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Via Jokes, ChatGPT Chooses Which Religious Traditions and Figures Deserve Respect — And Therefore What Counts as ‘Religion’

…ah, or Muhammad. With regard to these latter examples, ChatGPT informs the user that it could hurt someone’s religious sensibilities by telling such a joke. But it does not say this with regard to Krishna. At first it seemed to me that there is an ontological difference between Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus in that the latter two are—or are at least widely understood to be—historical individuals. So to test this hypothesis, I went to ChatGPT and I…

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Waterboarding in the Living Room

…sed, then, that in comments responding to the The Smoking Gun article, one user called “rahimali” wrote, “I’m ok with a little waterboarding now and again if it shuts the wife’s cakehole. Maybe waterboarding would cure PMS?”  Although the torture captured on film at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was presented as aberrant (the behavior of “a few bad apples”), released memos have shown again and again that torture and so-called enhanced interrogatio…

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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

…ged like a pinball machine’s top-ten list. The service requires that every user play both Sinner and Saint, and a novice is granted five bits of each one’s currency: Five Horns for confessing, and five Halos for granting penances. One of each is “gifted… every Sabbath day” but for zealots and louts more credits can be purchased for 17¢ apiece. As with fancy chemical aids for our Facebook farms, this money goes straight to the developers. The users…

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Daily News Corrects JR Smith’s “Fool[ish]” Slavery/Black Friday Post… Incorrectly

…because nothing like that took place in American history. Still, the Daily News’ Jaime Uribarri drags Smith through the mud by recounting the cruelty of online critics: “You’re a f——— idiot” was one of the the more blunt responses to the head-scratcher of a post, while others, like Twitter user @j_weech1, tried enlightening Smith about the true meaning of the term. “It’s called Black Friday because businesses get into the black (profit) for the ye…

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Why Go to Church If You Don’t Believe Anymore?

…. Still, I come. But this year, unlike other years (that year when, hope renewed for a time, I wrote a book celebrating what courageous women were doing to change this punishing, patriarchal church), this year, my faith is gone. I can see a time when this awesome church will be an awesome museum, a monument to beliefs long discredited, as alien to future human beings as the gods of Greek mythology are to us. But this journey, this way of the cross…

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Freezing Our Way to a Fiery Hell?

…a chaotic system. For businesses tied to the weather-closing status of the New York City Public Schools, there’s yet another ethical element. During one of New York’s worst storms—last year—Mayor de Blasio kept the schools open in horrendous travel conditions. One of the reasons given? Many children get their only hot meal of the day at school. We have to force kids to school so they can eat a square meal? And Zuccotti Park was cleared out years a…

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Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

…sts as newsworthy. In 1981, when physician Lawrence Mass wrote a story for New York Native, a small gay newspaper, the disease did not even have a name. Several weeks later, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported an outbreak of a rare cancer among a handful of gay men in Los Angeles. Soon after, mainstream news outlets briefly reported the findings but despite its rapid spread, the cancer, which would be identified as AIDS, did not receive…

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Impossible Possibilities: Obama and Power

…l of a portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr, 1948, by Ernest Hamlin Baker, Gouache on board, from the National Portrait Gallery. Photo is by flickr user cliff1066, used under a Creative Commons license….

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Putin’s Violent Holy War Rhetoric Made it to the Christian Right Fringe — And There’s Reason to Believe it’ll Go Mainstream

…sident of Russia, launcher of invasions of Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya, user of assassination to deal with defectors, murderer of opponents, likely orchestrator of domestic terrorist attacks in Russia to justify warfare, champion of the Russian Empire directly in opposition to America: it seems strange that he would find American champions on the Christian Right. But they love him because he loves violence. He loves the same violence they crave…

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