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A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

…rely come under scrutiny, save for an occasional piece in outlets like the New York Times. Moreover, aggressive proselytizing by Christian groups has actually increased, including attempts at converting Hindu temple-goers right outside the temple doors. To be sure, from a distance, it would appear that India’s religious minorities might suffocate from the weight of a nearly 80 percent Hindu population. But Hindu majoritarianism in India isn’t just…

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Putin’s Violent Holy War Rhetoric Made it to the Christian Right Fringe — And There’s Reason to Believe it’ll Go Mainstream

…sident of Russia, launcher of invasions of Ukraine, Georgia, and Chechnya, user of assassination to deal with defectors, murderer of opponents, likely orchestrator of domestic terrorist attacks in Russia to justify warfare, champion of the Russian Empire directly in opposition to America: it seems strange that he would find American champions on the Christian Right. But they love him because he loves violence. He loves the same violence they crave…

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Robot Kills a Worker in Germany… Who’s to Blame?

…not entirely predictable, we may want to sue bots themselves, rather than user-workers. There is no guarantee that we will come to feel this way or that we must, but it is certainly one possibility. Whether or not we are replaced by robots, chances are, in the coming decades, more and more of us will work beside them. Right now our moral intuitions about robots are not well tuned, and we’re facing new problems that stretch our judgments. All of u…

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The Promise of Immortality in a Tech-Enhanced Heaven

….U. Sirius: I’ll answer the first part, since it was my idea. I did an A-Z User’s Guide to the New Edge back in 1993, introducing the then-novel ideas of a cyberculture or cyberpunk — the idea that the digital revolution was changing everything. We’ve seen that happen. The entire world and its economy has moved online, speeding things up, “disrupting” industries, increasing our vulnerability to hackers and spies. Now we’re at the beginnings of fee…

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Terror In South Carolina

…nfederate flag still flies, and in museums where secession is treated as an essential part of the state’s history, and sanitized as disassociated from anything having to do with race or slavery. In his floor speech, Pinckney referred to the body cameras as “new eyes for seeing” for the doubting Thomases. No doubt he keenly understood how those new eyes are needed metaphorically as well, something that, tragically, will require repeating as we seek…

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Google-Phonics, Or, ‘What Is the Sound of a Thousand Tech Workers Meditating?’

…sidents? Where was mindfulness when the company decided to consolidate its user privacy policies against the better judgment of consumer groups and over thirty U.S. Attorneys General? Tellingly, none of these issues appear in Search Inside Yourself. They are blind spots within a corporate-friendly version of Buddhist philosophy. Meng’s version of mindfulness ignores institutional dukkha in favor of a myopic focus on personal stress reduction and i…

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My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

…on that allows us to think about both role-playing games and religion in a new light. Of course D&D isn’t a “religion” in the way that moral entrepreneurs claimed: players are not actually worshipping deities, casting spells, etc. But something about the game made them think of religion and I think it’s worth asking what that was. I also think these games can be a lot more than just “escapism.” I found a lot of cases of gamers who found these game…

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5 Key Moments From the Year of the ‘Exvangelicals’

…ed in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, Salon, and other outlets. Exvangelicals were even featured in Newsweek twice, including in the cover article of the print edition for December 21. The biggest exvangelical media breakthrough thus far, however, is surely the CBS special “Deconstructing My Religion,” written and produced by Liz Kineke, and which began running on CBS affiliate stations earlier th…

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A One-State Solution for Israel and Why It Will Work

…is quickly closing. It is not true that, as Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times (‘Netanyahu Will Make History’), that there is either ‘only one state,’ in which Israel ‘cannot be Jewish,’ or a two-state solution, an Israel and Palestine living side-by-side. Get over it, folks. Not happening. The time for a two-state solution passed in the previous millennium. Friedman didn’t just miss the window of opportunity, he’s missed the closing cr…

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