Prayer at school board meetings

Back in 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of ceremonial opening prayers of the Nebraska state legislature was constitutional. In his strong and cogently argued dissent, justice William Brennan warned that allowing any ceremonial prayer at all, whatever the constraints imposed, would result in the Supreme Court getting involved in endless disputations about what kind of prayer and settings should be allowable and what should be disallowed.
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Mobs rampage in support of Indian religious rapist

It is not just in America or in the Catholic church that we find religious people exploiting the trust people place in them and indulging in sexual abuse. This happens frequently among Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim religious figures as well, though not reported as widely here. Just today in India, supporters of a flamboyant Indian ‘holy man’ Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh went on a rampage after he was convicted of a 2002 rape. At least thirty people have been killed and over 250 injured.
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That nice young neo-Nazi next door

The Vice News video of the events that unfolded in Charlottesville by reporters embedded among the marchers has had over 46 million views. When I was watching it, I was struck (and depressed) by the fact that most of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches and chanting racist slogans seemed to be young people. I like to think that the younger generation is more enlightened and tolerant than their predecessors, but of course that is an extremely broad generalization. There will always be those who are throwbacks to the past, embracing old abhorrent views even more strongly than their ancestors did.
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Evangelical Christian leader calls for war with North Korea

Robert Jeffress is an evangelical pastor who has been a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump and even said during the election campaign that he would never support a presidential candidate who embodied Jesus’s message, saying ” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.” Now Jeffress claims that his god has given Trump the “authority to take out Kim Jong-Un” and go to war with North Korea.
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Inclusive Islam movements

Islamic mosques separate people by gender and assign inferior roles to women. Majority Islamic nations and many orthodox Muslims have also had a deeply hostile attitude towards the LGBT community. So it was with interest that I saw this story about a new mosque in Berlin, Germany that operates under quite different rules than traditional Islamic mosques and adopts a far more inclusive attitude.
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National Review on the New Atheists

The neoconservative magazine National Review has used the recent decision by San Francisco radio station KPFA to disinvite Richard Dawkins from an interview to publish an article by Elliot Kaufman that takes aim at atheists. It consists essentially of two points. Firstly it argues that ‘the left’ has ‘expelled’ the New Atheists like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens because of their “insufficient deference to Islam” and secondly that their arguments against god’s existence are wrong. Kaufman even goes on to say that ‘the left’s’ dislike of Islamophobia has morphed into a defense of Islamic radicalism and thus have joined “a long line of left-wing apologists for murderous anti-Western regimes”. (Thanks to reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write for alerting me to this article.)
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Satanist to give city council invocation

Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in the case Greece v. Galloway that ceremonial opening prayers were permissible at meetings of local government bodies provided that there was no consistent pattern of discrimination in favor of or against one sect, a Satanist will be giving the invocation at tomorrow’s meeting of the Grand Junction City Council meeting in Colorado.
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Book Review: Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (2017)

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is one of the great enigmatic characters in scientific history, an extremely reclusive and private man with a fascinating array of foibles and personality quirks. I just finished the newly released book by Rob Iliffe, professor of history at Oxford University, that looks closely at the religious studies of this famous physicist and mathematician, based on a detailed examination of his vast collection of private notes, papers, and correspondence. The book deals largely with the first fifty years of Newton’s life, stopping around the year 1696 when Newton left Cambridge University and took up a government position as Warden of the Mint where he vigorously pursued and prosecuted counterfeiters.
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