In the US someone can set up a bogus church and proceed to fleece people by getting them to donate money, even what they cannot afford. Those donations are tax deductible and the pastors get to live the high life with fancy houses, private jets and the like at our expense. The government will not touch them because as soon as they do, people will scream ‘religious persecution’.
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The Girl Scouts of America are a great organization, very supportive of diversity and inclusion, and welcoming members of the LGBT community into their ranks. Unlike the Boy Scouts who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world by threats of boycotts, the Girl Scouts have been very forward looking.
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There is something sweet about poetic justice. Jessica Williams of The Daily Show returns to a church with a virulently anti-gay pastor. The building is under foreclosure because he has not been paying his water bills among other debts and now owes about a million dollars. The pastor seems to think that having tax-exempt status (itself an indefensible boondoggle) means he is entitled to free water as well. Why stop there? Why not free electricity too? And internet? And cable TV?
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In Idaho, a panel of Republicans in the state senate has approved a bill to allow public school teachers to use the Bible as a reference book in the teaching of astronomy, biology, and geology. Not to be outdone, two Mississippi Democratic legislators think that they have found the solution to the world’s many problems. They have proposed that the Bible be the official state book.
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The Guardian had an interesting article about a new book.
Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.
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A lesbian couple went to get a marriage license, something that by now should not be news and is even routinely taking place in the offices of Mike Huckabee’s hero, Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis. But that is not what Samantha Brookover and Amanda Abramovich discovered [link fixed] when they went to the Gilmer County Courthouse in West Virginia.
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Michael Newdow is the atheist who at one time argued before the US Supreme Court that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance that school children say in school violated the Establishment Clause and was thus unconstitutional. The court ruled against him on a technicality that he was at the time not the legal custodian of his daughter, the one in whose name the suit was brought, and thus lacked standing. His later attempts to rectify that issue by representing other children did not succeed at the Appeals Court level and he gave up on it.
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In a post a few days ago, I wrote about how The Satanic Temple had applied to deliver the opening prayer at a meeting of the Phoenix, AZ city council. The council had been having opening prayers for over sixty years but the 2014 Greece v Galloway decision by the US Supreme Court had required government entities that offered such prayers to open it up to all groups and thus avoid the appearance of endorsing specific viewpoints.
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The US Supreme Court decision in Greece v. Galloway was a bit confused but seemed to suggest that it was acceptable for government entities to open their meetings with a prayer as long as the opportunity for offering prayers was made without discriminatory intent And not limited to just those views that promoted one particular viewpoint.
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The famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow advised lawyers that they should not pick jurors who had strong Calvinist religious beliefs about right and wrong because they have a harsh and unforgiving attitude. It should not come as a real surprise that new research supports his view.
A new study backs up Darrow’s advice, finding that belief in a vengeful God will lead a person to oppose programs that help prisoners re-enter society, while a person who believes in a loving and forgiving God is more likely to support those programs.
“Stronger feelings of religious forgiveness led to greater support for assisting offenders,” says the study of 386 random Missourians. “The people who had the stronger punitive picture of God were less likely to support transitional programs, things like substance abuse programs,” says Brett Garland, a professor at Missouri State University and an author of the study.
Past research echoes the Missouri findings. “Fundamentalists tend to be more punitive. They do believe in ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” Monica Miller, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, tells Newsweek. Miller’s research found stronger support for the death penalty among those who take the Bible literally and among fundamentalists, who place more weight on the Old Testament than the New.
In Darrow’s time one did not have the option of picking non-religious people since they were unlikely to publicly declare their unbelief so Darrow advised defense lawyers as to which denominations were preferable.
In his 1936 essay for Esquire, Darrow predicted the views toward criminals and defendants that Guyton, the Methodist, and Moore, the Southern Baptist, would hold almost 80 years later. The guidance he gave defense attorneys for picking sympathetic jurors seems to remain solid.
“The Methodists are worth considering; they are nearer the soil. Their religious emotions can be transmuted into love and charity,” Darrow wrote. “If chance sets you down between a Methodist and a Baptist, you will move toward the Methodist to keep warm.”