Religion Dispatches
…on proposed by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes intelligent design. David Fowler, head of the conservative Christian Family Action Council of Tennessee, which is affiliated with Focus on the Family, and is one of the bill’s primary lobbyists. In defending the bill’s language, he has tried to draw on comparisons to the famous Scopes monkey trial that took place 86 years ago in his state. “…[T]oday’s evolutionary…
Read More…ntrol law became law. So we’ve got a lot of really foreign concepts in our code, and what a refreshing, refreshing thing it is to have a longtime member of Congress have these ideas of restoring the constitution and restoring the integrity of the Second Amendment. So it comes to the time that was advertised for my being here. It says, Dr. Ron Paul, defender of the Second Amendment, awarded for his many years of defending the Second Amendment and p…
Read More
…ionists’ latest strategy. His is merely relying on what Forrest calls the “code words.” But their long-term goals remain the same: To get God into science class. The full statement in the Texas standards reads: “The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.” (Italics added.) McLeroy considers common…
Read More…ers listened to Sarah Palin’s convention address expecting heavy religious code, the scriptural allusions that have come to be standard fare in speeches by Republicans and Barack Obama. There wasn’t much—“a servant’s heart,” a prayer for her son sent off to war. But there was, for those with ears to hear it, a far more disturbing allusion: to Westbrook Pegler, a mid-century Rush Limbaugh, and then some. At the height of his popularity, he was more…
Read More
…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
…ive, suggested that these invocations of prayers and positive thoughts are code words for deliberate political inaction by elected officials. The theological commentary on this shooting is what my grandmother would describe as “too heavenly minded and no earthly good.” These conversations about prayer reflect a graver moral issue than “prayer shaming” during a time of tragedy. Since the beginning of this year, 12,223 people have been killed in gun…
Read More…s of the military, and that is protecting us from our enemies. The Uniform Code of Military Justice also prohibits things like adultery, so as we look at this slippery slope we’re on, what is the next step? Will we see a move to strike down that prohibition as well? Jackson and others speaking at the press conference also repeated the charge that repeal of DADT will cripple chaplains who will be forced to “water down their teachings” or perhaps ev…
Read More
…First, Douthat warns of encroaching “scientism” which, in this context, is code for failing to believe the supernatural truth claims of Christianity. Second, paradoxically, Douthat perceives a tendency among non-religious people to embrace the mystical belief systems that he himself rejects, like astrology or wellness. (So much for scientism!) Yet we don’t see any actual evidence that these trends are as widespread among the deconverted as he sugg…
Read More
…ience, and then you add to that DNA, which has been called things like the code of codes, the holy grail. We give it this kind of supernatural significance. So, I think it’s a combination of being a society that values data, being a society that equates progress with scientific development, and being a society that thinks that genetics—in part because DNA comes from you, from us, from we—is the ultimate information, the ultimate data. It’s like th…
Read More…Zawahiri, however, see jihad as a holy war. Just last week, the nefarious Egyptian doctor posted “general guidelines for jihad” on several online forums, as if he, of all people, is the authoritative voice for defining such things. Absurdly, for many people on the right, he is, the authoritative voice. Graham and others employ the term precisely in a way that legitimizes that understanding and gives currency to such usage in discourses about Musl…
Read More