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The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

…her successes. Faith, as that Pope never tired of repeating, can never be promoted by force; truth’s power lies its truthfulness, nothing more. Now in a great many ethical and political matters, John Paul II was as anti-modern a Pope as the Church has seen in recent memory; his successor even more so. But on the devilish topic of religion, science and free enquiry, these same Popes have elected to stand emphatically on the side of the moderns. Th…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…oorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited, as virtues, manumission; Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, was lauded for “freeing six hundred slaves.” All well and good: Muhammad changed what slavery meant, or at least sought to, and the tradition developed in respo…

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In Hamline Case, the ‘Free Expression vs. Religious Sensibilities’ Frame Obscures a Stark Reality About Higher Education

…own skin is involved in the game. In other words, hanging rainbow flags to promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a cheap tactic if LGBTQ employees are treated poorly when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…tisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service age…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

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The Problem of Evil in Free Market Theology

…r calculate the economics of grace. Think of that: grace, the paradigmatic free gift, is replaced by the massive edifice of Wall Street number-crunchers and their continual wagering on the future probabilities. As we all know, a lot of money has been made—and lost—this way. Which leads Buchan to his second point: money generates more money, even on Sunday. This is a subtler point, one that he develops specifically in relation to the invention of p…

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Gun Owners of America Celebrates Defeat of Gun Control Amendments

…of bright ideas like we don’t want guns around children, so let’s have gun-free school zones. Do you know where most of the mass murders have occurred in the United States? In gun-free zones. There’s an exception or two but typically it’s where the bad guy has reason to think he’ll have a monopoly of force. It has to be one of the most stupid laws on the books, and yet we’ve had so much inertia because we don’t want guns around children especially…

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Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

…m Richard Dawkins encouraging the recipient of the mailing to subscribe to Free Inquiry: Dear Friend, If you live in America, the chances are good that your next door neighbours believe the following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA code decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, got himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn’t think of a better way to forgive the theft of…

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Texas Textbook Massacre

…s be able to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others,” was rejected by religious conservatives. 3. The Enlightenment Ends Here: Board members voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. Instead, they rep…

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