Money for Religious Teaching and Money for Religion

Money and relgion. Religion and money. The two have always been inextricably intertwined. Whether it's the catholic church hoarding it or the republican's taking it from us to support faith based initiatives, money is a sticking point everyone can relate too. On that note, this week has seen an awful lot of conversation about whether public funds should be able to fund religion teaching. Conservatives want to be able to hand out money for divinity students. Thankfully, people are asking important questions about this concept. One of the most important observations, as far as I'm concerned, is the "equal time" point. If the government is going to allow public funds to teach christianity, shouldn't it also teach judasim, islam and for that matter, atheism? We here at Modern Atheist would rather have public money go to fund things like the defecit or not fighting a war or fixing homelessness, but you get the idea.

On a related note, it seems even the religious folk in this country are coming up short in the spare change department and resorting to plastic when the collection plate comes around. I guess it's true that nothing is sacred.

Forums - now with 30% less fora!

Due to popular demand we have pruned the forums down to a manageable size (or at least a slightly more manageable size). This means that if you were waiting to register because you didn't know if your critical deconstruction of Deicide's lyrics should be in "music, tv and the arts" or "media" or whether your comparison of Judaism and Christianity belonged in "Judaism" or "Christianity", you can now rest easy. They belong in Music, TV, Arts and the Media and Abrahamic Religions respectively. Don't ever say we never did anything for you.

Banning T-shirts

Recently, there was a bit of an uproar when a school in California (registration required) forced a number of students to remove T-shirts with overt religious refernces before they would be allowed to appear in a school photo. Basically, they were told that a group of students, all wearing the same T-shirt with the same message could be interpreted as the school endorsing the religious message. Not surprisingly, there are some religious groups who feel that this infringes on their first amendment rights. The page above has a sounding board where readers wrote in to discuss the issue. My personal favorite in the obviously religious first respondant who delcares (innacurately) that the founding fathers were mostly practicing christians. Take a look.