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Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

…Deseret News included Trijicon in the list because the company “inscribed coded biblical references on high-powered rifle sights used by the U.S. military.” That’s it. Other than the founder’s purported religious beliefs, its inclusion is arbitrary. Why not include Ebay, whose founder Pierre Omidyar is a Buddhist, or any of Sheldon Adelson’s businesses? Trying to draw a line between “business with religious roots” and “everything else in global c…

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Catholic Anti-Nuke Activists Looking at 20 Years in Prison a True Test for Religious Freedom

…ons, such as a Sikh who successfully sued the Army in 2015 over a grooming code that would have required him to shave his beard and remove his turban. Justice, not to mention old wisdom about geese and ganders, demands that our judicial system should treat like cases alike. Either sincere religious conviction should be a defense, or it shouldn’t. There should be a healthy debate about the place and extent of religious exemption in contemporary, pl…

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Did the Duggars’ Fundamentalism Cause Sexual Abuse? Not So Fast

…dren is worth getting riled up about. Nor do I mean “Let’s be cautious” as code for “Maybe this isn’t an important question.” To the contrary, it’s a vital question. Yet it’s also an easy question to approach in an unhelpful way. Precisely because sexual abuse is appallingly common, compassionate people look for patterns to explain why it happened in this instance and not that one. And that’s a good thing: abuse prevention means recognizing common…

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Clashing human rights visions for LGBTs at United Nations; More Mixed Messages from the Vatican as Family Synod Begins; Timeline of Worsening Homophobia by Turkey’s AKP Party; Global LGBT Recap

…eloped world to make our country and continent, the dumping ground for the promotion of all immoral practices, that have continued to debase the purpose of God for man in the area of creation and morality, in their own countries. Honduras: LGBT advocates meet in country plagued by violence The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers reported this week on the more than 100 people who attended an LGBT equality strategy session in Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Ad…

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Conservative Points in Pope’s Speech Include Liberal “Chasers”

…human life at every stage of its development”—which has long been Vatican code for abortion—Francis doubled back to a progressive agenda, coupling it with a call to end the death penalty: “This conviction had led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty,” he said, causing progressives to jump to their feet as conservative attendees looked confused at the switcheroo that F…

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California Tribes Denounce Catholic Church’s “Fraud” and “Blatant Fabrication” on Serra Sainthood

…of a new documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code. Also distributed at the press conference were excerpts from A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California Indians by the Spanish Missions, by Elias Castillo, which include Serra ordering whippings for Indians who fled the mission. The statement by Amah Mutsun Tribal Band chairman Lopez concluded: The Catholic Church will someday realize that canonization of Serra h…

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How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

…words, as Nones. The economists involved in this study focused on the zip code where a clergy sex scandal had occurred. They found a “large and statistically significant effect” on charitable contributions in those zip codes after a scandal, and not only to Catholic-based charitable organizations. The researchers theorize that perhaps once a person stops attending church, the social pressure to be charitable declines. Interestingly, however, thes…

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Justice v. Revenge: The Question Beneath the Question of Prison Reform

…our brains, which makes the admonition “an eye for an eye” in Hammurabi’s code sound less like savagery and more like a way to keep everybody in check. To punish more than the guilt deserves has been a legal problem, apparently, since at least 1792 B.C.E or so. The distinction between justice and vengeance matters, because vengeance costs an enormous amount to taxpayers, and, as reformers on both sides of the aisle argue, our own moral selves. Pe…

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Brazilian Evangelicals Launch ‘Sin-Free’ (Read: Gay-Free) Version of Facebook

…traditional marriage. It was only in 2000 that the discriminatory ban on ‘promoting’ homosexuality was lifted. Since 2004, Cyprus has implemented an anti-discrimination law (Equal Treatment in Employment and Occupation Law 2004) that explicitly forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment. In 2013, the penal code was amended to include sexual orientation and gender identity thus criminalising all discrimination against…

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White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

…specific set of institutions and political positions, is regularly used as code for “most of Islam.” And those who obsesses about Islamism often flirt with more bald-faced statements of Islamophobia. Critics of white supremacy and patriarchy, on the other hand, point out that these ideologies are pervasive in the culture at large. The blame casts a wide net, not in order to single out a minority group, but in order to implicate a culture that’s be…

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