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Behind a Recent Stunt in Idaho Lies a Dangerous Theocratic Movement

…serious danger to women and trans men, were introduced by Herndon. In her phone interview with RD, Abbott brought up the December 22 service as an example of likely illegal political organizing by a tax-exempt church, which she says is one of her biggest concerns. A self-described “fourth-generation Bonner County girl” who forthrightly states, “I deeply care about consensus issues; I hate political parties,” Abbot referred to the year of Trump’s…

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On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

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Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

…n a neighborhood bar. But there it is: anything to get us into the holiday spirit. Soon it became evident that none of the other young Brooklynites around me (who were, informal polling later on revealed, entirely childless and, it was safe for the lecturer to assume, mostly godless as well) came for hard-hitting proof. When the promised proof never actually appeared, the crowd, as Cahn might have predicted, didn’t seem to mind. Baby Jesus’ Materi…

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The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

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From Shofars to Hammers: The Spiritual Warriors of MAGA are ‘ReAwakening’ to Political Violence

…o thunderous applause. But underneath it all was a seething groundswell of spiritually sanctioned incitement to violence that was impossible to ignore. The spiritual leaders of this new religio-political movement are using increasingly violent rhetoric to direct an inspired army of God to wage war against all who stand outside their camp. I watched as 4,000 faithful warriors sprang to their feet with each call to arms, roaring their approval, hand…

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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

…y’s zingers about 19-year-old Mormon “elders” fall on target. A surprising number of these Christian soldiers haven’t in fact read the Book of Mormon (“Another Testament of Jesus Christ”). Pairs of missionaries (“companions”) do often resent each other; sexual tension, homophobia, homesickness, and boredom strain the relationships of these co-workers/roommates. Many missionaries dislike their geographic assignments. Even as they compete against ea…

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Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

…’s hard to know, in the end, what to make of what seems a startling set of numbers related to “belief in God or a Universal Spirit.” Here, we learn what some 38% in the blended “Atheist/Agnostic” group says when asked about this belief. In commentary, the group is deconstructed, with 14% of Atheists and 56% of Agnostics expressing a belief in God of a Universal Spirit. We might well wonder what this could possibly mean, especially among self-ident…

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Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

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In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…

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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

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