Religion Dispatches
…n as at best useless and at worst deadly. One of the arguments Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens make, for instance, is that one need not be religious to be a moral person. They like to point to the evolutionary origins of our moral sense—or as Dawkins puts it: “the lust to be good”—in order to claim that morality precedes religion and does not require it. While plausible, this argument does not prove that religion has no effect on morality. In fact,…
Read More
…. The same year, it reached the members of a Mat-Su Valley, Alaska, church network (the Valley Pastors Prayer Network) whose pastors were so gripped by the video that they made contact with most of the religious figures shown in George Otis Jr.’s production. And they were so especially taken with Thomas Muthee’s story they brought him to Alaska in 1999 and raised $30,000 so Muthee could buy land in Kenya to build his church. As detailed in a late…
Read More
…mney’s entire campaign as a fraud perpetuated solely by the fact that his “net worth bought him instant status … [as] a serious contender.” While Huckabee nurtures a deep personal dislike of Romney, what he truly despises is everything Romney represents: the rich, East Coast, insider elites who dominate the Republican Party. Huckabee, the son of a fireman who struggled to make ends meet, effectively wages class warfare against the party insiders a…
Read More
…rd-Faith evangelist Kenneth Copeland and sent out via Hagee’s broadcasting network, a co-sermon in which Copeland declared divine power to be a technology humans could learn and wield. It was a classic form of Christian heresy and yet, as with many aspects of the evolving Christian right culture, such views have generally been ignored as marginal by the American mainstream. So why did Senator McCain pursue John Hagee’s endorsement for over a year,…
Read More…e families and fathers in their communities.” One 2011 awardee is the Care Net Crisis Pregnancy Center in Rapid City, South Dakota. Another is the Sav-A-Life Pregnancy Test Center (no mystery about its position, right?) in Birmingham, Alabama. On the National Fatherhood Initiative website, Sav-A-Life describes its mission as “to help men and women embrace the truth of God’s Word as they make life-affirming decisions about their unborn child.” Aha….
Read More…a Butt, R-Columbia, who said when she was in high school, “we gave up Aqua Net hair spray” because of fears “it was causing global warming.” “Since then scientists have said that maybe we shouldn’t have given up that aerosol can because that aerosol can was actually absorbing the Earth’s rays and keeping us from global warming.” Mother Jones has video of the debate. The bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, would require teachers to be helped “t…
Read More…ivate donations handle it? Thank goodness for Cincinnati pastor and Beliefnet blogger Chad Hovind who knows exactly how to help the poor—and even to end the Great Recession. Turns out we don’t need any fancy economists or earthly expertise of any kind. All the answers are in the Bible. Or so Hovind claims in his new book, Godonomics: How to Save Our Country—and Protect Your Wallet—Through Biblical Principles of Finance, published by Multnomah Boo…
Read More…ion year when the other candidates promise to eviscerate the social safety net. And now the Vatican is going after the sisters. The pollsters had better gear up, because the number of Americans identifying with—and funding—the institutional church is definitely at risk. My only concern with highlighting this line in the sand is that it may be exactly what the bishops and the Vatican have in mind. There is some disagreement over whether Pope Benedic…
Read More…is actually a human wrong.” Others, like David Lane who, writes for World Net Daily and is funded by the certified hate group the American Family Association, are writing op-eds calling for America to return to being a “Christian nation.” Christians must be retrained to war for the Soul of America and quit believing the fabricated whopper of the “Separation of Church and State,” the lie repeated ad nauseum by the left and liberals to keep Christi…
Read More…ey lost, Mormon media observers felt that his campaign must have yielded a net positive for public understanding of the Mormon faith. But new data released by the Pew Forum suggests otherwise. 82% of Americans surveyed by Pew say they learned little to nothing about Mormonism during the 2012 campaign. Nearly 50% said they still know “little to nothing” about Mormonism, a proportion unchanged from 2011. And only about 40% could answer two basic…
Read More