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Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

…een working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic reception remained the same. These Greeters, a dusty naked couple, asked me to get out of my car and embraced me, shouting “Welcome Home!” I had crossed the…

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An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…

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Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

…alse—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…

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Invited by Allah

…stopped then and taken into a room, offered something to drink, while they flipped through and through my passport. I was so nervous I could hardly sit still, but then they said: well, you need to renew this. And the next day, I went to the US embassy and applied for a new one, the one I have now. Here’s a tip, the fastest way to get a passport is to get one outside the US. Imagine that. But I digress… A friend of mine who lives in Madinah now onc…

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Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

…orsement of Herman Cain, and Santorum cancelled Sunday’s campaign stops in Florida after his daughter Bella was hospitalized.) Organizers said they had distributed 1,800 tickets, and the pews in the church were nearly full, with several hundred, if not nearly a thousand people in attendance. Gingrich was the only candidate to appear; Staver, the “forum’s” moderator took pains to point out that they had invited the other candidates. Santorum and Ro…

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‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

…Motivated in part by the deadly Islamic extremist attacks at home and at a Florida gay nightclub, a growing bloc of traditionally left-leaning gay voters has embraced far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, leader of the once-fringe National Front party. “Faced with the current threats, particularly from radical Islam, gays have realized they’ll be the first victims of these barbarians, and only Marine is proposing radical solutions…

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Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

…ts. Steve Hill The evangelist behind the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, Fla., Steve Hill died at 60. Hill’s testimony was that he had been saved from drug addiction at 21 and a merciful judge sent him to David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge instead of prison. He became a missionary with the Assemblies of God in the 1980s and then a traveling evangelist in the 1990s. Hill preached at the Brownsville Assembly of God church on Father’s Day 1995, and t…

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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

…t publicly opposed marriage equality and declared she would boycott Qantas airline “where possible” to protest the company’s support for marriage equality. She also told a Christian radio station that “tennis is full of lesbians.” Navratilova has said that while Court was “an amazing tennis player,” she is also “a racist and a homophobe.” Court charged that money from America was behind the “conspiracy” against her. Myanmar: Prejudice and a bit of…

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Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

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Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

…frontational, but several times during our conversation, I felt like I was flashing back to another lifetime, when I shared the same fundamentalist worldview as the Captains, perceiving “the World, the flesh, and the devil” as tangible enemies intent on deceiving believers into forsaking eternal life. (For all the Salvation Army’s good works, they are still an extremely conservative church, where a rogue Australian officer recently suggested that…

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