ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 245

Why faith leaders and the federal government will be in court this week defending the tax code

By Kelsey Dallas

SALT LAKE CITY — The Rev. Tuesday Jane Rupp’s new job came with an interesting perk: an invitation to live in an 181-year-old house. Like many faith communities, her new employer, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Woodbury, Connecticut, owns a parsonage and offers it to rectors as part of their compensation package.

“I had the option of living in it or receiving a housing allowance that would be financially equivalent,” she said. At her previous job in New York City, she took the allowance, which eased the burden of navigating the city’s pricey housing market.

Housing benefits help ensure clergy members can afford to live close to the churches they serve and reflect the congregation’s partial claim on the space. Pastors are often expected to treat their home like a second office and host scripture study groups or parties.

“So much of my work is location-based,” the Rev. Rupp said.

Because of these expectations, the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t tax ministers’ housing-related compensation, just as it doesn’t tax similar benefits offered to members of the military or foreign service. The current exemption has been in place since 1954, but its days could be numbered if a legal challenge from the Freedom From Religion Foundation succeeds.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Why They Stay. Why They Can’t: New York Catholics Wrestle With Their Faith Over Abuse Allegations

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Mariana Alfaro

New York City is a Roman Catholic stronghold.

One out of every three residents identifies as a Catholic. And there are more than four million Catholics in the city and seven surrounding counties.

So when a series of scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church unfolded in rapid-fire succession this summer, New York gasped.

First came accusations of sexual abuse by a premier American cardinal, Theodore E. McCarrick, who quickly resigned but left in his wake lingering questions about the role Pope Francis played in covering up the predatory behavior.

In August, an 884-page grand jury report out of Pennsylvania landed with a thud, offering a grim catalogue of seven decades of child abuse by more than 300 priests.

And last month, the attorneys general of New Jersey and New York followed Pennsylvania’s lead, announcing investigations into claims of clergy abuse and cover-ups, joining five other states that have started similar inquiries. Last Thursday, Pennsylvania dioceses said they had received subpoenas for documents as part of an investigation by the United States Justice Department.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Can a Christian foster care group reject non-Christians? The Trump administration may say yes.

By Tara Isabella Burton

The Trump administration is considering a request from a faith-based foster care agency to continue denying non-Christian parents from fostering children, the Intercept reported Friday.

The case centers around a South Carolina Christian organization, Miracle Hill Ministries, which claims that under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), they are not obligated to place children with non-Protestant Christian foster families.

Miracle Hill receives federal funds to pair children with foster families, while specifically recruiting Christian families. In practice, this means that they’ve frequently refused to place foster children with non-Protestant, non-Christian families. Several Jewish families, the Intercept’s Akela Lacy reports, have been explicitly told that they were rejected on the basis of their faith.

The request from Miracle Hill is currently under consideration by the Department of Health and Human Services, which has, under the Trump administration, consistently upheld tenets and rights affiliated with the political stance of evangelical Christianity, including anti-abortion rights and anti-LGBTQ positions.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Creationist Who Said He Supported “Fact-Based Curriculum” Wins School Board Race

Darrell Furgason just won an election to the Chilliwack School District Board (in British Columbia), and that may seem like good news if you glance at his platform and believe he truly supports “Academic Excellence,” “Inclusivity for all,” and a “Quality, fact-based curriculum.”

It’s too bad he doesn’t actually believe any of those things.

Furgason is actually an anti-LGBTQ Young Earth Creationist whose primary allegiance is to the Bible and not the students. We know this because of posts he’s made on Facebook as director of the Worldview Studies Center, a Christian non-profit.

And now he’s one of seven trustees who will run the school board, joined by fellow Christian bigot Barry Neufeld who recently referred to transgender students as victims of “child abuse.” (Both men ran on what critics dubbed the “Hate Slate.”)

Heather Maahs, who also got elected, wasn’t part of the Hate Slate, but she still had the support of Neufeld and Furgason.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

‘Toxic Christianity’: the evangelicals creating champions for Trump

By Harriet Sherwood

Three times a week, 15,000 students stream into the Vines Center, a huge silver-domed building on the campus of Liberty University for “convocation”, an intoxicating mix of prayer, political rally and entertainment. Thousands more watch a live stream of the event.

The star attraction has twice been Donald Trump, in 2012 and 2016. His first appearance was as a successful businessman and reality TV star, the second as the man campaigning to be the Republican party’s candidate for president. Last year, he made a third appearance at Liberty, to address the university’s graduation ceremony. By then, he was one of the most divisive leaders in the country’s history.

But not at Liberty. The Christian university which dominates the town of Lynchburg, Virginia, has become almost synonymous with Trump. It sits at the heart of the alliance between the president and conservative evangelical Christians – an alliance forged in part by Jerry Falwell Jr, Liberty’s president, Lynchburg’s most prominent citizen and Trump’s close associate.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Trump administration to strengthen religious liberty rules on birth control, LGBTQ discrimination

By Alison Durkee

The Trump administration is planning to double down on “religious liberty” protections that could affect birth control access and allow for LGBTQ employment discrimination.

Planned rules would strengthen or expand existing religious liberty protections for employers to deny health care access or make hiring decisions based on their religious beliefs and “moral convictions.”

The potential regulations continue the Trump administration’s push for “religious liberty,” which President Donald Trump has emphasized through multiple executive orders protecting religious liberty. Other executive branch agencies have also made their own moves to protect religious freedom, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Justice.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism?

By Casey Cep

Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”

Unsatisfied with the two available options—“Yes” and “No”—Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.” There were eight of those pages, and in them he described reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, all of whom “evolved comprehensive ethical systems of intellectual and moral integrity without belief in God,” and concluded that “the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, and the essence of His nature cannot be determined.” For good measure, Seeger also used scare quotes and strike-throughs to doctor the printed statement he was required to sign, so that it read, “I am, by reason of my ‘religious’ training and belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”

By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration

By Erica L. Green, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Double the fun: Mars scientists push NASA to send rock-harvesting rover to two sites

By Alexandra Witze

NASA’s next Mars rover — the first to gather rock samples meant to come back to Earth — should dream big and visit as many places on the red planet as possible, scientists concluded on 18 October.

Its stops would probably include some combination of Jezero crater, once home to river deltas and a lake; Northeast Syrtis, which contains some of the most ancient rocks on Mars; and Midway, a compromise option located between those two. Project scientists have proposed visiting both Jezero, for the river and lake sediments that might retain signs of past life, and Midway, for the ancient rocks.

The two are approximately 28 kilometres apart — so visiting both would be an ambitious but achievable goal.

“The community prefers a mega-mission,” says Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “If we’re going to do sample return, it has to be a sample cache for the ages.”

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.

Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy awaits verdict on death sentence

By Mushtaq Yusufzai and Linda Givetash

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Christian woman’s fate hung in the balance on Thursday as Pakistan’s Supreme Court prepared to announce whether she would be executed under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.

Demonstrators were out in the streets of Lahore last week demanding judges uphold the death penalty for Asia Bibi. Chanting “Hang infidel Asia,” activists from the Tehreek-e-Labbaik party also rallied in other cities Friday, threatening wider protests if she is freed.

The mother of five was convicted in 2010 for insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad during an argument and remains on death row while appealing the case.

Bibi’s lawyer Saiful Malook told NBC News he couldn’t comment on the details of the case as a verdict on the appeal is imminent. Malook wouldn’t comment on rumors that he faces death threats for defending Bibi but said the jailed woman’s family has moved to the United Kingdom.

Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below.