I just ran across this post on a washingtonpost.com blog. The author, a prominent Jewish Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, argues that the Pew Forum survey on religion overestimates the number of atheists in the United States (they estimate about 1.6% of Americans). Rabbi Steinsaltz argues that “true atheists” have two rare qualities: 1) an [...]

Humility. Temperance. Stewardship. Modesty. These are all good Christian values. They are good conservative values as well. Jesus taught them (as have most of the world’s great religious leaders of all faiths). In most cases, our parents and grandparents taught them as well. Christians, and I think [...]

I’ve been looking up some demographic data today, and ran across the Pew Forum survey. In particular, they have detailed information on the religious breakdown of the country, as a whole and broken down by states. I found some of this pretty surprising. For instance:

Mitt Romney gave his Mormon speech today. At least that’s how his campaign, aided and abetted by the media, have been spinning it. In reality, the speech is not nearly as controversial as it could have been, nor is it as revolutionary as some are calling it. It was just a campaign [...]

Ah Hanukkah, the festival of lights.  Many Christians are unaware of the significance of Hanukkah.  Allow me to enlighten you: there is none.
Hanukkah is the celebration of a victory in a minor battle, in a minor war, that the Jews eventually lost.  If I were to list the top dozen Jewish holidays in order of [...]

The New York Times published a story this weekend about several evangelical churches that are using the new Halo 3 video game to bring youths and young adults into church.  Halo 3 is poised to be the top video game released this year, and possibly this decade.  It is also an incredibly violent first-person shooter, [...]

Six Supreme Court decisions this week. All of them (but one) were decided 5-4. In my mind, the court got about half of them right… the problem is that the ones they got wrong were real doozies. Here are the cases, from best to worst (in my opinion):

Today’s New York Times has an extremely interesting article discussing new advances in the field of evolutionary-development, and what it means for our understanding of the processes of evolution.  Assuming that the information presented in this article is correct (a decent assumption, but one should always take mass-media articles on technical subjects with a significant [...]

I’m sick of seeing all this press about Romney being a Mormon. Because it plays right into his hands. The thing is, there aren’t all that many people in this country who would refuse to vote for somebody based on the candidate’s religion. Sure, there are some, but those are people that [...]

In an excellent blog entry at NYTimes.com, law professor Stanley Fish notes that three recent books critiquing religion all share a few basic ideas, including the dismissal of faith. These books, like so many others who attack religious belief, set faith as the opposite of reason and then claim that any argument that cannot [...]