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Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will!

…athematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell phone. “Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is compatible with highly ethical behavior,” the psychologist Jesse Bering comments in an article on these studies, “but the present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that possibility.” Theologians have proposed that science still allows faith in a “God of the gaps,” who…

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Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

…lt, particularly since the church wouldn’t leave me alone. (I got repeated phone calls, letters, and visits to my home from missionaries and people in the congregation, despite formal requests that they stop.) Eventually I sought a community of people also striving to come to terms with what it meant to have been but no longer be a devout Mormon. Luckily a diverse community of ex-, post-, or lapsed Mormons (we differ on what to call ourselves) thr…

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“You’ve Never Met a Muslim”

…and, for ours, that was an impossibly beautiful Tuesday morning. September 11 put an end to the long 1990s when, as it is nearly inconceivable to imagine today, the biggest problem in our post-Communist, unipolar world seemed to be Monica Lewinsky. I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down t…

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Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist

…ou need to know to keep on reading? I’d cheerfully watch that man read the phone book. So, when my buddy Rev. El Mundo sent me the link to the comedian’s message, I eagerly clicked on it. I was surprised when I saw this wasn’t a clip of his latest hysterical stand up, but an essay he penned for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog. The topic of his essay was how he came to be an atheist. The whole piece is here. While there is humor in the pie…

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Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

…g with regard to religious practice in particular. Both internet and smart phone users were more likely to participate in religious or spiritual groups than were people who do not regularly use digital media. By “participate,” the researchers were referring to physical, geographically located, face-to-face engagement: attending meetings, volunteering, taking leadership roles, and donating money. In all of these categories, participation was higher…

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Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships.   A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…

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Mitt, the Marriotts, and Porn

…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone.   And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…

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Lila Rose Targets Planned Parenthood with Lies

…posed.’ How is that different from lying? If one day she tells people she’s 15 and pregnant by a 23-year-old, and another day she tells people she’s 13 and pregnant by a 31-year-old, how is that not lying?” (Arguably, Rose’s most creative defender in that thread was JLS, who speculated that “perhaps Lila Rose was speaking in parables.”) It happened here, a year earlier, at Rebelution—which is evangelical in flavor, affiliated with the Household of…

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“God Created You”: Bishop Supports Gay Ugandans, Defies Death Threats

…or exhorted on homosexuals to repent or be punished by God before the microphone was snatched away one of Kato’s supporters. It might have seemed that the last person the activist’s friends would turn to for support at the moment would be another religious leader. Especially given that the church in Uganda was at the head of the drive for the draconian anti-homosexuality bill still pending in Parliament. But 79-year-old Bishop Christopher Senyonjo…

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Pro-Gay Marriage Mormon Keeps Faith Despite Church Pressure

…and within days an official at LDS Church headquarters placed a concerned phone call to Melanie S.’s local clergy. Three times her bishop met with Melanie to discuss the video. Because she had affiliated with “Mormons for Marriage,” he questioned whether or not Melanie and her husband should be allowed to keep their temple recommends—certificates that allow the most worthy and devoted Mormons to participate in the faith’s sacred temple rites. Nor…

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