This graph summarizes the data, with “average Americans” in tan, football fans in maroon, and other fans in olive. Now since the survey methodology reports a survey of 1,011 adults—not just sports fans—I assume that the data below represent a subset of those Americans who follow sports. But, according to the data, that is 89% of all Americans (I’m one of the other 11%).
Yes, exactly half of the fans (and 55% of football fans) see supernatural influences in sports.
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The Colorado nuns’ group, the Little Sisters of the Poor, is a religiously affiliated organization that is exempt from the health law’s requirement that employer insurance plans cover contraception without a co-pay. The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator. The nuns say that minor requirement infringes on religious exercise in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Under that law, the federal government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden. A federal trial court denied a preliminary injunction on that basis and a federal court of appeals declined to issue an injunction pending appeal, though decisions in some similar cases have come out differently.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/opinion/no-burden-on-religion.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
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The Pope comes in and shakes my hand, and we sit down. The Pope smiles and says: “Some of my colleagues who know you told me that you will try to convert me.”
It’s a joke, I tell him. My friends think it is you want to convert me.
He smiles again and replies: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”
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– http://www.repubblica.it/cultura/2013/10/01/news/pope_s_conversation_with_scalfari_english-67643118/?ref=HRER3-1
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Above all he approves of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which states that government can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Historically, many of these provisions were introduced in order to head off the danger of violence in the name of religion, though they function nowadays mainly to protect small churches and cranky sects that pose no real threat to anyone. But their real justification, according to Dworkin, has nothing specifically to do with religion: there is no special right to religious freedom, but only what he calls a “general right to ethical independence” – or, to put it differently, a restraint on any government activity based on the assumption that one conception of the good life is superior to another. He admits that it may be hard to decide what this principle implies, but has no doubt that it rules out any attempts to criminalise homosexual acts or early abortions, outlaw same-sex marriage or force schools to teach intelligent design.
Dworkin’s secularist defence of religious freedom is thus not as paradoxical as it might seem: for him, it is no more than specific application of a purely secular right – the right to “ethical independence”. But he puts a double lock on his doctrine with an argument to the effect that, strange as it may sound, religion should not be defined in terms of belief in God, and that secular atheism of the kind he espouses should be treated by the law as a form of religion.
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– http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4313/wrong-in-the-right-way
““I see the church as a field hospital after battle,” Francis said. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars. You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.””
shaun james bockert 