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"To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn't mean that the words and symbols are reality (that's fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that you can 'no more be religious in general than [you] can speak language in general' (George Lindbeck), and that the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge and experience of the all-too-temporal symbols and language of a particular religion. Lindbeck would go so far as to say that your religion of origin has such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it's your only hope for true religious fluency. I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I don't think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent," - Christian Wiman, "Notes on Poetry and Religion," from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

nder the umbrella of Shiite solidarity, Iran provides military aid and funds industrial projects, madrasas, mosques and hospitals. And its leaders have become more vocal about their aims, with President Hassan Rouhani proclaiming himself protector of Iraq’s holy cities.

The most extensive patronage efforts, however, were made by the Ottomans. From the reign of Abdul Hamid II in the 19th century, the Ottomans used their self-professed status as the defenders of global Islam to advance their influence into rival empires, from French North Africa to British India.

The politics of religion undermined the Westphalian order, based on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, these policies subverted states, fueled divisions within them — and often ended in violence.

In a recent piece for National Geographic, Book Talk curator Simon Worrall entitled his headline, “In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'?” For the answer, he gave platform to Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.

Coyne, an atheist and University of Chicago professor of Ecology and Evolution, answered, among other questions, why “are religion and science incompatible.”

“[T]here are a number of things about evolution and science that undermine religion,” Coyne responded, including “the fact that the Genesis story is wrong.” “There’s no evidence that there’s any qualitatively different feature about humans from other species, except maybe for language” – language that “could have evolved via culture.”

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion. If, for example, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics “do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ,” then perhaps it is a mistake simply to identify Catholicism with what Catholic bishops say it is. To conclude that Americans are “uninformed” about “their own traditions” betrays a subtle bias in favor of elites and begs the question of what constitutes one’s “own” religion: are we “illiterate,” or do we simply disagree about what belongs in the “canon”?

Is ‘having correct beliefs’ the main point of religion? There may be socially useful reasons to play that down in favor of encouraging shared values: compassion, service, and social justice.

People do not know who Maimonides was, I think, for the same reason they do not know the origin of “devil’s advocate.” Our culture has become more pluralistic, and people draw upon its elements in the way of the bricoleur to construct a web of meanings that is flexible, contextually activated, and what we would call “post-modern”

a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures.

People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set

Even what they count as evidence is different

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.

This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental.

that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested.

One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated — higher than at any time in recent U.S. history — and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. A third of young Americans say they don't belong to any religion.

raised Jewish and considers herself Jewish with an "agnostic bent." She loves going to synagogue.

I realize maybe there's a disconnect there — why are you doing it if you don't necessarily have a belief in God? But I think there's a cultural aspect, there's a spiritual aspect, I suppose. I find the practice of sitting and being quiet and being alone with your thoughts to be helpful, but I don't think I need to answer that question [about God] in order to participate in the traditions I was brought up with."

I try to articulate a position that I expect many fellow Catholics will find congenial and that non-Catholics (even those who reject all religion) may recognize as an intellectually respectable stance.  Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith.  I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason.

I read “self-respect” as respect for what are (to borrow the title of the philosopher Charles Taylor’s great book) the “sources of the self.”  These are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual’s life.  For me, there are two such sources.  One is the Enlightenment, where I’m particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic.  The other is the Catholic Church

My Catholic education has left me with three deep convictions. First, it is utterly important to know, to the extent that we can, the fundamental truth about human life: where it came from, what (if anything) it is meant for, how it should be lived.  Second, this truth can in principle be supported and defended by human reason.  Third, the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought.  (The Jesuits I studied with were particularly strong on all three of these claims.)

A gift for eternal truths is as dangerous as the gift of Midas’s touch. The pope cannot undo the eternal truths he has proclaimed.

How could Paul VI say that Pius XI, in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, had misled the people in such a serious way? If he admitted it, what would happen to his own authority as moral arbiter in matters of heaven and hell? So Paul VI doubled down, adding another encyclical in 1968, Humanae Vitae, to the unrenounceable eternal truths that pile up around a moral monarch.

In 1859, John Henry Newman published an article that led to his denunciation in Rome as “the most dangerous man in England.” It was called “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” and it showed that in history the laity had been more true to the Gospel than the hierarchy.

For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.

it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants

When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

Knowledge has been defined as "A clear perception of a truth or fact, erudition; skill from practice." Also "to know, viz.; To perceive with certainty, to understand clearly, to have experience of." On the other hand, Belief is an "Assent to anything proposed or declared, and its acceptance as fact by reason of the authority from whence it proceeds, apart from personal knowledge; faith; the whole body of tenets held by any faith; a creed; a conviction."

few would have guessed that the economic order built upon Mr. Reagan’s and Mrs. Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.

The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.

It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist political parties across Europe. It is the same anger fueling the candidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.

These are hard times for economists. Their reputations are tarnished; their favorite doctrines are damaged. Among their most prominent thinkers, there is no consensus as to how — or whether — governments in advanced countries can improve lackluster recoveries.

economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a retrospective study of its economic forecasts. This qualifies as an act of bureaucratic courage, because the record was predictably dismal

Interestingly, one item not on the list is “too much austerity.” The OECD economists found that they generally hadn’t underestimated the effects of spending cuts and tax increases intended to shrink budget deficits in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and elsewhere

After all, individuals who lack belief in a deity are, at least in their unbelief, essentially the same, right? But there’s a subtle—yet crucial—difference in degrees of incredulity that can meaningfully distinguish one’s person’s atheism from another’s. So if there’s an atheist in your life (or you’re one yourself), you might wish to consider just what sort of atheist they (or you) represent.

The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007). Its author, the prominent French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, makes the distinction between the “dogmatic atheist” and the “non-dogmatic atheist.”

For the assuredness of their atheism borders on an arrogance comparable to that of their fundamentalist-believing counterparts. In their outspoken conviction, they’re quite prepared to go on record declaring the non-existence of any supernatural being. Which is to say, their claim is not expressed as an opinion but as undeniable fact.

There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible. Stephen Jay Gould called them “nonoverlapping magisteria,” noma for short, with the former concerned with values and the latter with facts.

Noma is the received wisdom in the scientific establishment, including institutions like the National Center for Science Education, which has done much heavy lifting when it comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution. According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.

This is undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything under the sun — or beyond it — to work his will. Hence, there is nothing in evolutionary biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for most religious fundamentalisms

God is not only dead, author avers. He never lived. Not to mention the deaths of kids treated with faith instead of science-based medicine.

Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us. This is the dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains.

They’re incompatible first of all, because they both compete to find truths about the universe. There are some fundamental truths about the universe that believers have to accept in order to be religious.

parent of an aspiring veterinarian filed a lawsuit on May 12 alleging local, state and federal officials propagated a "religious faith" by teaching his daughter evolution. In the lawsuit, the man petitions the U.S. district court to declare the "policy of evolution" unconstitutional.

stated his daughter was taught a "faith base (evolutionary ideology) [sic] that just doesn't exist and has no math to back it." Due to this, Smith argued, his daughter's ability to enter college and obtain a good job and economic security in the veterinary field is compromised. Smith's lawsuit doesn't note his daughter's age.

He is also the author of a 2013 self-published book entitled The True Origin of Man, according to NCSE. The work reportedly "represents the truth of mans [sic] origins confirmed by DNA mathematical and scientific facts.