Religion Dispatches
…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…
Read MoreApparently if the US Senate repeals Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this week and allows gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military, marriage and family will be destroyed, the military will dissolve into chaos, religious freedom will be lost forever, military chaplains will be muzzled, rampant adultery, and there will be anarchy! In other words, gays will destroy not just our military, but our civilization! That’s the overarching message of a p…
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…en if he is not leading a faith-based organization! L: This kind of thing happened all week. People linked religion with intolerance and stupidity, even though they walked through the desert shouting, “Hermanos y hermanas, somos de la iglesia!” in an effort to make migrants feel “safe.” On top of all this, it was difficult to break into the established circles of the group structure. Of course, you can’t blame groups like this for being wary of ne…
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…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…
Read More…us who are keeping a close eye on this year’s election. It reminds us that appeals to a traditional mindset centered on security, and the powerful emotions it evokes, can trump even the most persuasive logic. Democrats ignore that lesson at their peril. But it’s a bitter pill for some to swallow. You can watch them struggling with it on the op-ed page of the New York Times, where the bellwether liberal columnists take very different views on the i…
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…d appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was just an idea, and wouldn’t appear online in any form until 2005. John Paul did embrace social media as it existed then. He was the first pope to use SMS to send out a daily message to Catholics in 2004, after brokering a deal with Verizon—one of the first troubling commercial agreements between the Vatican and communications comp…
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…that it stems from a failure to reckon with the truth that voting largely appears to be a matter of identity, rather than a rational or strategic consideration of policy choices. Why don’t social conservatives vote for Democrats’ economic proposals? Because that’s not the way social conservatives vote, simple as that. It’s not who they are. So to finally get around to answering your question directly, while I wouldn’t disagree that there’s a good…
Read More…st the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Foundation, which describes itself as a a Christian organization. (It also supports Allen West, running for Congress in Florida, who writes for a south Florida biker magazine, in which he has written th…
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…events, cloak themselves in Spiritual Gangster leggings with “Good karma” appliqued across the butt, or shop for “eco-friendly” biodegradable paper plates at Whole Foods. There is a difference between gestural subversion and collective resistance. According to the website of the athleisure apparel company Spiritual Gangster, “We exercise love as the most powerful form of activism.” The company donates an unspecified percentage of every sale to pr…
Read More…-sex marriage. According to Lambda Legal, same-sex couples will be able to apply for a marriage license in the US territory starting on Monday morning. As we have previously reported, Guam’s Catholic Governor Eddie Calvo has been stalling in spite of clear rulings from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, under whose jurisdiction Guam falls. This week USA Today reported that Calvo had said he would abide by a ruling of the US Supreme Court. He has…
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