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Whistleblower Alleges $100B Hoarding Scandal by LDS Church; But There’s An Easy Fix

By Andrew L. Seidel

…ransparency requirements. Even the most extreme understanding of religious freedom could not stop Congress from legislating transparency because accountability to the taxpayers does not “prohibit” or even hinder the free exercise of religion. For instance, Ensign claims that “the amassed funds would be used in the event of the second coming of Christ.” But filing financial information with the IRS would not prohibit the church from hoarding this w…

South Dakota Bill Could Legalize Killing Abortion Doctors

By Lauri Lebo

…e made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. “If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion.” Here is the bill in its entirety: FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA: Section 1. Th…

Catholic Anti-Nuke Activists Looking at 20 Years in Prison a True Test for Religious Freedom

By Patrick Hornbeck

…should be dismissed became they impinge upon the Plowshares 7’s religious freedom. This claim rested on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 1993 law that requires the federal government not to “substantially burden” someone’s practice of religion unless a “compelling government interest” is involved and the rule the government is enforcing is the “least restrictive means” of achieving its goal. The judge in the Plowshares trial denied…

Jerry Falwell Jr. Is Corrupt, but Liberty U’s Problems Go Far Deeper

By Will E. Young

…ntracts to family friends; and how he ordered his staff to violate IRS tax code. Falwell’s been able to get away with such behavior partly because he doesn’t fear his board of trustees, which is essentially just a collection of close friends of the family. As noted above, Mark DeMoss, the one trustee who did speak up in disagreement of Falwell’s endorsement of Trump, was immediately removed from the board—a testament to Falwell’s Trumpian fragilit…

Conservative Christian Book on Obama’s Faith

By Bill Berkowitz

…ses through near-plagiarism, the lies of pseudo-historian and former Texas Republican Party chairman David Barton, a man who Mansfield described in the book’s acknowledgements as a friend and mentor.” Rodda also commented on Mansfield’s 2005 book, The Faith of the American Soldier, “a book in which he … defend[s] and prais[es] Gen. William Boykin and his 2003 ‘sermon,’ in which he stated, referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, ‘I k…

The Facts About ‘Sharia’ May Surprise You

By Sumbul Ali-Karamali

…taken out of their ancient context and tacked onto existing Western civil codes and enforced by the government. That is not shariah, which has a sophisticated legal methodology of application. That’s just making up Islamic-sounding laws and calling it “shariah law.” The shariah-based legal system, which had operated for a millennium, was dismantled under Western colonization of Muslim lands, starting in the 18th century. Nearly 90% of Muslim land…

Margaret Cho: God Bless You, Fing Fers

By Lisa Webster

…dy for some serious War on Culture…er…culture war. So there’s Christian as code-word for ‘evangelical.’ Like when Republican politicians say it. And there’s Christian meaning Protestant, as opposed to Catholic. And there’s Christian the way a missionary might mean it, (as opposed to heathen?). And there are those “anonymous Christians,” or involuntary Christians…was that Rahner who devised that category? Does anyone outside of seminary or grad sch…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…hing the sins of a lost city, some prescriptions in the Israelite holiness code, and the Apostle Paul on the consequences of pagan idolatry. Or so the passages read to me.) Calling out the numbers is not meant to start a conversation about what these biblical passages might mean—or about how different Christian communities have decided to determine the applied meaning of any verse in their version of the Bible. The verses are often cited in church…

This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

By Jeff Sharlet

…ers listened to Sarah Palin’s convention address expecting heavy religious code, the scriptural allusions that have come to be standard fare in speeches by Republicans and Barack Obama. There wasn’t much—“a servant’s heart,” a prayer for her son sent off to war. But there was, for those with ears to hear it, a far more disturbing allusion: to Westbrook Pegler, a mid-century Rush Limbaugh, and then some. At the height of his popularity, he was more…

Why Bill Maher Gets a “C” in My Introduction to Religion Class…

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…Mark C. Taylor: Religion can be understood as a system of symbols (creed, code, cultus) by means of which people (a community) orient themselves in the world with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings, and values. (Albanese) Religion, I would argue, is a complex adaptive network of myths, symbols, rituals, and concepts that simultaneously figure patterns of feeling, thinking, and acting and disrupt stable structures of mea…