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Wiccan Prayer in Iowa House Highlights Religious Freedom Problem

By Joseph Laycock

…tes, “We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst. We need to look at not only their awe-inspiring architecture and gentle mystics but also their bigots and suicide bombers.” This is where pluralism gets tough. For Taylor and like-minded Christians, opposition to Maynard’s religion, and a refusal to engage with it on its own terms, is a religious commitment. Taylor explained: I prayed about this a…

The Most Forgotten Queer Folks in the US are Fighting Back Against a Powerful — and Publicly Funded — Group That Discriminates With Impunity

By Chrissy Stroop

…t shouldn’t be there” displays a severe lack of empathy and represents, at best, a profound misunderstanding of how socialization works. It seems to imply, wrongly, that the queer kids in evangelical and LDS institutions made a conscious choice to attend those schools with the goal of stirring up trouble—a victim-blaming mentality that couldn’t be further from reality. It’s wrong, plain and simple, to teach children that something is wrong with th…

Pope Francis v. Kim Davis: A Vatican Game of Thrones

By Anthea Butler

…ived for his welcoming tone in America, the truth is more complicated. The best explication of what most likely happened has come from Charles Pierce in Esquire, who verified (correctly) that Archbishop Carlo Vigano, the nuncio, is the person who hastily arranged the meeting between the Pope and Kim Davis. Archbishop Vigano is a Pope Benedict XVI supporter involved in the Vatileaks scandal. Vigano has lied about his own brother, with whom he is in…

The Roots of the American Right’s Muslim Brotherhood Panic

By Sarah Posner

…d all that: The Muslim Brotherhood, widely acknowledged as the largest and best organized opposition force in the country, abstained from the January 25 demonstrations, but belatedly endorsed the January 28 demonstrations. Perhaps as a result of this waffling there has been almost no Islamic content to the demonstrations. The tone has mostly been nationalist and secular. But that reality gets in the way of some good propaganda for the American rig…

Does Atheism Have a Misogyny Problem?

By Julia Galef

…ness of their fellow atheists. Those of us in attendance dealt with it the best way we knew how—by joking about it. When that got old, we resorted to jokes about how bad our jokes were. Underneath the layers of meta-humor, however, it was clear that the heated argument had taken a toll on the atheist and skeptic community. But the internet explosion wasn’t without its benefits. If you had managed to elbow your way through the melee without getting…

Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?

By Eric Reitan

…hile Lewis’s case is popular because of its accessibility, it’s hardly the best version of this kind of argument. Robert Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods is far more powerful. But given Lewis’s accessible approach, it makes sense that Collins would be both familiar with it and prone to invoke it in popular lectures. This line of argument is, obviously, controversial. It relies on the premise that there are standards of moral truth that hold regard…

Jerusalem Honors Right-Wing Mogul Sheldon Adelson

By Diane Winston

…” They ought to be offensive to Israelis as well, but Adelson is doing his best to spread the message through Israel HaYom (Israel Today), a free tabloid that is the country’s must-read news outlet. Adelson told reporters at the Jerusalem gathering that he does not dictate the newspaper’s coverage or editorials, but that both reflect his point of view and that of his close friend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a nation of news junkies, Isr…

2023 CPAC Lived Down to Expectations, But Don’t Buy the Narrative: The GOP is Not as Divided as You Might Think

By Annika Brockschmidt

…Trump wing of the Republican Party. The speakers who turned up tried their best to rile up the audience—with varying levels of success. Jair Bolsonaro, the disgraced former President of Brazil who fled his country for fear of being arrested due to his role in the insurrection, received an enthusiastic reception as he waxed on about “God and fatherland,” lauded Trump, and dished up his own version of the “Big Lie.” What was notable was the anti-Ukr…

Will Religion Finally Give Peace a Chance? Rising to the Challenge of Nonviolence as Armageddon Looms

By Peter Laarman

…forward, where negative campaigns often win, and where the sports we like best involve hard brutal contact. All of this is to say that there will be no saving turn toward a culture of nonviolence without also acknowledging and changing the violence we carry within. Then comes yet another step. Even when we stop ourselves from openly demonizing, we are still a long way from any kind of productive exchange. And that’s partly because it is still so…

Can a Progressive Atheist Defeat the Democrats’ “Family” Man in NC?

By Sarah Jaffe

…11th District from a self-proclaimed progressive Democrat who is probably best known for being an atheist city councilman in a state that still requires government officials to believe in “Almighty God.” And if Shuler can fend off a primary challenge, he may still lose the support of his right flank to a newly-drawn district that’s even more conservative than before. The incumbent’s primary challenger, Cecil Bothwell, actually prefers the term “n…