This Week in Religion and Disbelief, Part 2

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Americans United Urges Federal Appeals Court To Protect Birth Control Access
Church-State Watchdog Asks Tenth Circuit To Rule Against Non-Profit Religious Universities

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should rule against four sectarian universities requesting additional exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s so-called contraception mandate, Americans United for Separation for Church and State says. [Read more]

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

In the first decade of the seventeenth century in England, with the break with the Roman Catholic Church fully encoded into law and a bevy of scholars working to complete a new translation of the Bible under the sponsorship of the Protestant King James the VI of Scotland, a Lancaster minister, William Harrison, complained that “for one person which we have in the church to hear divine service, sermons and catechism, every piper (there be many in the parish) should at the same instant have many hundred on the greens.” [Read more]

Task Force Faults Twin Cities Archdiocese for ‘Dreadful’ Abuses

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis suffers from “serious shortcomings” in its handling of child sex-abuse complaints that have allowed priests to continue abusing victims, sometimes for years, a task force reported Monday. The solution, according to the church-ordered study, is to foster a culture that “places victims first” and creates more accountability by involving ordinary church members in the oversight and discipline of wayward clergy. [Read more]

India’s Muslims Worried About Controversial Hindu Leader As National Elections Begin

As priests chanted and smeared vermilion on Narendra Modi’s forehead, the opposition leader prayed that India would make him its next prime minister. Modi came to this Hindu holy city late last year to worship at a site that has been contested by Hindus and Muslims for centuries. Just yards from where he stood, a two-story wall of metal bars separated the historic temple from a mosque. Modi has been a polarizing figure in India for years. [Read more]

Catholic Hospitals Right to Reject Contraceptives, Doctors Say

Following controversy over a Catholic-affiliated medical center’s rejection of contraceptive practices in Oklahoma, physicians have said that such institutions are trying to act with integrity. “Catholic hospitals and health care providers do not prevent women from accessing what they want, they just don’t provide it themselves,” Lester Ruppersberger, a Pennsylvania physician and vice president of the Catholic Medical Association, said April 3. “They are not lobbying against contraception, they just do not wish to be forced to violate their beliefs and ethics.” [Read more]

Southern Baptist Pastors Hope to Revitalize Hundreds of Churches in Decline

About 800 to 1,000 Southern Baptist congregations cease to exist annually, largely due to a stagnant vision among the leadership and lack of impact within their communities, says a church planting director. However, church leaders say the closures are often the symptom of a greater problem. “Churches are closing in large part because they have either become disconnected from culture and, or disconnected from Scripture. When this happens, life leaves the church,” Joshua Hedger, director of Center for Church Planting at Midwestern Seminary, told The Christian Post. [Read more]

Report: Clemson Coaches Should Stop Leading Religious Activities

Clemson University Head Football Coach Dabo Swinney is known to be animated on the field. But members of an Wisconsin-based organization say what happens during practice sessions and on campus concerns them. For example, they say a Twitter picture of former wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins shows the player being baptized as he’s surrounded by coaches and players. [Read more]

Why Hasn’t the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Ruled on the Pledge of Allegiance Case Yet?

Last September, orals arguments took place in front of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court concerning the Pledge of Allegiance. If the plaintiffs win, it would likely mean the end of Pledge recitations in public schools throughout the state. I’m going to throw out a hypothesis (suggested by reader Pluto Animus) that may end up being completely wrong, but hear me out on this. First, a little background. [Read more]

Bill Nye’s Take on the Nye-Ham Debate

This whole thing started when a crew from BigThink.com asked me about creationism. I was in New York to promote Internet-based science education. While on camera, I remarked that if you, as an adult, want to hold on to a completely unreasonable explanation of the Earth’s natural history that is useless from a practical standpoint, that’s your business. But we don’t want our kids, our science students, to be indoctrinated into that weird worldview, because our kids are the scientists and engineers of the future. [Read more]

America: Stupidly Stuck Between Religion and Science

Young-earth creationism, a tiny fringe movement within Christianity whose influence is largely a reflection of liberal hysteria, is getting a totally unearned moment in the spotlight (for at least the second or third time). Evangelist Ken Ham of the pseudo-scientific advocacy group Answers in Genesis gets to “debate” Bill Nye the Science Guy about whether or not the earth is 6,000 years old, in a grotesque parody of academic discourse. [Read more]

Iranian Conservatives Threaten Riots If Richard Nelson Frye Buried in Isfahan

This is another story that shows how vapid and inhumane the Iranian conservatives are. Richard N. Frye passed away few week ago, and he had left a will asking to be buried in Isfahan, on the bank of Zayandeh River. Now the Iranian conservatives are throwing a sissy fit. But who’s Richard Frye? [Read more]

Hollywood Tries to Win Christians’ Faith

One analyst dubbed 2014 “the year of the biblical movie.” But with the surge of major movie studios, marquee stars and prestige filmmakers lining up to shoot faith-based projects, Hollywood is finding it isn’t always easy to usher viewers from the church pew to the multiplex. [Read more]

My Life in an ACE School

ACE stands for Accelerated Christian Education. Donald Howard, a pastor in Texas, started ACE in 1970. It was developed as a way to evangelize children. ACE relies heavily on rote recall and short-term memorization to teach children. Let me explain how an ACE school operates. Students start the day out in an assembly, where we prayed, read scripture, recited pledges of allegiance to the American flag, Christian flag and the Bible. Afterwards, we heard school announcements. [Read more]

Christian Planned Parenthood Exec Challenges Misconceptions About Nation’s Leading Abortion Provider

Alexis McGill Johnson, a self-professed Christian who is also the chair of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nation’s leading reproductive healthcare and abortion provider, told The Christian Post Thursday that many Christians don’t believe that abortion services were accessed by only 10 percent of the nonprofit’s clients. [Read more]

Why Christians Should Not Host Their Own Passover Seders

I recently moved back to my hometown: a western suburb of Chicago that borders a town that is home to one of the largest and most influential evangelical Christian colleges in the country. As with most college towns, graduates often settle nearby. This makes my neighborhood a hub for evangelicalism and means that my neighbors tend to have followed the injunctions of their pastors to “keep themselves pure” from culture that is not specifically Christian. [Read more]

Sikhs, Muslims, Christians Meet at Franklin Mosque to Educate, Understand

Three groups of three Sikhs, three Muslims and three Christians met Sunday to share their faith and then, like any good gathering, share a meal. The session was the final in a series of interfaith scripture dialogue circles — a structured time to share scriptures from each tradition. [Read more]

Kevin Wingate: ID Should Be Included in Science Instruction

Darwinian evolution has been a theory in crisis for several decades, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to people such as Eugenie Scott, spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education. Despite much discussion of significant problems with evolutionary theory in the relevant scientific literature, Scott insists that there are “no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.” [Read more]

Creationism and the Greater Good

There are all kinds of creationists — a topic we’ve discussed before — see Creationists: Ignorant, Stupid, Insane, or Wicked. Most are merely ignorant, and a few are deranged. The others know better than their drooling followers, but they have motives. Among those with motives, it’s possible that some are sincere, but most are charlatans who see their ministries as an easy way to make a living. [Read more]