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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

…her successes. Faith, as that Pope never tired of repeating, can never be promoted by force; truth’s power lies its truthfulness, nothing more. Now in a great many ethical and political matters, John Paul II was as anti-modern a Pope as the Church has seen in recent memory; his successor even more so. But on the devilish topic of religion, science and free enquiry, these same Popes have elected to stand emphatically on the side of the moderns. Th…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

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The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

…r calculate the economics of grace. Think of that: grace, the paradigmatic free gift, is replaced by the massive edifice of Wall Street number-crunchers and their continual wagering on the future probabilities. As we all know, a lot of money has been made—and lost—this way. Which leads Buchan to his second point: money generates more money, even on Sunday. This is a subtler point, one that he develops specifically in relation to the invention of p…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…tisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service age…

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Gun Owners of America Celebrates Defeat of Gun Control Amendments

…of bright ideas like we don’t want guns around children, so let’s have gun-free school zones. Do you know where most of the mass murders have occurred in the United States? In gun-free zones. There’s an exception or two but typically it’s where the bad guy has reason to think he’ll have a monopoly of force. It has to be one of the most stupid laws on the books, and yet we’ve had so much inertia because we don’t want guns around children especially…

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Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

…m Richard Dawkins encouraging the recipient of the mailing to subscribe to Free Inquiry: Dear Friend, If you live in America, the chances are good that your next door neighbours believe the following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of…

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Virginians may Vote in Elections, But in Counties with Militias Democracy Hangs in the Balance

…state and the tyranny of the majority.” [16] “Countries and Territories,” Freedom House, 2023. [17] Agustina Giraudy, Democrats and Autocrats: Pathways of Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity within Democratic Countries (Oxford University Press, 2015). [18] Paul Rexton Kan, The Global Challenge of Militias and Paramilitary Violence (Palgrave McMillan, 2019), 8. According to Army War College Professor Paul Rexton Kan, “collective self-defens…

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Two people on a podium with a board that reads "Project 2025 kills democracy"

Project 2025: How Trump Loyalists and Right-Wing Leaders Are Paving a Fast Road to Fascism

…who “purvey” it to be classified as sex offenders.[58] It turns out that “freedom” for Project 2025 activists is only freedom to live in alignment with their religious worldview: “When the Founders spoke of ‘pursuit of Happiness,’ what they meant might be understood today as in essence ‘pursuit of Blessedness,’” the report declares, adding, “That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants e…

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Texas Textbook Massacre

…s be able to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others,” was rejected by religious conservatives. 3. The Enlightenment Ends Here: Board members voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. Instead, they rep…

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