Religion Dispatches
…some evangelicals)—finds wanting? I don’t think this is a common scenario today, but in the not-so-distant past (when petrodollars were for many the only source of funding for the new community’s infrastructure and institutions, and before the widespread disillusionment in the 1990s with the Wahhabi or quasi-Wahhabi indoctrination that could accompany this largesse) equally debatable and ahistoric doctrinal commitments were foisted within Muslim…
Read More…as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.) The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, sch…
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…as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, believing that humans have always existed in their present form, while another 25 percent believe evolution was guided by God.) The historical-critical method of Bible scholarship meanwhile threatened the idea of scripture as the inerrant, uniform word of God. There were multiple authors and editors of scripture, sch…
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…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
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…net is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers—indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.” Silence from the cacophony of networ…
Read More…” Homosexuality is considered a crime in Morocco. Article 489 of the penal code states that any one found guilty of carrying out “a deviant act with a person of the same sex” will be jailed for to up to three years. Last week three men accused of homosexuality were jailed to three years each. In March, Human Rights Watch called on Morocco to decriminalise homosexuality, saying that “criminalising consensual, adult homosexual conduct violates inter…
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…the homosexuals,” Lively says. “There is nothing that they will not do to promote their agenda. There is no opposition that they will accept at any level. They must conquer every opponent and the spirit that has produced this book, this false Bible, this gay theology is the heresy of the modern world.” Canada: Prime Minister plans apology and pardons for people convicted under sodomy laws Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is reportedly planning to ap…
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…o women’s voices in the church: Women have a lot of things to say to us in today’s society. Sometimes we’re too chauvinistic, and we don’t allow room for women. Women are capable of seeing things from a different angle than men. Yeah, like from the angle of people who have the babies. Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them….
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…elevision host Pat Robertson and many other right-wing Christian activists today—are postmillenialists. Hence they believe that a Christian kingdom must be established on Earth before Christ’s return. They take seriously the idea of a Christian society and a form of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the United States. These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian politics into power. Bray said that it is poss…
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…uld go on and on. I think that many of our intellectual problems about God today come from the loss of this reticence. We are all talking far too easily today about God and what we say is often facile. We often learn about God as children, at the same time as we learn about Santa Claus. But as we mature, our ideas about Santa Claus change and become more sophisticated, though our ideas about God can get stuck in an infantile mode and become thereb…
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