Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet promo code free spins Central African Republic

It’s All In Your Head: Patricia Churchland’s Touching a Nerve

…f today’s neuro-babble should find something to agree with in Churchland’s central thesis, that “I am who I am because my brain is what it is.” The brain is, indeed, a central cause of who we are as individuals and as a collective species. Anyone seeking self-knowledge ought to at least consult these pages, even if it’s with a critical eye (or should I say visual cortex?). *** Given Churchland’s appreciation for complexity, the most surprising ele…

Read More

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

…heir own Globe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their o…

Read More

Booing Gay Soldiers and Expressing Faith in the Public Square

…s make against LGBT equality is that civil rights for LGBT people infringe on the religious freedom of Christians who believe homosexuality is sin. Therefore they insist the government shouldn’t give them, in Santorum’s words, “special privileges.” Conservatives frame this as a free exercise, or religious freedom issue, and, like Bachmann, skirt the church-state separation issue. Because these conservatives believe that the government should endor…

Read More

The Irony in the “Religious Liberty” Argument

…lowed suit, and both schools continue to reject federal money to this day. Free to run their organizations as they see fit, they are also free from government dependence. Even if you disagree on the particulars, you have to respect the consistency. These days, there is reason for skepticism whenever “religious liberty” clamors to the fore. Researchers have found, unsurprisingly, that frames touting liberties and rights serve as rhetorical veils, a…

Read More

Tony Perkins: Atheists Can’t Be Chaplains

…mplication is that explicitly nonreligious servicemen and servicewomen are free to consult with a religious chaplain. But for the same reason that a Christian may prefer a Christian chaplain over a Muslim or Jewish chaplain, nonreligious people should be free to seek out assistance from a member of their own community. As a Humanist chaplain, I frequently hear a version of Perkins’ argument (For more on what exactly I do as a chaplain, check out a…

Read More

It’s Only a Game: How Not to Think about Video Game Violence

…ntonin Scalia presented the 7-2 ruling as a defense of free speech and the free circulation of ideas. That’s been a consistent theme for the Roberts court, which in recent years has in the name of freedom of speech legalized the sale of animal torture videos and struck down limits on corporate political spending on the grounds that corporations have free speech rights too. But in his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, “What sense do…

Read More

Discrimination on the Taxpayer’s Dime? The Fight To Curtail the Overreach of RFRA

…ervices, between the USCCB and HHS, and—most visibly to the public—between Republicans and Democrats as conservatives’ religious freedom campaigns have been increasingly politicized over the past four years. In 2011, during the peak of the Republican presidential primary and as the USCCB-led campaign for religious freedom escalated over the contraception coverage required under the Affordable Care Act, conservatives accused the Obama administratio…

Read More

A Religion Scholar Gets It Wrong on Indiana’s RFRA

…em. Across the nation, the ACLU has fought for decades to defend religious freedom. But, while the freedom to hold religious beliefs and opinions is absolute, the freedom to act pursuant to one’s religion is not. The conversation about religious freedom in Indiana has revealed confusion about not only this point, but also the very significant differences between the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and SB 101 and other states’ RFRAs. They…

Read More

Praying for a Victory: Packed Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Christian Nationalist Cause

…stitute, a Christian Nationalist legal outfit bent on redefining religious freedom under the First Amendment. The Institute’s goal is to morph the hallowed protection for religious freedom, the shield, into a tool to impose that religion on others, a weapon. The coach and the Institute aren’t seeking religious freedom, but religious privilege. They don’t want equal treatment (nobody else is allowed on the field to pray), but special treatment for…

Read More

Cues for Throwing Up

…the Manhattan Declaration, which appears as a blueprint for the “religious freedom” wars, and in the opposition to the HHS contraception benefit requirement, and in opposition to the jurisprudentially accepted understanding of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. Chaput has made his views clear in other venues. In 2004, he suggested that because abortion was a “foundational” issue, there was only one way a faithful Catholic could vote. In…

Read More