Creeping Canadian Theocrats (Are Creeping Me Out)

About a year ago, while vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, I had the pleasure of meeting up with some of the members of FLASH (Fort Lauderdale Atheists and Secular Humanists) at Geronimo's.

State-Church Separation in the United States

For the first while conversation focused on everyone's situation, who we've come out to as atheist and how friends and family were reacting.  This is pretty normal for first-timers at these meetings I would guess. Most of the rest of the evening was spent talking about the mixing of religion with state in Florida and in the country as a whole.

During that evening one thing struck me. When it comes to state-religion separation, people seem to be either rabidly activist or strongly apathetic.  There isn't much in between.  People at the meeting either felt very passionately about defending the state-church separation or they really didn't seem to want to concern themselves with it at all.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Teaching Religious Mythology 1: Noah's Ark

Some background. My son is two years old and I'm already interested in different age-appropriate ways of exposing him to as many religious mythologies and beliefs as possible.  I would love him to investigate, compare and independently ask questions about religious claims.

I need things to be entertaining, so cartoons or at least movies are good.  I'm also interested in printable lesson plans from websites.  I'd like to share me reactions to what I discover over a series of upcoming posts beginning with this one.

Was I a true Catholic?

A few days ago I came home from work to find my son playing with a plastic rosary.  Although I knew my wife had ordered this for free off the web and I'm fine with my son being exposed to religion, I still caught myself feeling a bit uncomfortable.

The idea is not to indoctrinate him in Catholicism, but rather to educate him about as many religions as possible.  I don't have problems with having Hindu prayer beads, statues of Ganesha, Hekate, Venus etc.  But the rosary still seems to have some power over me.  I don't believe in any of it and I don't think it holds any metaphysical power over me.  It's more like a PTSD trigger - it stirs up some still fairly raw emotions.

This experience got me thinking about my past.  Why did Catholicism fuck me up so much while many other Catholics I know, practising, lapsed or ex-, don't seem to be messed up at all.  What's the difference?  Was what I grew up in truly Catholicism or was it something else?  Was it really the religion that messed me up so much?

Save Alexander Aan

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/02/192028.html

Readership of this blog is so low that it's practically a personal diary.  But on the off chance you have stumbled on this post (and it's not too late) I'd like to strongly suggest you go here to sign a petition to save this guy from a grisly fate.

In a nutshell, Alexander Aan is an Indonesian civil servant who decided to take a principled stand for freedom of belief (or rather disbelief) in the world's largest Muslim country.  Well, unfortunately, its not surprising to me what happened.

Are you a good person? Part: The Second

Editor's Note: Click here to get a filter of all parts of this series.

A little while ago I posted the first part of my reaction to a religious tract I was handed in a Montreal Metro (subway) station.  There's so much here that I won't be able to do any of it the kind of justice I think it deserves.  And I'm pretty sure most people who bother to read this would agree with me on that. Perhaps I'll expand some of these points later.  But for now, without further ado...