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Satanists Want You to Respond to the Pandemic with Compassion. And Reason.

By Joseph Laycock

…as social distancing forces most religious communities to cancel in-person services and invent new online forms of worship. One might assume that Satanists would be unaffected by social distancing or even take a misanthropic delight in it. In 2017, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson advised Satanic Temple co-founder Lucian Greaves to “crawl back into your hole.” So now that people of all faiths are hunkering in their respective holes, how is The Satanic Tem…

How U.S. Conservatives Conjured the Jesus of Their Dreams

By Peter Laarman

…John Locke, by far the most influential figure in the background of early American thinking about the social contract. It goes without saying that this kind of thinking was racist to the core, as proponents “wielded these ideologies in ways that marginalized Indigenous and communities of color who were taken in slavery.” Fast forward to the challenge of the Great Depression, when Big Business desperately needed to save its credibility and fight b…

Why the Media and Democrats Should Reject the Christian Right’s Pearl-Clutching and Address Problematic Religious Views

By Chrissy Stroop

…rkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who documented the ways in which Americans understand politics through family-related metaphors, if the United States is a dysfunctional family, then much of the media has taken on the role of the peacemaker. In a dysfunctional family, the peacemaker “may become anger-phobic and attempt to smooth out differences before a healthy interchange can take place,” according to couples’ counselors Linda and Charli…

And the Violent Bear It Away? Disciplined Nonviolence and the Coming Election Emergency

By Peter Laarman

…can we not? Consider not only the still-advancing demolition of the Postal Service, where auditors are now reporting that about one million primary election ballots weren’t delivered on time, but also recent White House decisions to push science aside and suppress actual information about coronavirus spread and to block in-person Congressional testimony from the intelligence services on the latest iterations of foreign election interference. And n…

Exclusive: Why Did Chicago Public Schools Just Quietly Drop Transcendental Meditation?

By Aryeh Siegel

…d Cheetah House, which is affiliated with Brown University, Harvard, and a number of other prestigious institutions, exists to provide “information and resources about meditation-related difficulties to meditators-in-distress.” And this is a major part of the mission of a proponent of meditation. In addition, while the UK’s National Health Service notes that meditation can be very helpful in many cases, “The serious, long-lasting nature of some of…

On the Erasure of Whiteness in Responses to Convicted Pedophile Jan Joosten, a White Man

By Jae Han

…see his appeal to interiority for what it is: obfuscating rhetoric in the service of public rehabilitation. Or, we can take another step back and ask, who is allowed to have self-contradictions? Who gives and possesses the privilege to have a redeemable private-self and an unimpeachable public-self? Who gets to be “individual” and who must always represent something beyond themselves? Most importantly, who accepts the stupendous myth that brillia…

Turn on the News: Some Abortion Opponents May Opt For a New Vaccine, But Behind Their Skepticism it’s Often a Different Story — of Disinformation, Conspiratorial Thinking, and White Nationalism

By Daniel Schultz

…or a disruption of a natural order given by God or gods. Appeals to Native American spirituality and “nature” were raised (even though actual Native American communities had one of the highest vaccination acceptance rates in the country). There were many conspiracy theories with this fantastic quality, some of which came close to medieval blood libels: that unborn babies had been aborted for use in the vaccine, or that contamination of one’s blood…

‘Cancel Culture’ Is as Old as Religion, And It’s Only a Thing Because of Who’s Doing the Cancelling

By Shaul Magid

…iod. All we’d have is the record of a thin slice of the society in a small number of academies. Today, Talmudic scholars are exploring the wider vistas of the context of the Talmud, not only to show how it may have been influenced by its surroundings, but also in some cases to examine those the Talmud “cancelled”; those who engaged in magic bowl incantations, perhaps Zoroastrian fire worship, and other manner of religious practices that didn’t fin…

In Time of Crisis Christians Must Reject Charlatans and Magical Thinking

By Brian Rainey

…s that dismiss COVID-19 as a hoax. On the sinister side, predictably, some American pastors blame LGBTQ+ people, abortion, opposition to Trump, or general ungodliness for the pandemic. Other charlatans claim that they can defy social distancing directives because God will protect them with mystical visions or enchanted handkerchiefs. If we’re going to entertain silly explanations like these, we might as well also consider the possibility that COVI…

Some Mormons See a Message in the Angel Moroni’s Fallen Trumpet

By Christopher James Blythe

…cement that “In the coming weeks, based upon world conditions, substantial numbers of missionaries will likely need to be returned to their home nations to continue their service.” Rod Meldrum, author of Prophecies and Promises: The Book of Mormon and the United States of America, is particularly sure of this connection. On March 20, he is quoted as saying: “And so it begins. First Moroni’s trumpet is removed from the SLC temple, heralding the end…