This is the problem with ceremonial prayer

As justice William Brennan said in his incisive dissent to the majority ruling in the 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case that ruled that ceremonial prayer to open the legislative sessions was constitutional, the trouble with prayer is that you have no control over what the prayer giver will say even if you prescribe what prayers are acceptable, which you are not allowed to do anyway since that would be tantamount to having an official government prayer.
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Vatican III in the offing?

So it seems that pope Francis has convened an ‘urgent’ meeting of senior clerics of the church to take place this October in which they will discuss all the major issues that the church is confronting. He had earlier asked them to canvass the views of their members on these issues prior to the meeting and those results are currently being tallied, so that the discussions will reflect the actual concerns of people.
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Set theory and god

Science and religion share a long history of controversy and even hostility. Mathematics and religion, not so much. There could be many reasons for this, the primary one being that there is some similarity in the way that both mathematics and theology operate. Both seek to create self-contained systems based on axioms that are assumed to be true. In the case of mathematics, the axioms depend upon the field of mathematics being studied while in the case of theology, the fundamental axiom is that ‘god exists’.
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The flip side of the religious freedom argument

We have seen many examples recently of religious people claiming that their religious freedoms are being violated because they cannot practice discrimination or they wish to avoid complying with laws that they object to. But now comes a curious reversal in which religious people are suing because they are being prevented from being inclusive and accepting
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Philomena as a metaphor for the Catholic church and pope Francis

In the film Philomena that I reviewed earlier, the nuns that took in the young pregnant Philomena and then sold her child into adoption against her will were portrayed as overtly mean and cruel, mostly older women with stern expressions, except for the young nun who assisted her with her delivery and gave her a surreptitiously taken photograph of her child that she treasured all her life.
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Initiation rites as tools of intellectual captivity

I have been brooding about the sad case of Syble Rossiter, the 12-year old child who died of diabetes complications because her parents withheld life-saving treatment from her because of their belief that faith would heal her. These entirely preventable tragedies are unfortunately not uncommon. I wrote in February about Herbert and Catherine Schaible whose 8-month old child had also died unnecessarily.
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Believers in faith healing don’t have the courage of their convictions

Syble Rossiter, the child of Travis and Wenona Rossiter, died of diabetes complications at the tender age of 12 because her parents withheld life-saving treatment from her because they believed in faith healing. The child’s decline was so noticeable that her teacher questioned the parents as to why she was losing so much weight. The family belongs to the fundamentalist Church of the First Born in Albany that “believes traditional medical treatment is sinful, and instead trust in God to heal them through faith”.
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Luring men back into church

It appears that not only is church attendance declining overall, church leaders fear that religion and churchgoing is becoming increasingly seen as something that mainly women do, which is likely to lead to even greater male defections from religious institutions. Stephen Colbert looks at some novel attempts to boost attendance and to also give worship a more manly image.
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