Whenever I see people limit themselves in what they can wear or what they can eat or do because of their religious beliefs, it bothers me as a sign of the hold that religions have on people but I would not seek to prevent them from acting in that way. Hence the new French laws that bans women from wearing the ‘burkini’, a full-body swimsuit garment as seen in this photo that covers them up when they are at the beach, seems to me to be wrong.
But do they also get a special line and a little carpet to walk over that reassures them that they are much more important than the rest of us?
Today is Sunday when good Christians should be going to church. But while many do, more of them say they will be going while choosing to stay at home. A new report issued by the Public Religion Research Institute confirms something that has long been suspected, that people in the US tend to inflate their religiosity, in particular their attendance in church on Sunday.
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Theologians like to keep discussions of god’s existence on a high abstract plane because that enables all manner of wooly statements to pass unchallenged. It is down-to-Earth practical questions that tend to stump them. In this clip from the 1980s BBC comedy show Not the Nine O’Clock News, an audience member poses just such a question to a theologian.
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In September 2012, Karen L. King, the first woman to hold Harvard University’s 295-year-old Hollis Professorship of Divinity, announced at a meeting in Rome the discovery of a piece of ancient credit card sized parchment that contained scraps of dialogue written in the Egyptian language of Coptic supposedly of a dialogue between Jesus and is disciples where Jesus refers to “my wife”.
A huge amount of media attention has been given to the short speech by Khizr Khan, with his wife Ghazal Khan by his side, on the last night of the Democratic convention.
Khan, whose son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, 27, died from a suicide bombing in Baghdad 12 years ago, said Trump’s shifting proposals to ban Muslims from entering the country would have prevented his late son from serving in the military. The Khans, originally from Pakistan, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s from the United Arab Emirates.
The revelations that emerged from the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails merely confirmed what many of us already strongly suspected, and that was that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee were lying when they said that they were staying neutral during the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They were actively tilting the playing field in her favor.
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Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, died yesterday at the age of 90. For those of you unfamiliar with his oeuvre, it deals with the Rapture.
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The Washington Post highlights some interesting results from a new Pew Research Center Survey about atheism and the electorate, the key one being that their has been a dramatic rise in the number of people who say they are not religious when compared to just eight years ago,
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Honestly, sometimes I think that the Catholic Church goes out of its way to make itself look ridiculous. A prime example is the recent document issued by the archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput. It concerns divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment of their first marriage which means that the church does not recognize the second marriage as valid. Since they are living in sin, they are forbidden from taking part in the communion rite. But Chaput says that there is a way that they can receive communion, and that is if they abstain from sex and live together as “brother and sister.”
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