As could be predicted, the violence resulting from the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims has resulted in calls for the limits to freedom of speech and laws for the protection of religious sensibilities. The president of Egypt Mohamed Morsi and the president of Yemen Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi both made speeches at the United Nations this week calling for such restrictions. [Read more…]
You can be sure that when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the United Nations General Assembly today, he will ramp up the rhetoric against Iran. With all this saber rattling, the plight of the Palestinians in the occupied territories has taken a back seat. [Read more…]
Last week, the Australian parliament took a step backwards by voting 98-42 to uphold the ban on same-sex marriages, despite opinion polls that favor allowing it. (On a more encouraging note, here are photos of a same sex marriage held at a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. It is not yet legal there, though legislation has been pending since 2003.) [Read more…]
Religious people (at least the sophisticated ones) have abandoned trying to argue as evidence that god provides explanations for how things work. They have realized that this is a losing strategy as science has made god redundant as an explanation for anything, and that signs of god’s power seem to show a notable inverse correlation to the advance of science. [Read more…]
I have argued that the world would be a lot better off without religion. Religious people disagree and one would expect them to. But more surprisingly, there are those who are not believers and yet feel that religion serves a useful purpose and is worth retaining. [Read more…]
While writing about the Lenski experiment, I recalled the hilarious episode when Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and the son of conservative icon Phyllis, concerned about the support this experiment gave to evolution, tried to discredit Lenski and his work and got a polite but severe smacking from him, resulting in Lenski’s work becoming even more widely known. [Read more…]
This film has just been released on DVD and I watched it last night. It is a comedy-thriller with a religious backdrop, starring Pierce Brosnan as the charismatic Pastor Dan of a megachurch who has grandiose plans to create his own self-contained city based on Christian principles. [Read more…]
I appeared on Wednesday on the show HuffPost Live in a segment they call Community Sound Off where they have guests pick a Huffington Post article for discussion. [Read more…]
Remember the news item about Cecilia Giménez, an 85-year old parishioner who took it upon herself to restore a faded mural of Jesus in a church and turned it into something that looked like a monkey that then became known as ‘Rhesus Christ’? [Read more…]
