Oprah Winfrey apparently has a segment on her network’s program Super Soul Sunday called Soul to Soul. In one episode she talks with swimmer Diana Nyad. It was an interesting conversation in that Nyad flatly says she is an atheist but uses the words god, soul, and spirit to describe various emotional states relating to the awe that she feels about the wonders of the world. [Read more…]

A Malaysian court of appeals has ruled that only Muslims can use the name Allah to refer to god, even though other religions have been doing so for centuries, since the word entered the Malay language from Arabic a long time ago and is the word used for god in Malay translations of the Bible. This despite the fact that Christians in Indonesia and much of the Arab world use the word Allah with no problems (as yet). [Read more…]

The series of five interviews on the afterlife with NPR’s All Things Considered host Robert Siegel was pretty good. Siegel himself does not believe in the afterlife and his questioning of his guests was gentle but pointed. He interviewed an evangelical Christian pastor (that I wrote about before), a Muslim imam, a philosopher, a Jewish rabbi, and a Catholic theologian. Each of those links has links to the transcripts of the interviews. [Read more…]

In the Orthodox Jewish communities, in order for a woman to get a divorce, she needs to get permission from her husband, something that is called a ‘get’. If the husband refuses, she can go to a rabbinical court and if she gets a favorable ruling they can order him to do so. But it is not unheard of for husbands to ignore such orders, in which case the woman is stuck. [Read more…]

Retired Rear Admiral Barry C. Black is the 62nd Chaplain of the United States Senate, serving in that capacity since 2003. In his opening prayer last Friday, he delivered a blistering attack on the current state of affairs. [Read more…]

We can sometimes forget how much courage it takes for people in some other countries to be openly atheist and fight superstition. The murder of Narendra Dabholkar in India last month is a case in point. A physician by training, he was a simple man who tried to free Indians from the clutches of charlatans and god-men that plague that part of the world. He was gunned down by people on motorbikes as he walked along the road. [Read more…]

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…]

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…]