Before readers roll their eyes and wonder whether I have lost my marbles and am next going to discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, let me reassure them that I have a sociological and not theological interest in this question. It turns out that this question has had answers that have varied with time and I became curious as to the reasons why. [Read more…]
That is, of course, a question that practically answers itself. Via reader Vote for Pedro I learned about a court case arising from a tragic situation in 2006 when a woman who was seven months pregnant with twins started vomiting and was short of breath and was admitted to the emergency room of a Colorado hospital run by the Catholic church. The obstetrician on call did not answer his page and the woman died within the hour and the twins did not survive either. [Read more…]
A Los Angeles archbishop has now apologized for actively plotting with other church officials to keep secret from law enforcement priests in his diocese who had sexually molested children, continuing the dreary and disgusting trend of high Catholic officials expressing remorse for the abuse that they covered up only after they get caught. [Read more…]
Scientology has been in the news recently and not in ways that it likes. There is a new book on the organization by Lawrence Wright called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief that is reviewed here. [Read more…]
I was worried for a while about Pat Robertson. As far as I knew he had not uttered a statement on the Newtown shootings, and that was so unlike him. He had also recently been expressing some strangely sensible sentiments on subjects like marijuana and science, and I wondered whether he had seen the light of reason or whether those were momentary brain lapses and that he had since gone back to his old ways of seeing a smiting god everywhere, similar to what he said about the events of 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. [Read more…]
A news report says that the Catholic Church in Germany seems to be guilty of the same kinds of crimes that it has committed in the US and Ireland and elsewhere. [Read more…]
NPR ended its weeklong series on the topic ‘Losing Our Religion’ on a weak note. (You can also see/hear part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) In its last part, they interviewed a Methodist minister and a Catholic priest on what they thought of the increasing numbers of people leaving the church especially among the young and what might be done to get them back. (Note that the transcript is not complete and the audio has more.) [Read more…]
NPR’s week-long series on ‘Losing Our Religion’ continued today (you can read/listen to part 1, part 2, and part 3), with part 4 being a continuation of the conversation they had in part 2 with the group of six young nonbelievers from a variety of religious backgrounds. [Read more…]
When preacher Rick Warren was picked to give the prayer at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama, there were protests about his anti gay views but not enough to have the invitation withdrawn. This year the inaugural committee picked preacher Louie Giglio to give the benediction on January 20th but when videos surfaced that he too had preached anti-gay messages in the past and protests again erupted, he withdrew from the proceedings, likely because he would have been disinvited anyway. [Read more…]
NPR’s series ‘Losing Our Faith’ that is running all this week is turning out to be a remarkably thoughtful treatment of the reasons why people are leaving religion. I wrote about the first two parts here and here, and on the third one today they talked about how tragedy affects belief and how nonbelievers deal with them. [Read more…]