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How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

…statistically significant effect” on charitable contributions in those zip codes after a scandal, and not only to Catholic-based charitable organizations. The researchers theorize that perhaps once a person stops attending church, the social pressure to be charitable declines. Interestingly, however, these same individuals mirror the statistical notion that even though an increasing number of Americans consider themselves religiously unaffiliated,…

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Greece Must Suffer for Redemption: A Nietzschean Reading

…marked on his own countrymen’s past, “[O]ne has only to look at our former codes of punishments to understand… [that] Germans have employed fearful means to acquire a memory…” Having acquired their own memories, Nietzsche might suggest, the Germans seek to bring about the same in Greeks by inflicting pain. But did Germans acquire a memory after all? Many have noted the irony of Germany’s negotiating position, considering Greece’s forgiving of Germ…

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Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘Wild God’ is Not Here to Help

…lity,’ something greater than the sum of all the parts—the birds and cloudscapes and glittering Milky Way—that begins to feel like a single living, breathing Other. But lest she err on the side of romanticizing that newly named Presence, in short order there came a cataclysmic hurricane that wiped out “most of the evidence of my existence, the paper trace anyway,” she writes. All that she had now was the journal from her teenage years, the record…

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Russian Multimillionaire Makes Peace with Anti-Christ Milk

…ties, barricading themselves within a bunker because they believed that barcodes on food packaging are Satanic. In a statement, Christian dairy tycoon Boyko-Veliky explained the crosses: Russian Milk is forced to place bar codes on its packaging, as without this, we will only be able to sell our goods at farms, not in stores. . . . By placing the cross on the bar code, we want to demonstrate our stance: We are with our Lord, Jesus Christ, and not…

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An Evangelical Intellectual Takes On Same-Sex Marriage, Grasps at Straw Men

…minated, the rejected, and the vilified. Having spent decades opposing new freedoms for gays, Christians now claim that gays are somehow stripping freedoms from them. Given the history between these groups, this claim demonstrates an incalculable level of chutzpah. I suggested earlier that Craig’s reasoning might be instructive to those interested in the arguments that drive the debate over same-sex marriage. Having now worked through that reasoni…

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Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

…the good of an ordered society. Others counter that sexuality needs to be freed from the repressive constraints of religion. Ironically, both opponents and supporters of LGBT equality believe in this supposedly uncrossable divide between religion and sexuality. Versions of this argument are so frequently repeated by media commentators, politicians, and activists that they have become common sense. This is not just about homosexuality. In reportin…

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Queer Repentance: On Not Surrendering to a Text, to Guilt, or to Habit

…y Huck Finn in Mark Twain’s novel. Huck has been taught that if he helps escaped slaves, he will go to hell. But he has befriended Jim, the runaway slave, and cannot turn him in. So, Huck decides at a pivotal moment in the book, “I guess I’ll go to hell, then.” That moment, of course, is not damnation but salvation. It is the birth of a mature conscience. Gays and lesbians born into religious communities all each face a Huck Finn moment, at which…

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Why Have So Many Fallen for the Rune Stone Hoax?

…m the Rune Stone using such techniques as dowsing rods for divining hidden codes within the runes. Some of these new narratives describe large settlements of Christian Vikings who lived in Minnesota for centuries following Leif Eriksson’s arrival in Vinland. There is a ready market for such wild speculation on cable television, but Krueger notes that these tales of ancient European settlers effectively marginalize America’s actual original inhabit…

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What was Pants to Church Sunday Really About?

…tly gender-segregated customs of Mormonism are—like unwritten Sunday dress codes—traditional rather than doctrinal and human rather than inspired. It was also an opportunity to start a conversation about traditional gender inequalities in a community where feminism has been unnecessarily stigmatized as an excommunicable offense.  (And for the record, it is not.) Because really, it’s not pants or the right to wear pants that tops the list of Mormon…

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Jail for Bible Study? Note to Self.

…g for years requirements that he abide by basic building, fire, and zoning codes. So you go back to that Charisma story and the overblown rhetoric about religious persecution, and remind yourself not to take seriously the next thing you read or hear from the Rutherford Institute. And while you can’t be sure, you don’t recall reading that the heat and harsh conditions at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County Tent City Jail had previously moved John…

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