College Chronicles

"[W]hite student was... accused of 'cultural appropriation' for having dreadlocks"

The 47-second clip shows a woman physically stopping a white boy with dreadlocked hair and confronting him for 'appropriating her culture'.

SF Weekly has identified the man with the dreadlocks as Cory Goldstein.

Both the woman and Goldstein are San Francisco State University students and the confrontation is believed to have happened on the school's campus.

In the video another male student, who is also black, defends the woman.

Elsewhere... "University Cancels ‘Vagina Monologues’ Because a White Lady Wrote It"

“I felt that limiting women to only Eve Ensler’s work was doing a disservice to both the women performing and to the audience at large,” Rachel Arco, the sophomore who organized the performance, told the Megaphone. “This performance will largely be done with works by women of color,” she continued. “In doing so, it will be more representative of the experience of women, rather than only offering the white woman’s experience.”

But wait, that's not all... "Atheist group targets Muslim prayer rooms at University of Iowa"

“The presence of such religious venues on a public campus raises a number of issues,” the group argued. “By instituting areas that are exclusively used by specific religious groups such as Christians and Muslims, the University of Iowa is violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. … The organization is also concerned that the university is facilitating the discriminatory practice of gender segregation practiced in the Muslim prayer rooms.”

The atheist capital of America

Market Watch: If you don’t believe in God, you might want to move to the Pacific Northwest.

Portland, Ore., is No. 1 on the list of metropolitan areas with the most religiously unaffiliated residents (42%), according to the nonpartisan and nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas, a survey of 50,000 people. Seattle and San Francisco were tied at second place (with 33%) on the list, and Denver (32%) and Phoenix (26%) were third and fourth.

On the other end of the spectrum, Nashville was the metropolitan area with the fewest people without any religious affiliation (15%), followed by Charlotte, N.C. (17%), and Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando and Pittsburgh (all with 18%).

Why the regional differences? “Portland is quirky and different, and very attractive to people who may not feel comfortable in other social environments, particularly with a stigma against those who are atheists,” says Daniel Cox, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute. In fact, “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book by Bill Bishop, documented the “clustering” of like-minded Americans around politics and culture. While 94% of people said they would vote for a Catholic for president and only 5% say they would not, 54% said they would vote for an atheist while 43% said they would not, a nationwide 2014 Gallup survey found.

Marco Rubio addresses atheist snark

This is great polemic. An atheist approaches Rubio with a well considered question. He is nice enough but the snark and irritation are strong in this one. He has a question that signals and positions, of the sort that some atheist like to talk about, that goes: honestly, when it gets down to it, why should silly superstitions be allowed muck up our rational scientific sanity? Why should materialists be made to suffer spiritualism in government? Atheists are a growing unserved group, you know. We love science.

Rubio is also prepared with well considered answers. Very prepared. Actually, Rubio has several well considered prepared answers. These are subjects he's already written about, already spoken about at length and repeatedly. He's recalling what he's already spoken at length about to various groups. He's picking position papers previous speeches and tacking them together, deciding which rehearsed speech to tack on next and deciding which direction to go and deciding when to stop. He could keep going. He talks a lot.

Do you think this changed the guy's mind? YouTube commenters pick up where the unseen gent in the video started. That is, back at square one. Everything Rubio says here means nothing to them. To them, everything Rubio says is just more annoying superstition and Rubio is quite silly for pursuing it.

And since we're talking past each other and repeating our basic statements I'll restate something the YouTube commenters skip over. Rubio did this poorly with a question: where do they [our rights] come from? They don't bother answering and this is critical because it puts man in place of God. The founders believed our rights come from God and therefore they are inalienable.

Without God then our American rights would come from man and therefore they are alienable.

"Pope Francis assures atheists"

"You don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven"

In comments likely to enhance his progressive reputation, Pope Francis has written a long, open letter to the founder of La Repubblica newspaper, Eugenio Scalfari, stating that non-believers would be forgiven by God if they followed their consciences.

Responding to a list of questions published in the paper by Mr Scalfari, who is not a Roman Catholic, Francis wrote: “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.

“Sin, even for those who have no faith, exists when people disobey their conscience.”

The ultimate sanctuary city.

"Hasidic atheists opt for a double life"

"The moment Solomon lost his faith, he was standing on the D train, swaying back and forth with its movement as if in prayer. But it wasn’t a prayer book that the young law student was reading – he had already been to synagogue, where he had wrapped himself in the leather thongs that bound him to Orthodox Judaism, laying phylacteries and reciting the prayers three times daily."

The tome in his hands now was Alan Dershowitz’s The Genesis of Justice (2000), which used Talmudic and Hasidic interpretations of the Bible to argue that stories in the book of Genesis, from Adam and Eve eating the apple to Noah and his ark, constituted God’s learning curve – a means of establishing a moral code and the rules of justice that prevail today.

What struck him about the book was its depth, and a complexity of thought that he had been raised to believe was the exclusive domain of the rabbis whose authority commanded his community of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The book’s brilliance, coupled with its unabashed heresy, created the first of many cracks in Solomon’s faith. Seeing the scriptures interpreted in methods so compelling and yet entirely inconsistent with the dogmas of his youth caused Solomon to question everything he believed to be true.

"Sharia law or gay marriage critics would be branded ‘extremists’ under Tory plans"

“Anyone who expresses an opinion that isn’t regarded as totally compliant with the Equality Act could find themselves ranked alongside Anjem Choudary, Islamic state or Boko Haram,” he (Simon Calvert, Deputy Director of the Christian Institute) said.

He added: “How many times a day do intellectually lazy political activists accuse their opponents of ‘spreading hatred’?

“The left does it, the right does it, liberals do it, conservatives do it, it is routine.

“Hand a judge a file of a thousand Twitter postings accusing this atheist or that evangelical of ‘spreading hatred’ and they could easily rule that an EDO (Extremism Disruption Order) is needed.

“It’s a crazy idea – the Conservatives need to drop this like a hot brick.”

Why would anybody want to hold a hot brick without a proper glove?


Never mind... smart-alecky internet.

New-time religion

A new movement is afoot...atheist churches, spearheaded by the British comedy duo of Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, and using the springboard of social media. Jones originally came up with the idea after attending a Christmas carol concert:  "If you think about church, there's very little that's bad. It's singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people - and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. What part of that is not to like?"

That impulse, however, has raised the ire of those who have spent years pushing back against the idea that atheism itself is a religion.

"The idea that you're building an entire organization based on what you don't believe, to me, sounds like an offense against sensibility," said Michael Luciano, a self-described atheist who was raised Roman Catholic but left when he became disillusioned. 

"There's something not OK with appropriating all of this religious language, imagery and ritual for atheism," said Luciano, who blogged about the movement at the site policymic.com.

I think Luciano makes an interesting point about about basing an organization on what you don't believe. That would be odd, but is that what the new 'churches' are doing?  I don't think traditional churches have a monopoly on people gathering to sing songs, tell stories, and encourage each other. I can think of at least two organizations that do that. In this coming age of insularity it will be important for people to interact and talk about the type of society they wish to have. 

Hundreds of atheists and atheist-curious packed into a Hollywood auditorium for a boisterous service filled with live music, moments of reflection, an "inspirational talk" about forgotten - but important - inventors and scientists and some stand-up comedy.

During the service, attendees stomped their feet, clapped their hands and cheered as Jones and Evans led the group through rousing renditions of "Lean on Me," "Here Comes the Sun" and other hits that took the place of gospel songs. Congregants dissolved into laughter at a get-to-know-you game that involved clapping and slapping the hands of the person next to them and applauded as members of the audience spoke about community service projects they had started in LA.

This reminds me of an article I read a few years ago about the rise in the interest in the supernatural in Britain. One point from the article (exact memory faulty) was that as church attendance was falling, the sporting of crucifixes and supernatural or pagan symbols was rising. The author supposed that these things filled some sort of need in the young. 

Are we spiritual creatures?

“I know that people accept me for who I am.”

Eric Fromm has received a lot of hugs on campus lately — at least once a day since he “came out” as an atheist last week in an article in his Christian university’s online newspaper.

And while the Northwest Christian University student body president doesn’t quite know what to do with all the new attention he’s receiving, he says it’s a welcome change from the isolation, verbal attacks and accusing questions that he’d grown to expect as rumors about his nonbelief circulated.

Though his active campus involvement was enough to win him the student government presidential election, Fromm said he’s felt judged by some of his peers throughout college because, as he wrote in the article that appeared in the school’s Beacon Bolt newspaper last week, “I couldn’t force myself to believe in God.”

“I’m too young to really know what’s going to happen after death,” Fromm said. “What I really want to focus on is what I’m doing here, and what it’s going to change.”

The Register Guard