Jesus, come on down!

In February, I wrote about a story that reader Ahcuah sent me about a public school in the southeastern Ohio town of Jackson that had a huge portrait of Jesus in the entrance hallway. The school board rejected requests to have it removed, saying that the portrait was hung in a space reserved for students to use and thus they had no involvement in it and it could not be construed as an official endorsement of religion by the school district. [Read more…]

Planting the flag for atheism

My university is a secular private one and has for a long time not done anything explicitly religious. Then a couple of years ago, president Obama invited colleges across the country to join in an Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge and our university decided to take part, recognizing that students came to college having some yearning to find meaning in their lives and that we were not really addressing that need. [Read more…]

Establishment Clause? What Establishment Clause?

In another sign of desperation at the increasing secularization of society that is resulting in religion being relegated to its proper sphere of the private domain, the legislature of North Carolina is proposing a bill that would allow the state to declare an official religion as well as “nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide”. The bill reads in part: [Read more…]

Einstein’s views on religion

It is well known that Einstein spoke about god frequently, leading many believers to hope that he was religious in some way. This habit of his was a puzzle to his physics contemporaries who could not imagine that a scientist of his stature would be religious. They knew that he had no sympathy for the idea of a personal god and concluded that he was using the word god as a metaphor. [Read more…]

Mormon church holding fast against same-sex marriage

The Church of the Latter Day Saints has very similar views to the Catholic Church on homosexuality and along with it seems to be determined to try and hold back the tide of approval of same sex marriage that is sweeping the country. You may recall that it was one of the strongest backers of California’s Proposition 8 initiative, pouring money and personnel into getting that measure passed. [Read more…]

Sri Lanka’s touchy Buddhists

Sri Lanka has apparently decided that it needs to become the Buddhist equivalent of Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries where any form of disparagement to their favored religion, however trivial, is not allowed. We had the situation of tourists who were arrested for taking a gag photo at a Buddhist temple and R&B singer Akon who was denied entry because one his videos had scantily-clad dancing women with a Buddha statue in the background. [Read more…]