There exists a marble frieze in the US Supreme Court building that overlooks the bench that contains carvings depicting 18 secular and religious lawgivers of the past. Guess who is included in the pantheon? Yes, it is the prophet Mohammed himself.

We know that Muslims are highly touchy about depictions of their prophet, some of them being willing to even kill those who do so. Hence it must have been quite awkward for all concerned to discover this. After the various controversies involving this issue, the Supreme Court included [Read more…]

A court in Kingston, Ontario has convicted an Afghan immigrant, his wife, and son of first degree murder for the deaths of his first wife (it was a polygamous marriage) and his three daughters (aged 19, 17, and 13), apparently because they disapproved of the behavior of the daughters and [Read more…]

The second most senior cleric in the Church of England says that marriage must remain between a man and a woman and society should not attempt to change it because “I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just (change it) overnight, no matter how powerful you are.”

History and traditions can be powerful and even good things but if they are your only arguments against a practice then it is pretty clear that you have a very weak case.

Alaska Airways will apparently stop, as of February 1, the practice of handing out prayer cards on flights, after some passengers complained. Never having flown on that particular airline I was [Read more…]

I tend to avoid end of the year lists but I thought this one was interesting, since it included many items that had slipped by me.