Religion poisons everything?

During the 25 November 2018 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show, Steve Densley and Matt Bowen discussed some recent Interpreter articles as well as the movie A Case for Christ.  The program is now archived online for your listening convenience and enjoyment:

https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-november-25-2018/

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My wife and I met Jake Mangakahia at Church in Sydney last weekend, where we had a nice and fairly long conversation with him.  He’s an impressive fellow, and we didn’t even get to see him dance.  (The final performance of Spartacus had concluded the night before.  If we had known about it, and had known that he was in it, we would have made every effort to be there.)

“Legacy of Strength Continues”

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I really like the design for this new temple.  It fits a modern city, but it also fits Thailand:

“Groundbreaking Scheduled for the Bangkok Thailand Temple”

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I’ve received two grotesquely obscene emails so far today from an anonymous fellow who has been favoring me with this kind of attention for at least the past four or five years now.  I think that perhaps he still has some work to do on the civility front, and that this article might be of help to him:

“BYU Forum: Mastering civility”

I look forward to watching it or hearing it myself.

Incidentally, it’s slightly unusual, though not at all unprecedented, for me to receive multiple posts in a single day from this poor fellow.  I suspect that his is a deeply wounded soul, and I wish that he would identify himself so that he might be able to get some help.

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The late Christopher Hitchens repeated and publicly insisted that “religion poisons everything.”  (I’m quite confident, and I think that my atheist friends would agree with me on this, that he no longer holds that view.)  He was, of course, quite wrong, and demonstrably so.  Here, in fact, is yet another demonstration to that effect that recently appeared:

“Study: Religious Childhood Linked to Healthier, Happier Adulthood: A study found that people who attended religious services or prayed regularly during their upbringing were happier in early adulthood.”

And, in that same vein, here’s an item from the Australian newsroom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, representing merely one of literally thousands of similar stories that might be told every week around the world:

“Farmers Blessed by Visit of Macarthur Youth”

Posted from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia