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Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

…t buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name… his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” (Revelation 13:16-18) In the early twentieth century, this prophecy became linked to American fears of a powerful federal government. A 1943 letter to the editor of the Pampa Daily News was representative of this growing resentment coupling conspiracy with apocalypticism: We should count it dishonorable for…

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Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

…holic system of marital impediments and kinship (dramatically reducing the number of people a person was related to in a way that barred marriage), and cracked open the door to divorce. But as historian Lyndal Roper has taught us, these Reformers, by questioning the nature of marriage so thoroughly, helped to make more radical marital experiments possible. Roper points to both the short-lived polygamous city-state of Münster and, in much more dept…

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Forced Cremation of Covid Dead in Sri Lanka Further Marginalizes Muslim Community

…020, there have been 146 Covid deaths in Sri Lanka with a disproportionate number coming from the Muslim community; despite making up less than 10% of the population, Muslims account for nearly half of the reported deaths. A Muslim leader in Sri Lanka informed the authors that the number is actually higher, and that 82 Muslims have died, with over 70 cremations. The cremation of the victims was carried out by the state without the approval of the…

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The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

…her book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue with the dictionary. If you’re playing Scrabble you go to the dictionary to settle the argument. We’ve encouraged people to think about the Bible as this kind of book, a source of authority, the final word, not to be debated. I think that helps people to think that…

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Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

…e heady days of $2 a gallon gasoline. When Bachmann promised the return of cheap fuel, she tapped into that mythic connection between Americans and their cars. It isn’t simply that American’s worship the car or make it a sacred object; although one could not be blamed for thinking so. The Los Angeles Times reports that Americans spend almost 100 billion a year on new car purchases alone, not counting used car purchases or maintenance of existing c…

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Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests.  So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…

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Holding Out for a Hero: New ID Book Aims to Save You From Despair of Evolution

…nremarkable button marked “God made proteins.” But salvation is not such a cheap, glib thing. Those who are serious about salvation are serious about creating the conditions of genuine ease and assurance for others in the face of their deepest terrors and despairs. What this requires is much more difficult, interesting, and rewarding than trying to win the same tired arguments about the structure of molecules. What is needed, for theists and athei…

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On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

…ater, he was handed over to an Israeli employment agency to be a source of cheap labor in Eilat—the bottom tip of the country, where the Negev meets the Red Sea, and where Sudanese and Eritrean refugees do the service jobs that support the tourism industry. William’s people are no strangers to exploitation. He told me that much of Northern Sudan was built by the Southern Sudanese. To illustrate the system of forced labor practiced in the North, Wi…

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After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…

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The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…

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