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…]

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…]

Via Blag Hag, here is a collection of signs from the rally.

Jason Rosenhouse was also there and shared his reflections and some photos.

Every Friday, many Muslims around the world will attend their mosques. The next day, Jews will follow suit into synagogues, and on Sunday many Christians will attend church. We know that some of the people in these houses of worship will be those trying to hold on to their belief in a god despite their increasing doubts. Some of them will be people who are fighting to prevent the voices of doubt entering their minds while for others that battle has already been lost and now the only thing that keeps them returning is because they do not know how to make a clean break without alienating their family and friends and perhaps the only real sense of community that they have known. But even they may not suspect that leader of the congregation is also one of them, a doubter or even an outright nonbeliever. [Read more…]