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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

…m of theodicy. Communism, in short, is not the only “god that failed.” Who today can maintain the simplistic faith of our forefathers? Not in probability; the market simply refuses to behave in predictable ways these days (which may put a lot of so-called experts out of a job ere long). Not in money’s limitless potential for generative power; it doesn’t automatically generate more of itself, and we can’t just keep printing more of it forever. And…

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Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

…m Richard Dawkins encouraging the recipient of the mailing to subscribe to Free Inquiry: Dear Friend, If you live in America, the chances are good that your next door neighbours believe the following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of…

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Vatican Considers ‘Disordered’ Language; HBO Doc on LGBT Persecution in Russia; Nigerian Bishop Shifts on Anti-Gay Law; Arson at ‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa; Global LGBT Recap

…bbis and religious leaders” have spread. Scotland: Anti-gay Minister Named Free Church Moderator Rev. David Robertson, an opponent of marriage equality, has been named the next moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, which has welcomed some clergy and congregations that have left the Church of Scotland over the question of gay clergy.Robertson is also director of the Solas Centre for Public Christianity. Before the Scottish Parliament approved m…

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Gun Owners of America Celebrates Defeat of Gun Control Amendments

…of bright ideas like we don’t want guns around children, so let’s have gun-free school zones. Do you know where most of the mass murders have occurred in the United States? In gun-free zones. There’s an exception or two but typically it’s where the bad guy has reason to think he’ll have a monopoly of force. It has to be one of the most stupid laws on the books, and yet we’ve had so much inertia because we don’t want guns around children especially…

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Texas Textbook Massacre

…s be able to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others,” was rejected by religious conservatives. 3. The Enlightenment Ends Here: Board members voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. Instead, they rep…

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Two people on a podium with a board that reads "Project 2025 kills democracy"

Project 2025: How Trump Loyalists and Right-Wing Leaders Are Paving a Fast Road to Fascism

…ctive’? Why Trump’s push for more presidential power alarms his foes,” USA Today, October 26, 2023, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/10/26/donald-trump-presidential-power/71255801007/. [9] Lisa Mascaro, “Conservatives aim to restructure U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision,” Associated Press, August 29, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conservatives-trump-heritage-857eb794e505f1c6710eb03fd5b58…

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Black Women and the Sacred: With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé Takes Us to Church

…Black women, like Harriet Tubman, were often critical in leading people to freedom from bondage. Enslaved African Americans who became Christians were baptized by traditional doctrinal formulas. But, having endured the horror of the Middle Passage, black people had already been baptized by water and fire during their involuntary migration across the Atlantic Ocean. And this water imagery is not limited to the Christian imagination. “Lemonade” evok…

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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

…al rule of law than the government does. [They] lay out a social and moral code that governs human interaction, and supplies a context for suffering and poverty, constructing a group identity through which followers can hope to secure their worldly needs, and find some certainty about the hereafter.” It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example…

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