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…]
Pakistan has draconian blasphemy laws on the books. The latest bizarre turn in their use is that the Pakistani ambassador to the US Sherry Rehman has been accused of it. [Read more…]
I heard on NPR this morning that there is a new reality show called The Sisterhood featuring the wives of five Christian preachers in the Atlanta area.
Critics say the show takes reality TV one step too far, exposing personal, intimate and sometimes unflattering details about pastors’ wives. But Domonique Scott, former first lady of The Good Life Ministry church, tells NPR’s David Greene that The Sisterhood was somewhat of a calling for her. “We definitely believe that God told us to do it,” Scott says. “Individually, and together as a group.”
“I think for us, the assignment was to step out,” adds Christina Murray, the first lady of Oasis Family Life Church. “We knew it would probably be a little controversial, but we don’t do anything just for people to understand and give us our approval; we do everything for what God is trying to lead us to do.”
Yes, I am sure that their god told them he wants them to do a reality show about their lives since god must be sick of the other offerings on TV and was looking for something new. God has become an all-purpose get-out-of-jail free card for religious people when people question their behavior. I am waiting for the day when an interviewer will ask what seems to me to be an obvious follow-up question along the lines of “How exactly did your god tell you to take such a specific action?”
Needless to say, this show is stirring up controversy as to whether it is appropriate for preachers’ wives to expose their lives on such shows and questioning whether they are doing it for less than noble motives.