Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is perhaps the most prominent Catholic cleric in the US, a favorite of the media, even buddies with Stephen Colbert. In a recent interview, he tries to explain why the Catholic church is not anti-gay and suggests that this is largely a problem of marketing, that advocates of same-sex marriage have managed to pull the public relations wool over the eyes of the public to make them seem like they are the ones on the side of history and painting the church in a bad light. [Read more…]

This looks like Religious Freedom Restoration Act day on this blog because the US Supreme Court acted today in another case involving RFRA.

Last year’s major case involving the Affordable Care Act resulted in the US Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate that requires every individual to purchase health insurance. But there is another mandate in the law called the employer mandate that requires companies that have more than 50 employees to provide affordable health care to their employees. That was not part of last year’s case. [Read more…]

I saw this strange story about Jeremy Gordon Grinnell, a pastor in a Michigan church and also a professor of something called ‘systematic theology’ at Cornerstone University, who was caught peeping on a couple having sex in their bedroom. When he was spotted by one member of the couple, he quickly clambered down and escaped. [Read more…]

In the US, legal challenges on the role of religion in public life are governed by the section of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. It is the first part, known as the Establishment Clause, that has been in the news recently and comes into play whenever the government takes any action that leads to suspicions that it is endorsing any or all religions. The second Free Exercise clause basically guarantees that people should be free to practice their religion as they see fit. [Read more…]

Last year, following the beating the Mormon church took for its massive financial and logistical support in favor of Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage in California, the church seemed to be toning down its opposition and seemed to be taking a more moderate approach to the issue. There were hopes that the church was slowly changing its views. [Read more…]

I discussed on Sunday the main aspects of the case that was decided on Friday, November 21 2013 by a US District Judge in Wisconsin Barbara Crabb, concerning the so-called ‘parsonage exemption’ in which a housing allowance paid to clergy that was exempted from being included as gross income for taxation purposes. [Read more…]

Believers in an afterlife will often point to near-death experiences (NDE) or out-of-body experiences (OBE) as proof. These are situations where people who for whatever reason come close to dying say they had an out-of-body experience where their spirits/souls moved around freely and they saw things they could not have known about prior to that experience. Close examination of their claims usually find flaws in their story and there have been no conclusive evidence that such a phenomenon actually occurs, but this does seem to deter true believers who eagerly lap up such stories. [Read more…]

The way that religious people get tax breaks in the US is a disgrace. But Barbara B. Crabb, US District Court judge in Wisconsin, ruled yesterday that the tax exemption given to clergy for their housing allowance is unconstitutional. This allowance is taken advantage of by about “44,000 ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and others” and “some clergy members could experience an estimated 5 to 10 percent cut in take-home pay.” [Read more…]