By Kenny Smith (2-3 minute read)
In Florida, religious experiments of all kinds it seems. Determined to bring the Gospel to other married couples looking to “hook up,” a body-building Florida couple have created a website, fitnessswingers.com, to help other swingers “find Christ.” After evangelical Christian groups were allowed to distribute Bibles in Florida’s public schools, they were followed by members of the Satanic Temple who likewise demanded the right to distribute their own religious materials to youngsters. Now the International Raelian Religion (which was founded in 1974 by former French race car driver, Claude Vorilhon, and teaches that the Earth was created by extraterrestrials they call Elohim) seeks to do the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiStCudKILs
This summer has been a busy time for Wiccans and Neo-Pagans, with so many pagan holidays (e.g., Litha, Lughnasadh, Mabon), continued issues of religious discrimination (e.g., a Los Angeles police officer and Wiccan claims religious and sexual harassment by fellow officers), and learning to re-make vacations as religious pilgrimages, while visiting England’s “very pagan pubs.” The New Jersey School Board’s list of religious holidays for the 2014-2015 school year includes those from the Wiccan and Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year, as well as holidays from numerous other traditions, such as Scientology.
In a number of states now (e.g., Oklahoma and Texas), members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarians, are also insisting upon their right to religious freedom, most especially the right to wear religious head-coverings (an upside down pasta strainer) in their driver’s license photographs.
While one evangelical Christian mom is re-writing the Harry Potter series of books (Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry becomes Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles, Dumbledoor the wizard becomes Dumbledoor the evangelical minister “with a distinctive southern twang”), other Christians are debating whether “white magic” is biblically and theologically permissible. And while one writer recalls the (admittedly bizarre) early modern European practice of putting animals (e.g., pigs, dogs, horses, etc.) on trial and executing them for wrong doing, it’s not so clear we’re entirely beyond such modes of thought, as (just last year) a Tennessee gentleman insisted that his dog be euthanized “for being gay,” after witnessing “his male pitbull/American bulldog mix humping another male dog.” Elsewhere in Christendom, traditional images were creatively fused with Barbie and Ken dolls yielding a Mary-Barbie and a crucified Christ-Ken. These should go nicely alongside my Kali-Barbie and Buddha-Ken.
With the odds of discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe ever on the rise, NASA brought together “scientists, historians, philosophers and theologians from around the world for a two-day symposium, Preparing For Discovery. Their agenda: to explore how we prepare for the inevitable discovery of extraterrestrial life.”
Religious commitment, it seems, does not bring about an understanding of religion, but quite the opposite. The more committed typically know far less. What does? Education, and lots of it.
Well, it’s official: there is no God, or so concludes Stephen Hawking, the world’s most well-known cosmologist, who until quite recently was seen as leaning towards agnosticism. “Before we understand science,” Hawking tells us, “it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.” For atheistic philosopher, Sam Harris, however, disbelief in a theistic deity does not rule out spirituality, so long as this term refers only to experiences of “self-transcendence” and not “the crazy claims about crystals and Atlantis and the things you find in the spiritual section of a bookstore.” So, extraterrestrial-channeling atheist ghost-hunters will have to wait until next year. In Arizona’s 5th District, James Woods is running for Congress as a self-identified atheist and progressive, and in Arizona it’s difficult to say which is worse.
