Tens of millions of Americans — and most of its elected leaders — claim to be Christian, and yet we're a country that's completely broken. This is the state of our “Christian” nation: Our government isn't working, and when it does it’s on behalf of behemoth corporations and influential lobbyists.

One day, as a small child, John Allen Chau was rooting through his father’s study when he found something curious and alluring: an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic story of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island. “After struggling my way to read it with early elementary school English,” he later told a website for outdoors enthusiasts, “I started reading easier kid-friendly books,” like The Sign of the Beaver, “which inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks”.

The Roman Catholic Church has long argued that one’s life is the property of God and thus that to commit suicide is to deride God’s prerogatives. The counterargument, by philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) is that, if such is the case, then to save someone’s life is also to deride God’s prerogatives. Most religions share the Church’s belief in the sanctity of life, although a few have come to regard at least some suicides as honourable.

The father of an American Christian, killed by a remote tribe on an isolated island he was looking to evangelise to, has criticised the "extreme Christianity" which pushed his child to a "not unexpected end". Dr Patrick Chau has been speaking to the Guardian, months after John Allen Chau died near North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean.

Before I declined the arranged marriage proposal from my first cousin, I almost accepted it. This story is about the almost-acceptance. It’s about the social pressures which nearly buckled me into a ‘yes’, before I resisted and reclaimed my right to say ‘no’. It’s about the cultural codes of honour, perceptions of duty, and the deeply entrenched values of allegiance to kin which underlie the custom of cousin-marriage in Pakistan, my country of birth.

The 4th Century secret to lasting longer in bed...

Shortly after Fox & Friends aired a segment about proposed legislation to incorporate Bible classes into public schools on Monday morning, President Donald Trump cheered these efforts on Twitter. “Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!” Trump wrote.

North Dakota State Representative Aaron McWilliams has introduced a bill that would require high schools to teach a Bible class instead of the required semester of civics. The law would not distinguish between teaching the course as “literature” or religious studies. The bill is seen as a gift to evangelical Christians who have attempted to use similar laws to push anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic, and xenophobic religious teachings to children.

Call it an act of God — or don't — that a Tuesday snowstorm kept would-be testifiers on a bill requiring "In God We Trust" from filling up the Legislature's Education Committee hearing room. In a marathon 2 1/2-hour hearing, all but two of the dozen people who testified on the first day of committee work called Sen. Steve Erdman's bill (LB73) a naked attempt to inject religion into Nebraska's public school system.

Some fake news was going around in social media that mentioned how — “According to the American Psychological Association (APA), a strong and passionate belief in a deity or higher power, to the point where it impairs one’s ability to make conscientious decisions about common sense matters, will now be classified as a mental illness.” Though I later found these articles to be unfounded and wishful thinking, it did bring several dark memories from my past to the therapist’s couch.

For centuries, we’ve given lavish attention to the specifics of punishment, and left Heaven woefully under-sketched. When I was a kid of ten or eleven years old, newly returned to New York after a few years living in Chicago, I started accompanying my mother to a church in Harlem, in a shallow, sunlit upper room just south of 125th Street. Every Sunday, service began with a procession. The Hammond organ would start up, and the ministers, carrying their Bibles, trailed by the pastor, would file in in a loose line, singing a song.

For this exercise to work, we need to establish a couple of ground rules. First, drop your logic defense. That’s the exercise. Then, consider that everything that the mind could possibly imagine … has indeed occurred. If time and space are one, we will one day be able to revisit the realms of what we call our “imagination.”

The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, which oversees the Jehovah’s Witnesses, has sent legal notices to a watchdog group demanding the takedown of documents describing what Witnesses say and share with each other in private. Because nothing would hurt the Witnesses more than their beliefs being exposed to a wider audience…

For centuries, we’ve given lavish attention to the specifics of punishment, and left Heaven woefully under-sketched.

Would you be able to leave everything you have ever known behind in order to follow your dreams? That was the choice Izzy Posen, a Hasidic ultra-Orthodox Jew faced when he decided to leave his isolated religious community. He told BBC World Service how his life has been transformed since breaking free.

Some Republicans accused their Muslim colleague of being more loyal to Islam than the US constitution.

Click open the newspaper and behold: stories of religion, the monotheisms born of desert honor culture particularly, messing something or someone up, often fatally. Click open the international section where conflict and war follow the bloody borders of faiths. Inter-faith and sectarian aggression have been the primary drivers of war throughout history. In the highly religious Middle East...

The 116th Congress is the most diverse in history, with incoming members expanding political representation on a number of fronts. For the first time, Congress now includes Muslim women, Native American women, an openly bisexual senator and the youngest woman ever elected to serve in either chamber. Yet despite that progress, Congress is once again beginning a new session without a single member who openly identifies as atheist, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest CQ Roll Call “Faith on the Hill” survey.

The Dutch population is rapidly losing interest in going to church, according to social and cultural planning office SCP. The decline of the Christian faith also continues in the Netherlands. "Churches are losing in authority, binding power and popularity", the SCP said in a new report, RTL Nieuws reports.

My belief in God didn't spontaneously combust—it faded. I lost my virginity at 16. I stopped going to church. I snuck out past curfew. As punishment, my mom made me memorize Bible verses, and I recited them like recipes. I wasn't the only kid who stopped believing. A record number of young Americans (35 percent) report no religious affiliation, even though 91 percent of us grew up in religiously affiliated households.