More on the birth control flap

The fuss over the rule that religious institutions that employ and serve the general public do not qualify for an exemption to providing free birth control services to their employees seems likely to go away, now that the Obama administration seems to have outmaneuvered opponents on this issue by saying that while the religious institutions do not have to pay for the cost of birth control, the health insurers must absorb the cost. While this can arguably be said to be a mere accounting trick, it does undermine the religious freedom argument considerably.

If they are smart, the Catholic Church and [Read more…]

Why we must defend and expand freedom of speech

Via Jerry Coyne, I learned about a debate in 2006 in which Christopher Hitchens gave a full-throated defense of freedom of speech and on the evils of religion, and how religion survives by restricting or intimidating speech. His talk lasts about 20 minutes and is in four parts, the first of which is below, with the rest being prompted at the end.

I am becoming more and more of a First Amendment absolutist on free speech. I can [Read more…]

The Koran for dummies

I have tried to read the Koran on several occasions but have never been able to make it all the way through. I keep getting stalled because the writing is so turgid that its meaning is hard to determine without great effort. The fact that I have strong suspicions that after all that effort I am not going to end up with anything useful also dampens any motivation.

Since it is supposed to have been directly dictated by god, this does not reflect [Read more…]

The odd opposition to same sex marriage and contraception

Yesterday a three judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision upheld the ruling of US District Court judge Vaughn Walker that Proposition 8 (that reversed the policy allowing same sex marriage in California) was unconstitutional. This ruling will likely be appealed to either the full Court of Appeals or the US Supreme Court and until such time as they uphold the appeals court ruling or decline to hear it, the ban on gay marriage in California will continue.

One of the things that really puzzle me is [Read more…]

An old Earth, population bottlenecks, and Adam and Eve

It is always interesting to see religious people trying to find ways to reconcile modern science with their religious texts. For people who have a literal interpretation of the Bible, the task is much harder, with the Genesis story being a nightmare. This is not because the Genesis story is particularly crazier than the other miraculous stories in the Bible but because it is the most familiar and you cannot easily finesse it away. Everyone knows the general outlines of it, even if they are [Read more…]