Laws against blasphemy have rarely been about religious dogma. They are, like anti-terrorism statutes, political weapons that are available to intimidate and ensure conformity in the population. The very vagueness of the concepts of terrorism and blasphemy allow them to be interpreted so broadly that almost any action can be interpreted as breaking the law. These weapons are invariably used by the most extreme elements of society. [Read more…]
I have written before about the absurd dietary rules imposed by religions. The Mormons have their own bizarre prohibitions and one of those was supposed to be to avoid caffeine. Hence I was surprised to read in some news reports that Mitt Romney drank Diet Coke because by all accounts he is a devout Mormon with the rank of bishop, not just some ordinary guy in the pews (if Mormon temples have pews in their temples). [Read more…]
In his article trying to explain the decline of religion in the US that I commented on a couple of days ago, Rod Dreher pinned the blame on Christian institutions being too liberal and abandoning traditional verities in favor of what he sees as a post-modern sensibility that demands nothing from its followers and has abandoned its core principles. He calls for a return to a “traditional religion, with its truth claims and strictures”. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert zeroes in on how Paul Ryan conveniently abandoned his enthusiastic promotion of Ayn Rand once her atheistic and political views became better known and uncomfortable for modern Republican orthodoxy and his own political ambitions. [Read more…]
The comments by the Catholic priest Benedict Groeschel that I wrote about yesterday, where he seemed to view sexual abusers like priests and even Jerry Sandusky with indulgence while suggesting that their victims may be the real predators who may have seduced them, created a predictable uproar. [Read more…]
I have referred before to the WIN-Gallup survey of 57 countries that showed a decline in religion worldwide and a rise in disbelief. When you have a global phenomenon, the reasons for it are likely to be global in scope as well. My argument (made in a series of posts titled Why Atheism is Winning) is that it is the inevitable march of modernity that is slowly but surely killing religion. Religion has no escape. It is anchored in the past by its holy texts and that anchor is a major drag on it, causing it to steadily fall behind even as science and technology are rapidly moving the world forward. [Read more…]
One of the puzzling things about the sexual abuse problems that have been exposed in closed, secretive, and hierarchical organizations like the Catholic Church, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, and football programs is the fact that these abuses were so widespread and long-standing that they could not possibly have been kept secret from others in the organizations. So why did they not speak up? It is suggested that the reason is that the higher ups wanted to avoid damage to the image of the institution by a public scandal and thus tried to address the problem internally. [Read more…]
In the September 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine, David Sirota had an excellent article (subscription required for the full article though you can see a shortened version here) that examined how the fact that almost all the major cities have become one newspaper towns lacking any competition has resulted in in an unhealthy collusion between the papers and local institutions and business leaders, with the papers often suppressing stories that might harm the interests and images of powerful people. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about the puzzling feature of some atheists going out of their way to praise religion, sometimes even denigrating science in the process in order to make their point. Reader Baga sent me a link to this article in Nature that has yet another atheist (this time a scientist) trying to do the same thing. [Read more…]