If there is one thing about religion that really drives me crazy it is when religious people act out their beliefs in ways that harm children. If adults want to handle snakes and otherwise kill themselves out of faith, that’s one thing. But leave children out of it. [Read more…]
Comedian Emo Philips writes to express his pleasure that a joke he wrote twenty years ago has been voted the funniest religious joke of all time, even though people have forgotten that he was the creator. I have to admit that I had heard it before but that I had not even heard of Philips. Here is the joke. [Read more…]
It looks like the UK has its own share of nutty politicians who seem to think that their god is like one of these deranged people who go around randomly killing innocent people and causing havoc out of a sense of grievance. [Read more…]
When we last discussed this story, on December 12, 2013 a US District Court judge had ordered the removal of the huge cross on the top of Mount Soledad, staying his order for 90 days until any appeals are filed and heard. The Ninth Circle Court of Appeals had ruled that the cross standing on federally owned land was a violation of the Establishment Clause and the situation needed to be remedied in some way and while the District Court judge said he disagreed with the ruling, given the constraints the Appeals Court had imposed, he saw no option other than its removal. [Read more…]
The president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni has decided not to sign a controversial bill that the parliament passed that called for life imprisonment for gays. There had been worldwide protests against the bill (earlier versions of it had called for the death penalty for homosexual acts) and although he claimed that this had not influenced him, he had warned legislators of serious damage to the country’s international relations if the law passed. [Read more…]
Former Seventh Day Adventist pastor and teacher at two Christian universities Ryan Bell decided to adopt as a New Year resolution to “live without God” for a year. In other words, he will live as an atheist would and “refrain from praying, reading the Bible and thinking about God at all”. Instead, he will read atheist authors, attend atheist gatherings and seek out conversation and companionship with unbelievers. [Read more…]
There was an interesting article in the Guardian newspaper about a couple, mother an atheist and father atheistic but leaning towards agnostic, who were taken aback when their eight-year old daughter told them that she believed in god and wanted to be baptized in the Catholic church. [Read more…]
While equal rights for gays have been gaining increasing support in the US, this not so elsewhere. Russia and India have taken steps backward recently. But the harshest measures have been in Africa and in its most populous country. Despite considerable pressure from the global community, Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a ban on same-sex marriage. [Read more…]
By every tangible measure, Pope Francis is no different from his predecessors. He opposes abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, adoptions by gay couples, and has not called off the inquiry into the social activism of American nuns. And yet simply by saying a few things about gays and atheists that were not outright hateful and that many other Christians had long ago said, and by expressing some gentle criticisms of the current scandalous state of wealth inequality, he has driven the right and the Republican party in in this country into a tizzy. It just shows how much they have assumed that successive popes were Tea Party members in all but name. [Read more…]
R. Albert Mohler is a highly influential evangelical Christian theologian. He confirms what I wrote about earlier, that the new evangelical push to join the Catholics against contraception is not some random deviation from more pressing concerns but is definitely being pursued as a major component of a long term strategy. [Read more…]