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“We Blew it” on Climate Change, But May Survive Anyway: An RD Discussion with the First Transhumanist Candidate

By Andrew Aghapour

…t want to have virtual avatars of themselves. If we had the Empire State Building filled with servers, we could potentially recreate all the neural connections of every single living person on earth. You could fit the entire species in one single building, and they could just exist as virtual lives there. It would almost be like The Matrix. That is one way to fix some of the environmental problems because humans wouldn’t need the planet as it is….

Fear, Guns, and the (Unwinnable) War Against Death: A Letter to My Fellow Americans

By Beatrice Marovich

…rld around us. The machines that facilitate our daily life exploit the fossil fuel spoils of the underworld, slowly turning the planet into a kind of living hell. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose knew that, even if many of us choose to ignore that it’s happening; phenomena like mass species extinctions are affecting us deeply. Rose argued that in the past, life and death were part of the ecological fabric of life on earth. Death was a fact. And wh…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…rizon of our common hopes and fears. Global warming and rising sea levels will impact every human being on the planet, and will place unique new pressures of interpretation and understanding on each and every religious tradition—whether new, or old, or just emerging. Perhaps the most striking thing about the disappointments expressed at and after the Copenhagen conference is not how little of substance was accomplished there. Not at all. The vari…

Does It Matter If Islam Is A Religion? An American Ahmadi Explains The Effects Of Religious Discrimination

By Daniel Schultz

…’s real. The problems are not just administrative: Ahmadis have a “glass ceiling” in the civil service, and discriminatory use of voter registration lists (Ahmadis are enrolled separately) keeps them from participation in elected government, even in areas where they are the overwhelming majority. From there it spreads through society in ways both perverse and corrupt, according to Ahmad: a non-Ahmadi colonel’s career is ended because his staff dri…

The Wounded People of God

By Anthea Butler

…sexuality, while allowing a good deal of their own clergy and orders to defile children sexually, well, I just can’t be nice. As a matter of fact, I am righteously angry about it. Maybe for those who have critiqued my tone, it’s also about a woman’s voice being in the mix. Lord knows there aren’t women in the Vatican hierarchy who could provide a balance to the high male clericalism. I also doubt anyone is telling Christopher Hitchens to tone it d…

Sean Feucht’s New Year’s Rockin’ Superspreader Revival is a ‘Tepid and Meager’ Effort at Racial Reconciliation

By Isaiah Murtaugh

…at] a time where Jim Crow laws were still in place, where lynchings were still happening. William Seymour was the son of former slaves. It was radical for white people to be going to a church where a Black leader is in charge,” said Ramirez. For his Azusa Street stop, Feucht is partnering with the Azusa Street Mission and Historical Society, a ministry founded in 2006 by Fred and Wilma Berry, a pair of Black pastors. His stop will run concurrently…

Is Herman Cain’s Long-Running Minstrel Show Finally at an End?

By Anthea Butler

…des to 999. Allowing his private dalliances to become a public spectacle while pretending to tout “family values” is hypocritical. What’s more, Cain may want to rethink all of the things he said about black people being brainwashed into voting for Democrats. He is going to need the solace of the black church to comfort him when he gets off the campaign trail. Somehow, though, I don’t think his church will be a very comforting place when he returns…

Vatican Instruction on Cremation Rankles Many, But Give it a Second Look

By Karen E. Park

…had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered around Boston I felt a momentary panic. Where could I ever go to find her again? Last week, just in time for the Feast of All Soul’s Day, celebrated each year on November 2, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a new Instruction regarding the burial of the dead and the treatmen…

High Ark: A Geologist on the True Meaning of Noah’s Flood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…are all describing the same, worldwide, catastrophic flood]. But their similarities basically boil down to: there was a large flood, and there was someone left on Earth to describe it. And if you think about it—those are required elements of any flood story. There had to be a big flood, and someone had to survive to record it, or we wouldn’t know about it at all! The real insights are in the differences between the flood stories. Whether they are…

When Mormons Mobilize: Anti-Gay Marriage Prop. 8 Effort ‘Outed’?

By Joanna Brooks

…July, when letters read in Sunday meetings of men’s and women’s church auxiliaries conveyed a $10 million fundraising goal for July and August and instructed Church members to donate exclusively to protectmarriage.com. Donors were asked to identify their home congregation on donation forms, according to campaign observers, so that Mormon congregations could track their progress towards meeting fundraising targets set for each congregation based o…