How Important Are Religious Principles in Our Increasingly Secular Society?
“How much importance should be given publically to religiously based principles, particularly in societies that are growing increasingly secular?” Roger Trigg posed that statement in his recent article titled “Canary in the Coal Mine: Mounting Religious Restrictions in Europe,” published on the website for the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Religious freedoms in Europe, it seems, are taking a back seat to more “politically correct” agendas, such as equal rights for homosexual couples....
Read MoreReligious Liberty: U.S. Government and the Vatican
In 2008 at the beginning of his U.S. Presidency, Barack Obama supported legalized abortion and embryonic stem-cell research– all opposed by Catholic Church teaching. The Vatican strategy in public was to remain aloof and above the fray, avoiding politics. They sought to work with the Obama Administration on similar in-common international goals like assisting migrants, working to prevent human trafficking, and preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS. In 2009 the Catholic Church decried that Notre Dame—a bastion of Catholicism and...
Read MoreLiberal Mormon and Conservative Catholic Join Forces for Religious Freedom
Katrina Lantos Swett, a convert to Mormonism, describes herself as “both completely Jewish and also deeply Latter-day Saint.” In March, Swett, a Democrat, became head of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), “a little known oversight body commissioned by Congress to monitor abuse of religious minorities abroad and keep U.S. foreign policy attending to the issue.” One of the first cases that came to her attention was that of the punk rock group in Moscow who received heavy penalties as a result of a protest in a Moscow...
Read MoreUK Shows How Sexual Rights Can Trump Religious Rights
Governments in the United Kingdom (UK) claim that civil unions and same-gender marriages will not adversely affect religious rights. But evidence seems to be to the contrary. British citizens who lost jobs because of their Christian beliefs recently presented their cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. The ECHR was created by the Council of Europe Member States in 1959 to deal with violations of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. The four took their cases to the court in Strasbourg after Britain ruled against them in...
Read MoreChurch of England defends traditional marriage
By Jan Arguments fly, comparing the legalization of same-gender marriage to the civil rights movement. But for the religious world, no argument is valid when it means changing what God Himself declared (Gen. 2:24). In 1995, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon or LDS) reiterated the scripture when it issued The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which states: We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is...
Read MoreInternational Religious Freedom Report for 2011
The United States Government released its annualreport on the status of religious freedom world-wide for 2011. International Religious Freedom Report for 2011 Executive Summary The Deseret News published an editorial encouraging the nation to continue fighting for international religious freedom. U.S. should continue role as international advocate for religious freedom, Deseret News editorial, Published: Thursday, Aug. 2 2012 They noted that almost half the countries in the world abuse religious freedom in some way. Some do it as a government. Others...
Read More
Recent Comments