Religion Dispatches
…watching California and the vote on marriage. Because if you fail there to stop it, if you fail to stop it, what will be unleashed across the world will be a spirit worse than radical Islam.’” In late September, Sergey Brin, cofounder and the president of Technology at Google, took a public stand in opposition to Proposition 8. The statement, titled “Our position on California No on 8 campaign” read in part: “As an Internet company, Google is an a…
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…than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he told me he would. Yet here we are. There’s a philosopher at the UC Riverside I admire named Eric Schwitzgebel. One of his more popular theories is his theory of jerks, which he defines as follows: “the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools…
Read More…lobal Islamic Ummah.” While Breivik wants to ban race-mixing and limit the number of non-Europeans in his future Europe, he is quite happy to offer assistance “to our Buddhist and Hindu brothers if they request our help against Jihadi attacks or campaigns.” In the end, as long as everyone stays within their own ethno-religious territory, all is well. Fences make good neighbors in the wake of the clash of civilizations. Breivik hoped conservatives…
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…omes from bullets or a virus. When an electorate is scared enough, it will stop turning to democracy to solve problems. It will turn to the party that promises to restore “law and order,” that is, rule by white power. Seen in this light, right-wing calls to stop “politicizing” mass shootings start to look about as apolitical as the “Jesus 2020” campaign—that is, not apolitical at all. And there’s plenty of evidence to back up Stoehr’s point. Repub…
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…FBOs the UN has in mind as partners. In 2007, nearly two decades after the Stop the Church action, for example, headlines indicated “Pope skirts condoms issue in World AIDS Day Statement”— reminding readers of the ongoing entanglement of reproductive justice, AIDS/HIV prevention, and the Catholic Church—and who can forget Pope Benedict’s role in declaring homosexuality an “intrinsic disorder” earlier in his career as Cardinal Ratzinger? Of course,…
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…2020. Hopefully that’s not true. Hopefully it’s just memes. Hopefully the worst rallies of the movement spent their energy four years ago. But hope, by itself, is not enough to diffuse fascist movements, not enough to stop religious violence, not enough to stop an apocalyptic conspiracy theory that’s still champing at the bit to murder any leader or elected member of government, or official who opposes the former president….
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…ms, we relinquish our power, and give them authority over us. It’s time to stop giving our power away and instead find ways to come together with others, as Jesus did, and be the loving community of God in the world. I’m not asking us to found yet another organization. What I am asking is that we stop giving a fuck about what anti-gay Christians have to say. They can say whatever they want, but we must give it no authority over our own lives, or o…
Read More…room slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.” That was the moment that the president turned into a jackleg preacher. A jackleg preacher is an untrained preacher who relies on tried and true tropes to get his audience to respond to preaching. If a jackleg is really good, he or she can get the money or whatever else they want by hitting the sweet spot, that emotiona…
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…ches would stop quoting Leviticus and Paul on the subject of sodomy, would stop saying that tolerance for homosexuals is a mark of moral decline, and would stop using tax-exempt funds to campaign for repeal of pro-gay ordinances and statues, there would be fewer gay-bashers around. Organizers of the Day of Dialogue have already defined the “with whom” question to the detriment of any potential interlocutors even before the conversation starts. The…
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…FBOs the UN has in mind as partners. In 2007, nearly two decades after the Stop the Church action, for example, the headline “Pope skirts condoms issue in World AIDS Day statement” reminded readers of the ongoing mire of reproductive justice, AIDS/HIV prevention, and the Catholic Church. And who can forget Pope Benedict’s role in declaring homosexuality an “intrinsic disorder” earlier in his career as Cardinal Ratzinger? Of course, the negative im…
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