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Satanic Harmonies and Zoom Church: Readers Respond

…e “‘fanatical’ and ‘hateful’ ‘tribal’ Likud” and conservatives doing their best to throw blame on the left. All of this in sharp contrast to response to the tweet itself, which was much more directed at the offending extremist than to Likudniks as a whole. A.R. thinks this is the result of Maariv making a tempest out of a teapot. American media is certainly no stranger to this routine—outrage gets clicks, and in this age of negative partisanship,…

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Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

…at we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last…

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#MeToo and the Problem with the “The Billy Graham Rule”

…sex are threats to powerful men’s reputations. In such a circumstance, the best solution is sex-based segregation. But what Graham, Pence, and their ilk fail to understand is that neither women nor sexual desire are the problem; the problem is the abuse of male power. This is why women fear confronting powerful men, or simply men who have power over them. It’s easier to claim that sexual desire is inherently dangerous than to hold powerful men acc…

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FX’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Adaptation Rejects Reductive Elements of Krakauer’s Book, But Confirms That ‘Mormonism Breeds Dangerous Men’

…r the Banner of Heaven appeared the very next year, immediately becoming a bestseller. The book tells the story of the grisly murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, at the hands of her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Though excommunicated from the LDS church, Krakauer argues that the brothers were inspired by their religious heritage. The Laffertys were the natural culmination of 150 years of history centered on blind ob…

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Election Reporters: Here’s Why Simply Descriptors Like ‘Christians’ Can Have Enormous Consequences

…For a lot of reasons, conservative Christians tend to own the cultural megaphone today. (Most important among them: conservative judges endorsing extremist conservative Christian arguments.) So I don’t expect the average person to understand all the nuances. But journalists covering national politics, especially those on the Trump beat, need to do better. Here’s why. First of all, it’s a matter of accuracy. As Sarah Posner points out on Bluesky, t…

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Do Not Arrest the Pope: New Atheists’ Call for the Pope’s Arrest Isn’t Likely to Produce Justice

…can combine with a requirement of clerical celibacy to produce inordinate numbers of priests whose sexuality has become deeply dysfunctional by virtue of failed adolescent efforts to suppress it altogether. But any impulse to reflect seriously on these and other ideas will be compromised if the opposing impulse prevails—by which I mean the Church’s deep-seated impulse to react defensively, to respond in terms of its subjective sense of being besi…

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Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

…. In that light, an argument like Barash’s sounds hopelessly retrograde at best, and intolerant at worst. But just because a question is uncomfortable doesn’t mean that it should be taboo. Evolution clearly made male and female bodies different. Human brains are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain beh…

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Sure, There’s No ‘Religious Left’… If You Ignore Non-White Christians and Non-Christians

…s, and single-issue groups that make up a loose coalition that despite the best efforts of the Religion-Industrial Complex, cheerfully and successfully resists just about anything in the way of central coordination. Jenkins sees this as a distributed movement, and likes to point to areas where it’s played a crucial role in progressive successes in recent years. (Some of his most interesting reporting has been about Indigenous religious activism ar…

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Capricology: Divine Madness

…n spend time together in the Dive smoking a hallucinatory substance which, best we can tell so far, seems to be legal—if not exactly respectable—in this society. Of course, you’ve heard the joke that you can tell you are watching a cable show if the sympathetic characters are using drugs. This imagery is still not going to be appearing on the major networks. I also continue to be very interested in some of the representations of games in the serie…

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CNN Editor Leaves Over Tweet on Hezbollah ‘Giant’

…for women’s rights. She rightfully acknowledged that the Tweet is not the best format for expressing complex thoughts. For example, were I to Tweet “Sad to hear of the passing of R. Reagan … One of the Republican’s giants I respect a lot,” no one would think I support Republicanism in any of its modern incarnations, because of the totality of my work. I can say that Reagan was an amazing orator, or acknowledge how he gave the country hope. That d…

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