Mixed news out of Uganda

The president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni has decided not to sign a controversial bill that the parliament passed that called for life imprisonment for gays. There had been worldwide protests against the bill (earlier versions of it had called for the death penalty for homosexual acts) and although he claimed that this had not influenced him, he had warned legislators of serious damage to the country’s international relations if the law passed. [Read more…]

Christian pastor resolves to try atheism for a year

Former Seventh Day Adventist pastor and teacher at two Christian universities Ryan Bell decided to adopt as a New Year resolution to “live without God” for a year. In other words, he will live as an atheist would and “refrain from praying, reading the Bible and thinking about God at all”. Instead, he will read atheist authors, attend atheist gatherings and seek out conversation and companionship with unbelievers. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-3: The tricky issue of neutrality

In ruling that the prayer practices of the town of Greece were unconstitutional, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals basically said that the US Supreme Court, in its 1983 precedent-setting case Marsh v. Chambers, had used the wrong reasoning by rejecting the so-called Lemon Test and other tests for Establishment Clause violations and using instead an argument based on history and tradition. It is quite unusual for a lower court to challenge a Supreme Court precedent and the Appeals Court had to do some dancing around to justify this. [Read more…]

New sanctions bill against Iran stalls

While talks continue between the P5+1 countries and Iran, there have been determined efforts to try and disrupt the talks and thus increase the threat of war, and the main vehicle for doing has been to push for more sanctions against Iran while talks are going on.. This push has been strongly supported by Israel’s main lobbying group in the US known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC. The new sanctions have been vigorously opposed by the Obama administration, which is seeking to make improved relations with Iran the centerpiece of its second term foreign policy. [Read more…]

US government’s no-fly list gets a setback

The US government is notorious for its abuse of the so-called no-fly list. People find that they are suddenly refused to be boarded on to planes and are not told why. The government refuses to state who is on the list and what criteria are used to put people on it or even confirm to people denied boarding that it is because they are on the list. And once you are on it, it is almost impossible to get off it. [Read more…]

Playing sports in extreme weather

Those climate change deniers who gleefully seize on any cold spell in the US as evidence that global warming is a hoax conveniently ignore the fact that there is a part of the globe called the ‘southern hemisphere’ and winter here means summer there. It turns out that Australia is currently going through a blistering heat wave with elevated risks for forest fires and heat strokes. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-2: The nature of the Greece prayers

Like many observers, I was puzzled by the decision of the US Supreme Court to accept the case in which in 2008 two citizens of the town of Greece in upstate New York (Susan Galloway who is Jewish and Linda Stephens who is an atheist) sued the town council for beginning its monthly meetings with a prayer. As I said in the first post in this series, there was nothing in this case that seemed to exceed the boundaries established by the precedent 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers and since those prayers were ruled constitutional, then one would have expected these to be too. The District Court ruled in 2010 in just such a manner but in May 2012 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals surprised everyone by unanimously overruling the District Court verdict, and the US Supreme Court took up the case, hearing oral arguments in November 2013. [Read more…]