Anyone want to be on a game show? Because they’re casting for “The American Bible Challenge” with Jeff Foxworthy right now.

Imagine a team of well-versed atheists taking first place! And all winnings go to charities. We just missed the Atlanta casting call but those of you in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas areas still have a chance!

Tentative Schedule
Los Angeles: May 14th-June 8th
Chicago: June 1st-3rd
Dallas: June 1st-3rd
(June 2nd “Vista Ridge Mall” beginning at 10am) First 500 people receive a free gift!

WHO:
We want teams made up of three people — Grab your friends, your bible study partners, your family members or your coworkers! Teams of three people who have competitive spirits, great personal testimonies, a general knowledge of pop culture – and, of course, you have to know your Bible! Do you love the Bible, want to share your knowledge, and compete to win money for the charity of their choice?! SIGN UP!

WHAT:
OPEN CASTING CALL: GSN (Game Show Network) and the creators of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” are looking for you! We are casting ”American Bible Challenge” with Jeff Foxworthy! We’re looking for teams of three! IF YOU HAVE A PASSION FOR THE BIBLE AND LOVE COMPETITION, THIS IS THE PERFECT GAME SHOW FOR YOU!

Come on, you know you wanna….

(Thanks to Bob for the link!)

I am a massive fan of Jon Stewart‘s The Daily Show.  I try to catch every episode, and I think Stewart is consistently on point and relevant.   Shockingly, the Catholic League and I do not agree on this.

On April 16^th, The Daily Show featured an amazing send-up of Fox News Channel’s protest of the term “War on Women”:

At the 4:50 mark, Stewart wondered if there was anything women could do to elicit the outrage over their bodily rights that Fox News correspondents typically reserve for, say, attacks on Christmas.  ”Perhaps women could protect their reproductive organs from unwanted medical intrusions with Vagina Mangers.” Behind him, as he spoke, appeared an image of a woman with her legs spread and a manger scene covering her …mistletoe?  (Nutcracker? Holiest of Holes? Virgin Mary?  Secret Santa? Pick your favorite vagina euphemism.  Or come up with your own!  Fun for the whole family!)

Anyway, to the surprise of no one, Bill Donohue didn’t think this was funny.  At all.  In fact he called it “hate speech.”

With all of his muster, he called for advertisers of The Daily Show to pull their sponsorship.

For a quick reminder, when Rush Limbaugh defamed Sandra Fluke over a period of several days, the list of advertisers that pulled sponsorship looked like this:

1. Service Magic home contractor
2. Hadeed Carpets
3. Accuquote Life Insurance
4. Vitacost vitamin supplier
5. Bonobos clothing company
6. Sensa weight- loss program
7. Thompson Creek Windows
8. AOL
9. Tax Resolution Services
10. ProFlowers
11. Legal Zoom online document creator
12. Carbonite web security firm
13. Citrix software maker
14. Sleep Train Mattresses
15. Sleep Number mattresses
16. Quicken Loans
17. Girl Scouts of Oregon and Southwest Washington
18. Cascades Dental
19. Consolidated Credit Counseling Services
20. Constant Contact email marketing firm
21. Philadelphia Orchestra
22. Reputation Rhino online reputation consulting firm
23. St. Vincent’s Medical Center
24. Cunningham Security
25. Regal Assets precious medal investment group
26. Freedom Debt Relief
27. Norway Savings Bank
28. Portland Ovations performing arts center
29. Stamps.com

When Donohue and the Catholic League called for sponsors to abandon The Daily Show, the list read like this:

1. Delta Airlines

Notably, when The Catholic League sent a complaint to Kellogg’s, a major sponsor of the show, they responded with this:

We understand that our customers come from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, lifestyles, and cultures and we respect their individual decisions to choose the television programs that they deem acceptable for themselves and their families. Consumers speak most loudly when they vote with their remote control and change the channel or turn off the TV if a program does not fit their personal criteria.

Well said, Kellogg’s!

Obviously, this was not well received by Donohue and his cohorts — they described the response as “telling Christians to shove it.”  He also said in an interview that ”… just from what we can gather, thousands of people have been pounding Steve Albani at Comedy Central, and clearly Kelloggs,” and ”We have evidence that people have really been pounding Kellogg’s”… presumably without a hint of irony.

A month ago, I posted about how one of the cast members of “Teen Mom 2,” Kailyn Lowry, openly talked about her atheism on Twitter.

Yesterday, one of her followers questioned her status as a role model because of that:

Not one to shy away from the label, Kailyn not only reaffirmed her atheism, she did it while giving a shout-out to President Obama:

And a few minutes later, one of her “Teen Mom 2″ costars, Jenelle Evans, wrote back to both of them:

Again, it’s not so much that these are teenagers coming out as atheists — That happens all the time. But we don’t normally see teens already under the glare of the media spotlight willing to talk about something like religion, especially when their views put them in the minority. Maybe the fact that they’re already letting people peek into a huge part of their lives gives them the confidence to be honest about other aspects of it.

In any case, it’s welcoming to see MTV stars open up about their atheism like it was no big deal.

(via Gather)

Back in 2008, the popular Christian rock band Haste the Day kicked out one of its guitarists, Jason Barnes, because he was an atheist.

When I posted about it then, I had no idea what prompted his deconversion.

Roy Culver recently caught up with Barnes and asked him about what made him walk away from his faith (and, therefore, his band) and what it was like telling the people close to him:

And what began that journey to begin thinking more objectively about Christianity? Did that present a crisis for you?

Well, for me it was just bound to happen. I am the kind of person who needs good reason and evidence to believe something, and it became increasingly difficult to square my Christian worldview with reality. The amount of mental gymnastics I had to put myself through to keep rationalizing my religious faith started to get really old. There seemed to be a mental mechanism that I was employing that felt dishonest and didn’t allow me to really address challenges and questions about faith. Once I decided to be completely honest about what I believed to be true and where the evidence pointed, religion naturally dissolved for me.

…

How has your family dealt with your departure from Christianity?

That was actually the most unpleasant conversation — nobody wants to make their mother cry. The bizarre part of it is, I didn’t do anything wrong, you know? I was just being honest. I would imagine gay people deal with a similar coming out process.

The good news is that Jason has moved on and he’s with a new band (called, appropriately perhaps, On the Shoulders of Giants). Check out the rest of Roy’s interview here for more of the details.

Looks like atheist comedian/singer Tim Minchin will be playing Judas in an upcoming production of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar”:

He will join the pop singer Nicole Scherzinger, playing Mary Magdalene, in an arena tour of the musical by Lord Lloyd Webber and Sir Tim Rice which will open at London’s O2 arena this summer.

The character of Jesus will be cast via a television talent competition next month, where contestants will compete for the lead role in the musical telling the story of Christ’s final week.

The man’s on a roll — he was also cast to play a “coked-up rock star” next season in Californication.

Are there any shows that cover religion in a fair way? That is, they don’t push one particular belief system (or even faith in general) but offer somewhat a little more nuanced?

Mark Oppenheimer argues that The Daily Show stands above the rest:

Stewart comes at religion with buckets of derision, but I do not find him offensive, nor should anyone who enjoys comedy. Like so many of the best comedians, he is an equal-opportunity hater. Sometimes it’s atheists he cannot stand, as in his bit about the beams in a shape of the cross that survived the Ground Zero wreckage, which the American Atheists did not want displayed. Sometimes it’s the Catholic church, which last November proved a useful point of comparison for the football culture at Penn State: “I get that it’s probably hard for you to believe that this guy you think is infallible, and this program you think is sacred, could hide such heinous activities, but there is some precedent for that,” Stewart said, referring to coach Joe Paterno and the sex-abuse scandal. “Yeah, and just like with the Catholic Church, no one is trying to take away your religion, in this case football. They’re just trying to bring some accountability to a pope, and some of his cardinals.” In both cases, it was the culture of certainty that Stewart was mocking, not the belief system itself. It was the human tendency toward hubris.

…

… the implicit message is one that religion scholars are always trying to convey: all religions have beliefs that seem bizarre to outsiders, and “cult” is often just a word to describe the other guy’s religion. The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.

Oppenheimer dismisses Real Time with Bill Maher as too “simplistic,” but I don’t buy that. You don’t hear nuanced discussion of religion on that show because there’s no need to debate the color of a unicorn’s horn when it comes to matters of truth. Maher may not know much about various religious faiths — he’s pretty black/white about what he assumes religious people believe — but he doesn’t let even moderate religion get by with a free pass. That’s not bad religion coverage — that’s just preaching reality.

In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, Jack Black stated that he was an atheist who got his “spiritual needs” in other ways.

You can hear it around the 14:10 mark in the interview:

“I don’t have any real spirituality in my life — I’m kind of an atheist — but when music can take me to the highest heights, it’s almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.”

Not that everyone has to “fill that spiritual void,” but it’s nice to hear another celebrity speak so casually about not believing in a god.

(Thanks to Randall for the link!)

The PBS show Finding Your Roots gives scholar/host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. an opportunity to chat with celebrities about their ancestry.

In this week’s episode, he met with Pastor Rick Warren. As it turns out, one of Warren’s ancestors was a prominent slaveowner. That’s not particularly surprising, and it doesn’t say anything about Warren himself. The conversation surrounding it, though, is pretty interesting.

Rick Warren speaks beginning at the 32:47 mark, but the most interesting bit begins at the 33:40 mark:

Gates: Do you think there was a valid Christian justification of slavery before or during the civil war?

Warren: There is ZERO biblical justification for slavery.

Gates: (laughter)

Warren: ZERO. From the very beginning of time, God says, ‘I have created every man in my image’. And I’ve read those arguments, and they’re spurious. They are false exegesis.

Gates: Yeah.

Warren: They’re… isegesis, you’re reading INTO it instead of exegesis, reading OUT of it, what it actually says. And the Bible, like any other book, and people do it with the Constitution, make it mean what they want it to mean. I mean, the Supreme Court now finds all kinds of things in the constitution that isn’t there. But they try to create something out of it. And so everything that we look at, we read with our lenses, and if you were raised with a prejudicial lens you’re going to read Scripture wrong…

Of course, Warren doesn’t have any problem opposing civil unions and marriage equality through his “lens”… and considering how many Christians don’t find opposition to love (even same-sex love) in the Bible, it’s amazing that Warren doesn’t notice his own hypocrisy in action.

By the way, there are plenty of references to slavery in the Bible. At no point in the Bible is slavery condemned. In the view of the Bible’s writers, slavery is perfectly acceptable.

…

On a side note, at the beginning of that segment, Gates talks (32:12) about the dark hours in our country “when we, as Americans, have failed to live up to our original Christian values of religious freedom and tolerance.”

Gates, what are you doing?! Those values aren’t strictly Christian. They’re human.

(Thanks to Richard for the link)