A Recent Pew Research Center survey of American’s knowledge about religion shows widespread ignorance. The study asked 32 mostly relatively basic multiple choice questions about various religions (including a few on religion and public life): On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s […]
Archive | Religion
Obama is too a Christian
Ann Coulter’s column today argues that Obama is not a Muslim; rather, he “is obviously an atheist.” The gist of the argument is “The only evidence for Obama’s Christianity is that he faithfully attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years….Attending Wright’s church is the conscious, calculated decision to immerse yourself […]
Three Issues in the Debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque”
By Ilya Somin on August 31, 2010 1:41 am in Property Rights, Religion, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom, War on Terror
The ongoing debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” has generated lots of commentary. But I fear that much of it conflates three separate issues: whether the government should use its power to block the construction of the mosque, whether the construction of any Islamic facility near Ground Zero is objectionable, and whether this particular organization […]
Koran-Burning Minister and Council on American-Islamic Relations Spokesman Play Into Each Other’s Hands
As I mentioned last week, Terry Jones — a minister at the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center — is organizing a burning of Korans to mark September 11. That strikes me as both largely pointless, non-substantive rudeness (as opposed to fair and substantive criticism of Islam, which would be perfectly proper) and as largely […]
“46% of Americans Believe Islam Is More Likely Than Other Faiths to Encourage Violence Against Nonbelievers” = Evidence of “Islamophobia”?
“Is America Islamophobic?,” asks Time magazine. The lead story is abridged online here. I have little opinion on the title question, partly because I’m not a public opinion researcher, and partly because I don’t know what exactly “Islamophobic” means. And paragraphs such as this don’t help much: Although the American strain of Islamophobia lacks some […]
Human Events’ ridiculous “Obama the Muslim” article
Ronald Reagan once said that the conservative D.C. weekly Human Events was his favorite newspaper. And with good reason. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were few significant alternatives to the then-hegemonic MSM. Along with National Review, which was Reagan’s favorite magazine, Human Events was an essential source for stories that the MSM refused to cover, and […]
Religion and Geography
The New Zealand Herald reports, Instead of facing Islam’s most holy city, a clerical error of astronomical proportions has seen the faithful [among the 200 million Muslims in Indonesia] directing their prayers towards Kenya and southern Somalia. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), the country’s highest Islamic body, has admitted that they made an error in […]
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Certainty About the Origins of the Universe
In a recent Slate essay, Ron Rosenbaum argues that agnosticism is preferable to atheism because atheists wrongly believe that they can explain the origins and nature of the universe: I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed […]
Property Rights for Advocates of Thoughts We Hate
By Ilya Somin on June 22, 2010 12:35 am in Property Rights, Religion, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that freedom of speech requires “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” The same point applies to property rights. A free society must protect the property rights of those who espouse unpopular views – even if their unpopularity is […]
The Ongoing Debate Over Jewish Fantasy Literature
Jewish Studies Professor Michael Weingrad’s essay “Why there is No Jewish Narnia,” touched off a massive debate over the validity of his claim that there is no Jewish fantasy literature, including my own humble critique. Abigail Nussbaum has posted a helpful roundup of the debate. Weingrad himself responds to his critics here. Like Nussbaum, I […]
Are More Intelligent People More Likely to be Atheists?
In this post, I criticized psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa’s widely discussed recent article claiming that more intelligent people are more likely to be politically liberal. Kanazawa also claims that his data shows that more intelligent people are more likely to be atheists. This claim is better supported than the article’s argument about political liberalism. Nonetheless, the […]
Pat Robertson Blames Haiti Earthquake on Pact with the Devil
Pat Robertson recently blamed the Haiti earthquake on a pact with the devil that the Haitians supposedly made in the early 19th century: Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a “pact to the devil” brought on the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Officials fear more than […]
Why is it More Wrong to Attack a Person’s Religion than their Secular Moral or Political Views?
By Ilya Somin on January 2, 2010 4:28 pm in Atheism, Freedom of Speech, Religion, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom
Ireland has recently enacted a law banning “blasphemy,” which has in turn attracted plenty of justified criticism: Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court. The new law, which was […]
The Alternative Theologies of Santa Claus
(Waiting for relatives to arrive on Christmas Day, I have decided to take up the deep theological questions raised by this … Claus, this Santa Claus.) Last night at the children’s Mass at our Catholic parish in Washington DC, observe the arrival of the fellow up top in the photo, dressed in a red suit, […]
Obama and the Universal Golden Rule
Over at National Review Online, Cliff May, who is right 99.9% of the time, makes a rare error. He questions President Obama’s Nobel Prize speech claim that “the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” May points […]