shunned as a story of a brutal father by skeptics. A bit of deeper study of the story may make it even more controversial.
The story is attributed to the E source, [...]

Mithras

Mithraism was a mystery religion (a religion requiring an initiation rite and secrecy from non-members) popular in the Roman Empire from the first to the fourth century AD. The members met in a cave or other underground structure, known as a mithraeum, and we have found hundreds of them all over the Roman Empire (modern [...]

Do Invisible Agents Control the World?

Micheal Shermer has an article in Scientific American titled Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World.
I think that a major reason people believe in religion is because they never view their own religion with the same skepticism that they view others. Take the Jehovah’s Witness proclamation of Jesus’s second coming in 1975 (or any [...]

Celibacy “May Be Flawed” say former Bishop

President of Paraguay and former Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo admitted that the vows of celibacy taken by the Catholic Church aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. He had to, really, since he also admitted to fathering a child while a bishop.
Now, if the Catholic Church with it’s two thousand years of studying human nature [...]