Religion Dispatches
…ose either secretly or overtly a Taliban-like, religious, strict religious code upon all Americans, which is ridiculous.” Honor killings, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and other abuses are “un-Islamic,” he said, adding that there is “no debate among serious Muslim scholars about that.” As far as fear-mongering that that Muslims seek to supplant the Constitution with shari’ah, Khan noted, “there is room for individual religious pract…
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…ovidential success derived from the nation’s fidelity to God’s unforgiving code. It is easy to be seduced by these beliefs into some very strange conclusions. Christianity, after all, is not Judaism, and the Christian religion begins with the assumption that it is not about nation-building or Kingdom-creation anymore. The “Kingdom of God” that Jesus preached is precisely not the Kingdom of Judah; it took the disciples quite some time to get this p…
Read More…d art trump writing. Hazel and Gus, who, like the author, are residents of Indianapolis, visit the “Funky Bones” sculpture, where children frolic upon enormous dry bones. On this, Green reflects: “To dance on the dead is not to dishonor them.” Green’s notion of religion goes well beyond institutional spaces: “I don’t think ministering requires a religious context,” he says. Here Green is aligned with those atheists who find beauty in God and the r…
Read More…ntrol law became law. So we’ve got a lot of really foreign concepts in our code, and what a refreshing, refreshing thing it is to have a longtime member of Congress have these ideas of restoring the constitution and restoring the integrity of the Second Amendment. So it comes to the time that was advertised for my being here. It says, Dr. Ron Paul, defender of the Second Amendment, awarded for his many years of defending the Second Amendment and p…
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…calculated pi long enough, you’d eventually find the works of Shakespeare coded in 1’s and 0’s. “Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, a coding of our motions and all our thoughts through time, all our memories…. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal,” Pic…
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…d not permit boys and girls to talk to each other, demanded a strict dress code, taught that girls should never run, and demanded that girls style their hair wavy—not straight or curly—because “wavy hair is attractive and becoming—it causes you to focus on the woman’s face instead of her body.” Gothard’s approved wavy hairstyle is meant, she said, “to attract men to your bright eyes, which will attract them to God, instead of your body.” Eliza ela…
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…ws prohibiting whites from marrying blacks, “Mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese, Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays,” or Filipinos. Twelve states forbade marriage to a “drunk” or a “mental defective.” A Washington state statute forbade marriage to any “drunkard, habitual criminal, epileptic, imbecile, feeble-minded person, idiot or insane person,” or anyone with advanced tuberculosis or contagious venereal disease. Interestingly, these prohibitions applied…
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…lmed by emails from educators around the country accusing him of trying to promote religion. Indeed, the version of the resolution that passed the Senate and was amended in the House said, “Evidence relating to global climatic change is complex and subject to varying scientific interpretations,“ and that “all instruction in the public schools relating to global climatic change be presented in a balanced and objective manner.” For anyone who follow…
Read More…the day in 1954 when the “Johnson amendment” language was put into the tax code was the day that “changed America” and set the stage for bad Supreme Court decisions and everything else that has gone wrong since the 1960s. Pulpit Freedom Sunday participants agree to preach political sermons, send them to the IRS, and dare the agency to sue them. The Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund) has offered legal help to c…
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…art of a discussion of workers’ rights, or to include Maimonides’ medieval code in a discussion of the death penalty, or to quote from the writings of twentieth-century Orthodox Rabbinical jurists to make a point about trying minors as adults. So what does this all mean? I would like to suggest that this marks the third stage in an evolution from a desacralized language of social justice to the current reclamation of the language of tradition. In…
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