By Dale McGowan – Beneath the amber waters of the River Tees in Northern England lives a creature named Peg Powler. Peg is a mermaid — but don’t picture the perky Disney redhead. Peg is a river hag, with green hair and skin and a row of jagged teeth. Unlike Ariel, Peg lives not to make children glad, but to kill and eat them. Peg Powler lives in the foamy yellow rapids of the river. Wander too close to the... Read more
Marriages between religious believers and nonbelievers are sometimes a nightmare of tension and conflict. Many others are strong and lasting. So why do some fail miserably and others succeed brilliantly? Read more
My doctors had written me off as a vegetable. But I was aware of what was going on around me. Read more
by Dale McGowan It’s easy to get your own story wrong. Selective memory takes a messy life and creates a narrative — a winding path, but one that in retrospect was always bringing Odysseus to Ithaca. And you’d swear it’s a documentary. For years, the movie in my head of my own road to religious disbelief started with a clear establishing shot — me at 13, staring into the open casket of my father. I always said his death was the event that hit me between the eyes with the... Read more
| by Stephanie Savage | It’s not every atheist who has the privilege of receiving an authentic Miracle of God — you know, the kind they canonize saints over. Okay, I’ll admit that I had several frequently fatal conditions competing with each other over which one would get a chance to kill me: Legionnaire’s disease, severe sepsis, multiple strokes on both sides of my brain, lung and kidney failure, and a six week coma. And that’s ignoring my rare autoimmune... Read more
Thanks to a lexical gap in English, translated Chinese philosophy sounds awfully religious -- even the atheists. All they seem to talk about is heaven. Read more
| By Dale McGowan | Finding evidence of religious unbelief in the ancient world isn’t always easy, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Challenges to religious thought tend to quickly disappear from history for several reasons. Most of what people know today about the past depends on written records being passed down hand-to-hand over thousands of years and scores of generations. This process isn’t ideal, but it’s the only one we’ve got — and religious unbelief is among the least... Read more
| By Dale McGowan | Part of an ongoing series on The Unpigeonholeables Pantheism, which means “all-God,” is the view that the universe and God are one and the same. Any reverence or worship is directed not to a god in human form, or in any form at all, but to the whole of the cosmos, and spirituality is centered not on a traditional deity but on nature. The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett said, “Is something sacred? Yes, say... Read more
According to a 2005 Baylor University study, about a third of U.S. religious believers hold beliefs that are closer to Deism than anything else. Read more
| By Dale McGowan | There’s a Southern Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas that holds the Letter of Baptism for my wife Becca. After mostly growing up in the denomination, she was willingly baptized as an adult in 1990, the year before our wedding. I was by her side. She was not a Mainline Protestant when we married — by affiliation, she was a Protestant Evangelical. If she ascribed to every piece of the denomination’s creed, the Baptist... Read more
The Secular Spectrum
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