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Your Pseudoscience Beach Read: Creationist Infighting Edition

As Joe Laycock noted here on RD, another creation museum called the “Northwest Science Museum” recently opened in Boise. That’s right, the Northwest Science Museum. Guess it’s time to trademark the word “science.” As a friend quipped on Twitter, “next the Westboro Baptist Church will be opening a Museum of Tolerance.” But it’s not quite as bad as all that. The “Northwest Science Museum” is really a small group of creationists who have opened an a…

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The Faith that Faith Produced

…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too.  I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…

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Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

At oral argument in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties, Inc. v. Sebelius this morning, the Supreme Court justices spent a great deal of time questioning the lawyers in the case about whether corporations have a religious conscience, and whether Congress intended to protect it when enacting the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). What was most striking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia So…

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Does Romney’s Religion Condone Torture? [UPDATED]

…questions about the candidate’s position, and the recent appointment of a Spokane, Washington LDS bishop who in his professional life as a psychologist pioneered so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 has raised new questions about whether Mormonism condones torture. Washington newspapers are reporting that Bruce Jessen was called and “sustained” (or approved) to serve as bishop by his Spokane-area congregation in mid-October. […

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A Real-Life Truman Show?

…no knowledge that anything bad could be headed its way. But then Rosemary Beach is designed to keep out the bad elements of reality. The private beach is only for those who own homes here. To get through the gate leading to the water, one must punch in a combination pass code. The town’s elegantly manicured gardens belie its state’s housing market collapse. But just outside of town, realtors advertise “Free Foreclosure Lists!” Sitting along a com…

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The New Disciples: Report from South Carolina

…thering with fellow travelers at the GOP-sponsored debate Monday in Myrtle Beach, or Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition meeting there. Still, though, the national elites had pressed for and endorsed The Response. At last summer’s event, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson called it “the highlight of my life” and praised the “next generation” of evangelicals. The old guard of the religious right isn’t blind to new religious movements in…

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Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…

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Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…

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The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

…ment of 50,000, as if the faithful at church. The devotion was audible, as tickets were distributed to friends of the Cuban government and not through a public sale. Here the religious nature of the Cuban sporting event is acknowledged only to be dismissed as inauthentic. The patriotic, quasi-religious crooning is suspicious because of its apparent production by the Cuban government, which distributed tickets to friends. Morosi recognizes religiou…

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Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

…ust be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hear he…

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