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“Freedom” vs. “Liberty”: Why Religious Conservatives Have Begun to Favor One Over the Other

…liberty suggests a “defensive response.” “I think you could say we are all free, but what does free mean? It’s such a general concept,” said Green, noting that liberty can have more immediate and personal connotations, when spoken to the right audience. “That word seems to resonate with a particular segment of society,” he said. It’s very clear which segment that is. Over the past ten years, lobby groups on the religious right have latched onto “r…

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‘Atheizing’ the Dead, Religious Doughnuts, & Tax-Free Witching

…e Church of Body Modification has run into trouble with her school’s dress code. The 14-year-old is looking at a ten day suspension if she returns to school wearing her prohibited nose ring. In Roswell, New Mexico, a group of students have been suspended for giving their teachers boxes of doughnuts with religious messages attached to them. Romania has decided not to tax its witches and fortunetellers. One reason being that the witches and fortunet…

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Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian’s Latest Reveals the Problem with Today’s ‘Religious Freedom’

…than a historical summation, described by Rakove thusly: “Disestablishment promoted free exercise, and free exercise made establishment superfluous.” Beyond Belief recounts this history, and, while Rakove touches on the present, his focus is the past. But it’s impossible to read Beyond Belief and not notice that, in their desperation to “make America great again” Trump, Pence, and the other Christian nationalist politicians and judges have turned…

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Pope Francis Says Teaching Gender Is Nasty; Far-Right Religious Groups Helping Mexico’s Anti-Equality Movement; Colombia’s Peace Deal Killed by Anti-LGBT Campaign?; Global LGBT Recap

…ubt that homosexuality is seen as a crime. Article 427 of the Afghan penal code refers only to “pederasty” – a sexual act between males, one of them understood to be a youth or a boy. The act is punishable with “long imprisonment”. However Dr Niaz Shah of Hull University in the UK, an expert in Afghan and Islamic law, says that the penal code reflects the underlying Islamic principle that homosexuality is banned. “Islamic law allows only one form…

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If the Media Are Reluctant to Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy

…people, more obedient voters, from the third world. But, they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.” “Third World” is code for non-white voters—because Carlson only has a problem with non-white immigration. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” Carlson claims. He also said on his show: “Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it, ‘Ooh, the whi…

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Mitt, Moochers, and Mormonism’s “Other” Legacy

…ngressmen urging them to protect right-to-work legislation in the name of “free agency.” “That’s Not Flip-Flopping” A key principle of Mormon theology, “free agency” is foundational, with roots extending all the way back to the Mormon pre-earthly existence, which was also the scene of a momentous battle. God had centered his plan for our earthly salvation on freedom, and had to defeat the followers of Lucifer, who proposed to force us all to obey…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…tisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service age…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

…ro-business wing of the Republican Party—with its unwavering commitment to free markets, deregulation, extended tax cuts, and an image of America as a providential city on a very wealthy hill—suddenly appears more clearly in its true light. They are the Gnostics, the elite heretics, whereas the Social Democrats are ironically true heirs to an orthodox gospel of compassionate care for the least among us. And in the egregiously hierarchical world of…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…es do, I suspect—then Eisenhower would surely have agreed with DeMint: “America works, freedom works, when people have that internal gyroscope that comes from a belief in God.” The “internal gyroscope” is nothing but the willed commitment to maintain self-discipline in the face of every temptation to selfishness. Without it, Ike would have agreed, “you no longer have the capacity to live as a free person”; you’ll have to submit to “the external co…

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