I finally got around to seeing Julia Sweeney’s 2007 monologue performance Letting Go of God, where she describes her journey from being a good Catholic girl to an atheist in adulthood. It was funny, informative, and moving, as she describes the kinds of questions that occurred to her and the answers she sought from her parents, her priest, other religions, and her readings, before she finally accepted that she was, in effect, an atheist. [Read more…]

A Mormon woman describes what happened when her husband told her that he had stopped believing in god. It is a poignant story of the tensions that can arise between believers and non-believers in the same family. [Read more…]

Back in 2006, I speculated in a post titled Is the Pope an atheist? that it was possible that many religious clergy were atheists, with the probability increasing the higher they were in the religious hierarchy. I had no evidence that this was actually the case but was basing my argument on what I thought were plausible premises. [Read more…]

Some time ago, I commented favorably on an essay by philosopher Richard Rorty titled Religion as Conversation-stopper. In his essay, he responds to another essay by Stephen Carter in which the latter said, “One good way to end a conversation — or to start an argument — is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will.” [Read more…]

One result of the Vatican’s attack on Catholic nun and theologian Sister Margaret Farley and her 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics that I wrote about yesterday is that her book shot up in Amazon rankings from #142,982 to #16 just one day after the attacks began.

Frankly, I think I am a much harsher critic of the Catholic Church and the pope than Farley so I am appealing to the pope: Please, please, attack me and my books, as harshly and loudly as you can.

More details on the sordid behavior of the Catholic Church hierarchy in covering up the sexual abuses cases by its clergy keep emerging. The latest is this revelation that the church paid priests accused of such abuse to leave. The church, of course, denies that this amounted to a secret payoff to keep the matter quiet by quietly getting rid of the priests rather than reporting them to the authorities. [Read more…]