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…]

Yoga has its roots in India and Hinduism and Buddhism, though now many do it purely for the mental and physical wellbeing it provides practitioners without concerning themselves too much with the religious aspects. So is having a twice-weekly half-hour yoga program as part of the physical education curriculum in public schools a violation of the Establishment Clause, because it is promoting religion? [Read more…]

Larry Alex Taunton (a Christian) has an interesting article in The Atlantic magazine where he undertook a project to interview young people who had become atheists. It was not meant to be a scientific survey but more a collection of individual stories, which can often provide richer insights than dry statistics. While Taunton’s goal was to find ways to create a more appealing form of Christianity, the themes that emerged from his conversations as to why young people stopped believing are interesting on their own. [Read more…]