“Christiane Amanpour is on vacation in France. Sort of. The CNN star also is putting the finishing touches on a six-hour documentary airing next week about the often volatile mix of politics and religion.

She has spent the past eight months on the project, traveling around the world – to the West Bank to spend time with Jewish settlers, to Iran to film Shiite Muslims, to the United States to sit down with Christian conservative Jerry Falwell just before his death, and to Jerusalem, ground zero for all three religions.

The result is “God’s Warriors,” a provocative look at the fundamentalist foot soldiers who fight in the name of their faith.”

Via SignOnSanDiego.com > 

“WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers.

As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show.

I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people’s lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.

But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.” (cont’d)

Cont’d at LaTimes.com >

A well-written account of one man’s journey away from his faith as the result of covering news stories related to religion.

The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great light, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.

A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.
“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

Via Ocellated.com >

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. That people can still deny this easily understood and intuitive scientific fact by relying on their holy text should give us pause considering some of the other, less benign, things that are written in it. For instance, things about the roles of women, the value of certain races, and the end of the world

“JAKARTA, Indonesia — A dozen Christian men were convicted Thursday and sentenced to up to 14 years in jail for beating to death and beheading two Muslims to avenge the government executions of three Christians in Indonesia last year.

Five other Christians received eight-year terms for burying the pair, who were set upon by a mob as they drove though a Christian neighborhood on Sulawesi island a day after the Sept. 22, 2006, executions of Fabianus Tibo and two other Christian militants.

The three executed Christians had been found guilty of leading a militia that killed at least 70 Muslims during a 1999-2002 religious war on the island that led to the deaths of at least 1,000 people from both faiths.”

Full article here (WashingtonPost.com) >

“No, not by radical Muslims but by our own military. This email was forwarded to me from a soldier in Iraq whose friend is being harassed at another base for organizing a meeting of atheists on the base. The email was originally sent to Kathleen Johnson, the military director for American Atheists, who is currently serving in Iraq herself. The full email is below the fold:

Kathleen Johnson:
Thought you’d be interested in this report of the first-ever meeting of Atheist service-members in Iraq under the umbrella of the MAAF-Iraq chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. This meeting was put together by the same young MAAF member who recently had his second letter published in the Stars and Stripes.

One of our members, a young Atheist enlisted soldier, thought he would like to see if he could generate some interest in MAAF meetings at his Forward Operating Base (FOB) here in Iraq (not the base I’m at, by the way). He got things coordinated and started hanging flyers, and after weeks of having to re-hang his flyers almost daily because some vandal kept tearing them down, he finally succeeded in having a small MAAF meeting.”… (cont’d)

Read the rest here.

It’s sad that religion can even break down the ties and sense of “being-on-the-same-team” that exist between a tight knit, fraternal group like the military.