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Does God know if I cheat on a test in São Paulo?

There are at least two ways to summarize the latest study out of the Canadian Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture. The nice way is rather technical. To quote the author, Benjamin Purzycki: “The present work is the first study to systematically compare the minds of gods by examining some of the intuitive processes that guide how people reason about them.” Another way to summarize it is this: our gods are more moral than your gods. O…

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You Can Take The Boy Out of the Crack House: MyPillow CEO’s New Book Promo Has Deep Roots in American Christianity

…It might as well be as old as Moses, given what a commonplace it is for right-wing Christians. The rest of it is a chestnut of its own. We ought to just be grateful that Lindell isn’t enforcing coronavirus rectitude with a hatchet. (Carrie Nation was also an unabashed self-promoter, by the way.) It’s a strand that goes back to Wesleyan perfectionism and Calvinist propriety, some of the deepest roots of American religion. It may look like faith se…

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First Draft Of History Today Could Be Fox News Promo Tomorrow

As President Obama signs the health care bill into law today, we are watching the first draft of history. But imagine what students a generation from now will be taught about the most significant overhaul of this nation’s health-care system since Medicare if the conservative activists on the Texas Board of Education are successful at their long-range goal of using the public education system to rewrite history. If publishers kowtow to the board a…

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Driscollpalooza Time… Must Be Book Promo Time

…ownright bizarre things “Cussing Pastor” Mark Driscoll says, usually while promoting a new book, as well as the ensuing negative publicity and essays critical of Mark Driscoll, which somehow increase the popularity of Mark Driscoll’s new book.  Mark Driscoll has a new book coming out, and with suspiciously good timing, he’s managed to initiate back to back controversies. First, he showed up at John MacArthur’s “Strange Fire” conference uninvited a…

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BYU Honor Code Used to Harass Black Atheletes

…de, we sounded a note of caution here at RD about the “dark side” of honor code enforcement. After all, the honor code had been created during the 1960s in an effort by ultra-conservative BYU President Ernest Wilkinson to root out liberals, and honor code enforcement (including anonymous referrals) had been used to bait and harrass feminist, liberal, and gay students, shut down campus free speech, and compromise the privacy of pastoral counseling…

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More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

…atened gay Congressman Claudio Arriagada Macaya. Ireland: Interfaith group promotes marriage equality, Catholic bishop warns against As Ireland heads toward a May referendum on marriage equality, an interfaith coalition, Faith in Marriage Equality, has been formed to urge support. Richard O’Leary said the group was created to let people of faith know that they can vote yes, adding that media attention has focused on conservative Christian groups a…

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God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is

…tion in two locations—one in Brazil, another on the West African island of Principe, off the coast of Guinea—in the path of a complete solar eclipse that was to occur on May 29th, 1919. There, on the warm waters of the south Atlantic, Einstein’s theory was to face its Experimentum crucis, its possibly fatal test. Two decades later, Eddington would write in his book The Philosophy of Physical Science that “For the truth of the conclusions of physic…

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The Dark Side of BYU’s Honor Code

…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…

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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

…. But who is to decide what constitutes a “vice against nature”? The Portuguese legislators had been too coy to mention gay sex explicitly, and so a meaningless clause entered the statute books, which no court could act upon. This year, the Penal Code was rewritten. The new Penal Code sweeps away a great deal of the musty colonial legacy, including the mention of “vices against nature”. Now not even the most contorted of arguments could claim that…

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When Religion Kills: The Narco-Traffickers of the Borderlands

…nt, and a pledge at the end. A final admonition declares that breaking the Code will result in immediate execution. The Code is illustrated with images pulled from a website promoting the 2007 Swedish film Arn: The Knights Templar. This past spring, copies of the Code were mysteriously distributed across Michoacan. Like La Familia, members of the Knights Templar must refrain from drugs and must commit to routine drug testing, but unlike La Famila…

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