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Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

…ing of how the brain keeps time. During the mid-nineteenth century, the prevailing theory was that there was a single, integrated time-keeper somewhere in the brain—the equivalent of a neurological stop watch. More recent studies, however, suggest a hodgepodge of overlapping systems: the hypothalamus, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions.  Imagine, for example, w…

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From Licking Floors to Praying for an Inept Government, Churches React to C-19

…less pro-social, let us say. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, a Tampa Bay televangelist, equated changing habits in an effort to “flatten the course” with weakness, declaring that his congregation wouldn’t adjust their behavior in worship because they weren’t “pansies.” https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1239267305730736130 Others are willing to go some lengths to show they just don’t believe in this whole coronavirus thing: In Arkansas, the R…

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New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

…ica’s most singularly anti-trans demo. In 2021, for example, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only two genders, with that number rising to 92% in 2023. The report also states, “Among White Christian groups, White evangelical Protestants (82%) and Latter-day Saints (72%) are much more likely than White Catholics (51%) and White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (50%) to strongly feel there are only two genders.” None of this is particula…

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Size Matters According to New Study

…regularly actually activate entire regions of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us.   There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly mi…

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New Pope Accused of Conspiring in Kidnapping

…Bergoglio noted disapprovingly in a 2007 speech. Meanwhile, an astounding number of women in Argentina, women without access to or education about contraception, die annually as victims of botched abortion procedures carried out in secret.  If we do dig a little deeper into Bergoglio’s past, we find that he was accused of participating in one of the numerous human rights violations committed during Argentina’s Dirty War (which ended up resulting…

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Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

…tragically simple: deploy religious narratives to describe the other as savage in order to justify savage acts upon them. The founding myths of America regularly draw from a legacy of settlers who utilized religious language to portray Christian colonialism as a civilizing process in order to justify violence against the indigenous inhabitants. Citing Columbus, in 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera (known as the Doctrine of Discovery), o…

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Christian Epistle on Islamophobia

…a), I met a number of Christian pastors and activists. Afterwards, a conservative evangelical told me he felt that Islamophobia and Christophobia were similar (I guess it’s better than denying bigotry exists at all). I also received an e-mail from a participant in the event who came by because of RD: Dear Haroon, Thanks for your talk at WSU tonight and [for] your perspective on things. In many ways I feel that the American attachment to sensationa…

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Obstacles for Secularists

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

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The Threat to Democracy Runs Deep, But Mathematics Could Address the Abominable State of Representation and Voting

…llions of voters (rightfully) feeling like their voice doesn’t matter. The vastly undersized House of Representatives creates a vacuum between the representatives and the 760,000 people they are each somehow supposed to speak for, a gap skillfully filled by lobbyists and special interest groups. The Electoral College repudiates the ‘one person, one vote’ mandate and perpetuates inequities in the voting power between voters in different states. Cha…

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Supreme Court Rules Religion is Special… This Time

…he one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of re…

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