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Blasphemy and Betrayal: The Murder of Salman Taseer

…ctatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq from 1977-1988. The blasphemy laws (Penal Code 295-298) make it illegal to: “outrage religious feelings,” defile the Qur’an, or deride the Prophet, his family, the first four Caliphs, and the companions of the Prophet. What constitutes outraging or defiling behavior has varied from distribution of purportedly anti-Islamic literature to placing a calendar with passages from the Qur’an onto a work table. The blasphem…

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2012 Presidential Hopefuls: God Game is On

…ed into the “founding principles,” “Judeo-Christian” foundation, and other code, but they did more. They wept; they told stories about soldiers and family members; they evoked imagery of mountains climbed and enemies vanquished. Mitt Romney, though? Not so much. Speaking directly after Pence, who since the inaugural Values Voters Summit in 2006, has always invoked the language of the religious right base, Romney was at a disadvantage. He was borin…

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Sullivan v. Gallagher: Catholics Debate LGBT Rights At Georgetown

…ality to Nazism. There was, of course, no need to debate Catholics for Equality’s mission by mentioning Soros. The fact that NOM did speaks to an effort to deploy conservative tropes about who is or isn’t the “real” religious person, and to drop code that political adversaries betray God to support evil. But it was Gallagher who had the gall to call out Catholics for Equality in her prepared remarks. “There is still time to repent,” she said witho…

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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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Glenn Beck’s ‘Social Justice’ Heresies

…ericans for Democratic Action, which is the Progressive Socialist Party of today.” Socialists, the ACLU: basically Glenn Beck’s enemies list. Harry Ward was in fact the chair of the ACLU, though he had nothing to do with the social gospel movement. (He was a communist though, which is probably why Barton threw him in there.) And Niebuhr, whose ideological evolution is very complex—from socialist to foreign policy ‘realist’ whose influence extends…

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Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid

…also be pedestrian, taking place year-round on every continent, every zip code. It is a game, proven by its global appeal, which defies socioeconomic standing. Therein lies further emphasis of the World Cup’s importance, too: the world stage. Marxism has long been called the world’s secular religion, but a football fan knows economic ideology pales in comparison to the world’s devotion to football. John Carlin of Time magazine is right when he sa…

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Devil’s Bookmark: Doubting God’s Existence, but Angry Nevertheless

…mes below the dividing line stand for fictional characters. The same color code was applied to match an author to his/her fictional creation.) First, what this diagram shows is a continuum of diminishing intensity of God-hatred from left to center: from rage, to hatred, to anger, to resentment.  And, as we can see, as the intensity of hatred for the “real” God diminishes, it enters a phase where it can coexist with the diminished hatred for a God…

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Angels & Demons: America’s Preeminent Pop Theologian Takes on Religion and Science

…leased in mid-May. Angels & Demons is the successor to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, which its star Tom Hanks called “just a good story loaded with hooey and nonsense.” Of course, he only has to say that because it’s not true. Everybody knows that despite getting most of his facts wrong, Dan Brown is American culture’s preeminent religious thinker and, in particular, our most trusted interpreter of Catholicism. Even though the Vatican decided to play…

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Dispatches from the Beltway: Beyond the Graying and Greening Religious Right

…ke just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the religious right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay. If the argument that “the era of the religious right is over” depended…

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Conservative Christian Book on Obama’s Faith

…e Founders got it right: Religion now rests in a tortured place in society today, thanks largely to unfortunate and misguided rulings of the Supreme Court,” Don Byrd of Talk2Action wrote that Mansfield “called up all of the standard church-state myths and mis-directions: that the Founders intended America to be a Christian nation, that religion is being stripped from the public square, that there is no constitutional wall of separation, that preac…

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