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Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…d by your encounter with Asian religions. Would you still call yourself a “freelance monotheist?” Or is “freelance religionist” a better moniker? Yes, I wish I had never made that quip about being a freelance monotheist. I drag it around with me wherever I go. What I meant was that at that time I drew nourishment from all three of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and that I could not see any one of them as superior to th…

Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World: An Excerpt

By Michael J. Baigent

…de that the fundamentalist religions of all denominations are opposing the free will and vibrancy of human life—they are, paradoxically, performing the very task they attribute to the feared Antichrist: they are attempting to convert a distorted view of reality into such a skillfully packaged shape that it might be taken as truth. Fundamentalist religions are humanity’s greatest enemy. Blunt speaking, certainly, but time is short, and I see no rea…

Tea Partiers and Religious Right Court at Values Voter Summit

By Sarah Posner

…of that, there was a movement rising up saying we’re not going to let our freedoms be taken away from us… I firmly believe there is a spiritual and biblical component to what we’re doing.” For Hernandez, socialism is unbiblical because “freedom is usurped.” She offered a jumble of “my husband is from Cuba, that’s how they started there,” “Michael Moore hates our nation,” “Tim Gill is a billionaire” promoting the “homosexual agenda,” and “the gove…

Atheists Gather in Burbank: A Humanist’s Response

By Anthony B. Pinn

…scended on Burbank, California earlier this month for the Atheist Alliance International 2009 convention. The main topic? The great harm done throughout history by religion: the single most dangerous human creation. The welfare of humanity, it was argued, depends on the dismantling of religion and all of its delusions. The possibility of collaboration, of compromise, of any shared ethical commitments between theists and non-theists, was not on the…

Aung San Suu Kyi: The Verdict is Unfair

By Juliane Schober

…ngs suggest a Buddhist vision of civil society in which people can live in freedom from fear; empowered to resist corruption and coercion. She articulated her political thoughts in her address to UNESCO’s World Commission on Culture and Development: The true development of human beings involves much more than mere economic growth. At its heart there must be a sense of empowerment and inner fulfillment. This alone will ensure that human and cultura…

Weird Testament: The Bible Gets the R. Crumb Treatment

By Gabriel Mckee

…ater renamed the Worldwide Church of God, and now known as Grace Communion International). This Adventist offshoot was fervently pre-millennialist, and Armstrong saw in Wolverton’s grotesque style the perfect means of capturing and communicating the horrors of the tribulation. And horrific the illustrations are—with their crashing planes, erupting volcanoes, boil-stricken sufferers, and monstrous whirlwinds—Wolverton’s literalist depictions of Rev…

Tariq Ramadan in Montreal: Defining Ethics in Terms of Religion

By Spencer Dew

…principle of religious diversity and respect for religious differences and freedom of conscience. From the Abstract to the Concrete Such claims—so at odds with popular conceptions of Islam and, indeed, from the very real ideologies of terrorists such as bin Laden—prove hard for many critics to swallow. Thus, Ramadan’s reception is shadowed by the suspicion of “doublespeak,” which is another manifestation of this fear that Ramadan, as Muslim, canno…

Defending the Helpless: New Bible Highlights Poverty and Justice

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…nd injustice,” said Richard Stearns, president and CEO of World Vision, an international relief organization and collaborator on the Bible project. I’m not sure that it’s because the Bible is “outdated” that so many people can’t pick out scripture verses dealing with issues of poverty and justice. The poll really proves that the religious right has so thoroughly hijacked the real message of the Bible that when people quote passages about helping t…

No Buddhists in Washington?

By Danny Fisher

…Dialogue at Cambridge, founded by Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International. Consider the Bay Area-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship, which mobilizes dozens of chapters and thousands of members around important social and political issues. Consider publications like Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and Shambhala Sun (for whom I blog) that have found appeal beyond just their target demographic. Consider the work of Buddhists in professional…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…