There is an evangelist named Paula White who asks her followers to send in an entire month’s salary to her so that they get off to a good start with their god in the new year. Failing to do so, she warns, has consequences. And that is not all the tripe that she peddles. She claims that she can bring the dead back to life.
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I came across this interesting blog post by someone named Jaybird (whose gender is not specified and I will refer to as a ‘he’) who had been a young-Earth creationist. He was taught that it was vitally important to defend the idea of a young Earth because that was based on a biblical chronology and if that was taken as metaphorical, then that would open the floodgates for thinking that everything, even the resurrection of Jesus, as metaphorical, and that would be the end of everything. He describes the rhetorical tricks that he was taught to enable people like him to defend that position and get the better of their more-scientifically-minded critics.
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The royal commission in Australia charged by the government with investigating how institutions (religious, federal and state governments) have responded to child sex abuse allegations has, after five years issued a 17-volume report containing 400 recommendations, of which 189 are new. Such commissions usually issue fairly mild recommendations but these were quite sweeping. Naturally, the report looked at the Catholic church, one of the worst perpetrators of child sexual abuse, and suggested two major changes: ending celibacy for priests and requiring priests to report to the authorities anyone who in confessions to priests said that they had abused children.
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Those of us who are lapsed Christians, however long ago it was that we fell from grace and chose the express lanes to hell, will likely remember the Lord’s Prayer even if we have forgotten everything else in the liturgies. We said it so often that it was deeply embedded in our brains long after we stopped paying any attention to what the words actually mean. So it is a big deal when none other than the pope suggests changing a line in the prayer because it puts their god in a bad light.
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You may remember Kim Davis, the clerk of a rural county in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the US Supreme Court said that same-sex marriage bans were unconstitutional. She said that having her name on the licenses violated her religious freedom because her faith did not allow for same-sex marriages. She then defied a local judge who explicitly ordered her to issue the licenses and she went to jail for five days for contempt of court while her subordinates issued licenses. Naturally Davis became a hero to the most odious religious bigots and groups such as the Family Research Council, and people like the Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz went to greet her at a rally when she was released from jail.
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It is hard for Muslims to renounce Islam. In 13 Muslim-majority countries such an act is punishable by death but even in other countries that are more secular, there is tremendous family and community pressure to stay within the faith. People who say they no longer believe can face being ostracized even by the members of their immediate families. Given the close-knit nature of Asian families and the strong deference expected to be shown by children to their parents, it is extremely hard for young people to do anything that might harm those ties.
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Blackfriars Priory school, a Catholic boys school in Adelaide, Australia commissioned a statue of a saint Martin de Porres that was supposed to showed him giving a loaf of bread to a child. While the commission was granted on the basis of a drawing of the statue, when the final statue was unveiled, it suggested something completely different, though one that is consistent with what we have learned about the Catholic church.
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As we have seen, many evangelical Christians have closed ranks behind Roy Moore’s candidacy for the US senate despite the many credible reports that he repeatedly hit on teenage girls when he was an assistant county district attorney in his thirties and his creepy behavior was so well known that some girls at the local mall set up an informal alert system to warn others when he was on the prowl and his presence was monitored by security. There was even a security watch to see that he did not harass high school cheerleaders.
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There is a nagging little problem that I have with all the proofs of god that theologians keep insisting should be convincing. The fact that we are not all believers in the various gods means that these arguments are not that persuasive and, if gods exist, immediately raises the question: Do these gods want us to know they exist or not?
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Sri Lanka is a Buddhist majority country and like the members of majority religion in any country, Buddhists there tend to be very touchy about any perceived insults to their religion, however trivial, and are willing to punish people for acts they deem to be disrespectful. So I was not surprised when they arrested, detained for four days, and then deported, a British tourist because she had a Buddha tattoo on her arm. Some years ago, another tourist was refused a visa upon arrival when the immigration officials noticed that he too had a Buddha tattoo. The irony is that both people are practicing Buddhists who got the tattoos as symbols of their devotion.
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