Religion Dispatches
…ares. There’s something strange afoot on Starship UK—a strangeness perhaps best illustrated by its “voting booths,” which show the ship’s citizens a video and then gives them two options—to protest what they have seen, or to forget the video’s contents, having their memories selectively erased. The voting booth won’t show the Doctor the video—it can tell he’s not human, and thus not entitled to vote—but he chooses the “protest” button, sight unsee…
Read More…work. 2) Follow Harris’s instructions There’s no need to wonder about the best way to critique Harris’s work: you can just follow the very clear instructions he gives. Harris’s explanations of the critiques he wants to see are a tad oblique, but he generally invites two methods of attack: a) Disprove the idea that morality is that which makes everyone the most happy. Luckily, Joesph Bingham has already done this for you. In the University of Chi…
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…rt to consider state-level bans of abortion—or laws on fetal personhood—as best interpreted, from an originalist perspective, as matters of ensoulment or quickening. This, they may argue, would make the private decision on abortion best understood as a question of a constitutional right to religious free exercise. Such debates, held before, are already emerging again. And, when they do, it’s far better to learn from the voices—including Muslim voi…
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…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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…7-8. The event featured such notable figures as Rev. Scott Lively, perhaps best known as an advocate for the notorious “Kill the Gays” legislation in Uganda, and retired Army Major, Stephen Coughlin, a former high level military intelligence analyst and Fellow at the White House National Security Council. The publications of Coughlin’s think tank, Unconstrained Analytics, argue that Black Lives Matter in conjunction with ISIS, Antifa, Neo-Marxists…
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…The revelation of these memoranda and of the use of such techniques is the best recruiting tool we could ever have given to al-Qaeda. Again, does waterboarding have utility or not? Does it create more pain than pleasure? These questions have pretty well defined the contours of the current debate. Buried near the end (at page 37) of the fourth memorandum, dated May 30, 2005, is a discussion that gives away the lie that this is a debate about utilit…
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…ve in front of you. And I just don’t believe in truth. I think we have the best attempt to reach these truths, and we can make the best decisions as we have all this information in front of us, but the scientific method would always say: you’re going to have to re-prove it. I think that humility is the cornerstone of an advancing species. It’s the ability to say “I don’t know, but I’m going [to] move forward carefully with reason.” I agree with yo…
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…is the tool of innocence; so many of these armed men said, “the gun is the promotion of peace.” But it’s also simultaneously the transgression. That’s what the thrust of “Thy Rod” and the sexual innuendo of it means—the way that’s also the transgression of a White man who’s doing his best James Brown imitation. Because in that imagination, Blackness is a kind of sexuality, and Kunnemann possesses that potent sexual power in the same way that he cl…
Read More…Catholics, black Protestants, and the unaffiliated “all believe America’s best days are ahead of us.” Jones called the pessimism/optimism gap a “deep cultural divide,” associated with a perceived decline in the influence of white men. “White working class Americans are less happy and less apt to say our best days are ahead of us,” he said. Relatedly, and not surprisingly, PRRI found that supporters of Donald Trump are more likely than even other…
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…hers, the paper’s site was part of a group of Russian-backed websites that promoted Nazism, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism for an American audience, though this one stood out as a site that specifically sought to play a disruptive role going into the 2020 elections. The paper began as a Pennsylvania politics blog in April 2020. It was, according to Hatewatch, “mirrored online by a Russian website… affiliated with creators of the pro-Kremlin p…
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