Religion Dispatches
…. It’s a legal system, shari’ah law; it’s a financial system; it’s a moral code; it’s a political system; it’s a military system. It should not be protected under the First Amendment, particularly given that those following the dictates of the Qur’an are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with shari’ah law.” Bachmann is taking heat from fellow Republicans for her attempted witch hunt of Abedin. But will those Republican…
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…” theologies, and boldly touts its commitment to tolerance. Moreover, its code of ethics includes: “We commit ourselves to respecting the diversity of ecumenical, theological, ideological and personal expressions of the various faiths and traditions found in our community.” Since the aforementioned is an ongoing case that most likely contains more details than those I’ve offered, I use it only as a backdrop to illustrate the ease in which orthodo…
Read More…ooklet’s content isn’t religious: This may be the first nonreligious moral code based wholly on common sense. It was written by L. Ron Hubbard as an individual work and it not part of any religious doctrine. Any reprinting or individual distribution of it does not infer connection with or sponsorship of any religious organization. It is therefore admissible for government departments and employees to distribute it as a nonreligious activity. (Repr…
Read More…the day in 1954 when the “Johnson amendment” language was put into the tax code was the day that “changed America” and set the stage for bad Supreme Court decisions and everything else that has gone wrong since the 1960s. Pulpit Freedom Sunday participants agree to preach political sermons, send them to the IRS, and dare the agency to sue them. The Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund) has offered legal help to c…
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…tes throughout secular democratic Europe. Article 226b of the Danish Penal Code, for instance, singles out for protection—among other categories—groups of people who “on account of their faith” are threatened, insulted, or degraded. It does not single out people, regardless of their affiliation, on account of their convictions of conscience. Know Thy Enmity The most principled motivation for hate speech laws can be found in the principle of equal…
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…in 100 years.” It isn’t a stretch to say that his invocation of “truth” is code for conservative Christian dogma; his real problem with Harvard—and academia in general—is that its scholars do not defer to such dogma. But there’s no need to stretch as Santorum explicitly linked higher education to the work of Satan in a 2008 speech (which has recently gone viral) at Florida’s Ave Maria University. The intimate connection between these views and his…
Read More…wants to make us slaves again. Sigh. Palin’s over the top proclamation was coded in one of her specialty word salads that few can translate. Since I have been called the Palin Whisperer by one of my Twitter followers, let me give you the short version: Obama wants to make white people slaves!!!! In case you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the transcript: PALIN: Well, what we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are all on the ro…
Read More…known for attacks on Scientology, decided to send a message to the Catholic Church by shutting down the official Vatican website (still not responding as of this posting). What are the Church’s misdeeds, according to these code crusaders? They go back to the selling of indulgences in the 16th century. And more recently, of course, there’s the Church’s interference in Italy’s domestic politics. (Not just Italy, we’d have to say.) – The Eds. …
Read More…, could he possibly come out in favor of arresting women for praying? Or even, with a straight face, say it was a matter of local concern that he wasn’t going to comment on, when he otherwise has (albeit in a perfunctory way) called for the promotion of women’s rights in other parts of the Middle East? And since Obama was promoting the rights and freedom of religious minorities last night, wouldn’t this case fall under his concern? There are good…
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…ooled by Santorum’s defense that he believes Obama when the president says he’s a Christian. Listen to the world salad Santorum and Stewart dropped onto the national airwaves. Anyone steeped in the “Christian worldview” (including Stewart’s old boss Bachmann) would fully understand that code as “Obama doesn’t govern from a ‘Christian worldview.’ And you know what that means: he must be a secularist, or an Islamist, or some other enemy of Christian…
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