A Maryland woman involved with a group described as a religious cult pleaded guilty in the starvation death of her son, but insisted that the charges be dropped when he is resurrected.
Under terms of her plea agreement, Ria Ramkissoon’s charges will be dropped if her son rises from the dead.

The condition was made a part of Ria Ramkissoon’s plea agreement, officials said. She entered the plea Monday in Baltimore, Maryland, to a first-degree felony count of child abuse resulting in death, her attorney, Steven Silverman, said Tuesday.

Ramkissoon, a member of a group called One Mind Ministries, believes Javon Thompson, her year-old son, will rise again, and as part of her plea agreement, authorities agreed to the clause. Read More

This is outrageous. Please distribute widely and send your complaints HERE. (Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue” Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion. )

Tomorrow I take down the links for the convention registration. If you are going, this is your last time to register at the reduced price, or to register for the dinners at ALL (no dinner purchases at the door). Register now!

This will be informative and fun. Dawkins, Phelps, Morrow, and of course the Debaptism. Here’s an article on the rise of debaptisms on the rise.

De-baptisms seems to be on the rise. They consist of anything from participants being blown with a blow dryer to people actually filing to be officially separated from their churches.

In Great Britain, it has been reported that 100,000 people have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the internet. Now, people can actually receive a de-baptism certificate that is printed on parchment from the National Secular Society (NSS).

Atheism has been all over my TV set in the past week, for better or for worse.
1) We learned the “big secret” of Battlestar Galactica, a show I’ve been watching religiously (g) since it began airing, is “God did it”. Now, I’m not opposed to the God character appearing on TV. I’m OK with shows like Reaper and Supernatural, where God is extant and it’s the whole good vs evil thing. But BSG wasn’t like that. It was a complex plot with a lot of questions and a wide array of characters, some of whom were religious fanatics who turned out to be right. We were promised that all questions would be answered, and we got “God did it” as our answer. How did Baltar survive a Nuclear blast? God wanted him to — yes, that’s it. Chalk this one up to the “Quantum Leap” category of good shows with good plots that ended with the laziest writing possible: Deus Ex Machina.

2) On the other hand, we now know for sure that Brian the Talking dog on Family guy is an atheist. In this episode, he faces intolerance in every direction, even from his family. Sound familiar? Well the good news is everyone gets over it in the end.

3) While this was not on “my” TV, I’ve gotten a report that Steve Harvey went on an anti-atheist rant on Tyra Banks’ show. Apparently, it’s wasn’t very nice, and I’m going to write a letter offering to rebut the stereotypes. You’d think a black woman would know bigotry when she saw it and not allow it on her show, but then again there’s Star Jones…

I haven’t written about vouchers in a while, but the recent news item about their defeat in Arizona motivated me to revisit the issue.

There are lots of reasons to oppose school vouchers, which allow parents to take the money that the town would have spent for their child to go to their public school and use it toward private education. Among those reasons is the significant drain on the already dwindling income of the public school system. Additionally, since private schools (lawfully) discriminate on the basis of test scores or religion, it’s easy to see how the public schools would be left with the more challenging kids and the nonreligious kids, AND less money to spend on them.

Remember that the vast majority of private schools are religious in nature and preach religion to the children. Many times, these kids are brainwashed into thinking Creationism is science, or that intolerance against “outsiders” is acceptable — thereby hurting the children and our society as a whole. In this way, private school vouchers are clearly illegal (and why the state of AZ turned them down).

Now some have suggested that these vouchers only be used for secular purposes, but this is bull. If the private school spends less money on secular programs like Gym and Math class they have more to spend on mythology. Same effect.

Lastly, some use the words “freedom of choice” and “competition” to support their scheme. This is also ill-informed, because you don’t break the law to increase competition. If they really want competition, PUBLIC school vouchers will do the trick. Such programs allow parents to pick which PUBLIC school their child attends, thereby increasing competition among public schools, while avoiding discrimination against less-developed / nonreligious kids or taking money out of a school system that needs it so badly. The reason public school vouchers have not taken off is simply that competition is NOT the real concern– it’s another lie to cover up their real intent to funnel money to religion at the expense of local children.