More evidence of who really runs things

The New York Times reports on yet another deal in which the government lets a big bank get off lightly with crimes and does not disclose the deal to the public. The deal between the New York Fed and Bank of America occurred in July but only came to light because of court filings last week. Not only did the government give the bank a mere slap on the wrist, it then maneuvered to release the bank from other massive legal claims against it totaling billions of dollars. [Read more…]

Keeping Benedict from being arrested

The Vatican is concerned that after the pope resigns and is no longer the head of state and loses his immunity, he might be in danger of being brought to trial for the many crimes of the Catholic Church. Hence they are recommending that he stay within the confines of the Vatican and not travel to other countries where he might be subjected to arrest, the way that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was when he traveled to England. [Read more…]

Expectations of privacy

My recent post on the pastor who scrawled on her meal receipt an ungracious note to the server in an Applebee’s restaurant resulted in an interesting discussion in the comments on whether the server was justified in putting a photo of the receipt on the web with the name of the customer visible but other information (the name of the restaurant, the date, and the credit card number) omitted. [Read more…]

Expert pickpocket

I once had my pocket picked. It was on a bus in Sri Lanka and I never even noticed that I had lost something. But the thief made a mistake in that he mistook a case containing keys for a wallet. When he discovered his error, he threw the case away and left the bus. When I later discovered my loss I asked the conductor if he had seen my keys and he said that he had found them and gave them back to me. So I had a lucky escape. [Read more…]

Sending women and doctors to jail for abortion

Anti-abortion activists who want to outlaw the procedure entirely have usually shied away from answering the question as to what punishment should be meted out to the women and doctors who get abortions anyway, since they know that there is not much support for putting such people in jail. Most people realize that people get abortions because they are desperate and should not be treated as criminals. [Read more…]

The plight of single women who desire to have children

There is a curious hypocrisy when it comes to unwed mothers. When those mothers are wealthy and/or celebrities, this is seen as a lifestyle choice on the part of the woman, courageous even, boldly taking charge of their own lives and changing society’s attitudes to traditional mores. But when the unwed mother is poor and/or black, it is deplored as if it were yet another sign of the lack of virtue that is presumed to be the cause that keeps them down. [Read more…]

Decline of religion in Brazil

Latin America has 42% of the world’s Catholic population, a dominance that is not expected to change appreciably over the next few decades. Hence the Vatican must be viewing with concern the declining fortunes of Catholicism in the most populous country on the continent, according to an article in the New York Times.

Despite the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue that towers over this city, there is deep anxiety among some Catholics about the future of their faith, given rising secularization and indifference to religion here. Only 65 percent of Brazilians now say they are Catholic, down from more than 90 percent in 1970, according to the 2010 census. The decline has been so steep and continuous, especially in Rio de Janeiro, that one of Brazil’s top Catholic leaders, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, has remarked, “We wonder with anxiety: how long will Brazil remain a Catholic country?”

What has happened to those lapsed Catholics? One problem is competition from evangelical and charismatic churches. Some Catholic churches have responded by adopting some of the practices of their competitors and have created mega-churches. But there is a deeper threat that cannot be combated by speaking in tongues and having priests behave like pop singers, and that is-you guessed it-secularism.

But while evangelicals have grown more powerful in Brazil, a new shift threatens churches of all stripes: the rise of secularism. Andrew Chesnut, an expert on Latin American religions at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that the fastest-growing segment in Brazil’s religious landscape may now be nonbelievers and people unaffiliated with any church, making up as much as 15 percent of the population.

For a country that as recently as 1980 had negligible levels of people saying they were atheists, this development points to big shifts in society. Compounding the problem for the Vatican, many people in Brazil who say they are Catholic rarely attend Mass, and practicing Catholics often express frustration with the Vatican’s policies.

Across Latin America, growing numbers of people say they have no religious affiliation, a phenomenon similar to what has happened in Europe and the United States, but somewhat less pronounced, said Philip Jenkins, a history professor who teaches at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. One sign of this, experts say, is the drastic drop in fertility rates, which for the church means fewer children to be baptized and confirmed, fewer young candidates to become priests and nuns, and diminishing ties for Catholic parents to the church.

Brazil’s fertility rate, one of Latin America’s lowest at about 1.83 children per woman, is below the level needed to keep the population stable.

“If I were a Brazilian cardinal, I would be even more worried about family size and fertility rates, which are a very good augur of secularization, than Pentecostalism,” Dr. Jenkins said.

This is always going to be a problem for religion which maintains its numbers via a largely non-biological hereditary mechanism. It depends upon families producing children who will adopt the religion of their parents and thus provide a steady replenishing of the membership of churches. Modernity thus poses a double threat to religion: a rise in secular thinking and a drop in fecundity.