I have long felt that what people really want to believe in is an afterlife, not in a god so much. Belief in a god serves as a gateway to belief in an afterlife but if you asked people which they would prefer (a god but no afterlife or an afterlife and no god) I suspect that they would choose the latter by a landslide. (I explained my reasoning back in 2010.) [Read more…]
In the widely publicized interview with New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia talks, among other things, about his religious beliefs and they turn out to be pretty orthodox. [Read more…]
That is what the character Dr. House said in one episode of his eponymous TV show. That particular episode about a 15-year old faith healer is hilarious and sharply written. An excellent summary of that show that lasts 17:30 minutes and contains all the good bits can be seen here. [Read more…]
The rise of the religiously unaffiliated (referred to as the ‘nones’) in the US to about 20% of the population has already been widely noted and commented upon. These are people who say that they do not identify with any particular religion or religious institution or heritage, although they may not consider themselves to be atheists or agnostics.
But there is another group that has not been as closely measured and that is the group that may still belong to some religious denomination but are not committed at all to the doctrines of that institution. Such people have now also been given a label (because as a society we love giving people labels) and are called the ‘nominals’, “people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only”. [Read more…]
Sometime ago I wrote about how creationist Ken Ham teaches children to ask “Were you there?” to anyone who says that some event happened much earlier than the 6,000 years that the Bible is supposed to say that the Earth has existed. The idea behind this question is that when you say of course you were not there, they will say that you cannot assert that as a fact any event to which you were not a witness. [Read more…]
Today (September 30) in International Blasphemy Day in which skeptics are encouraged to engage in acts of blasphemy in order to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of gods and religion and show disdain for the silly taboos that religions have about their founders and prophets. [Read more…]
(This clip aired on September 26, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
A group of Muslim comedians are touring the US, hoping to use humor to combat the negative stereotypes that Muslims have here. They have made a documentary of their experiences. Here is the trailer. [Read more…]
I have written repeatedly about the fact that it is when you are entering the US that you have the least rights and that the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which operates as part of the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security, abuses people with impunity by detaining them for long periods of time, harassing them, keeping them under harsh conditions, taking their property, humiliating and degrading them, and renditioning them to other countries to be tortured, all without giving them any reasons. Other countries also abuse their border powers, as what happened to David Miranda at Heathrow airport shows. [Read more…]
Pakistan has terrible blasphemy laws in which a person can get the death sentence for “desecrating the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, mosques or Islamic beliefs.” Because these are pretty loose definitions, it means that the law can be used to settle personal scores and to target one’s enemies by finding the most trivial issue and making it into a blasphemy charge. [Read more…]