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Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

…applaud this news, a murmur through the convention hall, Blackberries and iPhones tweeting on all sides of me.  “When you come out of the closet, shut the door behind you because you won’t need it anymore,” he continues. (Who’s he talking to? He’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? As far as he knows?) “If you don’t have a deity,” he says, “you are an atheist.” I’m an English teacher and I agree this may indeed define an atheist—someone without a g…

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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

…omething-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hea…

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Thoroughly Modern Mormons

…ass. A stranger, upon learning that I don’t have one of the highly-coveted tickets to the Sunday Conference sessions, spontaneously offers me his last extra. Mitt Romney would blend right in amongst the crowds here. But so would Marco Rubio. Or Antonio Villaraigosa. Or any clean-cut man in a white shirt and tie, any woman in Sunday dress with a baby stroller. I try to strike up a conversation with an African woman dressed in a pagne. “Where are yo…

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Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

…abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which are still active. The protests so shaped the city that, 22 years later, both sides recall the fight vividly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied…

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Death in the Desert: Riding With the Samaritans

…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…

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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…cation, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourg…

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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…ith formal, centralized leadership. With access to drug money, oil wealth, cheap weapons, and consumer-grade digital toys, they don’t have to worry that 93% of people in the Muslim world still refuse to condone the 9/11 attacks. No one can control them: not their communities, their politicians, their leading clerics, nor even their ostensible figurehead, bin Laden himself. When forced out of one area, the fighters re-create another in their own im…

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Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…

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Who’s to Blame for BP?

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…

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Hookers for Jesus: Sex and Salvation on the Strip

…fans among the expo’s 40,000 visitors. “Some Christians Think We are Just Cheap Harlots” “A lot of guys pose for photos with us and when they go home and look up what’s on our T-shirts, they learn what we’re about,” Lobért explained to Telegraph reporter Philip Sherwell. “We call it booby-trapping.” But those who attend adult entertainment fairs aren’t exactly Lobért’s target audience. Her conspicuous appearance is also meant to attract the other…

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