NPR’s week-long series on ‘Losing Our Religion’ continued today (you can read/listen to part 1, part 2, and part 3), with part 4 being a continuation of the conversation they had in part 2 with the group of six young nonbelievers from a variety of religious backgrounds. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece that reveals what is actually going on in the investigations and prosecutions of people like Aaron Swartz. He says that Aaron Swartz was a pawn in the US government’s war against one antagonist that challenges their power and that they feel they have insufficient control over – hackers. [Read more…]
Anyone paying any attention knows that news reporting on TV is being steadily replaced by groups of talking heads discussing events. It costs a lot less to invite a few people to a studio to shoot the breeze about current events than to have actual reporters going deep into stories. [Read more…]
When preacher Rick Warren was picked to give the prayer at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama, there were protests about his anti gay views but not enough to have the invitation withdrawn. This year the inaugural committee picked preacher Louie Giglio to give the benediction on January 20th but when videos surfaced that he too had preached anti-gay messages in the past and protests again erupted, he withdrew from the proceedings, likely because he would have been disinvited anyway. [Read more…]
NPR’s series ‘Losing Our Faith’ that is running all this week is turning out to be a remarkably thoughtful treatment of the reasons why people are leaving religion. I wrote about the first two parts here and here, and on the third one today they talked about how tragedy affects belief and how nonbelievers deal with them. [Read more…]
photo by Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer
In the second part of its series ‘Losing Our Religion’ (I linked to the first part yesterday), NPR convened a group of young people from varying religious family backgrounds to talk about why they were no longer religious. The young people came from families that were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant Christian, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, and mixed. [Read more…]
Having a hereditary monarchy in this day and age seems ridiculous. Having an official state church is equally ridiculous. When both anachronisms are simultaneously present, they give birth to the kind of absurd controversy currently taking place in the UK. [Read more…]
Last September I wrote about four people in England who had claimed that they were discriminated in their workplace because of their religious beliefs. They took their case to the European Court of Human Rights which has just issued its ruling. [Read more…]
When I talk with people and tell them that science and any religion that has supernatural elements are incompatible, I will often get the response that this cannot be true since so many scientists were (and some still are) religious. In particular, names of scientific icons like Galileo and Newton are dropped as devoutly religious people whose research revealed how the world works and who saw the hand of god as the creator of that marvelous feat of engineering. If such scientific luminaries could be religious, what right had scientific basement dwellers like me to say that the science and religion were incompatible? [Read more…]