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UPDATED: Oklahoma Personhood Bill Not Dead…

…d-down and unflinching personhood bill yet: the bill would amend the legal code to treat fetuses as persons at all stages of biological development. So what happened? Well, there was opposition, of course. People got nervous about the things that generally make a lot of people nervous about giving legal rights to fertilized eggs. What about in vitro fertilization? What about ectopic pregnancies? What about the liability of medical providers? The b…

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In Russia It Is Now a Crime to Insult Someone’s Religious Feelings

…n of religious believers’ feelings has been enshrined in the Russian Civil Code for quite some time, but making it a criminal offense to insult the feelings of religious believers could bring with it much harsher penalties. The Russian web was abuzz with a lively discussion of this topic last fall, and as the initiative was recently passed, there is renewed interest in the Russian media and blogosphere. Аccording to the just passed redaction of ar…

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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

…al rule of law than the government does. [They] lay out a social and moral code that governs human interaction, and supplies a context for suffering and poverty, constructing a group identity through which followers can hope to secure their worldly needs, and find some certainty about the hereafter.” It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example…

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Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

…ommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, announced that it was charging journalist Elena Klimova, the group’s founder, with ‘promoting homosexuality to minors.’” Among the “evidence” in the brief against Klimova was the group’s online suicide prevention efforts. The Barents Observer reports that for the LGBT community in Arctic Russia, “the danger is everywhere and it’s everyday.” It profiled young LGBT activists in Murmansk and the harsh challenges…

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Famous Atheists, Fat Ministers, Papal Tweets, and a Mega-Hoax

…atican, and the World Evangelical Alliance have worked together to issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism…

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Creationism: Don’t Use the “C-Word”

…tack the teaching of evolution and other subjects that Christian fundamentalists hate because it contradicts their narrow religious worldview – reality be damned. The language that was inserted into the LSEA, which the Livingston school district properly understood to mean it could teach creationism, says that the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education must “allow and assist” school boards “to create and foster an environment”…

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Republicans Claim Shari’ah Law Threatens Constitution

…mad said, is charity. But Gaffney et al. portray shari’ah as a fixed legal code that a fifth column of “adherents” seek to implement in place of the Constitution (somehow, they don’t explain how one Muslim in Congress or the less than one percent of the U.S. adult population that is Muslim would accomplish this). Gaffney told the audience for his talk, which was directed at Congressional staffers: [I]n fact we are looking at a mortal threat to the…

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Among the Problems with Trump’s Proposed Ban: Who is a Muslim?

…denying that Judaism is a religion (instead, it’s an ideology, or a legal code, or an international cabal), and emphasizing definitions of Judaism rooted in physical heritage. This nudge toward biology makes sense. For one thing, it’s easier to judge somebody’s identity based on ancestry than on beliefs and cultural traditions. The latter is pretty nebulous. The former is quantifiable. Also, bigots haven’t historically cared much about the person…

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An Untold Tale: American Fiction vs. The Religious Right

…me time, Sagan was not impressed by the creationism of Christian fundamentalists in the 1980s. He was searching for a middle ground. The Da Vinci Code, meanwhile, vilified the Catholic Church, but I show that it should better be understood as an attack on Protestantism, and particularly on the authority of the Bible. It was a woefully ill-informed attack on the Bible, but its target was the reliability of Scripture, which is far more important to…

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What American Flag-Worship Looks Like to a New Citizen

…s fiftieth anniversary, the Pledge was incorporated into the National Flag Code. Ten years later, in the shadow of the Cold War, two weighty words, “under God,” were added. It has become the creed of the state religion, taught early and often to our children. The Very Revd Will H. Mebane, Jr., Interim Dean at St Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, NY, grew up in the South in a fairly conservative religious household. He encountered the Flag at…

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