Jessica Ahlquist, the 16-year-old behind the prayer mural ban at Cranston High School West in Cranston, Rhode Island, just can’t seem to keep her name out of the news.

Months after she won her ACLU-led battle, the teenager continues to receive both attention — and threats. While she’s been quiet over the past few weeks regarding her take on atheist demands that a WWI and WWII monument in front of a Woonsocket, Rhode Island, firehouse, be removed, she’s finally speaking out.

Ahlquist, who was initially accused by some of having involvement in her state’s latest battle between atheists, believers and pro-military families, has consistently denied playing a role in the spat. But on Tuesday, she posted a message on her Twitter account that, at the least, clears up her views on the Christ-inspired memorial.

via Teen Atheist Goes on Rampage Against Religious Freedom | U.S. Constitutional Free Press.

An Oregon mother of seven is being sued for defamation by her former church over critical comments she made online.

Julie Anne Smith, a stay-at-home mom who home-schools her children, said church members began shunning her and her family after they left Beaverton Grace Bible Church almost four years ago.

She took to the Web in October 2009 to air her concerns about the church’s practices on Google reviews, but said her comments kept being pushed down by other church members’ more recent reviews. So in February of this year, Smith launched a blog called Beaverton Grace Bible Church Survivors to counteract what she called the “cat and mouse game” on Google.

“My primary issue was to discuss spiritual abuse in the church,” Smith told msnbc.com. “In essence, the legal suit is [O'Neal's] attempt of continuing that spiritual abuse.”

via U.S. News – Oregon mom sued by church over online criticism.

The article, “Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life,” by Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University represents an important advance in our growing understanding of the relationship between the brain and religion. The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation. It is a surprising result, given that many prior studies have shown religion to have potentially beneficial effects on brain function, anxiety, and depression.

via Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain: Scientific American.

Secular Americans’ worst fears have come true: there is now scientific evidence that evangelical churches brainwash believers. They don’t merely teach that Adam and Eve actually existed and that gay marriage is an abomination. They change the way their members’ brains work. But T. M. Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist at Stanford, argues that this is not as insidious as it sounds. On the contrary, mental conditioning has a noble lineage in the history of religion, and even or especially in this modern age, it can help humans flourish. “When God Talks Back” explains how rational people living in the 21st century can believe that God speaks to them — and why the rest of us should take them ­seriously

via ‘When God Talks Back,’ by T.M. Luhrmann – NYTimes.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nyregion/10indulgence.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

31-year-old Alexander Aan faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for posting “God does not exist” on Facebook. The civil servant was attacked and beaten by an angry mob of dozens who entered his government office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board on Wednesday. The Indonesian man was taken into protective police custody Friday since he was afraid of further physical assault.

The posting was made on a Facebook Page titled Ateis Minang (Minang Atheist), which Aan created. At the time of writing, it had over 1,700 Likes. Aan’s posting has been removed, but supporters on the Page are urging police to release him.

Dharmasraya Police Chief Sr. Comr. Chairul Aziz said the district branch of the council and other Islamic organizations believed Aan had defiled Islam by using passages from the Koran to denounce the existence of God and highlight his atheist views. “So it meets the criteria of tainting religion, in this case Islam,” Chairul told The Jakarta Globe.

via Man faces five years for ‘God does not exist’ Facebook post | ZDNet.

Dan Savage, creator of the It Gets Better Project, was invited to speak as a keynote speaker at NSPA/ JEA’s annual High School Journalism convention, Journalism on the Edge.

via Dan Savage discusses bible at High School Journalism convention – YouTube.

Martin McVeigh, the Northern Irish priest who accidentally displayed pictures of pornography on his memory stick to a group of parents, has taken a sabbatical from priesthood.

According to CNN, McVeigh asked his parish for a leave of absence after last month’s incident in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. McVeigh released a statement Sunday, describing that he destroyed the memory stick.

“After the images were inadvertently shown, I immediately removed the memory stick from the laptop,” McVeigh said. “In my shock and upset and in my concern to ensure that the images would never be shown again, I destroyed it later that evening.”

“In the hope of bringing resolution and healing to the division and pain within the parish, I have taken the decision to ask Cardinal Brady to allow me to leave the parish of Pomeroy and to take sabbatical leave. The memory of this awful episode will remain with me for the rest of my life.”

via Priest takes leave of absence for accidentally showing gay porn | The Raw Story.

A new report from the University of Chicago has shed light on the growth of atheism in Europe.

The report from the university’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) also found that belief in God is stronger among older people than younger generations.

The findings were based on an analysis of surveys conducted in 30 countries in 1991, 1998 and 2008.

Countries with the largest atheist populations tended to be in north-west Europe or former communist states while countries with fewer atheists tended to be in the developing world, with the exception of the US, Israel and Cyprus.

Sweden, Latvia, Denmark, Britain and Norway had some of the highest proportions of atheists.

via Report points to decline in belief | Christian News on Christian Today.

Muslim:

Whereas the religionist comprehends that in order for there to be a car in the street, both infrastructures required a cognizant planner to design and construct them. While even to make a computer, a thinking machine, there required that same cognizant planner, the human being.[] How be it now when we consider the human being, a complex thinking machine, does he not also require a planner and designer to have designed him and the infrastructure around him, in similitude to the human designing the street and the car?

Atheist:

A better debunk of the above claim.

Living things are so perfectly adapted to their environments and have such intricately amazing inner workings, they must have been purposefully designed. That designer was God. How else can you explain the beauty of a flower or the power of a jaguar? Those things could not have arisen by accident.

Objections: This argument also makes two assumptions, both of which are wrong. The first is that living organisms are perfectly formed. Unfortunately for the argument, and for living creatures, this just isn’t so. Our bodies have many design flaws that no engineer would have allowed. For example, the mammalian laryngeal nerve, which connects the brain to the larynx, does so via a detour around the aorta. In giraffes, it takes over fifteen feet of nerve length to cover the few inches from brain to larynx. Would you choose to loop an extension cord through the middle of your kitchen and back to a plug six inches from the end of your toaster?

Besides, arguing that creatures are perfectly designed for their environments points to a lack of imagination in my opinion. If dolphins were really perfectly designed for their watery environment, wouldn’t they have gills? Or extendable snorkels?

The second assumption is that even if the design is poor, it’s still the only explanation for how living things came to look the way they do. Wrong again. There’s a much better explanation for the diversity of life, and that is evolution. It’s thanks to our common ancestry with fish that our laryngeal nerves shoot off in the wrong direction and have to make a u-turn. In fish, this nerve goes to the last of the gills at the back of the head. As mammals evolved, the gills moved around and became other organs (such as the larynx) but the laryngeal nerve still had to start out in its original direction toward the bottom of the neck.

Via: Facebook

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/newshome/13381016/pell-says-adam-and-eve-didnt-exist

New University of Otago research suggests that when non-religious people think about their own death they become more consciously skeptical about religion, but unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief.The Department of Psychology research also found that when religious people think about death, their religious beliefs appear to strengthen at both conscious and unconscious levels. The researchers believe the findings help explain why religion is such a durable feature of human society.In three studies, which involved 265 university students in total, religious and nonreligious participants were randomly assigned to “death priming” and control groups. Priming involved asking participants to write about their own death or, in the control condition, about watching TV.

via Death Anxiety Increases Atheists’ Unconscious Belief in God | The Muslim Times: A Blog to Foster Universal Brotherhood.

(Reuters) – A 23-year-old man testified on Wednesday in the child sex abuse case against the Philadelphia Catholic Archdiocese that he was molested by two priests, one of whom prosecutors said had been known to church officials as a sex abuser years earlier.

The testimony came at the trial of Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of the clergy, who is charged with child endangerment and conspiracy over accusations he covered up abuse allegations against priests, many of whom were simply transferred to unsuspecting parishes.

The case has put a spotlight on the Philadelphia Archdiocese, the nation’s sixth largest with 1.5 million adherents, and experts say has likely caught the eye of the Vatican, given Lynn’s rank as the highest U.S. church official to go to trial in the abuse scandal.

Lynn faces the possibility of 28 years in prison if convicted.

Wednesday’s witness testified that in 1998 when he was 10 years old and serving as an altar boy, he was abused by Rev. Charles Engelhardt and Edward Avery, who is no longer a priest, at St. Jerome’s in northeast Philadelphia. Reuters does not identify victims of sexual assault unless they come forward to identify themselves.

Avery ordered him to do a strip tease in a church storage room, he testified.

“I was swaying back and forth and took off my clothes,” he said before detailing sex acts that he said Avery demanded.

He said that before the abuse incidents: “I was happy. I was outgoing, a people person.” In the years that followed, he said he battled drug abuse and as a teenager attempted suicide.

Prosecutors said the Archdiocese knew seven years earlier that Avery had abused someone else and not only did nothing but transferred him to St. Jerome’s.

Avery pleaded guilty and is serving up to five years in prison for sex crimes, while Engelhardt awaits separate trial on sex abuse charges.

Prosecutors also read several memos to the jury that Lynn had written about allegations of sexual misbehavior by Francis Giliberti, a monsignor in Media, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s.

The memos described Giliberti watching boys masturbate and, in one incident, inspecting a boy’s genitals. He was removed from the ministry in 2004 and has never been criminally charged.

The prosecutors sought to use the memos to bolster their case that Lynn did nothing about complaints against Giliberti.

“It shows how outrageous his activity and inactivity was,” Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington said.

via Ex-altar boy testifies about sexual abuse by Philadelphia priests | Reuters.

A Brazilian actor has died after accidentally hanging himself while playing Judas in an Easter Passion play.

Tiago Klimeck, 27, was enacting the suicide of Judas during the performance on Good Friday in the city of Itarare.

The actor was hanging for four minutes before fellow performers realised something was wrong.

Klimeck was taken to hospital suffering from cerebral hypoxia but died on Sunday.

The Passion play was being performed in Itarare, 345km (214 miles) west of Sao Paulo.

Klimeck was re-enacting the scene in which Judas commits suicide in repentance for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.

Police are investigating the apparatus that was meant to support Klimeck. It appears the knot may have been erroneously tied.

When the actors realised something was wrong, Klimeck was taken down and found to be unconscious.

The Santa Casa de Itapeva hospital has confirmed the death and an autopsy will take place on Monday.

via BBC News – Brazil actor playing Judas dies from accidental hanging.

The horrors of religion continue today and only world wide exposure can bring mankind to understand just how these religions lie, cheat, and steal their way through life
http://www.rationalistinternational.net/