Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 how to use promo code in 1xbet Malaysia

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

…ten by and for first-century Christians, a people under siege, the authors used allegory and coded language to convey a message of hope to believers and to protect authors from certain death at the hands of their oppressors. The author of Revelations suggests readers may not understand the severe trials and tribulations of their time, but reminds them that Jesus teaches in Christ all is well. Where Revelations was, “once seen as encouragement to h…

Read More

Is Religion the Only Tool Left for Legal Discrimination?

…twist themselves into knots to avoid admitting that the same argument was used to oppose interracial marriages—which it definitely was. Of course, modern “religious freedom” has been interpreted so broadly that it now covers all manner of sins. Are you a business owner who doesn’t want to employ trans people? Just say your faith doesn’t allow you to recognize your trans female employee as a woman, which means she’s violating the dress code when s…

Read More

Needle Exchange Gets Religion

…ice and without power,” said Iozzio. To do anything less than provide drug users, their co-users, sex partners, and children with the services that will reduce and/or remove the potential harms through needle exchange constitutes failure “to save human lives, to acknowledge the dignity of every human life, and to respond in solidarity to those who are marginalized by an addiction that places them and their associates at risk of life, limb, and lov…

Read More

From Christian Temperance to D.A.R.E. — The War on Drugs Has its Roots in White Christian Nationalism

…entary school classrooms in the early 1990s to explain the horrors of drug use. We watched videos of teens jumping to their deaths through skyscraper windows. Officers described the moral tragedies attendant to marijuana and let us know that if anyone we knew used it, including our parents, we should turn them in. More than 30 years later I still recall those lessons; they are etched into my long-term memory. But that enculturation has a genealogy…

Read More

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

…Spirit guided his pronouncements. “The Church cannot change her answer because this answer is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history,” they wrote. As one of the conservative theologians famously asked one of the female members of the commission, what would happen to “the millions we have sent to hell” for using contraception if the teaching were suddenly chan…

Read More

Does the Bible Really Call Homosexuality an “Abomination”?

…ing intimate expression, but sexuality in a cultic context. Detestable Because it is Foreign, or Foreign Because it is Detestable? Now, so far, it is unclear whether a toevah is detestable because it is foreign, or foreign because it is detestable. This question is resolved elsewhere in the Bible, because Israelites are not the only ones with toevot. There are several examples of things which are toevah for Egyptians but perfectly acceptable for I…

Read More

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

…of a norm violation. Consider “Why did he kick his friend in the shin?” We use the very same processes that we normally use to make sense of human behavior to now make sense of this violation of human behavior. Blaming is in a sense a socially grown mechanism to increase or decrease the degree of responding to violations, depending on (as research has shown consistently) whether the violations were intentional or not, whether they were based on ju…

Read More

The Road to Decriminalization of Psychoactive Drugs Runs Through Religion

…60s and early ‘70s counterculture. The federal government criminalized the use, possession, sale, and cultivation of these drugs, though many continued to use them both recreationally and sacramentally. To honor the latter, Ruck created the word entheogen by combining the Greek word “entheos,” often translated as “god within,” with “gen” from the word hallucinogen. The term has grown in recent decades motivated by several factors. Chief among them…

Read More

The Faith-Based Militia: When is Terrorism ‘Christian’?

…e uneven evolution of our thinking about these things, and the language we use to describe them, casts fresh light on how we use other shorthand terms in this complex and fraught dimension of public life. The term “faith-based,” for example, we use more or less synonymously with “religious” and as substitutes for such terms as “ecumenical” and “interfaith.” It has become a warm and fuzzy term used for glossing over religious differences, both for…

Read More

Catholic Bishops to Use Mass to Lobby Against Health Care?

…ealth care reform who has said that health care reform is too important to use as a way to advance either pro-choice or prolife objectives—from Jim Wallis to Catholics United and everyone in between—speaks out immediately in opposition to this kind of immoral use of religious services. And every pro-choice Catholic needs to walk out of church when the lobby sermon begins. USCCB Nationwide Bulletin Insert Pulpit Announcements & Prayer Petition Inst…

Read More