MIDDLESBORO, Ky. (AP) — A snake-handling pastor who appeared on the National Geographic television reality show "Snake Salvation" has died after being bitten by a snake during a weekend church service in Kentucky. Jamie Coots was handling a rattlesnake at his Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name Church in Middlesboro when he was bitten on the hand Saturday night. READ AP ARTICLE
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Religious conservative groups invest an insane amount of energy in the myth that they're an oppressed minority. Christian conservatives feel aggrieved and they want to be heard. The problem is that their specific grievance—that everyone else hurts their feelings by not admitting we’re inferior—kind of sounds, well, hard to sympathize with. They need something snappier, a reason to claim that they are being oppressed by “anti-Christian bigotry”. The only problem with that is that in a majority Christian nation, most people are actually pretty accepting and even admiring of Christianity. Even if they disagree with right wing Christianity, they don’t do so because it’s Christian but because it’s conservative. Being a Christian is a privileged position in American society; that makes it really hard to claim you’re being oppressed. READ FULL SALON ARTICLE
When it comes to discussions on institutionalized discrimination, atheists often are left out. That may not surprise many. In a world with widespread prejudice based on gender, race and sexuality, it may be hard for people to get incensed over a story about nonbelievers fighting to remove the phrase "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency. And while these kinds of divisive challenges may be the only things that some unsympathetic people remember about atheists fighting for justice and equality, the fact is that nonbelievers in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world face systemic and substantial discrimination.
Here are 11 things atheists couldn't -- and in many cases still can't -- do because they didn't believe in God. READ HUFFPOST ARTICLE Researchers Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University have discovered what may be a discrepancy in the history laid out in the Bible. Using carbon-dating to determine the age of the oldest-known camel bones, the researchers determined that camels were first introduced to Israel around the 9th century BCE. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament refers to camels as pack animals as early as the story of Abraham. Though there is no archaeological evidence of Abraham's life, many in the religious and scientific communities, including Chabad and the Associates For Biblical Research, cite the 20th century BCE as his time of birth. If the new evidence is correct, however, this suggests discrepancies between the Bible and human history as explained by science. READ FULL ARTICLE
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