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Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

…than thinking about the self as being a language—as being like a computer code that speaks—we think about the self as a cluster of forces. [These forces] make us what we are, and our decisions come from that rather than from this linguistic layer, which is actually constituted by that more fundamental cluster of forces. That’s what I see affect theory doing: upsetting this idea that human beings start with language and that we do what we do becau…

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Lost and Found: Despite the Hope, Morality, and Meaning Inspired by Deconversion, Why is Respect Only For Those Who Find God?

…First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for failing to believe the supernatural truth claims of Christianity. Second, paradoxically, Douthat perceives a tendency among non-religious people to embrace the mystical belief systems that he himself rejects, like astrology or wellness. (So much for scientism!) Yet we don’t see any actual evidence that these trends are as widespread among the deconverted as he sugg…

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“Traditional” Marriage or a Break with Tradition?

…who died before age 65—if the couple was legally married. The federal tax code was rewritten to provide special benefits to married couples. Private employers followed suit, using marital status to determine whether they would provide health insurance or pension benefits to employees’ dependents. Legal statutes strengthened the rights of a spouse at the expense of other kin, including parents and adult children. Lack of a marriage license meant t…

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RDGenerations: Youth and Liberal Religion

…to conduct our life together at the National Youth Event in a manner that promotes a community of faith.” Literally, that manual spent three times more words trying to get the kids to drink water instead of Coca-Cola in the heat than it spent on its entire religious/theological content. It made me wonder if the football players or UCC kids had more rituals and prayers during their weeks. L: Your example catches the flavor, but there is more to sa…

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What’s the Problem With a Good Placebo?

…al “symbologist” character played by Tom Hanks in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Semiotics is mostly dense philosophy and linguistics with a dash of neuroscience thrown in. The deep semiotics of health is an attempt to recognize the signs and symbols of health and to take control over the largely unconscious processes that affect our minds-brains-bodies. The mash-up of these terms is necessary in light of contemporary science. Let me explain. Psyc…

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Hillary Flirting with Fear

…close enough for vote-tampering to give him a victory. Was it “values” (a code word for conservative religiosity) or national insecurity? When Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville asked “Why America Wanted Change But Voted for Continuity” in 2004, they came up with the best answer: “A narrative is the key to everything, and the Republicans had a much more coherent attack and narrative… The president was able to keep the ele…

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Pope Tweeted into Retirement

…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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Cherry-Picking in the God Gap: A Post-Election Conversation on the Religious Vote and the Battle to Spin it

…d blog post on the issue, he still wrote, “I think Planned Parenthood is a code name for baby-killing.” Someone who thinks like that is not someone liberals can work with. And what could be more delegitimizing than Republicans clearly demonstrating that they’re no longer dedicated to democratic norms, to protecting the federal bureaucracy from politicization, to fairness, to democracy itself? McConnell’s Senate Republicans pushed through the confi…

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Stephen Broden, Beck’s Black Robed Regiment In Action

…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against 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 Fo…

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The Revolution Will Not Be Fetishized: Taking Resistance Beyond the Spiritual Industrial Complex

…action. They would need to support the efforts of groups like the anti-war Code Pink that resorts to reason, empirical evidence and visibility to challenge U.S. development policies, or the Platform for the Movement for Black Lives, (one of the most advanced and inclusive political visions ever articulated), or the Fight for $15 movement that successfully campaigned to raise the minimum wage in many parts of the country. It would mean standing in…

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