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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…ause he believed there were few greater acts to earn merit in God’s eyes. (Compare Abu Bakr’s rules of war, as delivered to his army, to ISIS’ practices. I pronounce the Prophet’s best friend a better interpreter of Islam than poorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic…

Are Muslims as Dangerous as Nazis, as ESPN’s Curt Schilling Tweeted?

By Haroon Moghul

…d killed 270 million people? That averages out to 193,000 people per year. Compared to the Nazis’ 4 million? We’re at 5% Hitlerian lethality. Although, of course, if you’re going to compare apples to oranges, you should make sure you have an equivalent amount of each. The Nazis did not represent all of Germany, but they leveraged the full power of German society to accomplish their ends. In 1939, there were roughly 70 million Germans in that count…

How Are the “Nones” Raising Their Children?

By Christel Manning

…ericans, especially young people, are leaving organized religion in record numbers. There are now more Nones than there are Catholics in the U.S. population, and one third of those under 30 say they have no religion. When I began this project ten years ago, most people writing about the Nones seemed to assume the story was temporary: that today’s Nones would be like the baby boomers a generation ago, many of whom dropped out of church in their you…

Praise the Lard This Holiday Season

By Becky Garrison

…hough they remain volunteer based with no paid church staff. For those who compare the United Church of Bacon with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, another atheism-inspired church with similar goals, Prophet John notes “bacon can be proven to exist, but we have no evidence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.” They are cool with the pastafarians though they prefer bacon as the main ingredient in bacon and pasta dishes. Both churches ordain…

5 Reasons That Cartoons Are the 21st Century’s Great Metaphysical Playground

By Ilana E. Strauss

…his species has been enslaved and degraded for so long). There are also a number of “children’s cartoons” that are really aimed at older children and adults, meant to speak to both groups on different levels. Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, for instance, is a children’s fantasy show in which a boy and his dog go on quests. The stories are simple enough to appeal to a younger audience, but the writers manage to throw in a good deal of mulling ov…

New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

By Paul Harvey

…as university libraries and college classrooms. Since the Civil War era, a number of other black religious movements have used unorthodox belief systems to advance radical political, social or religious ideas. How might you compare the Cercle, for example, to the Moorish Science Temple, or the Nation of Islam, or contemporary movements or writers (such as Black Lives Matter or Ta-Nahesi Coates)? By definition alternative religious movements push a…

More Bleak Times For Indonesian LGBTs; South Africa Bans Extremist Anti-Gay US Pastor; Mexican Marriage Struggle Heats Up; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…awn international criticism for anti-gay comments, “admits he was wrong to compare gay people to animals, but stands by his biblical beliefs concerning homosexuality,” according to an article in the Christian Post. Hungary: Perpetrators of right-wing, anti-gay violence sentenced to prison Fifteen members of a far-right group “The Arrows of the Hungarians” were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to 13 years for acts of terror…

Sexist, Homophobic Representatives of “The Black Church” Just Want to Make Black America Great Again

By Anita Little

…make up a disproportionate percentage of those who seek abortion care when compared to other races. However, that’s due to a lot of socioeconomic factors that mostly stem from poverty. If this group were truly interested in curtailing abortion rates, that entire section should have been about access to contraception, sex education and family planning services. But they didn’t seem to have space to mention that anywhere. The obsession these patriar…

Rising to Heaven in a Secular Rapture: Trump’s Golden Promises

By Eric C. Miller

…think they needed government because the churches often did offer a great number of services. They were tithed, members gave ten percent of their income to sustaining the church, and whatever problem they had, they could take it to the church. It was very central to their lives. At the same time, they sensed that they were Christians in an America that was becoming increasingly non-Christian, so I often heard them say things like, “You can’t say…

Noah’s All-White Ark, and Other Odd Directorial Choices

By Wil Gafney

…nemesis in the movie which doesn’t acknowledge that they share a father. (Compare Gen 4:12-22 and 5:28.) He becomes a stowaway on the ark and eats one of the snakes and kills one or more mammals. – Noah doesn’t recruit wives for his younger sons because he believes they should all die on the ark and he intends to kill his grandchild if his daughter-in-law gives birth to a girl—an inversion of the Exodus genocide. – Ham tried to kill Noah on the a…