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

…veys. And why is it that, as Purzycki seems to assume, the only difference between the color of a car and the act of lying is moral content? Personally, I find that lying produces certain effects—drama, confusion, a whole lot of effort on the part of the liar—that aren’t strictly moral in character, and that don’t, in general, apply to automotive paint jobs. Maybe the gods just want to watch the human comedy. Hard data does have its place in the s…

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

…ircuit riders hit the frontier villages. Even today, there’s no difference between Mike Lindell and a dozen televangelists, save a thousand milligrams of lithium. If you have any doubts about the commodification of the healing grace of God, google it for yourself. There’s a part of American Christianity that believes deeply and sincerely that if they can make it out of the lion’s den, they can teach you to do the same—for a modest fee, of course….

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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

…uired to solemnise same sex marriages, and continues to regard marriage as between one man and one woman, the advent of same sex marriage, widely supported across the political spectrum, creates an acute divergence between the church’s teaching on marriage and the civil law of the land. “It is likely that the ease with which same sex marriage was accepted in Parliament reflects a more general social move away from the church’s traditional understa…

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

…ecause what the black hole looked like and what it made me feel had a gulf between them. It may not have been as infinite as space but it still had the glow of the sacred about it. The photo from the EHT does in many ways appear as I had guessed it would; a ghostly, glowing, eerie ring of luminescence around a pitch blackness. Yet there’s something different about seeing the actual thing-in-itself as opposed to an illustration. This is pictorial e…

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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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Gambling with God: Ryan Bell’s Atheist Bet

…to act as if he did not believe. Yet his understanding of the relationship between belief and practice suggests something about how we have come to think of religion in the marketplace approach of contemporary spirituality. Bell treats atheism as a religious practice in which one attends services and reads devotional literature, the “sacred texts” of atheism, as he calls them. The conclusion he hopes for is just what Pascal thought was impossible,…

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