The most important reason for legalizing gay marriage can be found in the very nature of marriage itself. What truly differentiates civil marriage from other contractual relationships is not "one man, one woman" as conservative Christians claim, but fact that it establishes, legally, socially, and morally, a new kinship — and by extension, a new family. This, more than the legal rights which come with marriage, is why gays demand and deserve marriage equality.

Read More: Equal Dignity & Love of Gay Relationships: Gay Couples Have a Right To It

Someone who offers Pascal's Wager is arguing that to believe in God is a better bet than not believing in God. If you believe and God exists, you’ll go to heaven and avoid hell; if you believe and are wrong, you lose nothing. If you don’t believe in God and God does exist, you’ll lose heaven and go to hell; if you’re right, then you gain nothing. There are a lot of problems with this argument.

Read Article: Pascal's Wager

A couple of years ago, the Vatican released a statement on the nature of women as well as the relationship between women and men which purported to offer a "defense" of true feminism and an attack on "radical" feminism. According to the Vatican, it's necessary for men and women to accept divinely-ordained restrictions on different social, cultural, political roles in life. I suppose it's just a coincidence that the men's roles happen to be the ones which exercise the most power. Read more...

Religion has been with us for all of recorded history — probably for about as long as our species has existed and perhaps even before. Some aspects of religion have changed quite a bit while others seem to remain fairly constant. What direction might religion take over the next millennium of human history? Can we hope that it will change at all, perhaps for the better?

Some argue that we should simply get used to the fact that religion is here to stay. There is certainly something to this argument, but hasn't a similar argument been offered in favor of every cultural institution that people have tried to eliminate? Haven't people said similar things about slavery, segregation, racism, aristocracy, dictatorships, and so forth?

Because of how often this argument has been used, and how often it has been wrong, we should approach it with great care — and those who want to use it should exercise even greater care. Every cultural institution and tradition (if it's old enough) appears nearly invincible and impossible to overturn. The fact that something has been around for a very long time is not a reason to assume that it will never leave, never mind that it won't change dramatically.

Of course, the fact that this argument has been wrong before shouldn't cause us to assume that it is necessarily wrong now. It's arguable that religion is far more deeply ingrained in culture than other institutions of the past and, therefore, that the chances of eliminating it or dramatically changing it are much lower at best. Maybe religion really is different — but, at the very least, this is something which people making this argument should try to explain and support.