Religion Dispatches
…smatic persons will never be discovered embezzling money, enjoying kinky sex, or (The Da Vinci Code notwithstanding) fathering surprise children. It’s not necessary to label something a “cult” to understand the potential peril involved in looking to a living guru. However honest and virtuous that guru might be, she—like the rest of us—is susceptible to tripping and falling right up until the day she dies. What makes some folks willing and able to…
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…ning) than on religion, defined in terms of religious institutions. Ethics codes, like the Code of Ethics for Nurses of the American Nurses Association, emphasize the importance of patients’ spiritual well-being and the NANDA International, which develops language around nursing diagnoses, recognizes three diagnoses related to spirituality and spiritual distress. In medical and broader public discourse about religion, spirituality, and medicine, i…
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…ience, and then you add to that DNA, which has been called things like the code of codes, the holy grail. We give it this kind of supernatural significance. So, I think it’s a combination of being a society that values data, being a society that equates progress with scientific development, and being a society that thinks that genetics—in part because DNA comes from you, from us, from we—is the ultimate information, the ultimate data. It’s like th…
Read More…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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…Party of today—primarily because the Progressive Socialist Party doesn’t exist (unless his purview now extends to Lebanese politics). It’s impossible to discuss the history of the social justice movement without bringing in the father of the social gospel, the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. But while Beck and Barton ignore Rauschenbusch, Beck does bring up Father Coughlin—to whom Beck owes a debt for his invention of hate radio—because Coughlin…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
Read More…oned humans as the culmination of God’s specific acts of creation during six days approximately 6,000 years ago. It replaced this story with a less grand one of natural selection and random mutation across eons. And evolution also undermined the theologically important explanation for human and animal suffering, as the result of God’s fit punishment of Adam and Eve for “original sin.” (Today, 57 percent of white evangelicals reject evolution, beli…
Read More…ent implantation of the FEP. Also unthinkable under such a law is medical experimentation on embryos. Hey, those are people you’re experimenting on! Even microscopic persons have rights. Fertility clinics? Shut your doors. You can’t kill FEP’s just because you want to make a baby. Also, how do the poor IRS people handle those who add FEPs as dependents on their tax returns? The Census Bureau will also be hobbled in estimating the actual population…
Read More…s in the United States is a fabrication. For her proof, Bachmann cites an exhibit from the US government’s prosecution in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case. Here’s what I wrote about that exhibit, and that case, over a year ago: This claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s aim is a worldwide theocracy, and that all American Muslim organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a singl…
Read More…he line she draws in order to resist the majority’s reading of RFRA is not between natural and corporate persons but between corporate persons that are “religious” and those that are not. In the end, Porterfield obscures this distinction. She notes that from a historical perspective, “it is easy to see why corporations have freedom in the United States.” She then concludes that “whether we label this freedom ‘religious’ or ‘political’ is almost be…
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