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Win For ‘Natural Family’ Crowd at UN Human Rights Council…

By Peter Montgomery

…sure recognition of the right of same-sex couples to get married. On July 10, 20 same-sex couples were married on the beach in Acapulco. The ceremony, which was opposed by the mayor of Acapulco and the Catholic Church, was witnessed by the governor of the state of Guerrero, Rogelio Ortega. Kazakhstan: Human Rights Watch reports on intensified climate of fear for LGBTs Human Rights Watch this week released a report that says “LGBT people in Kazak…

Are We Living Through World War III?

By Haroon Moghul

…n at the granular level. But it does look like a World war all the same. In 1979, the Soviet Union, an empire made up of what are today 15 nations, invaded Afghanistan; the U.S. worked with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, like Egypt and China, to offer assistance and arms to mujahidin fighters to resist and defeat that occupation. In 2003, the United States mustered a coalition of some forty-nine countries, which was strong enough to…

Hide the Religion, Feature the Science: 60 Minutes Drops the Ball on Mindfulness

By jeff wilson

…at any point, except for a brief allusion to “the Zen people from ancient China” as folks who knew better than us. This is an example of what I call mystification: the obscuration of mindfulness’s roots and usual context so that it can be extracted from religion and recontextualized to fit new purposes. Instead of religion, the context for mindfulness on 60 Minutes is medical science. We’re shown headlines from journal publications that claim to…

Forgiving LeBron, Fetal Jesus Sonogram, and Hummus Wars

By Michael J. Altman

…en Dragon was going to be the long awaited sequel to Big Trouble in Little China. Turns out it’s a right-wing Christian anti-environmentalism DVD series. Bummer. Hummus sparked a controversy between pro-Palestinian and Jewish students at DePaul University. A federal judge has put a permanent hold on the Oklahoma ballot measure that prohibited Sharia law in state courts. In Saudi Arabia, the Mecca Clock Royal Tower is under construction. When finis…

Creationists and Dawkins Agree: Science Rules Religion

By Paul Wallace

…minal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights. As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there. Zimmerman does an admirable job pointing out the problems with Bergevin’s bizarre proposal, so I’ll merely suggest, as I noted above, that th…

Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

By Alan Levinovitz and Michael Schulson

…ed when it comes to odds. For instance, I think I’d like to know if I had a 100% chance of getting Alzheimer’s. But a 20% chance? There’s a question of how useful predictions of that sort really are. MHS: Too much knowledge, or incomplete knowledge, can be dangerous. It’s the reason that medical associations are recommending fewer prostate screenings, even though every once in a while they save lives. The statement “you have a 2% chance of dying”…

Teaching the Dalai Lama’s Monks: Better Religion Through Science

By Arri Eisen

…sterners, it is relatively common for Tibetans to become monks (even today, 1 in 10 Tibetans do). We just completed our second year of a five-year pilot with 91 monks and nuns. The project is designed for monks and nuns to learn science and for us to learn Buddhism and Tibetan culture, but also for us to simultaneously build the capacity for the Tibetans eventually to take over the science teaching and learning. If you’re like many of my administr…

The Revelation of Kurt Andersen: With ‘Evil Geniuses’ a Media Mandarin Discovers Plutocracy

By Peter Laarman

…p what said geniuses were doing to remake the political economy from around 1970 onward, but especially during those crucial 1990s, the decade when leading Democrats joined with Republicans in abandoning the idea that there is any kind of social contract that matters. As Andersen tells Bellafante, liberals like him played the role of “useful idiots” as the last century’s Great Divergence was gathering force, and as wealth wasn’t just trickling but…

No Longer At Sea: Kate Bornstein Talks Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…am “evil.” My daughter was born into the Church of Scientology in the early 1970s. I left in 1981 when she was nine. And you know, I needed to leave. It was the end of twelve years, and I had to get the fuck out of there. I’ll be saying “fuck” here—you can change it if you have to! [That’s OK, carry on. -Eds.] Anyway, I figured, I’m 64 years old. I won’t be around much longer. If she ever wonders what happened, I want it there for her. Do I hold o…

What Happens If the Bible Is the “Owner’s Manual For Life”

By Sarah Posner

…, anti-Planned Parenthood crusaders, the model family is something like the 19-kid Duggars—let God’s hand, not some pesky birth control—guide your life. As the Family Research Council noted last year in bestowing an award on the stars of 19 Kids and Counting at the Values Voters Summit, the Duggars, with their cable television reality show, serve as a Christian model for the rest of America of what happens when you let the Bible be “the owner’s ma…