Killed for eating beef

The more politicians try to appease religious groups, the worse things get as the groups demand more and more. This seems to be a global problem affecting pretty much all religions. In the US we see Christian groups seek one exemption after another from following the rules that everyone else must follow by saying that not being allowed to do so means that their religion is being persecuted. Paradoxically, these claims of persecution become worse when these religions are in the majority because they can get politicians to pander to them, as we see with Christian extremists in the US, Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Hindu extremists in India, and Muslim extremists in many Muslim-majority countries.
[Read more…]

Big Mountain Jesus can stay

I came across this interesting story about a lawsuit against a statue of Jesus on a ski slope on a mountain in Montana, a statue that has come to be known as Big Mountain Jesus. Back in 1953, the US Forest Service issued a permit to the Catholic group Knights of Columbus to construct a 6 foot statue of Jesus on a 6 foot high base (now known as Big Mountain Jesus) on federal land that had been leased to a private ski resort. During winter, the base is usually covered in snow, with just the statue sticking up.
[Read more…]

10 things Kim Davis likely said to pope Francis

The Kentucky county clerk who thinks that Jesus wants her to deprive other people of their legal rights had a secret meeting with Francis while he was in the US. Why it should have been kept secret is not clear since Davis is just a pain in the neck and not a political prisoner or anything that could have created a diplomatic row. Could it be that Francis was worried that such a meeting would be unseemly considering that this law-breaking woman’s life does not comport with Catholic doctrine and the main thing bringing them together is hateful anti-gay bigotry?
[Read more…]

The end of the road for the Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma?

The long-running saga of the Ten Commandments monument that stood on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capital may finally be coming to an end. After years of lawsuits that the state lost, threats by Satanists and Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees to put up their own monuments if it did not come down, digging in the heels by the governor, and threats of impeaching the state supreme court for ruling that the presence of the monument violated the state constitution, it looks like the end is near>.
[Read more…]

Anti-vaxxers get religion

As the dangers of not having children vaccinated become more well known, states are starting to cut back on the categories of exemptions given to parents who want to avoid vaccinating their children but yet want them to attend the same schools as other children and thus put them at risk. Vermont is the first state to remove the exemption based on parents’ philosophical beliefs. But since it keeps the religion exemption intact, some parents are suddenly ‘finding religion’.
[Read more…]

Pope Francis on atheists and heaven

Francis has left the US after what has to be considered highly successful visits to Cuba and the US, success being measured by the tremendous size of the crowds and the very favorable press that he received. There were no major controversies but also no surprises. My impression of the visit is that while Francis still holds on to all the nasty dogma of the Catholic church such as its opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, he would rather not talk about those things and prefers to focus on issues like climate change and wealth and income inequality and poverty, all issues that transcend religious dogma. I think that we secularists should treat him as an influential ally on the issues on which we agree with him while continuing to fight against him on those we don’t.
[Read more…]

Not the UN’s finest hour

While the UN does a lot of good work, one of its biggest problems is that many of the roles on its committees are either arrived at by rotation or by some Byzantine process that can result in what to outsiders seems like utterly ridiculous outcomes. In this category is the news that Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, has been appointed chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council, even as that nation is about to behead a young man Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr “accused of a variety of crimes against the state, all stemming from protests he took part in against the Saudi government” and who was just 17 years old at the time of his arrest.
[Read more…]

Little girl with letter catches the eye of the pope

A five-year-old girl broke through the security barrier along pope Francis’s motorcade to try and reach him. Fortunately for her in this day and age, she was not immediately shot and while she was being escorted away by security, the pope noticed her and asked her to be brought to him and she managed to give him a hand-drawn picture and a letter.
[Read more…]

The Thinking Housewife goes bonkers

Regular readers know that from time to time I wander over to the website known as The Thinking Housewife, a kind of online salon where hostess Laura Wood presides over a Downton Abbeyish genteel world in which the atmosphere suggests people daintily eating biscuits and drinking tea out of fine china, all the while politely discussing how hard it is to get good help these days and how these ghastly foreigners are ruining the country. All the usual tropes of conservative right-wing ideology are lauded, feminism and homosexuality and socialism are seen as horrible evils, and traditional Catholicism is venerated to such an extent that pope Francis is seen a subversive, Commie, usurper anti-pope who should be rejected. He is invariably referred to with ironic quote marks as “pope” Francis or by his street name Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
[Read more…]