There are some limits to religious exemptions

In the US, people use religious beliefs to claim a broad array of exemptions from the laws that apply to everyone. The primary vehicles for doing so have been the Free Expression clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and courts have often been willing to accommodate them. But it seems like there are limits to that leeway, as this case shows.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a religious rights case involving an Idaho man who refused to provide the state his Social Security number in a job-related filing because he said it was “the number of the beast” – an ominous biblical reference.

The justices let stand a lower court ruling against a man named George Ricks who in a lawsuit against Idaho demanded an exemption due to his Christian beliefs from the state’s requirement that he provide his Social Security number to apply to work as a state contractor.
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A scathing critique of prominent New Atheists

Phil Torres has published a scathing essay that looks closely at the ugly trajectories that the careers of a group of prominent people identified with New Atheist movement has taken. The title of the piece Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right, along with the subtitle What once seemed like a bracing intellectual movement has degenerated into a pack of abusive, small-minded bigots pretty much captures the essence of the essay.
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The forcible cultural subjugation of indigenous peoples

One of the shameful features of US history is its attempted genocide of the indigenous people here. Apart from the outright massacres, other attempts involved the erasure of their identities by destroying their language and culture. One means of doing so was a governmental policy involving the forcible abduction of Native American children from their parents and sending them to boarding schools where they were forbidden to practice any aspects of their culture and were forced to adopt those of white people.
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Satanic panic and other dangerous beliefs

While I am an atheist, I can understand the appeal that the idea of a god has for some people, since I was a believer myself at one time. But even during my most religious phase, I never gave much thought to the devil or Satan, as he was sometimes called. It just seemed such a silly idea and the various depictions one saw of a red-faced guy with wings and horns seemed ridiculous. He also seemed superfluous. Since god was omnipotent and it was he who consigned you to hell to suffer interminable torments for one’s transgressions, what was the point of Satan, other than to serve as some kind of doorman to the gates of hell?
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Yoga is ok but saying ‘namaste’ is not?

Alabama has, after nearly three decades, lifted the ban on teaching yoga in public schools.

Alabama has lifted a three-decade-long ban on allowing yoga to be taught in its public schools – though the word “namaste” and chanting “om” will still be barred in classrooms.

Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill which overrides the state’s 1993 ban on yoga instruction and allows local school boards to decide whether students can be taught the ancient practice.

Some conservative Christian groups fought to retain the ban, arguing that allowing yoga in the classroom could result in children converting to Hinduism.
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The final legislation was amended to include a regulation that parents must sign a permission slip for students to practice yoga.

Another amendment said: “School personnel may not use any techniques that involve hypnosis, the induction of a dissociative mental state, guided imagery, meditation, or any aspect of eastern philosophy and religious training.”

‘Namaste’ is just a form of greeting, a more respectful form of ‘hello’ that is from Sanskrit and means ‘I bow to you’ and is uttered with a slight bow when meeting someone. While ‘om’ is now used in chants in secular meditation practices, its origins do lie in Asian religions . The use of ‘om’ is now so widespread (and the word is so easy to make puns with) that it is often the source of humor.

I cannot see courts upholding the ban on saying words like ‘namaste’ and ‘om’ unless it is ruled that they are religious words. Even with ‘om’. the courts may rule that it has long since been stripped of its original religious meaning and is now just a word and thus exempt from the Establishment Clause. That is similar to the reasoning the US Supreme Court used in deciding that “In God We Trust” on US currency did not violate the Establishment Clause. I have not been able to find out if the ban on using these words has been challenged in court.

Apart from the legal issues, I find it extraordinary how the beliefs of some devout Christians are so fragile that just doing yoga and saying some words can undermine them.

Mother Teresa’s cult of suffering

Ashlie D. Stevens reviews a new podcast series The Turning: The Sisters Who Left that talks to some of the nuns who joined Mother Teresa’s missionary order and later left because they could not take it anymore. It seemed like MT had a peculiar fixation that suffering was somehow ennobling and good for you, and the nuns had to go out of their way to adopt the most painful option in any situation.

It’s a telling detail that Mother Teresa was so intently focused on Christ’s crucifixion. While, as [producer and host Erika] Lantz put it in “The Turning,” one would anticipate that the scriptural passages that would have most impacted Mother Teresa would have centered on Jesus’ interactions with the poor, sick and hungry, she was perhaps most moved by how his pain catalyzed his holiness. 
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The downside of meditation

Sri Lanka, the country that I grew up in, is made up of about 90% of Buddhists and Hindus, religious traditions that have meditation as a part of their tradition and yet, growing up there, I did not know anyone who was a real devotee of the practice. I do recall dropping in with a friend out of curiosity to a place that was supposed to be a meditation center and listened to the leader of the program tell us of the need to ‘open our third eye’, which my friend and I found pretty funny, conjuring up as it did the sudden appearance of an eye in the middle of our foreheads like Cyclops, and tried to suppress our laughter. We never returned.
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Are Christian nationalists killing Christianity in the US?

A recent Gallup poll shows that the number of people who belong to a church, mosque or synagogue is dropping rapidly and that this may be due to a reaction to aggressive Christian nationalist politics. (Thanks to reader Jeff for then link.)

Just 47% of the US population are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, according to a survey by Gallup, down from 70% two decades ago – in part a result of millennials turning away from religion but also, experts say, a reaction to the swirling mix of rightwing politics and Christianity pursued by the Republican party.

The evidence comes as Republicans in some states have pursued extreme “Christian nationalist” policies, attempting to force their version of Christianity on an increasingly uninterested public.
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Christian evangelism and the QAnon cult

An interesting fact about the QAnon phenomenon is that even though the mysterious Q has not been heard of in over four months, suggesting that following Trump’s defeat they are trying to wash their hands of this whole thing, the cult keeps going on, though there has definitely been some attrition as some people’s hopes were dashed when Biden’s inauguration went ahead without Trump swooping in and arresting everybody.

Another interesting thing is that the cult members are not easy to pigeonhole and are all over the place, except for one common factor.
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