Religion Dispatches
…important; in some ways the Fifties and Sixties seem impossibly far away, compared to the way religion and spirituality are represented in mainstream America today. Just compare King’s bold speech before the Lincoln Memorial in the early 1960s, to Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s religious rhetoric in 2010… There were progressive and aesthetically sophisticated Catholics in the U.S., and James Sweeney identified himself as one. These were the men a…
Read More…of the picture—literally. Pretty much the first thing you notice when you compare a Protestant church with a Catholic one is that Jesus is not depicted on the Cross in most Protestant churches. There is just a Cross, an empty Cross, on the wall. The broken, bleeding body, so prominent in most Catholic cruciforms, looks quite jarring when you come to it from the perspective of this Protestant emptiness. So, Roman Catholics leave the Baby Jesus out…
Read More…s mother survived a concentration camp, it seems that he feels entitled to compare Kushner to a kapo—one of the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis and served them in the camps. This is not to say that the use of richly descriptive and evocative terminology descriptive of humanity’s worst moments is never appropriate. As the world’s current multiple conflicts are more frequently described as ‘the outbreak of WWIII,’ this tendency to invoke the po…
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…y significant large numbers of people, write up the experience, repeat it, compare the same number of people at the same time who don’t believe in God, but are otherwise similar, see if they have the same experience, and then have someone in Australia and China repeat my experiment and see if they get the same results. This method is what science is supposed to be about; this is scientific proof, this is what scientists believe in. The Decline Eff…
Read More…utting a rock on trial. It doesn’t really do anything. Perhaps he wants to compare it to the Bible to see which is more violent? But what does that do? The film Holy Wars makes the great point that you have crazies of all stripes, and they will find whatever justification they want for their insanity. Will he put the text on trial to see if it’s true? A Scopes Trial for the Qur’an? Is it to see if the Qur’an is “truer” than the Bible? Better minds…
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…tarting points continues in the adjacent room, where several large posters compare various phenomena (the galactic universe, plants, animals, human knowledge itself) as seen from the perspective of “human reason” and “God’s word.” Lest one conclude that both perspectives are equally valid, however, the next part of the museum contends that they are not equally beneficial for human flourishing. In a room inhabited by several animatronic Biblical c…
Read More…wonder why it is that Jim Wallis is palling around with a guy who likes to compare liberals to Nazis—not once, but repeatedly—is that questioning his motives, or is it raising a legitimate concern about his role as spokesperson for liberal or progressive religion? Conservatives will no doubt raise all kinds of counter-arguments (Keith Olbermann, Markos Moulitsas, etc., etc.), but this only proves my point. As long as there are disagreements in the…
Read More…he Brotherhood are, you come to realize it’s not good.” He then goes on to compare what’s happening in Egypt to the Islamic revolution in Iran — a theory that Haroon Moghul has ably debunked here at RD. Then Christian talk radio host and evangelist Michael Youssef announced that he would be appearing on CNN through out the day: “Before you judge the motives of the protesters, you must know who is really behind those young people on the streets,” s…
Read More…n strategy used by the religious right to demonize gays and lesbians is to compare them to pedophiles and paint them as sexual deviants who recruit children to their “lifestyle.” Even Rick Warren has compared homosexuality to incest and pedophilia. These canards have long been effective, though the tide may finally be turning. After getting a daylong earful of hateful speech against gays and lesbians during a hearing on the bill, one Maryland lawm…
Read More…At least we won’t have to read briefs from the DOJ in support of DOMA that compare same-sex marriage to incest and child rape. It’s bad news, apparently, for those opposed to gays and lesbians getting married. National Organization for Marriage leader Maggie Gallagher blasted the decision on FOX News [and no, that isn’t a typo in the following transcript]: This is an end-run really around our normal constitutional processes. And we’re going to be…
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