If there is one verse form the Bible that Christians are likely to be able to recite verbatim, it is John 3:16 which goes:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
For nonbelievers like me, one of the most irritating aspects of the US tax system is the tax-exemption given to churches under the section of the code known as 501(c)(3) that is meant to provide tax relief for organizations that improve the general welfare. This topic has been discussed before in the context of whether churches that overtly take political stands should continue to receive that benefit and I concluded that it was unlikely that the IRS or the courts would eliminate it. [Read more…]
I wrote recently that Lawrence Wright had released what looks like an interesting and pretty thorough book on the Church of Scientology that is titled Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. In an interview, he describes some of the weird things that he discovered. What they do to dissidents and young people is awful. [Read more…]
The recent revelations of the cover-up of priestly abuse in the Los Angeles diocese by now-retired Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has resulted in him being ‘punished’ by the current archbishop Jose Gomez. However, it does not seem like much of a punishment to outsiders, consisting of him being supposedly ‘stripped of his official duties’. Since Mahony is already retired, it is not exactly clear what he loses. [Read more…]
France has been steadily moving to implement a promise made by its president Francois Hollande to legalize same-sex marriage, despite the Catholic Church and right wing groups mobilizing large protests against it, similar to what they have done in the US. [Read more…]
Religious people are always fighting the inroads made by secular modern culture. One example is the Super Bowl that is coming up this Sunday and which is expected to drawn an audience of around 100 million. Some religious groups are worried that the halftime shows are not appropriate for their flock because the performances can be somewhat raunchy. Ever since the entire nation was traumatized in 2004 by briefly seeing one of Janet Jackson’s nipples, religious groups have felt the need to protect believers from such dangerous threats to their holiness. [Read more…]
A recent news item caught my eye. It said that the Jesuit-run Regis College at the University of Toronto had started offering a course on “Responding to 21st-Century Atheism.”
It’s an attempt, says the Rev. Scott Lewis, for people of faith to understand and come to terms with the increasingly muscular secularism and atheism that has arisen in Western societies over the past generation.
Atheism “has become militant, aggressive and proselytizing,” said Lewis, a Jesuit scripture scholar, who teaches the class with three other scholars. “It’s made great in-roads and is now socially acceptable. If you’re young and educated and believe in God, you’re (seen as) a jerk.”
William Lane Craig is a theologian whom I have encountered before because of his advocacy of what is known as ‘divine command theory‘ that asserts that “things are morally good or bad, or morally obligatory, permissible, or prohibited, solely because of God’s will or commands”, and results in him justifying the most horrendous atrocities, both biblical and contemporary. [Read more…]
It is quite extraordinary how religious people seem to be comfortable telling atheists that they are arrogant for asserting publicly that there is no god. Those on the liberal end of the political spectrum tend to be particularly prone to this failing, perhaps feeling the need to protect their flank with the ‘religious moderates’. (Connie Schultz is another columnist who does this and whom I challenged in the past.) [Read more…]
You have to hand it to the Catholic Church. When it comes to inventing tortured reasoning to justify its own failings, it stands alone. No doubt the millennia of experience trying to explain why people should believe in a god or accept the authority of the pope or what happens to babies who die before being baptized (Do they go to limbo? If so, for how long?) gives them a lot of practice. [Read more…]