The organizers have released a list of the speakers, topic, and times for this conference that is to be held over the Labor Day weekend (August 29-31) in Pittsburgh. You have to reserve your hotel room by August 8 to get the conference rate.
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Gallup has done a survey and found the not very surprising result that the nonreligious and moderately religious tilt Democratic while the very religious tilt Republican. This pattern holds true (though to a smaller extent) for all subgroups such as non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics, and Asians, but not for blacks who go Democratic whatever their religiosity.
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Pakistan is a country that one thought was on the way to becoming a modern state but it seems to be regressing into a medieval religious one. One of the symptoms is the incorporation into its judicial code of blasphemy laws. This has emboldened Muslim extremists to take the law into their own hands to defend the honor of their god by killing those accused of blasphemy, without even waiting for these laws to be used against offenders.
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The Onion points out that religious people often have to deal with tricky decisions that for us atheists are no-brainers.
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The Satanic Temple, the group that seeks to put its monument on state grounds that have allowed things like the Ten Commandments, has said that by virtue of the rights granted to religious organizations by the Hobby Lobby verdict (authored by justice Samuel Alito), it will exempt its own employees from state laws that restrict rights to abortions.
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When I was an undergraduate in Sri Lanka, I was a member of a student Christian group and as part of our activities we did various kinds of charitable work such as helping in anti-TB campaigns and the like. We did not talk about religion when we visited the homes of poor people in the slums to dispense supplies to help them control their illness.
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In order to maintain their non-profit status, the IRS has rules that say that such institutions have to refrain from outright partisan politics such as supporting political parties and candidates. Some churches have chafed under this restriction, think it an unconstitutional infringement on their free speech rights, and have sought to directly challenge that rule by organizing ‘Pulpit Freedom Sundays’ where they explicitly endorsed candidates and even sent the tapes to the IRS, daring them to come after them.
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I briefly mentioned before a study that said that children brought up in a religious environment had a harder time distinguishing whether stories that had fantastical elements were real or fictional. Unfortunately, I did not have access to the full paper but reader Raven did have access and he kindly sent me a copy and I have now had a chance to look at it. [Update: Ben Finney in the comments has kindly provided a link to the full paper.]
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Unfortunately I do not have access to the full article but the abstract of this study titled Judgments About Fact and Fiction by Children From Religious and Nonreligious Backgrounds reports findings that do not surprise me in the least.
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