Secular Café Archive

town clown

break point

vision quest

course load

true fact

Hmm. I wonder if gay-hating churches can start claiming that their marriage ceremonies are only for 'holy matrimony' or some other similar term, defined as one man + one woman? No law need be passed for that, does it? Let 'em make up their own word for it!

Warn your friend that starting and running a board is a lot of work, especially one for skeptics. Organizing unbelievers is a lot like herding cats!


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Derail moved to SS.

Welcome, Nino. As it happens, we're in the process of merging with the Talk Freethought board; see the thread Merging SC and TFT . I'm one of the founding admins here at Secular Cafe, and have considerable experience starting boards. But I'm afraid I'm about burned out on running them. Still, I'd be...

In the US, that 'wall of separation between church and state' has the unfortunate effect of protecting all but the most blatant frauds in religious clothing, I think. Jesus is quoted as saying 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's.' But deciding which is which ...

Hi Rome. Yeah, we're going to merge with Talk Freethought, which will become the Freethought Cafe (or similar). Since DMB died, things have gotten very quiet here; we were well on our way to becoming a ghost town. I hope the merger will at least allow all our archives to be maintained.

maker hooks

piano tuning

It seems to me that though there have been fluctuations in the amount of religiosity over time in all nations, the general trend over the past several centuries is toward less and less. I suppose this is because the scientific, rationalist paradigm has proven itself far more effective in explaining ...

I have no doubt that the conclave following Benedict's resignation would make for a really shocking novel of corruption and power politics in the Catholic Church, were all the back-room discussions known. Personally I think that the conservative contenders for the Papacy probably all had scandals of...

flute solo

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/27/the-war-against-pope-francis The crunch point has come in a fight over his views on divorce. Breaking with centuries, if not millennia, of Catholic theory, Pope Francis has tried to encourage Catholic priests to give communion to some divorced and remarr...

Living in the South as I've done all my life, I've met a lot of self-proclaimed literalists, though most of them aren't, really. (Certainly not for the Old Testament.) I've also met plenty who would say that the NT is inerrant as the authors wrote them. But most of such people are very far from Bibl...

Saw an interesting story this morning.

Japanese drug stops flu in one day

I always take this sort of prediction with a certain skepticism- but if it turns out to be true, wonderful.

What an awful pun. Have you no pride?

GIA, you should read a thread I started in 2015- Evilution . It's about a science fiction story, Judgment Engine , by writer Greg Bear. Obviously Bear's story is meant as an explication of the philosophical/theological/ethical consequences of Dawin's Theory of Evolution. And in Bear's view, the 'Pro...

bore hole

Outsiders have their own implied definitions. But my point there was that every single Christian also seems to have their own implied definition. We outsiders who want to understand 'true Christianity' are thus unable to find a good general one. If we skeptics seem prone to adopt the definitions of...

Do keep in mind that the topic here is literalism and inerrancy- and I knew when I posted it that we don't presently have any believers here who hold to those positions. And though Koy may attack you if you seem to defend those, I think he's clear that you aren't actually a literalist or inerrantist...