Religion Dispatches
…“getting ahead of his time.” We chant “Justice, Justice We Shall Pursue.” Will we, or will we continue to plod along contentedly with our newfound comforts? Can the horrors of the history of the Nazi Holocaust and the relative depth of German reckoning in its wake teach us something about how to be and what to do in this country? Could reparations be a major part of this? At the very least, increased efforts, awareness and activism could lead to w…
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…to pursue changing from gay to straight].” True. That’s the point of free will. However, it wouldn’t be free will unless the partnered gay Christian has the ability to choose to live as a partnered gay Christian. Once these ideas were given voice the conversation quickly shifted, as each heard the other for the first time. When social policy, theology, and personally-tied emotions are parted for even the slightest moment, it becomes clear that at…
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…d for seven years. This period is called the Tribulation. Antichrist rule will lead to a series of wars, which will then culminate with Jesus coming with an army of saints and fighting the battle of Armageddon, in the literal land of Palestine. Jesus will defeat the Antichrist, vanquish evil and then establish a new kingdom. There’s been a long debate in Christian history about the timing of Jesus’s Second Coming. Would he come to initiate the sta…
Read More…rch Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe’s future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes “a decline that Europe hasn’t experienced since the Black Death.” The comeuppance has a name, one being fervently hawked among a group of Christian-right “pro-family” activists hoping to spark a movement in secular Europe. It’s called the “demographic winter,” a more au…
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…sas, hutchnews.com recently reported that legislatures were considering a bill that would repeal the state’s 1994 death penalty law: “A bill headed for hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee later this month would require that convicted criminals not be sentenced to death after July 1, 2009. The state’s maximum sentence would be life without the possibility of parole under the measure,” hutchnews.com reported. If passed, the bill would not “af…
Read More…ves. But that interpretation only underscores the larger point: Trump is still the one candidate who coalesces the largest number of evangelicals—even the weekly churchgoers—around him. Those numbers would likely shift should Trump face a two-man race with Ted Cruz. But if survey data still show what they have revealed so far—that Trump will continue to win at least a third of the most frequent church-attending evangelicals—it undermines anti-Trum…
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…ile the Muslim population in North America has increased tremendously, the number of Muslim characters on television has remained negligible. The few that exist are of alien, violent men. Think about it. Can you name a Muslim character on television? Was your answer the terrorists in 24, the terrorists in Sleeper Cell, the torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard on Lost, villains on professional wrestling, or the black Muslim prison inmates on OZ?…
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…sippi Clarion Ledger reported earlier this year that the overall growth in number of interracial couples in Mississippi was behind the national average (less than 2.4 percentage points in Mississippi compared to 2.8 percentage points nationally). According to a report released by Pew Research Center in 2017, only 9% of Americans say that interracial marriage is “a bad thing,” while 17% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll said that interracial mar…
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…addition to publishing content aimed at secular readers broadly, OnlySky will be conducting its own research on secular Americans, so it will no longer be necessary to “rely solely on research produced by institutions that do not, either by way of their mission or their funding sources, have an explicit interest in serving the nonreligious,” Levin explains. On the issue of media representation of secularism and secular Americans, Levin, the found…
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…elimination of the Ten Commandments as guideposts for student behavior. I will continue to fight against state-sponsored atheism that has caused society to go downhill. One can practically feel the flying spittle. And more importantly, none of this is accurate. The claim that our laws and Constitution are based on “Judeo-Christian” values—a problematic phrase, particularly in this context—are debunked in The Founding Myth, in which I also argued t…
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