Religion Dispatches
…ople of a different religion that they don’t know what their religious rituals actually mean is ipso facto not a historical argument but a sectarian one. The claim that Christians unknowingly practice a Pagan mystery religion has a long history combining sectarian claims with goofy pseudo-scholarship. It was Protestant Reformers, in fact, who first accused their Catholic rivals of adulterating Christianity with Paganism. However, it was during th…
Read More…ly opening in Africa, it is a great time for Mormon feminists to take a deep breath, shed our well-earned fear of excommunication, and work towards greater understanding for the temporal and spiritual challenges and strengths of women (including LDS women) worldwide, including our Spanish-speaking sisters here in the US. For Mormonism 2011, it’s adelante, hermanas!…
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…ia appeared to have gone in all the right directions, so why had it politically failed? And why didn’t we expect it? It’s because of this mind-map: If an Arab/Muslim is culturally Western, he is naturally in favor of democracy; if culturally other, he is some kind of authoritarian. I’m saying this because of the New York Times’ coverage of Tunisia’s revolution, which expresses a deep concern for Tunisia’s “secularity,” a term that vexes me precise…
Read More…ir displeasure. In 1991, while the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hilaleah case was making its way to the Supreme Court, a muzzled goat head was found in the police parking lot. The head was part of a campaign of harassment aimed at mayor Julio Martinez, who was attempting to clean up the city after the previous mayor was suspended for corruption. Martinez’s supporters also received cow tongues and dead fish in their mailboxes. These gestu…
Read More…Idaho reprinted in the March issue of the Ensign, I read it and sighed heavily. Callister boldly claims that his talk encapsulates God’s word and “trumps all the opinions” on sex and morality, including those of “psychologists, counselors, politicians, friends, parents, or would-be moralists of the day.” To recap: sex is allowed only within heterosexual marriage; masturbation is “self-abuse”; pornography is “any picture or narrative that feeds the…
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…Weiss acknowledged the ethical reprehensibility of this chess move, but he also called us out for our selective levels of voyeuristic sympathy: “It’s like a two-tiered system,” he noted. “If a superhero knocks over a building and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they’re not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it’s the worst thing we’ve ever seen. I totally u…
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…hink that you could invade a Muslim land, and we would not invade you, but Allah will have soldiers scattered everywhere across the globe.” The discrepancy in Mohamud’s mind between reality in the media and reality of actual events speaks to McLuhan’s assertion that media are extensions of man. There is, of course, no real equivalency between the actions of a teenager seeking to become operational through the Internet and the actions of the most p…
Read More…recent article on reasons that atheists shouldn’t equate religion with mental illness was no exception. But I think the hypocrisy and arrogance of this tactic merits a little more venom. So here’s a little more venom. Has anyone lobbing “mental illness” as a pejorative considered the irony of not being a mental health practitioner making this diagnosis? It wouldn’t be especially egregious were it not for the frequent complaints by non-believers an…
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…disenfranchised by the Shi’a regimes of Bashir Assad in Damascus and Nouri al Maliki in Baghdad. On the other hand, the psychopaths and believers are often foreigners, including Muslim youth from Britain, the US, and other Western countries, like the cruel executioner who appears in the YouTube videos of the beheadings of foreign journalists and aid workers who, according to some authorities is believed to be a 23-year old former rapper from West…
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…ist belief [from the U.S.]. But, on the other hand, you have to have a fertile soil where these ideas can take root and develop. People take from the American creationist version whatever elements they can use within their own cultural context. In the United States, it’s very important to creationists that one can give at least the impression of [creationism] being a science. So you have the development of scientific creationism, intelligent desig…
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