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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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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