Thoughts of a Freethinker

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...