Religion Dispatches
…her than try to change God’s standards” (1-14-08). 6.) TOP TEN COMPARISONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND DENTISTRY: Between Google ads for “oral sedation” and “dental fear,” blogger Mark Wright writes thoughtfully about many things. On this list he points out, helpfully, that “Both Dentistry and Religion benefit financially from your sins” and reminds us that “In Religion there is the promise of Heaven. In Dentistry there is only Hell.” 7.) BOOKLIST’S TOP…
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…ransgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit the altars of Beth-el: [Bet-is House] [el- is GOD] and the horns [trumpets] of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the ground. *When the trumpet fell off from Moroni on salt lake temple today.” While this sounded reasonable to many, the following day, several Latter-day Saint scholars of Hebrew had criticized the faulty reading of the passage and pointed out that horns referred to the actual s…
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…d now requires a simple majority vote in the Senate, those who believe in civil rights, individual autonomy, and the equal balance of power in a democratic republic had better get our houses in order and find a better strategy for opposing the next great threat to our way of life….
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…(I would disagree with BU’s characterization as ‘awful’, seeing as we all used/abused the term to some degree), but has become more of a burden as time has gone on. Any label is usually exclusionary, and artists usually hate them. I most certainly believe in an afterlife, and would call myself a Muslim. HR: This question of blasphemous content is so interesting, because there is such a long history of these types of lyrics and approaches in Islam…
Read More….” That is, men are in the image of God in terms of authority over their households; women are created in God’s image in a decidedly different way, sometimes called “reflected glory.” Even complementarians, who try to stake out a moderate position that sounds a lot like the squirming around Bachmann did last night, end up saying the essential differences in the way men and women are created make distinct roles for them in the family, the church, a…
Read More…s of all the other religious minorities, recognize a bad bet for religious freedom when they see one. They see how Trump treats Muslims, Mormons, and Hispanics, and they know his commitment to them is thinner than his actual hair. Anyway, you might say it’s only one state, but it’s also the one state with a sizable Jewish population and an uncertain outcome. There’s no way Trump is winning in New York or New Jersey, and if he doesn’t take the Jewi…
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…Ever since the Book of Revelation was written, Christians have tried to decode it. They have used gematria to prove that Muhammad, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and countless popes were the Beast. Some have noted with dread that each of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s three names contained six letters. Indeed, when the Reagans retired to Bel Air in 1989, they asked to have their new address changed from 666 to 668 St. Cloud Road…
Read More…atives as out of the mainstream (at least for a state like New York) has caused a frenzy against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Charles Pierce: The other day, Cuomo gave a radio interview in which he made the unremarkable point that the kind of Republican who wins elections in, say, Alabama, likely would have something of a tough row to hoe in New York. “If they are extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York,” Cuomo said i…
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… It seemed just possible that some of you made more money than I did because you deserved to. You made more money because you had more talent and did more work. Of course, there remained the question of how much more deserving you were, of whether either of us, a freelance scribbler or a Wall Street investor, deserved to occupy a whole other financial galaxy than the attendant who took care of our ailing parents, or the farmer who produced our m…
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…s?” Or does it cause me to view the Bible as merely another supernatural mythos lying behind a fantasy-based experience that distracts me from ordinary daily responsibilities or activities? I won’t be able to resist entering the fray when the beta version is released today, if only to see how we as a culture we are trying to figure out the relationship between play, theology, and performance of belief. If you’re curious to learn of my progress, yo…
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