The New York Times recently ran a long profile of a Bible-belt pastor Jerry DeWitt who abandoned his faith after 25 years in the ministry. This follows another high-profile defection that NPR recently featured involving Theresa MacBain, a Methodist minister who realized that she too was an atheist. These are just two cases of an increasingly common phenomenon. [Read more…]
Sometimes I feel that my local newspaper The Plain Dealer‘s motto must be “All Catholic News All the Time”. It has devoted an endless number of news stories to the decision by the local bishop to shut down a number of churches and consolidate those parishes with others. We had stories about the anguish of the parishioners, their defiance, their appeals to the Vatican to overturn the rulings, their elation when many of the appeals were successful, and their work in reconstituting the parishes. Many of these stories got front page, above the fold coverage. [Read more…]
One of the benefits of the Todd Akin fiasco is that it has stripped away the mask of reasonable affability that Mike Huckabee has managed to wear for so long and revealed him for what he truly is, an extreme religious dogmatist who values being anti-gay and anti-abortion above all else. [Read more…]
Here’s an oldie but goodie for those who haven’t heard it before, a great rant from Marcus Brigstocke about the three Abrahamic faiths. I particularly like the bit that begins at the 6:00 mark, where he nails the problem with trying to distinguish between ‘good’ religion (that we should seek to retain) and ‘bad’ religion (that we should try and eliminate). [Read more…]
Todd Akin’s bizarre theory of rape and pregnancy has been getting brutal reviews. Perhaps the most succinct is that of Dr. Michael Greene, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, who said, “There are no words for this — it is just nuts.” [Read more…]
It is never a good sign when the name of my country of origin Sri Lanka appears in news headlines in the western media. It usually signifies a major catastrophe (like the tsunami) or a horrific massacre (like during the decades long civil war and insurgency) or somebody doing something really stupid, like Buddhist monks demanding (and succeeding) that the government change the country’s time zone (scroll down) because the country’s ‘spiritual plane’ was out of alignment. (What were the symptoms, I wonder? Headaches? Nausea?) [Read more…]
An elderly parishioner was upset at the deteriorated state of a fresco depicting Jesus on the wall of a church in Spain. Years of moisture had taken its toll leaving a splotchy mess. [Read more…]
The latest news from Pakistan lends further support to the impression that it is coming further under the sway of vigilante Islamic groups that are terrorizing those who offend their delicate sensibilities. [Read more…]
There are a lot of crazy people out there. An Ipsos Global Public Affairs survey conducted for the Reuters news agency finds that one in 7 (14%) of the global population believes that the world will end in their lifetime. About 10% associate this with the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy that supposedly signals the end of the world on December 21, 2012, totally ruining the Christmas holidays. [Read more…]