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religion Tag

English actor, writer, and comedian Stephen Fry, who is perhaps as well-known for his leftist politics and atheism as he is for Blackadder or A Bit of Fry and Laurie, has run afoul of Ireland's 2009 blasphemy law. Gardaí, the Irish Republic's police, are investigating Fry for allegedly mocking Christianity on Irish television.  The investigation is a response to a viewer complaint.

Jesus: social justice warrior? Apparently so, if you believe Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of the very liberal Middle Collegiate Church in NYC. During her appearance on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this morning, Lewis described Jesus as a "brown-skinned Palestinian man who understood he needed to resist." The notion that Jesus was Palestinian has been thoroughly debunked. He was Jewish, after all. But that hasn't stopped anti-Semites like Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from also making the claim.

As Holy Week begins for Christians around the world, some intriguing information on the faith has been released by the Pew Research Center.
Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people, according to a new Pew Research Center demographic analysis. But the report also shows that the number of Christians in what many consider the religion’s heartland, the continent of Europe, is in decline. Christians had the most births and deaths of any religious group in recent years, according to our demographic models. Between 2010 and 2015, an estimated 223 million babies were born to Christian mothers and roughly 107 million Christians died – a natural increase of 116 million.

Back in 2015, the American Humanist Association (AHA) sued the Birdville School District, located near Fort Worth, TX, because school board members started their meetings with a prayer. The AHA said this violated the First Amendment "through its practicing of promoting Christian prayers." Former student Isaiah Smith brought the case to AHA and claimed "the prayers made him feel unwelcome at the public meetings and that the school board endorsed Christianity." On Monday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the "school board may open its meetings with student-led prayers without violating the U.S. Constitution." From Reuters:
Writing for the appeals court, Circuit Judge Jerry Smith said the matter involved legislative prayer, because a school board was "more like a legislature" than a classroom.