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How to Become an Atheist in Twelve Short Months

By Hollis Phelps

…he work has just begun. How we reshape or build the narratives by which to live our lives is the most interesting part of our work as human beings. My work to end homelessness, my interest in the crises facing our democracy and our ecosystem—these are the interesting aspects of my life and work. At least, I’d like to think so.” I suspect that there are many former believers out there who feel similarly. Perhaps they call themselves atheists, perha…

Greatest Hits of 2015: Religion Stories Our Readers Couldn’t Resist

By Ellie Faustino

…simply tragic figures, they are harbingers of great things to come.” The “new world of universal transparency” that has been created in the digital information age certainly poses a new set of challenges to religious institutions, and Dennett offers his predictions as to how religions will fare in the future. #9 Fighting Fire with Ire: 3 Lessons from Noam Chomsky’s Takedown of Sam Harris In May, New Atheist Sam Harris launched an offensive agains…

Lila Rose Targets Planned Parenthood with Lies

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…f it[.]” (Humanae Vitae II.14) Awkward. Now, that’s not to say that all of Live Action’s employees are Catholic. They aren’t. And it’s not as though Catholic teaching hasn’t addressed scenarios in which telling the truth causes evil—the Nazis-at-the-door scenario, for example. Catholic teaching includes the doctrine of “mental reservation”: a kind of equivocation wherein someone says something which is deliberately misleading, ambiguous, confusing…

Gays Are Oppressing Christian Florists, and Other Dishonest Arguments

By Eric C. Miller

…tant matters of sexuality can co-exist alongside gay persons who desire to live free lives as well. History reveals that when one group gains cultural favor over another, it typically overreaches, going to extremes to mercilessly subjugate their enemies to whatever table scraps are left over. That’s the phase we’re in now. In these circumstances, détente is discarded. Instead, embattlement and entrenchment passes on to the next generation. It is t…

GOP v. GOP on LGBT

By Peter Montgomery

…ent against marriage equality. Listening to Lampo talk about the rise of a live-and-let-live approach to gay rights among Republicans, it occurred to me that even the National Organization for Marriage recognizes the appeal of a libertarian message. NOM’s number-one poll-tested message, repeated over and over again by its spokespeople, is this: “Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose, they don’t have the right to redefine marriage f…

Are Republicans Going Soft on Gay Marriage?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…l conservatives. But their actions, whether viewed as “pro-gay” or simply “live and let live,” are nothing new for many conservatives who, over the years, have stood for individual rights. But “live and let live” isn’t a concept the rabidly religious right recognizes when it comes to gay and lesbian people. They may well be small-government Republicans—wishing the government would get out of their pocketbooks and stop trampling their individual ri…

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

By Peter Laarman

…iar to need detailing by me. A few keywords will suffice: climate, Covid, cruelty, corruption, and excessive cravenness among many in leadership whom we would like to admire more than we do. My friends at RD know that I struggle over what to say in the face of the unending shit. They also know that I never stop trying to process what this moment might be about. I am no Candide, and I can offer none of the holiday treacle you might get from, say, a…

The Sacred and the Dead: I Love You More than Words Can Tell

By David Vanderveen

…list of ways you were supposed to believe, behave, and become. It was constructs of truths built upon so many constructs of truths that real truth didn’t matter anymore. Wheaton continues to be a place where intellectual dishonesty is favored over difficult truths. Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical models of belief have more constants than pre-Galilean star charts and eventually I got kicked out for writing the wrong poetry. Twenty-odd y…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…eligion I was a Christian for over twenty-five years—not a “buffet-style,” live-and-let-live Christ follower, but a hardcore fundamentalist true believer. I was “radically pro-life” to the point of shunning all forms of birth control. I desired to raise “a quiver full of arrows” for God’s army: mighty warriors who would valiantly battle the forces of darkness, battering against the Gates of Hell and ultimately ushering in Christ’s Kingdom on Earth…

Newtown Tragedy: The Horror of No Future

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…s his daughter. No angel stays his hand. We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future. K…