The difficult road for ex-Muslims even in the US

It is hard for Muslims to renounce Islam. In 13 Muslim-majority countries such an act is punishable by death but even in other countries that are more secular, there is tremendous family and community pressure to stay within the faith. People who say they no longer believe can face being ostracized even by the members of their immediate families. Given the close-knit nature of Asian families and the strong deference expected to be shown by children to their parents, it is extremely hard for young people to do anything that might harm those ties.
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“But the drawing looked fine!”

Blackfriars Priory school, a Catholic boys school in Adelaide, Australia commissioned a statue of a saint Martin de Porres that was supposed to showed him giving a loaf of bread to a child. While the commission was granted on the basis of a drawing of the statue, when the final statue was unveiled, it suggested something completely different, though one that is consistent with what we have learned about the Catholic church.
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‘Presuppositonalism’ seems like just a fancy name for shutting your ears

As we have seen, many evangelical Christians have closed ranks behind Roy Moore’s candidacy for the US senate despite the many credible reports that he repeatedly hit on teenage girls when he was an assistant county district attorney in his thirties and his creepy behavior was so well known that some girls at the local mall set up an informal alert system to warn others when he was on the prowl and his presence was monitored by security. There was even a security watch to see that he did not harass high school cheerleaders.
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Does Melvin the god want us to know if he exists or not?

There is a nagging little problem that I have with all the proofs of god that theologians keep insisting should be convincing. The fact that we are not all believers in the various gods means that these arguments are not that persuasive and, if gods exist, immediately raises the question: Do these gods want us to know they exist or not?
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Sri Lanka’s touchy Buddhists get a setback while India’s touchy Hindus get mad about a film

Sri Lanka is a Buddhist majority country and like the members of majority religion in any country, Buddhists there tend to be very touchy about any perceived insults to their religion, however trivial, and are willing to punish people for acts they deem to be disrespectful. So I was not surprised when they arrested, detained for four days, and then deported, a British tourist because she had a Buddha tattoo on her arm. Some years ago, another tourist was refused a visa upon arrival when the immigration officials noticed that he too had a Buddha tattoo. The irony is that both people are practicing Buddhists who got the tattoos as symbols of their devotion.
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Plutocrat Mother Teresa and more Vatican sex abuse

A new book titled Original Sin by Italian investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi exposes even more corruption in the Catholic Church and is bound to cause a stir. Even though the existence of rampant pedophilia and financial misdoings within the church are by now pretty well known, the new details are still shocking. Barbie Latza Nadeau describes some of the details revealed in the book.
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Another pathetic article about the existence of god and the soul

Reader Jeff ‘Hyphenman’ Hess takes one for the team and reads the neoconservative rag National Review so we don’t have to, and flags my attention to a recent article that deviates from their usual warmongering to present arguments for the existence of god and a soul. They start by saying that science is what gives evidence for the existence of souls, so you know right off the bat that this is going to be a doozy, and it does not disappoint.
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Book review: Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief & Experience (2014) by Christopher C. French and Anna Stone

Following my recent post and discussion on the issue of psychics, I read three very different books on the subject, all shedding different perspectives. The first of these was the memoir In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist (1996) by Susan Blackmore that I reviewed two weeks ago. The second of these was the book Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief & Experience (2014) by Christopher C. French and Anna Stone who are both academic researchers, the former at the University of London and the latter at the University of East London.
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Another public cross bites the dust

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has, in a 2-1 decision, overturned a federal district court opinion that a big cross on public land in Maryland did not violate the Establishment Clause. The cross is 40 ft high and was erected in 1925 in memory of soldiers who died in World War I. The case was brought by the American Humanist Association, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Center for Inquiry. You can read the opinion here.
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Important court ruling on tax benefits for clergy

Among the many tax benefits that religious clergy get is that any housing allowance that they are given is exempt from taxes. But if they buy a house and then use that allowance to pay the mortgage they can then, like the rest of us, deduct that mortgage interest from any taxable income that they might have. This is a form of double dipping.
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