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Current and past news concerning
religion, morality, spirituality, etc.

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Religious news: positive and negative:

We used to maintain a type of blog that documented events chronologically. They numbered three in total:

• Religious tolerance or religious information.
  
  
• Religious change, violence, conflict and/or intolerance.
  
  
• Intra-faith or inter-faith cooperation, apology, etc.

The time that we took to maintain these sections of our web site were easily justified back in 1995 when this web site first went online. At the time, the Internet was in its infancy. There were only about 6,000 web sites on the entire Internet, compared with over 65 million near the end of 2010. The information that was available on religion was often highly biased. Essentially every web site, promoted only the views of the webmaster or sponsoring agency.

However, by mid-2010, many web sites specializing in religious information had become available. Also, this web site had grown to the point where the available staff hours were insufficient to properly maintain its more than 5,400 essays and menus. Something had to give.

We analyzed the traffic that each sections of the web site received. We studied the amount of effort to maintain each section up-to-date. We reluctantly decided to stop the blogging of religious news. It was not an important part of the web site in terms of visitor interest, and it took a great deal of effort to update -- effort that we don't have available.

However, we will continue to update this web site to include new developments with a religious or moral component in North America and occasionally elsewhere in the world. For example, if the Roman Catholic Church and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fund another initiative to eliminate same-sex marriage in a state, we will describe that in our same-sex marriage section. If the Conservative Party gains majority control in the Canadian Parliament and starts to bring back the death penalty, privatize the health care system, eliminate abortion access, renew the army's activities in Afghanistan, eliminate same-sex marriage, etc. we will describe these events in the corresponding sections of this web site.

We recommend the following news sources:

• Beliefnet.com's news section at: http://www.beliefnet.com (Balanced presentation)
  
  
• The Christian Post at: http://www.christianpost.com/ (Evangelical Christian presentation)
  
  
• CNN's belief blog at: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/ (Balanced presentation)
  
  
• Huffington Post's "HuffPost Religion" at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (Liberal presentation)
  
  
• Life Site News at: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ (Conservative presentation; concentrates on abortion access, human sexuality issues, culture of life)
  
  
• "On Faith" blog by the Washington Post at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/  (Balanced presentation)
  
  
• The Pew Forum on Religion & public life at: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ (Balanced presentation of survey data, roundtables, and briefings and other social science research on religion and public life in the U.S. and worldwide)
  
  
• Religion Dispatches at: http://www.religiondispatches.org/ (Liberal presentation)
  
  
• Religion Link at: http://www.religionlink.com/ (Resource for journalists)
  
  
• Religion News Blog at: http://www.religionnewsblog.com (Resource for "religion professionals, academics, cult experts, reporters and others")
  
  
• Worldwide Religious News at: http://www.wwrn.org/ (Resource for the academic and legal communities)

News sources that we do not recommend:

We recommend reading the article by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- an organization that monitors hate groups in the U.S. It describes "18 anti-gay groups and their propaganda." Written in late 2010, it found 18 such groups, of which they will list 13 as hate groups in 2011.The latter include (in alphabetic order): Abiding Truth Ministries, American Family Association, Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, American Vision, Chalcedon Foundation, Dove World Outreach Center, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Family Research Council (Washington DC), Family Research Institute (Colorado Springs, CO), Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment, Illinois Family Institute, MassResistance, and the Traditional Values Coalition.

Choosing news sources:

Many people have a natural tendency to adopt as their main news source one supplier (e.g. CNN, Fox, & MSNBC) that matches their political and religious beliefs. We recommend that people consider also tapping into a new source that sharply contrasts with their beliefs. We have four reasons for recommending this:

• It is only by learning what other people believe  that we can fully understand our own position.
  
  
• It is only by learning why other people believe as they do that we can fully understand why we believe what we do.
  
  
• Reading about opposing positions helps us detect baloney, false reporting, and bias that permeates the media -- particularly religious news sources.
  
  
• It sharpens our analytical skills and may help slow or prevent mental problems later in life.

Bias in religious news sources:

On 2009-NOV-1 about the time that the federal hate crimes bill was signed into law, we noticed an increase in the level of bias, misinformation, confusing reporting, and disinformation being spread by some religious news sources. So we started a new section of essays on this web site:

Misinformation, disinformation, exaggerations, lies, darn lies, statistics, etc on the Internet related to religion, morality, ethics, culture, etc.

Other sections on this web site deal with:

	Information on specific topics with religious or ethical content including abortion access, equal rights for gays and lesbians, environment, same-sex marriage, scientific developments, cloning, Ten Commandments displays, and dozens of other topics.
	Top news stories of the year: 2006 2007

News feeds:

These are items from the world's media that are selected by other organizations. We do not have any control over which articles and which news services are selected. Some of the articles may be biased.

Among the news feeds are:

	A group of news religious feeds, covering all aspects of religion.
	News feeds on other topics, including abortion, agnosticism, atheism, divorce, the environment, Judaism, etc.

Latest update: 2012-JUL-15

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