Religion Dispatches
…don’t knows” or “others,” that gets to about 20% and 40%, respectively, at best. These are not small discrepancies, and based on these falsely inflated statistics, Silverman makes startlingly inaccurate claims, like that there are 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustr…
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…the line!” But of course I need to look at it through my perspective. The best I can say is I do my best to be mindful of it. I never intend to attack or criticize people. What I always intend to do is expose the shadow side that people are usually not aware of. The type of comedy I enjoy is when the comedian delivers a line in such a way that it makes us become aware of something we previously weren’t aware of. The punch line is delivered and th…
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…es before we decide that, just maybe, our theory about the Bible isn’t the best fit with the idea that God is love—and hence isn’t the best fit with the content of the Bible itself? Any theory of the Bible that requires me to ignore my neighbors in favor of teasing out the correct meaning of Romans 1:24-27 seems to do an injustice to the Bible’s heart. If there’s a core message to the Christian Scriptures, it’s that Jesus—a person, not a book—is t…
Read More…ng the hypocrisy of his words. Daly, similarly, did what he and Focus does best—not getting that the message they’re putting out starkly reveals their own hypocrisy. For example, Bush tells Daly: “I don’t believe you can lead by demonizing somebody. I believe you lead by convincing somebody,” he says. “And in my case, I was unable to convince (some people) on different issues. I understood that.” Here’s where tears of frustration begin. While Daly…
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…that if the idea of genius evolved to preserve wonder, that we must do our best to develop new constructions and new ideas to best encapsulate wonder in whatever era we are heading into. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s to expand how we envision genius, and to see and recognize it where we find it. For example, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a welcome figure, not just for his deft explanations of complex phenomena, but because as an…
Read More…n-sponsored Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, perhaps best known for its open letter to Hillary Clinton, days before the 2016 election, challenging the candidate on her support for reproductive health and failure to support religious freedom in the face of “a well-financed war… being waged by the gay and lesbian community”; and William Galston, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution scholar who was a leader…
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…njoying refugee status in the United States is an affront to our country’s best traditions and aspirations for religious freedom and equality under the law. President Obama rightly said there should be no “religious test” in our policies on these matters. But Senator Ted Cruz, among others, has said in response to the Syrian refugee crisis that the U.S. could limit refugees to Christians. I am reminded of the Spanish Inquisition in which Jews and…
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…knees and stop, drop and roll roll roll out of that broke-down palace. The best thing I got from Wheaton was lifelong friends—and finding a place to live in community, doing life, raising our families, becoming more fully ourselves as the years pass. Together. Mark grew up in Laguna Beach, Calif., and after college, returned there to start his own family. One of the many things he taught me was the importance of place. Where you choose to live mat…
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…way, we cannot avoid believing in stories. We can only hope to choose the best ones. How to do this? I propose that good stories are stories that tell the truth, and bad ones are ones that do not. I fear that I may have lost some of you just now. In particular, most atheists I know would be quite critical of the idea that stories are related in any meaningful way to the bedrock truth about the world. So in the interest of keeping everyone on the…
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…e plain, it becomes obvious that the debate over the new traditionalism is best construed not as a debate between traditional and modern varieties of ethical discourse, but rather as a debate involving at least two traditions or strands of modern ethical discourse: a tradition dedicated to a very narrow conception of how traditions ought ideally to operate and a tradition dedicated to the project of loosening up that conception democratically and…
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