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…]

My local newspaper the Plain Dealer had an article recently on legends and myths in the universities in the Cleveland area. One item caught my attention because it concerned the Amasa Stone Chapel that is in the center of my university campus. Built in 1911, it has carved angels on three sides and a gargoyle on the wall facing west. The news report said, “According to legend, trustees of Western Reserve University had the gargoyle placed there to face the campus of the Case School of Applied Science in their belief that Leonard Case Jr., who founded the school, was an atheist.” (You can see the gargoyle on the left and the angel on the right.) [Read more…]

In the second part of its series ‘Losing Our Religion’ (I linked to the first part yesterday), NPR convened a group of young people from varying religious family backgrounds to talk about why they were no longer religious. The young people came from families that were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant Christian, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, and mixed. [Read more…]

Last September I wrote about four people in England who had claimed that they were discriminated in their workplace because of their religious beliefs. They took their case to the European Court of Human Rights which has just issued its ruling. [Read more…]

When I talk with people and tell them that science and any religion that has supernatural elements are incompatible, I will often get the response that this cannot be true since so many scientists were (and some still are) religious. In particular, names of scientific icons like Galileo and Newton are dropped as devoutly religious people whose research revealed how the world works and who saw the hand of god as the creator of that marvelous feat of engineering. If such scientific luminaries could be religious, what right had scientific basement dwellers like me to say that the science and religion were incompatible? [Read more…]

NPR is having a series of reports this week around the theme ‘Losing Our Religion’, on the rise of those now being referred to as the ‘nones’, people who say they are unaffiliated with any religion. In their report today they showed a graph with a sharp rise in the nones in the 1970s, a plateau until 2000, followed by another sharp rise. This trend is especially pronounced among young people. [Read more…]

One of the qualities of large institutions like churches is that they are incapable of making sudden changes in their policies even if they know that their current policy is wrong. Instead what they do is slowly edge towards a new policy by incremental steps, each time claiming that it is as far as they can go or is theologically justified. [Read more…]

The Catholic Church continues its war on women in ever-more bizarre ways, tying itself into all kinds of knots as it tries to enforce its policies on the people over whom it has some authority. For example, the church seems to hate the thought that women might be getting pregnant in ways that it does not approve of based on its medieval ways of thinking. As a result, it finds itself embroiled in legal cases that do not show it in a good light. [Read more…]