Tag: Government

The Canadian government is planning to create an international religious freedom watchdog that it’s installing within the Department of Foreign Affairs, with a $5-million annual budget, to promote and monitor religious freedom around the world.

In an essay written in 1890, Ingersoll discusses the purposeful absence of God in the Constitution.

A recent Pew Research study of people 18 to 29 years old found, among other things, that they “are slightly more supportive than their elders of government efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involvement in politics by churches and other houses of worship.”

Two Harvard economists conclude that certain religious beliefs correlate with faster economic development.

Governments have a history of not listening to their scientific advisers. Politicians, popes and princes want things that can be said unequivocally, while scientists know that their advice is necessarily provisional, and sometimes open to dispute.

A great deal of ink has been spilt over the nature of the relationship between the arts and sciences since C. P. Snow delivered his Two Cultures lecture in 1959. But that lecture has largely been taken out of context. Snow was frankly not interested in whether the plays of Shakespeare or the second law of thermodynamics was the more appropriate starting point for a full and rich understanding of contemporary Britain. Rather, the lecture was the culmination, rather than the beginning, of a postwar debate about the role of science in British society.

An article outlining Oklahoma’s finalized plans to erect a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma City.

The Pentagon has stopped putting Biblical quotes on the cover of the daily briefing for the president.  Under Bush, the Pentagon briefing had quotes such as “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”

US stem cell researchers will always meet with some disapproval – but at least they now have their president behind them.

This wasn’t really a budget speech, or even a State of the Union. It was a call to rebuild a country—from its infrastructure, to its economy, to its values.