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Today, the body of Sen. Edward Kennedy traveled from Hyannis Port to Boston along a route that included some of the late politicians favorite places. Spectators cheered respectfully as the hearse went by.

Television and radio reporters talked reverently about Kennedy taking his final trip through Massachusetts. Hello? With all due respect, he wasn’t taking the journey. It was his dead body.

I kept thinking, wouldn’t it have been better if the LIVE Ted Kennedy covered that same route a few weeks ago, taking in the love of his state’s residents while he was still alive and able to drink it all in? That would have been a real moment for everyone.

This clapping for a lifeless body shows how much we suspend our belief when it comes to death. That’s just part of our DNA. We don’t want to really acknowledge death so we put our loved ones in velvet coffins with comfy pillows (please think about how strange is that) and chat with them graveside.

I’m convinced that we should all have our memorials and funerals BEFORE we die. Like a fish about to be caught in the net, most of us don’t know when are time is up. So tomorrow, use the good china for no reason. Wear your party dress just because. Tell the people you love that you love them for no reason at all.

Don’t wait until you’re dead — and people applaud you, but you won’t even know it.

Here’s my travel schedule for the fall.

• I’m be the keynote speaker at the ExMormon Foundation 2009 Conference on Oct. 10 in Salt Lake City.
• I’m also be speaking at the annual Freedom From Religion convention in Seattle, which takes place on Nov. 6-8.
• I’m competing in Ironman Cozumel on Nov. 29 (nothing to do with beliefs, but I wanted to brag a bit).
• And on Dec. 3, I’ll give a talk at the New York City’s Center for Inquiry.

Hope to see some of you there!

I’m having trouble with definitions, something folks ask me often at speaking engagements. Can someone help me? Please explain to me, like I was a a third-grader, the difference between these terms:

• Secular humanist.
• Humanist.
• Atheist.

Thank you.

One of my day jobs is co-publisher of the Newport-Mesa Daily Voice, an online newspaper for Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, Calif. One of Costa Mesa’s council members is an evangelical Christian who is trying to get the “In God We Trust” motto posted inside the city council chambers. This is an open letter I wrote to Councilwoman Wendy Leece in the Daily Voice.

Dear Councilwoman Leece,

Wendy, we’ve been mutual admirers for a long time. I’ve always respected your religious convictions, whether I’ve been a believer in Jesus Christ or, more recently, as an atheist.

But I strongly disagree with your latest cause.

Before I continue, a major disclosure. I’ve lost my faith. You can read about it in my recently published memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace.” The New York Times Review of Books gave it a glowing review, as did many evangelical pastors.

That said, here’s the deal. My views on putting “In God We Trust” mottos inside government buildings (or on our currency or in our Pledge of Allegiance) has not wavered whether I believed in Christ or not. I just don’t think the public square is any place for the promotion of God — because of the First Amendment and, more pragmatically, because it’s simply not an effective tool for evangelism.

Wendy, as the Daily Voice first reported last week, you’re lobbying to have the “In God We Trust” motto put inside the Costa Mesa City Council chambers. Why? Obviously to signal to residents that the City Council is operating under the guidance of God, specifically the Lord of Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.

I believe your faith is genuine enough that the “In God We Trust” proposal has nothing to do with pandering to your base. But in a lesser politician, I would think otherwise.

It’s an easy political play to propose that “In God We Trust” should be displayed in the City Council chambers. I mean, who can be against it except the devil? But in reality, it’s fundamentally unAmerican.

First, it’s blatantly unconstitutional. The “In God We Trust Motto” is clearly an endorsement by government of a monotheistic religion. The First (significantly it’s not the 2nd, 3rd or 9th) Amendment makes clear that the government should not endorse ANY religion.

Second, it’s offensive to those who don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian god (i.e., Muslims), who believe in many Gods (i.e., Hindus), or who believe in nothing (i.e. atheists).

Wendy, you’ve taken a lot of couragous stands in your public life. Please take one more. Remove your proposal from the City Council agenda. If your God is the one, true God, He doesn’t need a motto to support Him plastered inside the Costa Mesa City Council chambers. And the U.S. Constitution is too important to circumvent in order to inject your heartfelt religious beliefs into local government.

I know it’s nearly impossible, Wendy, but please imagine that you simply don’t believe God exists. You believe it with the same force that you believe now that God is real. And then a local government official wants to put an “In God We Trust” into the public square. You would look at the First Amendment and the official’s proposal and say, “This just can’t be.”

Be a profile in courage. God, if He exists, would totally approve.

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has named its finalists for the 2009 SCIBA Book Awards, and I’m one of them!

I’m one of three finalists for the non-fiction category. Boo-yah! The winners will be announced Oct. 24.

WESTMINSTER, CALIF — A church youth group leader will be arraigned Thursday for smoking marijuana and having an unlawful sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl in the parking lot of the church. Timothy Han, 21, Fullerton, is charged with one felony count unlawful sexual intercourse, one felony count of oral copulation of a minor, and one misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

He faces a maximum sentence of three years and eight months in state prison if convicted. Han is out of custody on $50,000 bail.

Han, a youth group leader at Miracle Land Korean Baptist Church in Cypress, is accused of meeting 15-year-old Jane Doe through the church. On June 22, 2008, Han is accused of meeting with Jane Doe and driving in his car to the church, where he parked in the lot. He is accused of smoking marijuana with the victim and illegally engaging in oral copulation and sexual intercourse with her in his car. 

Modesty forbids me to tell you that I’ve received Orange Coast magazine’s “Great Summer Read” award, part of its “Best of” edition for “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in American — and Found Unexpected Peace.”

From the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Mormons have not only posthumously baptized President Barack Obama’s mother into their faith, but they may have performed the ritual for the president’s African ancestors as well, including his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, according to researcher Helen Radkey.

She has uncovered records in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s new FamilySearch database that include personalized identification numbers for Obama’s relatives, including his father, Barack Obama Sr.

From Gawker:

Want to work in one of Scientology’s fresh new “Ideal Org” churches? Then get ready to put on your 20-piece uniform, mandatory for all cult staff. Planetary humanity is not going to be perfected by slobs, after all.

[snip]

The outfits were done by Richard Tyler, the Los Angeles-based designer to the stars and sometime Project Runway judge who fell on hard times in December 2005 after falling off a ladder at his South Pasadena home. They’d look at home in an Ian Shrager hotel, save perhaps for the capes. A tipster tells us all “Ideal Org” staff members must wear them; presumably this means the cult’s comical goons must finally give up their cheesy action-movie attire.

The best statistical portrait yet available of atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious Americans, based on data collected from nearly 6,000 respondents, has just been published in Free Inquiry magazine. Luke Galen, an associate professor at Grand Valley State University (Grand Rapids, Mich.), reported on the Non-Religious Identification Survey (NRIS), which he conducted in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry, a secular think tank.

“NRIS is the first study of its type to direct a full range of sociological survey questions to a population of ‘nones,’ as they have come to be known,” said Thomas Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry. (“Nones” are respondents who tell pollsters they identify with no religious tradition.) “For decades, pollsters and social scientists have used surveys to measure the religious beliefs and attitudes of believers. We have mountains of data, from the substantial to the silly; there’s data on the nonreligious too, but it’s far skimpier and suffers from having been collected accidentally.”

This new survey reports that confident nonbelievers are more emotionally healthy with respect to “fence sitters” or religious doubters, shows that “spirituals” report less satisfaction with their lives than those who identify with other self-labels, and suggests that the common assumption that greater religiosity relates to greater happiness and life satisfaction is not quite true.

“The nonreligious account for as much as 16.1 percent of Americans, yet social scientists still pay much more attention to distinctions within the religious portion of society,” Flynn noted. In general-population surveys, meaningful differences between distinct types of nonbelievers (atheists, humanists, agnostics, etc.) have often been neglected, with the broad category encompassing the nonreligious only included with the implication that they merely represent the “absence of religion.”

The NRIS explores the social and personal distinctions within the nonreligious population, including religious upbringings, social demographics, emotional stability, and preferred self-labels. The study, which compiled the questionnaire results of 5,831 mostly U.S. respondents, also tested certain stereotypes often pushed onto secular people (e.g. that the nonreligious are “angry loners” or “asocial”), and sought to discern the basis for variations, such as how “spiritual” individuals differ from “religious,” or how “humanists” differ from “atheists.” Big-picture questions were addressed, such as why women tend to be overrepresented among the spiritual and religious, and why men likewise dominate the atheist and agnostic subset. The study also shows how the label “atheist”—long taboo—is now supplanting others as the self-label of choice.

Click here for a PDF copy of Galen’s Free Inquiry article.
Click here for a PowerPoint slide show of Galen’s study.