This is the time of year the U.S. Supreme Court releases its decisions on cases reviewed and adjudicated during the session; and here at home in Louisiana the state legislative session ends and we have a list of bills it has passed, and, if any, those subsequently vetoed by the governor. High Court cases and proposed new laws at the state level have some interest for humanists and all others that have an ideological stake in the primacy of individual…
Review by Dean Bedekar, June 2023 Seth Andrews is a podcaster and sits on the board of American Atheists. The book is available as a premium with a 1-year subscription to American Atheist magazine. He was a devout Christian from Oklahoma for many years before turning to reason. He doesn’t claim that all Christians are idiots, merely that Christians sound like idiots as they try to defend a hopelessly contorted religion. The Big Con The Christian Con rests on…
The national book purge fever came late to the self-appointed Protectorate of Their and Your Children in St. Tammany Parish, but they have been making up for lost time. The American Library Association (ALA) reports that the first indication of a surge of complaints about books dealing with race theory, honest interpretations of history, and especially, books and graphic novels addressing LGBTQ+ issues began in 2021 when the number of unique titles challenged increased to 1858 from the 223 challenged…
……and Louisiana’s electorate and their elected representatives have a thing for state constitutions: they love making new ones, and then almost immediately begin willy-nilly tacking on amendments, as if they had forgotten a few things in their rush to put the seal of approval on the new document—adding amendments designed to address all issues— large, small, and sometimes even non-existent. We are currently ruled by our eleventh constitution, adopted in 1974, which itself has been amended…
By NOSHA member Marion Freistadt (aka Penny Bright) That’s the enigma you’ll see revealed on April 26 at the Marigny Opera House. My co-writer, Helen Stone, and I have written a play, called The Enigma of the Torah based on our decades of participation in Torah Study. (Torah is also called “the Hebrew Bible” and is the same as the first 5 books of the “Old Testament.”) I am a lifelong atheist. I am also Jewish. Atheism, skepticism, and questioning is…
Chances are you have seen at least one of the “HeGetsUs” campaign ads on television or YouTube, or even on a billboard, since reportedly 120 Americans have been reached by the campaign since it kicked off in March last year. According to its website, “There are billboards, a 13-stop college football tailgate tour, and a remarkable internet presence that spans far beyond YouTube, branching into the modern public squares of Meta, Snapchat, Reddit, and Instagram with…
Review by Dean Bedekar, January 2023 You may ask, what’s the big deal if grownups believe in ancient aliens? Nothing really unless those beliefs cause harm to the believer and society. The list is long, from anti-vaxxers, consumers of crackpot remedies like homeopathy and acupuncture, to science deniers. In each of 5 volumes, Dunning takes on 50 such pop phenomenon, explaining them in simple terms, without casting judgment. In this review, we’ll cover some of most flagrant violations of science…
….and If You’re Woke You Dig It In 1962 the young and talented author William Melvin Kelley published an article in The New York Times. He had recently seen a public notice posted in a Manhattan subway car on the subject of encouraging the ridership to help officials keep the car clean. The post was supposedly written in 21 languages; one in particular belied the humorless bureaucratese one would expect: “Hey cats this is your swinging-wheels, so dig it…
…and Postliberalism Does Not Bode Well for Groups Like Ours January 22, 2023 It is easy to be distracted by the continual ruckus coming from the evangelical Protestant Christian crowd which, with their demagogue-of-the-day, almost weekly seems to draw a new battle line by trying to block the rising tide of secular modernism and the liberal administrative state that they believe is complicit in all sorts of anti-Christian conspiracies. But on another level, practitioners of another Christian sect are…
…….and When Fantasy Meets Virtual Reality The secular community should be concerned that Facebook’s multi-billion dollar, all-in investment in metaverse development includes millions of dollars to upstart Virtual Reality churches. The metaverse is the immersive, virtual reality digital world that includes video games such as Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, others, and a host of non-gaming platforms that allow the user to create an avatar and interact with others active on the platform in digitally…