The President, Donald Trump, proclaimed this day, January 16, 2018, to be Religious Freedom Day. Religious Freedom Day is, in the president’s words, a day when we… … celebrate the many faiths that make up our country, and we commemorate the 232nd…
Sam Harris has created a simple, but effective template for how to believe in God that he fit easily into six tweets, which are shown below. I’ve added brief commentary to each step. https://twitter.com/SamHarrisSays/status/652543742755344384 Step one is critical because, by default,…
Torture and religion. That’s sort of an oxymoronic sounding phrase, isn’t it? But in fact, a recent Washington Post poll suggests that torture and religion are not entirely unrelated. Specifically, the poll shows that one’s religion–or lack thereof–is correlated with one’s view on…
I was recently forwarded a chain email message (“Under God in the Pledge” Chain Email | PDF) with the subject A Shock to NBC. You can follow the link to browse a PDF version of the message, but here’s the gist. It is…
This week marked another interesting milestone in the ongoing evolution of Catholicism. Since Tuesday, media outlets across the globe have been abuzz with headlines like: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a…
Last Tuesday, Bill Nye (the science guy) debated Ken Ham (founder and CEO of Kentucky’s Creation Museum) on the question of whether a young-earth creation model is compatible with the theory of evolution. NPR posted a nice summary of the debate,…
We all know the Catholic Church evolves. It is not static. For example, just in my lifetime, the Catholic Church: introduced non-Latin mass translations (1963); introduced Canon Law (1983, replacing changes introduced in 1917); abolished the concept of Limbo (2007); altered…
Last week I wrote about Joe Klein’s cover story in TIME Magazine. I’ve been sort of hoping that TIME, Joe Klein, or both, would have made some sort of apology—or at least acknowledge their factual errors. They didn’t. Instead, TIME…
In a cover story for TIME Magazine, political columnist Joe Klein takes a gratuitous and factually incorrect swipe at secular humanists.
Blaise Pascal was a towering intellect of the 17th century; there is no doubt about that. But with regard to his famous wager, I have my doubts—Pascal’s analysis, and thus his conclusion itself, is derived from faith.