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Tea Party’s Cosmic Conflict in Wisconsin

By Gary Laderman

…ndamental to its existence is one of the oldest, and most socially useful, tricks in the evolutionary book of human life. An enemy brings life to social solidarity and brings into sharp relief the ultimate values which must be upheld at all costs. What is the sacred enemy that animates the TP? Big Government. All of the various fears that have made their way into contemporary political discourse since the rise of the TP movement—death panels, soci…

RDBook: There is Nothing New About the New Atheism

By Ibrahim Abusharif

…piece.” And religious impulses and experiential modes are vestigial mental tricks, lingering superstitions, imperfect explanations of natural phenomena, or primitive ideas that now need to be expunged because of human progress (evinced by our darkening skies, melted glaciers, uncontainable greed, and shrinking fresh water supplies?). Like art, the core of the checks and ethics that we live by (even in secular societies) and that make civilization…

Is the Internet the End of Religion?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ions reproduce through chanting and song. What are some other evolutionary tricks, Dawkins asks? Promises of an afterlife! Dennett also maintains that religions are “designed by natural selection in such a way as to presuppose the relative ignorance of the parts that make it up.” Since more knowledge and reason inevitably equals less faith (something I’ve argued against before), the Internet will bring the end of religion. Finally, in my favor…

‘Murder Among the Mormons’ Ep 2 Recap: A Family Man With a Wild Side

By Benjamin E. Park

…me, and power. He spent more than he brought in, accumulated an increasing number of toys, and made frequent trips to the East Coast to both initiate more sales as well as party hard while away from his traditional home life. Some of the documentary’s tricks to capture this escalation and duplicity work well, like the home-footage of a smiling, and obviously proud, Hofmann watching news footage of himself. Others come up short, like the comedic re…

Why It’s Okay to Criticize Fundamentalist Evangelicals

By Tom Eggebeen

…ught my attention. Calvin labels their claims to be Scripture-abiding, as “tricks” and “equivocation” (Institutes, 1541 edition, trans. Elsie Anne McKee). The Anabaptists, with their “believers’ baptism,” have a diminished view of God, a view of grace compromised by “holiness” convictions, an overbearing focus on the believer’s need to “come to faith.” Faith is then “proved” with dramatic conversion stories, allowing little room for failure. Today…

David Barton: Creationist Founding Fathers Settled Debate Over Evolution

By Lauri Lebo

…that the bible takes a stand against net neutrality. One of Barton’s chief tricks is to conflate two concepts and treat them as the same thing. In this case, he references the 1968 Supreme Court decision of Epperson v Arkansas in which the court ruled that laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution were based on religious objections and therefore violated the First Amendment. On his WallBuilder website, he says the subject of evolution predates th…

Will Religion Solve the Obesity Crisis?

By Andrew Aghapour

…the finding (reported by The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer) that simple mental tricks can dramatically improve our ability to delay gratification. If we pretend that the chocolate cake in front of us is made out of plastic, for example, we can trick our ACC into assessing and evaluating a little bit differently, so that our DLPFC reserves aren’t diminished. In other words, it is much easier to resist temptations if we adjust our worldview so that they…

Christian Right Denialism is More Dangerous Than Ever: A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…olic age, including healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. One of the tricks in reporting this is that people may mean different things by the terms apostle and apostolic. The Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination, for example, issued a report in 2001 which states that most Christian denominations “think of themselves, in one sense or another, as apostolic.” But only the NAR/five-fold ministry churches “claim God has raised…

Transgender, Scientologist, “Cult Hero”

By Jay Michaelson

…t as such (Urban focuses on the conceptual arguments rather than the dirty tricks), and how it problematizes conventional and academic definitions of religion itself. Taking a convincing and objective tone—sometimes too objective—Urban shows that Scientology was never intended to be a religion but only pursued what founder L. Ron Hubbard called “the religion angle” when its claims to healing ran afoul of government regulators (i.e. they didn’t wor…

The Sacred and the Dead: I Love You More than Words Can Tell

By David Vanderveen

…ns, and cutting to the bone of experience. The Dead were real. The idea of buying an album (although we’ve all done it) was antithetical to what they were about—live shows, imperfect, grungy (before “grunge” was a thing). Plumbing the depths of each moment was why people became Deadheads. The first show I went to in 1988 was at the Rosemont Horizon just outside Chicago with my Wheaton College roommate, Mark Metherell, and our buddy Dave Panjwani….