atheist

How God Worked Through an Atheist to Teach Me About Love

The Prayer of La Faba

“Make sure you stop in the church at O Cebreiro and read the prayer there,” Rick’s e-mail told me. He had gotten ahead of me…

Godless in Alabama

A red Hyundai with a Darwin fish and an “atheist” license tag eases up to a fast food drive-through window in Huntsville, Alabama. A van pulls up behind it. Five children slip out, line up along one side of the car and chant “God loves you” and “Praise Jesus.” The kids scramble back into the van, congratulated by a high-fiving mother.

Blair Scott — the 38-year-old, cherub-faced man in the red car — still chuckles about it a year later, joking that the kids yelled “god-scenities” at him. The quick-to-laugh Scott shrugs off the negative attention — which also includes 75 hate emails and at least one death threat a week. Scott is the founder of the largest atheist organization in the state, the North Alabama Freethought Association (NAFA) in Huntsville.

In 2004, NAFA had two members; today it has more than 200. Scott says that a decade ago, three atheist organizations in Alabama floundered, but now 10 thrive. “Atheists are on the rise in Alabama. But we may not be what you think,” he beams.

Called Out Of Darkness

I came out of childhood with no sense of being a particular gender, and no sense of being handicapped by being a woman because I…

Seductive, Reductive, Religulous

In May of 2002, the comic Bill Maher faced the studio audience of his long-running program Politically Incorrect for the first time since learning ABC was canceling the show. As he sometimes did, Maher began the episode of PI—an irreverent roundtable discussion on current affairs—with a short monologue.

Pure Sex, Pure Love

In our last BustedHalo poll, we asked how you would handle it if your spouse became significantly more—or less—religious. That question seems to have hit…