In the comments on my post yesterday about a senior Anglican cleric who defended ‘traditional marriage’ and said that it excluded same sex ones, people offered variants of what that phrase implied.
Since there seems to be some confusion on what constitutes ‘traditional marriage’, I thought that I would set everyone straight by reposting the definitive ruling on what constitutes Bible based marriage from the ultimate authority on this topic: Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™.
A court in Kingston, Ontario has convicted an Afghan immigrant, his wife, and son of first degree murder for the deaths of his first wife (it was a polygamous marriage) and his three daughters (aged 19, 17, and 13), apparently because they disapproved of the behavior of the daughters and [Read more…]
The second most senior cleric in the Church of England says that marriage must remain between a man and a woman and society should not attempt to change it because “I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just (change it) overnight, no matter how powerful you are.”
History and traditions can be powerful and even good things but if they are your only arguments against a practice then it is pretty clear that you have a very weak case.
As we all know, billboards with atheist messages seem to arouse indignant responses because of their purported offensiveness. Richard Wade wonders if it is the message itself or simply the fact that the word ‘atheist’ appears in the billboard sponsor’s name that drives believers up the wall.
To test his hypothesis, he suggests a number of billboards. Pretty funny.
(Thanks to reader Fu Dayi.)
Scientists and atheists tend to be naturalists. Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, has written an article titled Buddhism Without the Hocus-Pocus in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 13, 2012, page B4, unfortunately behind a subscription wall) which provides as good a definition of naturalism as any.
Naturalism comes in many varieties, but [Read more…]