He who puts God in government puts politics in the pulpit.
Remember that when His Holiness the Very Reverend Newt Gingrich (and third wife) stop by to collect your tithes and offerings, and lecture you on family values.
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows, but this one seems a bit stranger than most.
David Coburn, the openly gay spokesman of Great Britain’s U.K. Independence Party, claims that Prime Minister David Cameron is “picking a fight” with the religious community over same-sex marriage, insisting that pushing such legislation “shows a lack of toleration towards others who look on marriage as a holy sacrament between man and woman.”
Coburn and UKIP made their opposition to the same-sex marriage legislation known last week, arguing that civil unions are a superior alternative that would not hinder religious freedom.
via the Christian Post.
Allowing everybody the same rights is a lack of tolerance? I suppose it is, in the same way that allowing McDonalds to sell hamburgers shows a lack of tolerance for vegetarianism.
Sadly, I thought I was too busy to be able to attend the Reason Rally. But now I might just have to go anyway.
Members of the secular community are expecting to see Richard Dawkins, James Randi, PZ Myers, Hemant Metha, Greta Christina, David Silverman, Jessica Ahlquist and many more well-known personalities at the Reason Rally, an event slated to be the largest gathering for the secular community in history, but some other unexpected guests — in addition to the list of speakers and performers — from the Westboro Baptist Church will also be in attendance.
Wait, “Hemant Metha”?
This one seems pretty cut and dried.
The British government asserts that Christians have no right to wear a cross or crucifix at work and is eager to prove it in court.
The case was initiated by two British women Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin, after they were punished for refusing to take off their religious symbols.
via Cross to bear? UK denies Christians right to wear crucifix — RT.
So Doonesbury is taking on the medical rape bill this week, and there’s all the associated uproar you’d expect. Maybe now would be a good time for me to reminisce about my experiences as a pro-life advocate.
This was back during my evangelical Christian days, of course. As a conservative evangelical, I was automatically pro-life, almost without thinking. And yet, I did think too, which got me into a bit of trouble. Creationism was the biggest factor that ultimately made me question my faith, but my pro-life experiences made no small contribution to that outcome.
[Here’s an excerpt from this week’s Evangelical Realism post on Chapter 9 of William Lane Craig’s book, On Guard.]
Ted and Shelly are driving down the road one day when they see an minor accident up ahead, with a policeman and a wrecker already on the scene. Being bloggers, they stop and ask the policeman what happened.
“Oh,” says the policeman, “some bimbo piled into the back end of the car in front of her. She says he passed her, cut her off, and slammed on his brakes, but she had her cell phone out and was probably just texting to her friends and not paying attention to the road. She’s just using road rage as an excuse.”
That afternoon, they both go home and each reports the story on his/her blog. Ted reports that a woman was texting while driving, and caused an accident, and goes off on a rant about texting. Shelly reports that a man deliberately caused a woman to have an accident and that there was little hope of the woman receiving justice due to the sexism of the reporting officer.
Do Ted and Shelly’s blogs constitute independent accounts? Yes and no. They are independent accounts of how the accident was being reported, but they are not independent accounts of the accident itself, because neither Ted nor Shelly saw it happen. The common elements in Ted’s and Shelly’s accounts are due to the fact that they’re sharing a common source for the story, not due to the fact that they’re independently verifying the original incident.
If you haven’t yet stopped by Libby Anne’s blog, you should at the very least check out this post about Kirk Cameron and Doug Phillips.
Phillips teaches that a woman is never to be out from under male authority no matter her age or marital condition, and that being under male authority includes complete submission and obedience, because God speaks to women through their male authorities. This is nothing short of slavery.
Christians all too often criticize mainstream Muslims for failing to police the more radical and barbaric of their sects, but turn a blind eye to oppression and medieval morality in their own ranks.
A controversial billboard has disappeared 24 hours after being posted.
The Pennsylvania sign, which was first vandalized and then taken down, bore a verse from Colossians 3:22: “Slaves, obey your masters.”
While intended as a message against Keystone State legislators who designated 2012 as the “Year of the Bible,” many felt the sign — which also featured a shackled black man — were racist.
via NY Daily News.
A recent study suggests that morality may owe more to biochemistry than to authority or social convention.
Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm… These simulated harmful actions increased peripheral vasoconstriction significantly more than did witnessing pretend harmful actions or to performing metabolically matched nonharmful actions. This suggests that the aversion to harmful actions extends beyond empathic concern for victim harm. Together, these studies demonstrate a link between the body and moral decision-making processes.
The study was published in the journal Emotion by the American Psychological Association.
An Intelligent Design creationist is suing Caltech for allegedly firing him for espousing his beliefs at the workplace.
David Coppedge has sued Caltech, which operates Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, claiming religious discrimination and retaliation, harassment and wrongful demotion. Officials removed Coppedge from a lead system administrator position on the Cassini mission to Saturn in 2010, and was let go in 2011. Some 200 workers were laid off that same year due to budgetary constraints.
Denying the allegations, in documents filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court, JPL officials allege that Coppedge received a written warning because Coppedge allegedly harassed co-workers about his beliefs.
