Reba Boyd Wooden, the director of Center for Inquiry Indiana, was recently on a panel discussion called “Faces of Faith” at a local healthcare center.

She tried to explain how some atheists may feel in a hospital:

Imagine this scene: You are in a hospital. You are very ill and may be dying. Someone comes in to talk with you. They tell you that your religion is based on myth and superstition. There is no heaven or hell. You have wasted your life believing in things that aren’t true. You must renounce your faith before you die. Scary?

Imagine this scene: You are in a hospital. You are very ill and may be dying. Someone comes in and says, “Do you know Jesus?” You must know Jesus or you will burn in hell for all eternity. You must accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior or face eternal damnation. Let me give you the sacraments so that you will go to heaven.

Scary? Yes. This is the nightmare that many people who are not religious have.

I’ve never heard of the first scenario happening, but the second one happens all the time.

Has anyone here encountered the religious presence in hospitals or do you know someone who has?

I’m pleasantly surprised the organizers of the event put a Secular Humanist on the panel in the first place.

There was a great outcome at the end of this, too.

Some background: Wooden explained five problems Secular Humanists can encounter in a hospital — I’ll jump to the end of the list:

5) There are no non religious chaplains at the hospitals as far as I know. I am sure that most chaplains honor the patient’s personal tradition but just the stress of having to explain to a well meaning and seemly respectful chaplain why they do not want to talk to a chaplain may be more than a severely ill person can handle and they should not have to do so. They may still fear that because the chaplain is religious that they will try to push their views on them. We at CFI would like to be allowed to have a team of trained volunteers on call who have the same privileges as lay visitors from churches and can visit, talk with, and give comfort to nonreligious people.

…

As an outcome of my being on this panel, Father Lyon and others from the medical center will be coming to CFI Indiana to train volunteers for a “hospital visitation team” who will be on call to serve the nonreligious. I already have ten of our members who have volunteered to be on the team.

That’s fantastic! Let’s work on spreading this idea so that atheists also have someone to talk to when they must be in a hospital setting.

(via Center for Inquiry)

Greta Christina explains 11 myths and truths about atheism (with a bit of riffing off of Sam Harris‘ original list of 10).

She explains each of these in depth, but here’s her overall list:

1: Atheism are 100% convinced that there is no God, as blindly faithful as religious fundamentalists.

2: Atheists are immoral: without religion, there’s no basis for morality.

3: Atheists are angry and unhappy, with no meaning to their lives, and no hope.

4: Atheists are disrespectful, intolerant, and mean.

5: Atheists are whiny.

6: Atheists are just being trendy.

7: Atheists are just angry with God, or with religion. They’re angry about abuses in religious organizations; about actions of God that they don’t understand; or because God puts restrictions on them that they don’t like.

8: Atheists are arguing with straw men: they criticize the ugliest, stupidest, most simplistic, most outdated versions of religion, and ignore the thoughtful, complex forms of serious modern theology.

9: Atheists are responsible for the worst crimes in history: Stalin, Mao, etc.

10: Atheists think science belongs to them; atheists treat science as their religion.

11: Atheists think they’re superior.

Is there anything else you can think of that should have been included?

Melbourne Catholic Church is now going to be “testing” priests to make sure they don’t have The Gay:

Under the guidelines, potential priests who “appear” to be gay must be banned.

…

Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby spokeswoman Hayley Conway said the church was sending a ‘‘dangerous and offensive’’ message about sexuality.

…

‘‘If the plan is to root out pedophilia or child molestation, targeting people with homosexual tendencies isn’t the way to go about it.’’

This will end well…

You know, for some reason, I just don’t trust the gaydar in the Catholic Church.

But if it helps get more people out of the Church, I guess it’s not all bad…

I wonder: How will they be “tested”?

Cynical-C speculates:

I wonder if the test will be true/false, essays, or something a bit more interactive

So from now on, if you hear of a pedophilia scandal in the Church, you can sleep safely knowing it’s only a heterosexual priest doing the raping.

You’ve heard this already, I presume, but the James Randi Educational Foundation YouTube account was suspended yesterday.

Usually, these types of situations get resolved in a day’s time… but just in case:

To complain to YouTube, follow this link.

Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue.”

Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion (the account in question is JamesRandiFoundation).

For good measure, whoever is behind this got to the Rational Response Squad, too.

I’m not feeling very sympathetic toward any religion at the moment.

Here’s an awful story for you:

Members of One Mind Ministries… denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say “Amen” at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.

The boy’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, agreed to plead guilty to “child abuse resulting in death” instead of murder… with one catch (you know the prosecutors felt safe with this one):

Ramkissoon, 22, has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge on one condition: The charges against her must be dropped if her son, Javon Thompson, is resurrected.

Here’s where it gets even stranger.

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

“She wasn’t delusional, because she was following a religion,” Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors’ psychiatric evaluation.

Some people may ask: Why are those things mutually exclusive, especially in this case?

She chose to follow her beliefs and didn’t suffer from any actual mental illness or disorder. Because of that, she should face a harsher sentence.

Her attorney is arguing she wasn’t acting on her own free will:

Silverman said he and prosecutors think Ramkissoon was brainwashed and should have been found not criminally responsible; prosecutors declined to comment. Although an inability to think critically can be a sign of brainwashing, experts said, the line between that and some religious beliefs can be difficult to discern.

“At times there can be an overlap between extreme religious conviction and delusion,” said Robert Jay Lifton, a cult expert and psychiatrist who lectures at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a difficult area for psychiatry and the legal system.”

Lost in all this is the fact that an innocent child died because his family harbored absurd religious beliefs. It’s not the first time that’s happened and it won’t be the last.

As if the rest of it wasn’t enough, here’s one last excerpt from Dan Morse‘s article:

The body was placed on a mattress in a back room, and Queen Antoinette told her followers that God would “raise Javon from the dead,” according to the charging documents.

Javon’s body remained there for at least a week, police said. Eventually, it was wrapped in a blanket and placed in a suitcase. Queen Antoinette burned the mattress and Javon’s clothes, police said, and the room was washed down with bleach.

The group came to believe there had been no resurrection because someone among them was not a true believer, according to an attorney for one of the other defendants, Marcus Cobbs. With that person no longer part of the group, they headed north out of Baltimore with the suitcase, believing Javon could be raised at a future date, according to Cobbs’s attorney, Maureen Rowland.

I don’t think any religious person is about to defend their actions. But at what point are their beliefs considered absurd? Is it because they allowed a child to die? Is it because they believed he would be resurrected? Is it because they tried to cover this all up?

Where’s the line between “regular” religious beliefs and the beliefs of this cult? What’s acceptable and what’s not?

I’ve mentioned the notion of de-baptisms before — renouncing your childhood faith at a later age. De-baptism certificates took off in Italy last year and they’ve spread to London:

More than 100,000 people have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.

The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a controversial advert displayed on London buses which declared: “There’s probably no God.”

“We now produce a certificate on parchment and we have sold 1,500 units at three pounds a pop,” said NSS president Terry Sanderson, 58.

John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be “de-baptised,” held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old.

At the moment, they Church of England’s Religious Intelligence website is running the following poll:

As 1,500 people pay to get ‘debaptism certificates’ from the National Secular Society in the UK, is it time the Anglican Church followed Rome and offered a service for those who wish to annul their baptism?

Your options are simple enough:

As I write this, the poll has already swung in the right direction (Yes = 92.9% of the votes) but you can cast your vote into the ring.

Obviously, every religion should allow for an easy opt-out. True believers won’t take them up on it, so it shouldn’t be a problem… But most religions won’t allow for this to happen because I imagine they know they would lose membership like crazy.

You can get your own “official” Certificate of Debaptism from the National Secular Society or watch an amusing unofficial Debaptism ceremony in action.

(via Sachiko Space and The Freethinker)