Is religion the real story behind the shut down?

So it is the morning of the 16th day of the shut down and the stalemate over that and the debt ceiling continues. As is almost universally accepted, this is entirely due to the efforts of a minority of members within the Republican party who seem to be driven by a fervor that has seized on the Affordable Care Act as some kind of demon possessing the body politic that must be exorcised or the nation will plunge over the cliff like the pigs in the Bible. They say they will not accept anything less than a major undermining of the ACA. [Read more…]

(Atheist) Soul to (Religious) Soul?

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…]

Allah is not for allah the people

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…]

Various views on the afterlife

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…]

Divorce-Jewish style

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…]

Narendra Dabholkar (1945-2013)

dabholkarWe 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…]