A Turkish barber working in Saudi Arabia has been condemned to execution, based on testimony that he had sworn at God during a personal quarrel. (Think of it as a Muslim equivalent of denouncing the Holy Spirit: completely unforgivable.) You can read about it in the Arab News or Turkish Daily News.

For a while now, I’ve been an Honorary Fellow of The Jefferson Center in Ashland, Oregon. When I was first invited to speak there, I thought of it as an ultraliberal religious organization, and soon discovered that quite a few people associated with it were at least ambivalent about supernatural beliefs. I got to know … Jefferson Center

When you write skeptically on religion, you get some interesting reactions. My favorite so far is is a Muslim comment on An Illusion of Harmony: . . . that book by the enemy of Allah, and the mini-dajjal of our era Taner Edis. (I ran across it on an online forum discussing a nasty review … “Mini-Dajjal”

In Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed interpret results from a Gallup World Poll to describe what a large and apparently representative sample of Muslims think. As with any popular work by Esposito, it has an overriding concern to counter the demonization of Islam. And … Islam and American Christianity

David Berlinski, the “agnostic mathematician” associated with the Intelligent Design movement, has just published a short piece online called “The Scientific Embrace of Atheism.” It’s largely a set of distortions. For example, The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility. … Berlinski strikes again

I just read the revised and updated edition of John Beversluis’s C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Very interesting. I confess I hadn’t paid much attention to C.S. Lewis’s apologetics before. Oh, it’s impossible not to know about his books, since they’re so popular among conservative Christians. I’ve every gone through a couple. … C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion

According to the BBC, at recent conference in Qatar, “Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.” Indeed, “A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the … Mecca Standard Time

In some corner of the multiverse, there exists a universe-bubble with physics close enough to our own to be recognizable, but different enough to make colonizing the stars feasible. In some point in this universes history, there was a Galactic Empire that ruled over many zillions of humans with an iron fist, imposing its religion … What about improbable events?

Secular nationalism might not take a stand on supernatural beliefs, but it restricts the public role of religion. Citizens are expected to have an allegiance to a modern state and its political process, while their specifically religious commitments get relegated to private life. Legitimate coercion, including violence, and the task of imposing public order are … Global Rebellion