Religion Dispatches
…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
Read More…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…
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…ion does not necessarily equate with atheism or agnosticism. Religion News Service regrets the inaccuracy.” Well, okay. Take a number if you’d like to complain about my own writerly inaccuracies. Still, the trouble with the piece goes beyond an inaccurate (though indisputably grabby) headline. Reporter Kimberly Winston is careful to point out that the Pew report authors have noted “that [the religiously unaffiliated] are by no means homogeneous.”…
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…rom Allah that we do not reflect upon. Think about it, how many of you gave thanks for the rising of the sun today? Yet, if the sun had not risen, we would all have taken note. Shukr then is ALSO to take note when the everyday ordinary goes according to plan. Don’t wait for the bridge to collapse, and don’t wait for some one to die, give thanks now and give it often. Thank you Allah for all that You do and forgive me when I fail to take note. …
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…tionalizations,” he said. But the revised story needs to be issued rapidly—wait too long and your followers will fall away. The conversation shifted from why there was no earthquake on May 21 to whether the “door to salvation” was now closed. Rather than believers getting called up, as they expected, perhaps non-believers had been shut out, forced to continue on minus any hope of eternal life. The proofs for this were elaborate and hard to follow,…
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…’s hard to know, in the end, what to make of what seems a startling set of numbers related to “belief in God or a Universal Spirit.” Here, we learn what some 38% in the blended “Atheist/Agnostic” group says when asked about this belief. In commentary, the group is deconstructed, with 14% of Atheists and 56% of Agnostics expressing a belief in God of a Universal Spirit. We might well wonder what this could possibly mean, especially among self-ident…
Read More…tions as well. It gives Humanist service members access to Army Chaplaincy services, including spiritual counseling and gathering spaces for Humanist groups. It also means that the numbers and distribution of Humanists in the military can be tracked along with those of other religious groups, potentially inviting a reshaping of the military chaplaincy, which critics complain is inappropriately weighted in favor of Christian, and specifically Evang…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
Read More…ess just isn’t very popular in our culture these days. What people want in spirituality is egalitarianism, an emphasis on the ways in which God welcomes, rather than rejects. It’s okay that Shrum or other conservative pastors might say “Sorry, we can’t offer that in our church.” To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to church with the God you know, not the God you might want or wish to know. Weirdly, though, the standard conservative religious arg…
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