Taslima Nasrin is someone who has had to suffer many persecutions simply for expressing her views. Her Wikipedia page recounts her history and the times she has had to go into hiding and even leave her home country because she angered narrow-minded and vindictive people. [Read more…]
While driving along yesterday I listened to a Marketplace report on wine that said in passing that Vincent of Saragossa was the patron saint of wine and that he had been crushed to death in a wine press. [Read more…]
Today is both Good Friday and Passover, so what could be more appropriate than looking at one of those idiotic controversies that religions fight over, this time over a building in Jerusalem? [Read more…]
Vicki Kennedy, wife of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, was disinvited from being the commencement speaker at a small Catholic college after the bishop of that area expressed concern about her views. The bishop declined to even speak with her about them before intervening. [Read more…]
I live close to Amish country, with its people who reject electricity and the automobile and live lifestyles largely unchanged from well over a century ago. Drive for a little over half an hour or so, and you enter a world of horses and buggies, men with beards and hats, women with blue dresses and bonnets, and neat, well-maintained houses and barns set in a picture-postcard countryside. [Read more…]
This coming Sunday is Easter which commemorates the day when Jesus rose from the dead. Or so I’m told.
Looked at dispassionately, the whole Easter thing is a bit over the top. The idea of vicarious atonement when it comes to things like sacrificing children and virgins to assuage the gods who unleash natural disasters is something we are now horrified about and yet the idea of Jesus having to die to save the rest of us from sin does not seem odd. In fact, many Christians seem to positively relish all the gory details of Jesus’s suffering and death, as can be seen in the commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which I did not see since I am not a fan of gratuitous violence. [Read more…]
Via The Digital Cuttlefish I found a video that Bill O’Reilly’s show shot of the Reason Rally. It is a bit disjointed with some weird cross-cutting but not too bad. The people they interviewed were pretty articulate and gave a good account of themselves. This means that either O’Reilly’s team did not go too far out of its way to selectively edit the footage to make the rallyers look bad or that they simply were not able to get video to allow them to portray atheists as crazy people.
If someone says to you “I am a Christian”, where do you think they are likely to fall on the political and social spectrum?
It used to be that people who called themselves Christians could not be that easily pinned down as to their social and political and moral attitudes because they could span a wide range of viewpoints, from extremely liberal to rigidly conservative. But in an article in The New Republic, Timothy Noah argues that things have changed, and that the label Christian has been increasingly co-opted by one narrow faction, and the media is going along with it. [Read more…]