Far from being in thrall?

Is secularism really winning in the US?

The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. “It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF. [Read more…]

Test of honesty

Despite profound disagreements about elevatorism and its fallout, I can’t ignore useful investigations of the Templeton Foundation and similar at Why Evolution is True, like today’s post on Templeton’s ridiculous stealth “Faraday Institute” and its hot new “Test of Faith” project.

The “Test of Faith” project has a Study Guide. The study guide has an introduction. The introduction explains things.

The challenge that has been put forward so many times recently is that God is a delusion and science has removed the need for faith in anything. But there are many practising scientists who have a sincere Christian faith, even at the highest levels of academia. They have all been trained to think and test ideas to the limit. If their faith and their science are both genuine searches for truth, we need to hear from them. [Read more…]

Without religion

One important step away from theocracy.

The court ruling last week that granted the writer Yoram Kaniuk the right to be registered with the Interior Ministry as “without religion” rather than as Jewish, is a step in the direction of separation of religion and state. Such is the view of Irit Rosenblum, who heads the New Family organization, which favors making civil marriage more easily available in the country.

Currently Jewish Israelis can only marry other Jews in the country under the auspices of the Orthodox rabbinate. A law was passed last year that allows civil unions and considers them as marriage for all intents and purposes – but only under special, limited circumstances in which both parties are registered as having no religion. The legislation was criticized for not allowing people to marry in a religious ceremony because they are not of the same religion, and for not allowing people who do not want a religious ceremony to get married in Israel.

God’s messengers meddle with people’s lives again.

A ruling of historic proportions

This is huge.

After brief deliberations on the eve of last week’s Rosh Hashanah holiday, a Tel Aviv judge ruled that Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk could register his official religious status as “without religion.”

“Freedom from religion is a freedom derived from the right to human dignity, which is protected by the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom,” Judge Gideon Ginat of the Tel Aviv District Court wrote in his unusual ruling.   [Read more…]

A man generally cannot know

Someone called “bluejohn” suggested yesterday that I should engage with James Onen of Freethought Kampala on the subject of Rebecca Watson and elevators and sexism. I replied that I already had.

I had a discussion with James at Facebook, but we fundamentally disagree. I don’t think more discussion (on this subject) would be productive.

(What we disagreed about is that his view is: men have the right to ask women [politely] for sex, even if they are total strangers and it’s out of the blue, and it’s akin to racism to make a social or moral rule saying they shouldn’t do that. My view is: women’s right not to be pestered in that way trumps men’s right to invite stranger women to have sex.) [Read more…]

Welcome to the neighborhood

It’s a good neighborhood here at Freethought Blogs. There’s a lot to read, a lot to learn, a lot to talk about. I’ve barely scratched the surface so far.

This morning I was belatedly reading Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article about Michele Bachmann, and there was, in the section on Bachmann’s inaccurate account of her Iowa history –

In fact, Muskego is a town in Wisconsin, the state where Bachmann’s forebears,  the Munsons, settled in 1857, twelve years after the manifesto was written.  Then, in 1861, they moved west, to the Dakota Territory, near present-day Elk  Point, South Dakota. That is where, according to the family history that  Bachmann relied on, they encountered the awful winter and the flooding and the  drought and what the text calls “grasshoppers.” The Munsons seem to have been  part of the group that established the first Lutheran church in the Dakota  Territory, but there were already Lutheran congregations in Iowa when they  arrived there, in late 1864 or early 1865. As the author and historian Chris  Rodda has pointed out, the story chronicled is not quite one of superhuman  perseverance on the frontier; rather, it’s the story of a family fleeing to the  relative safety and civilization of settled Iowa.

Chris Rodda is right next door, a fellow FTB blogger. See what I mean? Good neighborhood!

She’s the Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and her stuff is fascinating. Don’t expect any posts from me for awhile, I’ll be too busy reading.

Check her blog tomorrow. Srsly.

Summing up

In the final chapter of Braintrust, “Religion and Morality,” Patricia Churchland is doing an exegesis of The Euthyphro.

The pattern of questioning strongly hints, however, that whatever it is that makes something good or just or right is rooted in the nature of humans and the society we make, not in the nature of the gods we invent. There is something about the facts concerning human needs and human nature that entails that some social practices are better than others, that some human behavior cannot be tolerated, and that some forms of punishment are needed. [p 196]

That second sentence makes a nice summing up of the book, and it’s also what Sam Harris was trying to say but didn’t.