Thoughts of a Freethinker

The University of Portland has the term Catholic by name. Being a Catholic business, there is a requirement that all students take one of various courses offered by the Department of Religion. While formerly the requirement probably was a course on "Biblical Texts" or "Catholic Theology" now students can choose others and fulfill this requirement. One has the title "Queer Theology."   Looking at the course description of Queer Theology, it is apparent students will study the Bible. That is, instead of studying it under the course title of "texts", they will read texts in the Queer course. No doubt the previously required course touched on various meanings of these texts, including how Catholics interpret such material, the replacement options will include other interpretations as well.  How could a private university with "Catholic" in its name get away with this? Perhaps the way to answer that is another question, "How can a priva...

The most fun part of this blogging hobby is finding absurd things in religion and writing about them. Less fun is finding books and articles that say exactly what I say here over and over again. A book is just now going on sale by a sociologist at Notre Dame who explains the fall in numbers of the religious due to society no longer finding is relevant. No one who reads this blog would find that to be news. Yet, so many in the faith do not understand this. The author, at the Catholic Notre Dame, is himself a Catholic. Yet he can come to no other conclusion after watching society and the church grow further apart. As he says, the reasons for the split are complicated and many.  To me, the split follows a pattern we have seen since the beginning of human history. Think of the Greeks and their worship of their gods. How could the Greeks have ever left behind gods that were so revered. The same with Pagans. When Christianity first appeared outside the Middle East prominent people said i...

I read today another of the same articles that appear almost daily. I suppose the same message is repeated at many services, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. Probably one could add Islam and Hindu and who knows what others. The message is the faith must stick with "orthodoxy" or people will leave. That the public is attracted to orthodoxy and nothing else.   The link's reasoning goes like this. Surveys show that those who remain in the faith hold to orthodox beliefs. For Christians this means people who go to church a lot and pray a lot also believe there was a Jesus who came back to life after being dead, there is a God, sin, heaven and hell. Those who are unsure about these things do not attend church as often nor pray as much. The conclusion, of course, is that if every church and denomination hammered home those tenets of the faith as true the decline of the faith would reverse and it would again grow.  A man who commented a lot on this blog years ago made the same po...

A year or so ago a multi church group in California founded by famous author, Rick Warren, left the Southern Baptist Convention over women behind the pulpit. Now another multi church group in South Carolina with 33,000 people is doing the same . How does any denomination or denomination-like group of churches think it can discriminate against women and survive? Beats me. The Southern Baptist Convention, Catholic Church and Missouri Synod Lutherans are three denominations that do not ordain women as clergy. Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination and are an association that churches join rather than one run by a denomination's home office as are the Catholics and Missouri Synod. The membership in all three is falling rapidly.  It is also true denominations that include women as clergy are falling also. The economics of churches, however, gives those who include women as pastors a fighting chance of hanging on. The larger the pool of people available to pastor churc...

Hopefully, this rational decision will stand. It is that the State Government of Alabama cannot prosecute those who pay travel expenses of women for out of state abortions. Several organizations are raising huge amounts of money to help women in these backwards states.   While certainly I'm not an expert on law and the Constitution, one hallmark I've understood to exist is that legal commercial business between states is to be permitted. In fact, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 came about because of letters between George Washington and John Madison both were disgusted with the colonies charging tariffs on goods coming into one colony from another. The emotional opposition to abortion blinds otherwise rational people into irrational votes and behavior. In other countries, opposition to abortion bans melted away when women went elsewhere to get abortions. This happened in Catholic Ireland where abortions were illegal but women got abortions in England. It happened in Chil...

Mostly when I read articles by religious writers I find myself silently scoffing. But once in a while there is one so good it jumps out at me. This one is by a university president who is searching for a way to make Christianity relevant today. The first task, of course, is to correctly identify what has gone wrong. The link found a lot of what most of us would call "group think" in the politics of clergy in the U.S. It was present during the period of the War of Independence, clergy preaching uniformly that independence was the message of the faith and being a colony of England was not. Sermons, he found, were all but 100% in agreement about this. The logical question we have today is, looking back, what does the faith have to do with the War of Independence? He discusses several writers and personalities in religion who were able to separate themselves from the political group think of their trade. The one in my lifetime was Billy Graham. Billy honeyed up to politicians and...