Seventy Percent of Young Adults Support Gay Marriage

A few months back news came out that over 51 percent of Americans support gay marriage.  Recently, Rhode Island became the tenth state to legalize same sex marriage.  There is a growing trend towards marriage equality in the country, but where is it coming from?  Young people seem to share a large part of the blame.  Pew Research Center recently released a poll showing that as much as seventy percent of young adults favor same-sex marriage.    The young adults in this poll were “Millennials,” or those born after 1980.  The report credits the Millennial generation for the overall shift in supporting same-sex marriage.  When polled the major factor that led people to change their minds to favor same-sex marriage was knowing someone who is homosexual.  The least influential change cited morality or religion for the shift in acceptance.

Age seems to be a strong factor in determining whether or not someone favors same-sex marriage.  Noticeably, each generation’s average view on same sex marriage follows a trend, with the older generations disfavoring same-sex marriage with the highest frequency.  This is strong motivation to think that same-sex marriage is now inevitable country wide and the question is no longer if, but when.  In another poll (LifeWay), 64 percent of those polled agreed that same-sex marriage will become legal across the entire United States.  It appears that many times society, unfortunately, progresses one funeral at a time.

Movie Review: Life of Pi

Spoiler alert: Pretty much everything important about the film is given away in this review. If you have any plans to watch the film without knowing the ending, I highly suggest you save this for later; the film largely depends on ignorance about the outcome for its effectiveness.

Perhaps you have heard about the new Ang Lee film Life of Pi. You may have seen advertisements for it, which communicated pretty successfully two things: one, this film is epic and two, it involves a guy being stuck in a boat with a tiger.

Turns out the preview did not mislead you – Life of Pi is a bona fide epic, and it does involve a boy stuck on a boat with a tiger. But from a strange ad on my facebook feed and an emotional post on an academic blog, I went into the film also knowing it had a much grander theme than merely spectacular visuals – I knew it had something to do with God, faith, and the meaning of it all.

Thus, I went into Life of Pi very curious but a little precautious. And at first, my precaution seemed at least slightly justified – early in the film, we are treated to several obnoxious and common mainstream (and typically liberal) truisms about faith – that God communicates himself through all the major religions, and that you cannot have faith without doubt, for lest how do you know you really believe? These are delivered by the adult Pi, living in contemporary Canada, who is visited by a struggling writer who tells him that a shared acquaintance told him that Pi had a story which would make him believe in God – and the film is structured by Pi’s recounting of this tale. This sets up the film to appear, at first, as another vehicle for delivering Hallmark-safe religion; all love, all acceptance, all inner-peace and in the end God or the force of love in the universe or whatever makes everything OK. But then things get a little more complicated.

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Islam and democracy

Following up on some of some of the issues I touched on in my last post, I thought to point our readers to a current roundtable over at the Times, which has several different people responding to the question, “Is Islam an Obstacle to Democracy?” Respondents include Reza Aslan, who we interviewed for the podcast a while back.

I’d also like to note that the responses to my previous post have been very thoughtful, and I hope to get around to continuing the discussion thread in the next week or so.

Sam Harris is wrong.

“This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas.” — Sam Harris

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece critiquing the tendency of the atheist community to analyze the nature and impact of religion through the exceptionally narrow lense of truth claims and discreet ideas. I summarized my position at one point by arguing that ideas, in and of themselves, have far less agency than atheists usually assume they do. Just as important as the contents of a certain idea is the social, economic and political context which gives rise to it. Atheists tend to ignore these, instead preferring to compose arguments which presume the dominance of ideas, and consequently often end up producing analyses of situations that they have less than stellar understandings of.

And then last week, along came Sam Harris, with this gem of an example of just what I was trying to argue against. Energized by the recent attacks and murders at US Embassies, Harris composed a stirring call for moral clarity – of the sort that comes only in shades of black and white.

Before I get going with what is wrong with Harris’s rhetoric and assumptions, let me state unequivocally that I agree with him completely on the issue of free speech – all nations which claim to value freedom of speech should not engage in any kind of censorship to appease anyone, be they Islamic radicalists or outraged conservative evangelicals or overly sensitive identity-politics laden liberals. Insofar as the liberals Harris criticizes really were recommending restriction of freedom of speech (enforced either through the government or social pressure), to address the problem of radical Islamic terrorism and, more broadly, Muslim alienation, they are wrong. First, it is unethical. Second, it would not work anyway. So let’s make it clear that we agree on that and move on from there.

However, I take serious issue with almost everything else about Harris’s approach to this question.

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Some Chick-Fil-A Appreciation from an Unlikely Source

The religious stood together today outside of Chick-Fil-A’s nationwide.

More, in fact, at one time than we’ve ever seen waiting for a chance to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or stand up for social outcasts whom society has marginalized… like the entire homosexual community.

You know, things Jesus actually told his followers to do.

Irony is a bitch.

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Sex Ed Part III: Homophobia and Biblical Revisionism

Here’s a simple question: How can scholars “revise” the Bible, throw in a new term that reflects a contemporary movement within the church or society, then go on believing it reflects the original, unchanging and perfect word of God? Sounds a bit suspect, yet this has occurred within Christendom numerous times, and one major instance within living memory is what I’d like to draw our attention to now.

Before the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was released in late early 50′s, the word “homosexual” didn’t occur in any English translation (and to contrast, the King James goes back to the 17th century). The curious might ask how this came to be, and the answer is simple: There is no Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic word for “homosexual”.*

It does make one wonder, with stacks of different English versions of God’s eternal word, many with the word “new” right in their description, how does anyone have the audacity to insist God’s word is in any way static? (To say nothing of the fact that no one in the Bible spoke or wrote in English to begin with.) Continue reading…