Religion Dispatches
…guilt regarding the seven deadly sins. Shofars joined with shouts of Hallelujah to blast demons away from the Philadelphia area. And Garlow, of course, promoted Pulpit Freedom Sunday as a key to the nation’s “spiritual turnaround.”…
Read More…e handed me a booklet called The Way to Happiness: A Common Sense Guide to Better Living. The rules in chapter one are indeed common sense: Get care when you are ill; Keep your body clean; Preserve your teeth; Eat properly; and Get Rest. Other rules caution against harmful drugs, excessive drinking, and sexual promiscuity. Two chapters are devoted to the Golden Rule, stated both positively and negatively (“Try not to do to things to others that yo…
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…” theologies, and boldly touts its commitment to tolerance. Moreover, its code of ethics includes: “We commit ourselves to respecting the diversity of ecumenical, theological, ideological and personal expressions of the various faiths and traditions found in our community.” Since the aforementioned is an ongoing case that most likely contains more details than those I’ve offered, I use it only as a backdrop to illustrate the ease in which orthodo…
Read More…s, with a seat on the House Intelligence Committee, Mrs. Bachmann you know better. Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hardworking, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges. As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior. (emphasis mine) House Speaker John…
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…the 30-year average. Gallup also reports some unsurprising relationships between creationist views and religious affiliation, education levels, and political views. Creationism is strongly correlated with church attendance (two-thirds of weekly churchgoers subscribe to the view). Creationism is negatively correlated with education level (it is endorsed by only 25% of postgraduates, but 52% of Americans with high school educations or less). Final…
Read More…uired to solemnise same sex marriages, and continues to regard marriage as between one man and one woman, the advent of same sex marriage, widely supported across the political spectrum, creates an acute divergence between the church’s teaching on marriage and the civil law of the land. “It is likely that the ease with which same sex marriage was accepted in Parliament reflects a more general social move away from the church’s traditional understa…
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…tion” uttered out loud any longer. What one does hear, however, amounts to code for the same thing. Thus, R.J. Rushdoony’s still-influential ideas about forging a godly nation—a nation organized according to biblical law—take it pretty much for granted that godly social organization has whites on top. Rushdoony, who lived into the current century, condemned interracial marriage as “unequal yoking.” Un-dead David Barton, another hugely influential…
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…sents a much different global reality. Here the value at stake is not just freedom of speech, but freedom of conscience. The real contest is not between atheists and believers, but between those who affirm the equality of all persons of conscience and those who deny it. Aan was arrested in a small town in West Sumatra on January 18 after a number of local residents assaulted him at work in an act of self-styled vigilantism. They were reacting to s…
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…of the duties of the Muslim ruler and established furthermore an elaborate code of conduct for initiating war. And this is where we must look deeper. Privileging the legal literature above other kinds of literature—particularly the exegetical literature on the Qur’an and ethical treatises—in discussions of jihad almost inevitably leads to the conclusion that it is primarily a collective military obligation incumbent upon able-bodied Muslim men in…
Read More…nd there is a very big group of people who really understand the Koran far better than I do. I’m certainly not an expert, to put it mildly. But there’s something there that teaches some very negative vibe. I mean things are happening, when you look at people blowing up all over the streets that are in some of the countries over in the Middle East, just blowing up a super market with not even soldiers, just people, when 250 people die in a super ma…
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