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Let’s Make it Legal to Execute Disobedient Children!

…ficient. So too with deregulation, and with the removal of a social safety net. These things create wealth, incentivize work, and preserve individual freedom from government interference. Liberals and humanists mistakenly think human beings can be improved, and that’s why they want to use government to make things better. But government equals unfreedom, so liberals are anti-freedom. However, imposing God’s laws about who needs to obey whom—which…

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Mitt, Moochers, and Mormonism’s “Other” Legacy

…r.” “Follow the Prophet” is the theme of children’s songs, refrigerator magnets, breakfast mugs, and board games. The then-Apostle Harold B. Lee added politics: “You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church,” he cautioned. “It may contradict your political views… But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself… the promise is that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against you.’” No leader was consider…

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Mitt Romney’s Best-Known Mormon Critic Tells it All. One Last Time.

…ave come to be represented by a man who has no interest in a social safety net and blames those in need for being in poverty or without work. Mormons don’t believe that. He is not us.  I get requests from Mormons around the country to do service projects in Gulu and work side by side with Ugandans. We are very clear about not imposing our ideas on the Ugandans. We have a local staff from the community who have worked all their lives with child sol…

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Romney’s Speech, and Boehner’s Catholicism

…, that argument goes, we wouldn’t need a government-provided social safety net. That claim lies at the heart of the most crucial economic argument of the election, the role of government in the economy, and it’s not going to be resolved through a theological discussion. It’s going to be resolved with facts and figures: that in spite of the kindness and generosity of millions of Americans, who, like Romney, have helped someone in need, millions of…

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Romney’s VP Pick of Ryan Will Bring Religion to the Fore

…ics,” an odd statement of solidarity with those who oppose the contraception mandate. Are we now all Catholics who beileve that subsidiarity means we need to slash the social safety net and leave the poor and vulnerable to fend for themselves? Because that, essentially, is what Mitt Romney is saying with his veep pick….

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The Internets Own Your Religion

…dy responsible for generic top level domains (gTLD) like .com, .org., and .net, asked for proposals for new gTLD, I watched with some fascination. One of the earliest discussions was around allowing “.xxx” to indicate pornography-related sites. However, I am interested in a new round of names that may potentially define who is in and who is out of religious communities. In particular, I am looking at the applications for “.islam” and “.shia”. Owne…

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LDS Church Brings Religious Pressure to Zoning Fight

…ournal recently described as the exceptional “insular[ity]” of his campaign and Romney’s own refusal to accept unscripted questions from the press corps. Add to it the ever-louder Obama campaign drumbeat over Romney’s offshore bank accounts, and the net effect is a characterization of Romney (and with him, Mormonism) that draws on old-time Mormon stereotypes of insularity, secrecy, and top-down authoritarianism. It would be wonderful if these ster…

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Does Analytic Thinking Erode Religious Belief?

…by The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and (unsurprisingly) RichardDawkins.net. In the Scientific American article that activated the echo chamber, Daisy Grewal claims that we possess two different ways of thinking: intuitive thinking, which relies on shortcuts, rules of thumb, and commonsense ideas; and analytic thinking, which questions our rapid-fire intuitions, but is much slower and more energy intensive. According to some “clever techniques,…

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Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

…dies’ legs into provocative stockings” or the “lusty buttocks” of ham. The net effect, she suggests, is the emanation of a “you know you want it” kind of sensuality. Make no mistake. Meat—the flesh of non-human animals—is a force of desire in human life. But is there an ethical argument in favor of flesh consumption? That is, can a meat-eating human find solid moral ground for her more carnivorous appetites? Is there a soul-cure for the stomachach…

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Paul Ryan’s Bible, Jim Wallis’, Or None of the Above?

…y the Heritage Foundation) is the Reagan-esque idea that government safety nets promote “dependency,” while evangelizing the poor will bring them to Jesus and—voila!—out of poverty. As I argued last year, writing about liberal-leaning religious groups countering Glenn Beck’s attack on social justice, the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology. As Peter Laarman has noted in these pages, in support of a robust defe…

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