Josh Rosenau talks about ‘ways of knowing’ and the non-empirical nature of the claims made by most religions.

It’s certainly true that the Jewish Bible can be read as making a number of empirical claims, for instance about the timing of human origins…But that’s not how Jews have understood the Bible for the last couple thousand years. Maimonides, writing well before any of the modern squabbles over evolution, explained:

“Ignorant and superficial readers take them [certain obscure passages] in a literal, not in a figurative sense. Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain the figure, or merely suggest that the terms

Albert Mohler the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so obliging and has saved us so much trouble – at a stroke he has rid us of the obligation to keep answering the charge that “New” atheists are all wrong because they ignore sophisticated theology and are talking about a crude old version of God that nobody believes in anyway.

Mohler points out that the Wall Street Journal paired articles by Dawkins and Armstrong were not articles by an atheist and a theist but articles by two atheists.

Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our “primitive” belief in his actual existence — thus freeing us to affirm merely a

Life in Yemen.

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday. Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children…Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year.

Well it was life for awhile and then it was premature death after three days of torture.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president

Life in Aceh.

Adulterers can be stoned to death and homosexuality is punishable by long prison terms under a new law passed in Indonesia’s devoutly Muslim Aceh province today…The law, which reinforces Aceh’s already strict Islamic laws, is to go into effect within 30 days. Its passage comes two weeks before a new assembly led by the moderate Aceh party is sworn in after a heavy defeat of conservative parties in local elections.

Ah – the conservatives have been voted out, so as a parting gesture, they pass a law saying that ‘adulterers’ can be buried up to the neck and slowly pelted with stones until they are dead – under ‘Islamic’ laws which notoriously have an impossible standard … Read the rest

So…what’s the Home Office thinking? That now that Pervez Kambaksh is out of prison and safely out of Afghanistan, it’s only right to replace him with another apostate? Or what?

[Anonymous], activist of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) and One Law for All Campaign, has been detained on September 10, 2009 and is facing imminent deportation back to Afghanistan where he will face the death penalty for ‘apostasy.’ As part of his fight against the Islamists, [Anonymous] has publicly renounced Islam in order to break the taboo that comes with such a renunciation and push for the right to leave religion, particularly crucial given that apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia law. As [Anonymous] has said

Karen Armstrong is irritating in a great many ways, but one of the major ways is her passion for stringing together resounding words that sound vaguely impressive but don’t actually mean anything that one can figure out – that are carefully chosen not to mean anything. That is a habit that always makes me want to hit things, and she has a really severe case of it.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to

As you may or may not know, Marie-Therese O’Loughlin, survivor of the nightmare of Goldenbridge Industrial School, has been working hard to get the education that the ‘Sisters of Mercy’ denied her. She took her first exam, in English, last June. She wasn’t sure she’d done terribly well, but was determined to re-take the exam next year if necessary.

She got her results a few days ago.

She got an A.… Read the rest