The Secular Spectrum
A look at what we chose to represent Earth and humanity on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. By David Babuschkin. Read more
A look at what we chose to represent Earth and humanity on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. By David Babuschkin. Read more
(Credit: akindo via iStock) Getting a tire replaced seems easy to me. I’d just go to the nearest tire place and get it fixed. But Jayleene was living from paycheck to paycheck and didn’t have $110 to spare. She couldn’t get to work, and her boss fired her. She couldn’t make her rent and was soon out on the street — all because she needed $110 at the right time. Jayleene told me her story during my volunteer shift at a soup... Read more
When you feel anxiety setting in, remember that your thoughts are controlled by you. This simple realization has tremendous power. Read more
By guest blogger Hunter Glenn Caption: Happy and sad person (image credit) ________________________________________________ We all take responsibility for our actions; we feel guilty when we’re bad, and fulfillment when we’re good. Do you do the same for your feelings? Should you? I used to… I alternated between priding myself on liking people and guilting myself for disliking them. Naturally, I rather preferred pride to guilt; I liked feeling virtuous, so I tried to force feelings of liking someone, or of... Read more
A former Republican atheist takes a detailed look at the troubling church-state implications of the GOP platform. Read more
Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on Immigration and Refugees. Read other perspectives here. By Dale McGowan Founding executive director, Foundation Beyond Belief In the summer of 2013, I spent a lot of time imagining that I had lost everything—and it didn’t take much imagination. It started with the F-5 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. A young woman holding her toddler in front of the ruins of her home made me feel, viscerally, what it would... Read more
Caption: Happy people (image credit) _________________________________________________________ How can you collaborate with others to reflect on meanings and values from a reason-oriented perspective? We’re sitting around a table in our home with about eight guests and discussing the nature of truth and morality. Some believe that truth is generally black and white – either something is true or not. Others insist that truth has many gray areas. Folks disagree on whether it is always moral to tell the truth... Read more
A message from Satan near the entrance to Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter brought me back to the churches of my Kentucky childhood. By Mark Alsip. Read more
____________ The deliberate murders of white police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas are terrible acts of lawless revenge for earlier shootings of apparently innocent black people during routine interactions with police officers, such as Philando Castile in Minnesota. Videos of these and other violent encounters between black people and police officers have sparked wide outrage and mass protests across the United States, and the recent vigilante killings. Some claim these videos are cherry-picked examples, and do not... Read more
This is a guest post by my friend and United Methodist Minister Rev. Caleb Pitkin. You all be nice now! _________________________________________________________________ How surprised would you be to learn that a United Methodist Minister was part of a group that was almost entirely made up of atheists? Most people would be very surprised. Well, I am a United Methodist Minister, and until I moved out of Columbus, for over a year I attended Columbus Rationality, a group called devoted to thinking... Read more
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