Religion Dispatches
…ars. You, the voters. We believe him against the evidence because it feels better to believe that his life—his survival, bound and tied, long ago—is a testimony to Jesus’ mercy. We feel better believing that nobody would ever, or could ever, lie about loving God, or lie about loving Christ. And despite our own schismatic compulsions (in daily life, in sectarian divide), we like to believe that all denominations look the same in the dark. Finally,…
Read More
…lation theory Mystwood is playing with—he is the universe, the universe is code, his code is part of the important bit, it’s all a simulation, and he’s ready to play. And, importantly, the rest of us might not matter. The language of programming in A Glitch in the Matrix is compelling and difficult. On the one hand, it is literal computer programming. On the other, intentional or not, the movie invokes the language of “deprogramming” that was comm…
Read More
…in Taiwan, where the Constitutional Court ruled last month that the civil code restricting marriage to ‘a male and a female’ is unconstitutional. The Court gave legislators two years to amend the Civil Code. The article says, however, that “the Court’s arguments for same-sex marriage were not entirely straightforward and left room for further interpretation”: It could be that this was due to the Court’s desire to cool down the same-sex marriage d…
Read More
…o women. There is also a bill in Parliament to revise the current criminal code, which was basically translated from the Dutch criminal code. The latest version apparently does have a sodomy article. So we actually face the criminalization of homosexual acts.” Somoa: Prime Minister Says ‘Christian Country’ Will Never OK Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage Prime Minister Tuilaepa Seilele Malielegaoi said in a radio interview that Samoa is a Christian count…
Read More
…s, the haredim have a very narrow reading of these sources but it’s a safe bet that they can cite chapter and verse to support their views—often more adroitly than their modern counterparts. In his Mishneh Torah (Code of Law), Maimonides explicitly advocated the position that women should stay mostly in their homes. The kabbalistic literature now so popular in modern Israel is in many ways worse. We have evidence that in the heyday of Safed in the…
Read More
…chers and school districts to use “supplemental textbooks,” which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materials. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, co-founder of Louisiana Citizens for Science and one of the creationist movement’s most damning critics, said she believes the complaints are merely a tactic to get disclaimers (Warning: These books teach evolution!) added to the tex…
Read More…r difference within the precincts of our hearts and minds. But the tension between our mainstream self-presentation—the blonde Ken-doll phenotype many ascribe to ethnic Mormons (descended from 19th-century English and Scandinavian emigrants), our conservative politics, the carefully crafted and highly standardized language Mormons learn to use to both protect our beliefs and describe them to non-Mormons—and the radical innovativeness of Mormon bel…
Read More…?) And who were similarly silent when the party tried to capitalize on the coded racism of the anti-Obama forces in 2012 or upend the Affordable Care Act, even though the Catholic Church has been advocating for universal health care since Model Ts were on the road. And it’s even funnier that those who helped put Bush and Cheney in office and watched as they led the nation into endless, unwinnable wars, and justified torture to prevent an ever-pres…
Read More
…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
Read More…are moral issues. His sense of economic morality, though, forged somewhere between focus groups and Ayn Rand, is very different from the one most Americans share. Obama could have taken up this claim, and articulated a different economic-moral vision, one in which the top wage-earners pay their share, and in which health care is not predicated on the right insurance bet. This could have been a worthwhile ethical exchange, undermining the too-neat…
Read More