About a year ago, I wrote about the awful case of Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of a Pentecostal church that believes in faith healing, who were charged with the death of their 8-month old child whose life could have been saved if they had sought medical treatment.
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In the past, Hinduism used to take a refreshingly open attitude towards sex. One has only to see the carvings on old Hindu temples with people engaged in all manner of sexual acts to quickly recognize this. But that was then, this is now. Hindus have become just like people of other major religions in viewing sex as something sinful and to be discouraged except in highly restrictive settings.
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The International Humanist and Ethical Union has published its 2013 Freedom of Thought report that takes a country-by-country look at the “Rights, Legal Status, and Discrimination Against Humanists, Atheists, and the Non-religious” and rates them according to five categories: 1. Free and Equal 2. Mostly Satisfactory 3. Systemic Discrimination 4. Severe Discrimination 5. Grave Violations.
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Rob Bricken has combed through the Bible and come up with a list (yes, another listicle!) with the ten worst things that the Judeo-Christian god has done, things that seem to have been driven mostly by sheer spite unbecoming of a supposedly all-powerful deity. As Bricken begins, “Before Jesus arrived and his divine father chilled out, the Old Testament God was, ironically, kind of a hellraiser. He was not a nice guy. He really liked killing people. And he may have actually been insane.”
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Pope Francis, please call your office. The German bishop whose high life that you have been critical of has a worthy US competitor.
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Over a year ago, I had a post in which I wondered why it was that snake Pentecostal snake handlers, who regularly handled poisonous snakes because Jesus promised true believers that they would not be harmed, seemed to be bitten a lot less than one might expect. Various suggestions were offered.
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There has been an interesting public split emerging among Catholic bishops over the attitude the church should take towards gays. Some bishops have taken a hard line, especially among those in Africa where they have supported vicious anti-gay legislation that has been passed in nations like Nigeria and others have been proposed in Uganda, Cameroon, and Tanzania.
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There were several commenters who disagreed with my assertion in an earlier post that belief in both god and evolution by natural selection are incompatible and forces one to choose one or the other. They pointed out that there were large numbers of people who believed in both god and evolution or that the tremendous suffering that occurs in nature was incompatible with only a loving omnipotent god or that I was being parochial and equating all religious people with the young Earth Christians in the US.
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In the clip from the film Questioning Darwin, we saw how a creationist pastor said that if the Bible said that 2+2=5, he would believe that and work everything around that ‘truth’. He was speaking in hypothetical terms but he has a chance to prove his commitment because the Bible actually does say that the number pi is exactly 3. It would be interesting to see how he deals with that. [Read more…]