When my youngest stepdaughter was ten, she was warned by her mother not to be too open, in school, about the fact that she comes from a Wiccan family. About ten minutes later she came running in, waving a dollar bill, and pointing at the words, “In God We Trust”.

“How come they get to put their God on the money, and we can’t even talk about ours?” she asked, outraged. (more…)

With the lights turned down low, Fox Valley Pagan Unity Council member Penny Goody led a group of people seated in a large circle through a guided meditation filled with imagery of nature. Some of the participants were sitting up and some of them were lying on their backs, but they all had their eyes closed as they listened intently to Goody’s words. When the meditation concluded, hand drummers provided music for the participants to dance to as the ceremony closed.

The ceremony celebrated the coming of Ostara, a pagan holiday recognizing the spring equinox, when the energies of the world shift to spring. (more…)

It is a certainty in the United States that no one knows or cares to know the exact value of the ecclesiastic demesne. We can, however, guess. In 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant said that taxable church property amounted to $1 billion. One hundred and one years later, in a 1976 study that has never been replicated or updated, researchers Martin A. Larson and Rev. C. Stanley Lowell found that total ecclesiastical property by 1906 came to about $1.3 billion. According to Larson and Lowell, by 1936 it was $3.8 billion. By 1964, it had risen to a spectacular $79.5 billion. When Larson and Lowell tallied their figures for 1976, real church wealth amounted to at least $158 billion, with churches the owners of an estimated 10 percent of all U.S. property. The figure adjusted for inflation today comes to at least $560 billion, likely the greatest non-profit wealth expansion in history (with the real value likely much greater). The reason for the accumulation transcends the giving of the flock: It is due, rather, to a systemic political bias in the form of the generous tax exemption traditionally afforded religious property and income, an arrangement that in Western history is as old as the Sumerian kings and the pharaohs of Egypt. (more…)

Few bureaucrats can subvert a well-intentioned principal like the separation of church and state with the hypocritical bombast of school administrators. But when they actually succeed in making religious fanatics seem rationale, well now that’s an achievement worthy of an OFF/beat Idiot of the Year nomination.

Donna Brewer, of Willow Hill, Pennsylvania, is suing Abington School District, claiming that her 10-year-old son’s “rights to religion and free speech were violated” because he was not allowed to wear a Jesus costume during his school’s Halloween parade. The federal suit was filed on her son’s behalf by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group that believes in spreading the Gospel through “traditional family values.” It further claims that since costumes were mandatory and many students chose to dress as “witches and ghouls” (i.e., pagan costumes), Willow Hill Elementary violated the fourth-grader’s equal protection rights. (more…)

Allentown, PA - There is nothing so evil, so clearly un-American, as the imposition of a particular religious dogma by force.

That is why America’s Founding Fathers made it the first order of business in the Bill of Rights to say that government must not advance ‘’establishment of religion.'’ (more…)

Don Larsen was, by all reports, an excellent Army Chaplain. When he was a Pentecostal Christian, that is. His superior while he was in Iraq, Chaplain Kevin L. McGhee, called Larsen “the best” out of the 26 chaplains he supervised. But then Larsen applied to change his religious affiliation to Wicca, and the Army railroaded him out of Iraq and out of the Army.

The whole sordid story is extensively detailed in a recent article in the Washington Post which (though long) is well worth reading for anyone interested in the subject. (more…)

Years ago my search for meaning ended with the frightening yet liberating conclusion that all efforts of the Human to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists. The Human has therefore the freedom and responsibility to give his life a meaning which is harmonious with his being, other beings and nature. 

I found this meaning in posthumanism, a secular philosophy which transcends the ideas and images of the world of classical Renaissance humanism to correspond more closely to the 21st century’s concepts of technoscientific knowledge. (more…)

Nowadays, some of those unable to acknowledge a creator seem eager to make a cult of creation instead. This should not surprise us. Earth worship, rather than deference to personal gods, is arguably humanity’s default religion.

The Earth, after all, requires no act of faith to validate its existence. The generosity with which it bestows life and livelihood, the awesome wrath with which it inflicts flood and famine, and indeed its control over our destiny, all brook no denial. What’s not to worship? What’s not to love, fear and propitiate? (more…)

When he was alive, the U.S. government had no trouble finding a place for Patrick Stewart, never mind his unconventional beliefs. It inducted him into the Army National Guard, issued him dog tags giving his religion as “Wiccan,” and deployed him to Afghanistan. He died there in 2005 when Taliban forces shot down his helicopter. It was only later that Uncle Sam had second thoughts.

Sgt. Stewart was buried in a veterans cemetery in Nevada, and his widow asked that his memorial plaque include the encircled five-pointed star of Wicca, a religion based on nature worship. But the Department of Veterans Affairs declined, because that emblem is not among the 38 religious symbols it allows. (more…)

Hampton Roads gets a fair share of titters because certain devout locals with access to a cable audience claim to get weather reports from God himself - and inaccurate ones at that. Fair enough. But for all Pat Robertson’s eccentricities, he cannot compare to the loonies in Greece who are attempting to revive the worship of Zeus.

To hear the pagans of Athens explain it at a recent ceremony outside a 1,800-year-old temple, Zeus-worship would fit right in on an average American college campus. While celebrating the nuptials of Zeus and Hera, high priest Kostas Stathopoulos intoned, “Our message is world peace and an ecological way of life in which everyone has the right to an education.” The only things they didn’t include were universal health care and a commitment to fight homelessness. (more…)