Bryan Fischer is a well-known evangelical leader and Director of Issues Analysis of the American Family Association who also has a radio show. He has the usual reactionary beliefs of his group, such as that men should rule over women in households and that the recent rise in the number of households in which women are the primary breadwinners was a bad thing. [Read more…]

The issue of dress codes is one that arouses strong passions. Part of the problem is the gender bias involved. What women wear comes under much closer scrutiny than what men wear and the stringent dress codes that Muslim (and Orthodox Jewish) women must operate under in many parts of the world is one of the hottest of issues. In 35 nations some form of veiling of women is compulsory. [Read more…]

It has been established that the number of people in the US who self-identify as unaffiliated with any religion is steadily on the rise, now reaching about 20%. One would expect that those who are religious would see it as a bad thing, while the non-religious would see this as a good thing, resulting in an 80-20% split as to whether this trend was bad or good. [Read more…]

While the LGBT community is making headway in gaining acceptance in the western hemisphere, things are still bleak in the rest of the world. It looks like the nations in the continents of Africa (with the exception of South Africa where same sex marriage is legal) and Asia and the Middle East may well end up being the last to accept the reality. [Read more…]

Yeshiva University is the latest all-male religious institution that has been exposed as covering up the sexual abuse of students by religious leaders. The newspaper The Forward reports, in a long article that details the abuses, that many but not all of the offenses occurred at an all-male high school run by the university and then, when the crimes were brought to the attention of the school authorities, they covered them up and quietly transferred the perpetrators to other institutions where they could continue to prey on students. Two of the accused, both rabbis one of whom taught the Talmud, now live in Israel. Once again, we see families of the violated young people being reluctant to go to the police because of fears that they would be seen as damaging the religious institutions to which they belonged. [Read more…]

Last week, I wrote about an affluent suburban school district in California that was being sued by some Christian parents because yoga sessions were being scheduled as part of their physical education curriculum and they felt that this was a subtle way of indoctrinating their children with non-Christian religious teachings. [Read more…]

The Boy Scouts in the UK are going to make changes next week that will welcome atheists to their fold by creating a new oath for them (tentatively called the Atheist Promise) that leaves out god. The scouts had had different oaths to accommodate different religious beliefs but this is the first time they have created one for nonbelievers. [Read more…]

I simply could not see how the Creation Museum in Kentucky, that opened to great fanfare and big crowds, could maintain that pace of visitors because unlike real museums which are dynamic and change with new scientific knowledge thus enabling productive repeat visits, this museum is pretty much stuck with unchanging source material. Once the excited faithful had seen it, why would they come again? [Read more…]

In an earlier post, I looked at the idea proposed by Jesuit theologian Michael J. Buckley that it was the enthusiastic embrace of natural theology by 17th century theologians, following the spectacular success of religious scientists like Galileo, Kepler, and Newton in explaining the workings of the cosmos, that ultimately led to the rise of atheism that we see today. How does he arrive at this conclusion? [Read more…]