From the Washington Post Much white evangelical support for President Trump is based on a bargain or transaction: political loyalty (and political cover for the president’s moral flaws) in return for protection from a hostile culture. Many evangelicals are fearful that courts and government regulators will increasingly treat their moral and religious convictions as varieties …
Continue reading ‘Evangelical support wanes among young people’ »
We concentrate on the obvious places where dictators thrive and warfare kills thousands, but tend not to note the stress experienced by the people of Greenland, who are struggling to cope with global warming, which is totally altering their way of life. More than 90% of Greenlanders accept that the climate is changing, while 76% are …
From the New York Times: Many of the people who have worked for President Trump have ended up “diminished” or humiliated in some way. To that long list we can now add a new name: John Bolton. Trump’s national security adviser won the role by impressing the president with his regular bellicose contributions to Fox …
Continue reading ‘A humiliating way to treat an old warmonger’ »
In Poland a simple poster distributed by an LGBT activist featuring an image of the Virgin Mary with a rainbow halo has got Catholic leaders in a lather. Elzbieta Podlesna allegedly put up the posters near a church to protest an anti-gay Easter message that denounced words like “LGBT” and “gender” as “aggressive” and “deviant”. …
Lawmakers in Alabama have passed a bill that virtually bans abortion. The legislation, to be signed by the state’s Republican governor, outlaws abortion except in cases where the pregnancy poses a “serious health risk to the mother”, the “unborn child has a lethal anomaly”, or the pregnancy is ectopic (in an abnormal place or position). …
In the early church nearly all Christian priests were married. Popes tried to ban marriage and co- habitation, but to little effect. Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) said that all sexual desire is sinful in itself (meaning that sexual desire is intrinsically evil?), but right up to the 800’s the majority of priests were nonetheless married. …
Only 40% of adults in the United States believe evolution to be “true”. A third of American adults positively believe it to be false, presumably believing that God delivered man and woman, fully formed, to the Garden of Eden five thousand years ago, as per one of the Hebrew creation myths (there were two of …
Some 380 Southern Baptist pastors, ministers, Sunday school teachers, deacons and church volunteers have been accused of sex offenses over the last twenty years. 700 victims have come forward, the youngest only three years old. One hundred are still in prison and one hundred are registered sex offenders and at least thirty-five have been allowed …
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders kicked up dust recently when she told the Christian television network CBN that she believed that God wanted Donald Trump to be president. “I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times,” she said, “and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become …
Both Vice-president Pence and Mike Pompeo are active evangelicals, believing in the whole evangelical package, including the so-called rapture, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest of us will go to hell. One of the preconditions for this event …
At the Second Lateran Council 1139 Rome imposed mandatory celibacy for priests. The issue was money because, under primogeniture (now disappeared) the sons of bishops and priests had a legal claim on the land and holdings of the priestly “living.” Celibacy was instituted, but at the same time the Church, not then or since, has …
In an interview published on Wednesday evening by Religion Digital, the religious portal of the Spanish-language news site Periodista Digital, Cardinal Maradiaga once again strongly criticized Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for having gone public about McCarrick’s sexual predations and the protection the Cardinal received from the highest spheres in the Vatican, especially since Pope Francis …
Continue reading ‘The scandal in the Catholic church goes from bad to overwhelming’ »
A highly placed Vatican source claims that Cardinal Gerhard Müller, together with three experienced CDF priests, was dismissed by Pope Francis because they all had tried to follow loyally the Church’s standing rules concerning abusive clergymen. In one specific case, Müller opposed the Pope’s re-instatement of Don Mauro Inzoli, an unmistakably cruel abuser of many …
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” (Richard Dawkins)
Liberals in Iran have recently been outraged by the arrest of a teenage gymnast who posted videos of herself dancing in her bedroom. Maedeh Hojabri, who has tens of thousands of social media followers, was seen crying on state TV last week during what some suspected was a forced confession: under Iran’s sharia law, it …
Continue reading ‘The reactionary ayatollahs should be ashamed of themselves’ »
It appears that the governor of Jubaland, Somalia, has banned the use of single-use plastic bags on the grounds that “they pose a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike”. It has also forbidden the logging of rare trees. The governor, Mohammed Abu Abdullah, is head of a terrorist group allied with …
The “Epicurean paradox” or “Riddle of Epicurus” is a version of the problem of evil. Lactantius attributes this trilemma to Epicurus in De Ira Dei: “God,” he says, “either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both …
“At a Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, TX, I witnessed something that is now seared into my mind: A large warehouse facility with cells constructed of fence posts and chain link fencing—like dog kennels or large cages. “But the style of construction isn’t the issue. What is the issue is that in that facility …
“If God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not. “If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over …
On 25 May, Ireland will vote on whether to repeal the 8th Amendment to its constitution, which prohibits abortion unless a mother’s life is threatened. Based on opinion polling, the Repeal campaign should win. But polls have tightened in recent weeks. About a fifth of Irishmen are undecided. The result will almost certainly not be …
Continue reading ‘Abortion in Ireland: the weaknesses of the Repeal campaign.’ »
