Religion Dispatches
…int that the New Atheism crosses the line and undermines its own effort to promote critical thinking. The problem with an exclusively negative approach to religion is twofold. First, while it helps sell books, it risks promoting intolerance and potentially even hatred of religious people. Atheists will point out that they do not fly planes into buildings or murder doctors, as some religious fundamentalists have done. However, it takes one visit to…
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…les, are banned. Rather, the camp is a ceremony, a call to bring forth the best in each of us, and to act accordingly. We are encouraged to live our entire lives as ceremony by one of the elders, in a mode that reminds me of the sacramental life—all of life and all of creation as a sacrament. And that means moderation in our participation of the dynamics that enable the Black Snake of Hopi prophecy. From what I could gather the Black Snake is both…
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…Gerbert questioned authority. He experimented. To learn which of two rules best calculated the area of an equilateral triangle, he cut out square inches of parchment and measured the triangle with them. To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models and devised an equation. (A modern physicist who checked his result calls it ingenious, if labor-intensive.) Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and con…
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…that if the idea of genius evolved to preserve wonder, that we must do our best to develop new constructions and new ideas to best encapsulate wonder in whatever era we are heading into. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s to expand how we envision genius, and to see and recognize it where we find it. For example, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a welcome figure, not just for his deft explanations of complex phenomena, but because as an…
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…e want to be loving, faithful to scripture and they are trying to do their best, so I can respect that and value where they’re coming from. When I was coming out to my dad a few years ago, as I recount in the book, he held strongly non-affirming beliefs. He did not instantly change his mind. It was a slow process. He was a good, decent, caring intelligent man before he changed his beliefs and he still is. I think that he’s now more able to faithfu…
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…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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