Religion Dispatches
…st of you suffer. Regulation More Broadly: You can catch up with our death-and-debt-dealing corporate friends AFTER the damage is done, OK? That’s the American Way. That’s the House Republicans. And on the Senate side: Presidential Appointments: It is our firm intention to thwart and destroy this president; effectively nullifying his power to make appointments forms a central part of that effort. (Please go ahead and do that Google search on ea…
Read More…hrumming of the human world. Still, Pinker doesn’t quite deserve the across-the-political-spectrum thrashing that he’s received. For Pinker, science isn’t just a method of hypothesis testing. It’s a broad methodology, with two overarching principles: First, that the world is intelligible: it has certain larger principles, and there “should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede ‘It just is,’ or ‘It’s magic’…” And second, that knowledge…
Read More
…cally rather than intuitively. David Bentley Hart would disagree. In his latest book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, the Eastern Orthodox theologian argues, instead, that that “the absolutely convinced atheist” is not an uncompromising intellectual, but rather “someone who has failed to notice something very obvious.” And while Zuckerman’s study is rigorously researched, it actually demonstrates Hart’s point: the study gets th…
Read More…e were bemoaning the plight of the helpless wife, forced by her brutish husband to cover her hair or face. Now, it’s not really about “saving” her anymore — it’s about saving Canada’s secular values. How quickly we have jumped down from the high moral horse we were riding towards the scene of the Muslim damsel in distress and hoisted flags in a new battle to save “our” homeland from the flimsy piece of silk cloth that covers her lips and nose! Oh…
Read More…, even spilling out to a tent set in the yard out front. Perhaps what I am feeling is a loss from all this company celebrating this time with the Queen. She has not yet departed after all, and we are still honored by her visit. Perhaps it is the deafening silence of being so removed from the hustle and bustle of the cities and even from my own family that makes me feel a bit melancholy. I should probably catch ride outside the gates of the estate…
Read More
…sion. Its signature show — ‘Open Forum’ — features Camping answering called-in questions, often rambling about obscure Biblical and religious references in his slow, deep voice. He repeatedly refers to Matthew 24, the Bible passage that speaks of how wars and other trials will precede Jesus’ second coming. Three years later, Camping was again publicly calculating the date of the end of human history. In Time Has an End, he explained that Christian…
Read More…not know what to buy and pray for, because the relic was stolen,” said a 23-year-old woman who has worked there for years. “We feel so sorry about the loss, but we do not know who stole it. Security has been been tightened ever since the relic vanished. Authorities stationed police and military police at the site, and put more security guards on duty. One of the new arrivals, a uniformed police officer named Kiet Ret, was sitting outside a room fu…
Read More…ade of horribles that has become de rigueur in arguments against marriage equality: “Concerns that schools might be compelled ‘to teach that “civil unions” or “homosexual marriage”‘ should be ‘equivalent to traditional marriage’ and that ‘churches whose teachings[do] not accept homosexual behavior as moral will lose their tax exempt status,’ fueled the proposed legislation,” she noted. The growing number of courts striking down bans on same-sex ma…
Read More
…raordinary, and she has only sharpened it since the 2008 election; those latest comments on the Civil War referenced earlier are just a part of the story of how Palin was able to dupe the religious right into embracing her, while pandering to the most dangerous elements in the Republican Party. Palin is also Exhibit A in why the Republican Party has an enormous problem with women voters. Palin’s abortion stance, her support of Rush Limbaugh in the…
Read More
…T, the guarantee of an honest God, released one last statement after his latest date for the final coming of Christ passed without incident. The Christian Post ran the text of that statement with a six-paragraph story. The headline: “Family Radio Founder Harold Camping Repents, Apologizes for False Teachings.” The headline was picked up and re-run by several dozen media outlets. The Huffington Post, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and others all ran s…
Read More