Truthout's reporting on the Army's so-called "spiritual fitness" test was featured on Thursday by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann on Countdown.

Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, discussed Jason Leopold's report detailing the forced spiritual testing of over 800,000 uniformed soldiers as part of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program.

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In the past two generations, a "Christian nation" movement in the US has made article 11 of the otherwise-forgotten treaty of Tripoli's an occasional point of debate. In a sense, article 11 is a bit of an enigma. Why was the disavowal of Christianity included in the treaty? Did Barlow intend it to mollify the Bey of Algiers and other Muslim leaders of the Barbary states, whose piracy exerted an expensive toll on US shipping in the Mediterranean? Was it meant to rally European revolutionaries, who had become Barlow's friends and allies? Did it aim to consolidate the authority of Thomas Jefferson and other secularists in America, whose achievements Barlow prized? It is not clear, and Barlow never explained.

It may not be clear why Barlow put article 11 in the treaty of Tripoli, but it is clear that he had once had religion, and lost it. Following his 1778 graduation from Yale, he entered the ministry and, in 1780, became a chaplain in the revolutionary army. In 1784, the Connecticut general assembly even made Barlow the state of Connecticut's official translator of the Book of Psalms. In 1792, however, after four years in London and Paris, he published Advice to the Privileged Orders, a revolutionary work which, basically, offered members of the European aristocracy their lives in exchange for their surrender.

November 30, 2010

These words are part of a coordinated multi-organizational ad campaign slated to launch tomorrow. It is designed to raise awareness about people who don't believe in a god. Ads proclaiming this message will appear on the sides of "T" buses traveling in Fort Worth and other Tarrant County cities. They will continue until the end of the year.

Placed by the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason (DFW CoR), each ad features the words displayed over an image of an American flag made up of the faces of real atheist and agnostic people. The campaign is designed to help those interested find the fifteen area nontheistic groups that make up the DFW coalition.

"We'd have run these ads on Dallas buses as well," noted DFW CoR Coordinator Terry McDonald, "but when we approached DART, they chose to stop running all religiously-related ads rather than include ours."

The Fort Worth bus ads are also part of a national effort sponsored by DFW CoR's parent organization, the United Coalition of Reason. Thus there have been similar transit ads this year in Detroit, Northwest Arkansas, Philadelphia and Washington DC as well as billboards in Austin, Des Moines, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Tucson, Sacramento, St. Louis and Seattle. Last year such billboard, bus and subway ads appeared in 20 cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Tulsa, Phoenix and San Diego.

"The point of our national campaign is to reach out to the millions of humanists, atheists and agnostics living in the United States," explained Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason. "Nontheists like these sometimes don't realize there's a community out there for them because they're inundated with religious messages at every turn. So we hope this will serve as a beacon and let them know they aren't alone."

Reaching out to a secular audience isn't the only goal of the campaign, however. "We want religious people to understand that non-believers are basically the same as everyone else," added Terry McDonald. "We are as 'good', as moral as any other group. If you look you'll find us among your friends, neighbors, coworkers and family members. There are about 50 million non-religious people in the United States. It's time we were recognized and granted our rightful place in society."

For more details on the Fort Worth campaign and for hi-res images of the ad, free for media use, go to <www.dfwcor.org>.

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Just in time for the holiday season, Americans are about to be hit with a spate of advertisements promoting the joy and wisdom of atheism.

Four separate and competing national organizations representing various streams of atheists, humanists and freethinkers will soon be spreading their gospel through advertisements on billboards, buses and trains, and in newspapers and magazines.

The latest, announced on Tuesday in Washington, is the first to include spots on television and cable. This campaign juxtaposes particularly primitive — even barbaric — passages from the Bible and the Koran with quotations from nonbelievers and humanists like Albert Einstein and Katharine Hepburn.

The godless groups say they are mounting this surge because they are aware that they have a large, untapped army of potential troops. The percentage of American adults who say they have no religion has doubled in the last two decades, to 15 percent, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford and released in 2008. But the ranks of the various atheist organizations number only in the tens of thousands.

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The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,” the brief said.

It is not clear if the position in the legal brief, which appears to have been the result of discussions among various government agencies, will be put into effect by the Patent Office.

If it were, it is likely to draw protests from some biotechnology companies that say such patents are vital to the development of diagnostic tests, drugs and the emerging field of personalized medicine, in which drugs are tailored for individual patients based on their genes.

“It’s major when the United States, in a filing, reverses decades of policies on an issue that everyone has been focused on for so long,” said Edward Reines, a patent attorney who represents biotechnology companies.
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IN DOVER, Pennsylvania, five years ago, a group of parents were nearing the end of an epic legal battle: they were taking their school board to court to stop them teaching "intelligent design" to their children.

The plaintiffs eventually won their case, and on 16 October many of them came together for a private reunion. Yet intelligent design and the creationism for which it is a front are far from dead in the US, and the threat to the teaching of evolution remains.

Cyndi Sneath was one of the Dover plaintiffs who had a school-age son at the time of the trial. She has since become an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a member of the Dover Area School Board. "My interest in public education and civil liberties was certainly sparked by the trial," she says. "And that interest permeates our family discussions."

Chemistry teacher Robert Eschbach, who was also a plaintiff, says the trial has made teachers less afraid to step on people's toes when it comes to evolution. It "forced me to be a better educator", he says. "I went back and read more of the history around Darwin and how he came to his conclusions."

None of this means that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, has been idle. The institute helped the conservative Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), headed by Christian minister Gene Mills, to pass a state education act in 2008 that allows local boards to teach intelligent design alongside evolution under the guise of "academic freedom".
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I was born in Den Bosch, the city after which Hieronymus Bosch named himself. 1 This obviously does not make me an expert on the Dutch painter, but having grown up with his statue on the market square, I have always been fond of his imagery, his symbolism, and how it relates to humanity’s place in the universe. This remains relevant today since Bosch depicts a society under a waning influence of God.

His famous triptych with naked figures frolicking around — “The Garden of Earthly Delights” — seems a tribute to paradisiacal innocence. The tableau is far too happy and relaxed to fit the interpretation of depravity and sin advanced by puritan experts. It represents humanity free from guilt and shame either before the Fall or without any Fall at all. For a primatologist, like myself, the nudity, references to sex and fertility, the plentiful birds and fruits and the moving about in groups are thoroughly familiar and hardly require a religious or moral interpretation. Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes — not the frolickers from the middle panel — but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards.

Five centuries later, we remain embroiled in debates about the role of religion in society. As in Bosch’s days, the central theme is morality. Can we envision a world without God? Would this world be good? Don’t think for one moment that the current battle lines between biology and fundamentalist Christianity turn around evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort. They are helpful for those prepared to listen, but fail to reach their target audience. The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it. For those who believe that morality comes straight from God the creator, acceptance of evolution would open a moral abyss.
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Yesterday I had an unexpected treat. Richard Dawkins, the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, was making a stop at Duke on his national tour promoting his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. At the last minute I was asked to join a small group having brunch with him and was given a front-row seat at his talk in the afternoon.

Dawkins is quintessentially upper-class British. Well-spoken, gracious, dressed impeccably even on a Sunday morning, he has a sharp wit that can be quite cutting in a subtle kind of way when he wants it to be. Great fun when you're on his side, not so much when you're not. Yesterday there were lots of laughs for the folks who fall on the side of Dawkins's cause célèbre.

That cause is evolution: that Darwin's theory of evolution is largely fact, not conjecture or speculation or hypothesis. And that is certainly the case. In his talk yesterday, as in his many popular books, he does a magnificent job of explicating the science, the evidence, and the history of how that science and evidence were developed.

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Bill Maher interviews Richard Tillman