As travel becomes easier and local communities across the world become increasingly diverse, the chances of marriages between people of different religions also increases. In the US alone, interfaith marriages have increased from 20% in 1950 to 45% today. For people in such marriages seeking common ground, values matter more than beliefs.
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A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
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The world of mathematics was agog last week with the announcement of the first woman to win the Fields medal, the most prestigious prize in that field, awarded every four years to two to four people. What was additionally noteworthy is that Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor from Stanford University is originally from Iran.
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There is an strong extremist Buddhist faction in Sri Lanka that believes that non-Buddhists are second class citizens and this group is powerful enough that it can influence the government, yet another example of the terrible consequences when religions can influence the use of state power.
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I want to point you to a very interesting post by Greta Christina on a recent Gallup poll that finds that members of the LGBT community are less religious than others. A lot less. Almost half of them describe themselves as ‘not religious’.
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Michael and Laura McIntyre decided in 2004 to homeschool their nine children, using as a classroom some space in a motorcycle dealership that he co-owned. But his twin brother Tracy noticed that the children never seemed to be doing any actual work, instead singing and playing. He also overheard one of the children tell a cousin that they did not need to do any work because they were going to be raptured.
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The actor and comic died yesterday, an apparent suicide, the cause of death whose reasons are often completely inscrutable. In his case, he apparently suffered from depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol, a deadly combination.
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There is a negative correlation between religious beliefs and education in that the more formal education one has, the less likely one is to be religious. But a new study suggests that that familiar pattern may be undergoing a shift, especially in the age cohort labeled as Generation X.
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A group of women walkers in Georgia who wanted to end their session by forming a circle and praying in a shopping mall were told that they could not do that.
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There have been a spate of reports of pastors of megachurches getting caught doing things that Jesus would not do. Consider Mark Driscoll, head of the Mars Hill Church, that is actually (if you can believe it) franchised out like McDonalds to 15 different locations. He has got into trouble because of revelations about his shady behavior and he has advised his followers to not believe what they read about him on the internet.
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