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Wiccan Prayer in Iowa House Highlights Religious Freedom Problem

By Joseph Laycock

…utional requirement of neutrality; such a forum need not become a religion-free zone.” Rep. Taylor’s response to last week’s prayer shows why inclusion is not a simple solution. When minority religions give opening prayers, there have been retaliations from the majority in the form of political protests and—in some cases—vandalism and death threats. So the promise of rotating in prayers by minority faiths is less viable in practice than on paper….

In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

By Ivan Strenski

…ng any distinctive rights or obligations: bye-bye to the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the Constitution, etc. They might as well protect us from the “establishment” of widget and the “free exercise” thereof. Both are meaningless, since neither “widget” nor “religion” point to anything specific. Linker, on the other hand, takes the exact opposite tack: he legislates the meaning of “religion” as those particular referents marked by the…

Time for Jews to Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel?

By Ira Chernus

…he Palestinians get no part of Jerusalem, no hint of a right of return, no freeze on settlements, and a vaguely defined state at some future date, but with no army, no control of their air space, no right to sign treaties unless Israel approves, and (it would seem) other unspecified limitations to be dictated by Israel as negotiations proceed. Of course Netanyahu knows full well that Israel can show its vaunted strength only as long as the United…

The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…lsewhere. What makes that idea different in the The Aquarian Gospel is the free and almost casual borrowing from every religious tradition known to Levi Dowling, the frank sense that all religions aim at the same essential truths and that what the Veda said first, Jesus said conclusively. The inhabitants of the Age of Aquarius just so happen to be especially ready for the revelation. There is a surprising degree of self-congratulation and a brash…

Far-Right Evangelicals And The Campaign Against Obama

By Frank Schaeffer

…ht are the ultimate camp followers. They’re latching onto government for a free ride while decrying it. They want to overthrow the present order from the inside in the name of God. The result is that there are two kinds of far-right evangelicals: the ones who make a public show of their animosity toward the president, accusing him of not being an American citizen, for example. They even say Obama has a secret plan to kill old people within his hea…

Everything Was Better When We Had God In Our Schools

By Hollis Phelps

…s not going to be found where they think it is, in some imagined, violence-free religious past. Our schools have regrettably always been violent, whether God has been “allowed in our schools” or not. In fact, below is a list of school shootings from K12 Academics, all of which took place prior to “the removal of God” from our schools: 1700s • The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac’s Rebellion school…

Paul Ryan Is Like Jesus, But It’s Not What You Think

By Sarah Posner

…ying that once people lose control of major portions of their lives, their freedom to be the best that they can be… including religiously, evidently becomes narrowed. And we see that very clearly in the Health and Human Services mandate that we’re under, where here, as we move to almost a welfare situation in health care, we see that the curtailment of religious liberty and other liberty seems to be part and parcel of a system where that type of l…

The Contraceptive Mandate and Animal Suffering

By Frances Kissling

…h Catholic teaching than hanging on to the hospitals and not providing any number of services that people need to be free from unnecessary suffering: voluntary sterilization when you have all the children you can afford; assisted reproduction when you long to have a child, the ability to end your life with dignity when the pain has become unmanageable psychologically or physically. Nothing says that other nonprofits could not run those hospitals a…

Back to Basics: Feminism 101

By Amina Wadud

…thout that context, is motivated by the same essence for me: Allah made me free and equal and anyone who dares to limit that freedom or curtail my equality has no right to do so. They also have no control over my choice to live that equality and justice, save for oppression. The Qur’an is pretty emphatic about that: oppression is human-made and must be human-eradicated. I reject anything and anyone who interferes with my choice and my right to liv…

Trump’s Fear and Loathing Won’t Silence The Nation’s Sole LGBT Muslim Organization

By Omar Sarwar

…e very survival of minority communities. As MASGD puts it, “none of us are free until all of us are free.” To get a sense of what motivates MASGD’s activism, particularly in the current political atmosphere, I interviewed four pioneers of the American LGBT Muslim movement: Faisal Alam, Urooj Arshad, Raquel E. Saraswati, and Tynan Power. These leaders are members of MASGD’s Steering Committee, and were gracious enough to discuss with me their appre…