Religion Dispatches
…own spiritual/cultural values. Liberals see porous borders as a symbol of freedom: free movement, free choice, and the free creativity generated by the intermingling of peoples. To conservatives, the very presence of so many Illegal “aliens” proves that the borders they once imagined as the key to a safe, orderly life have long been crumbling around them. To give undocumented people legal status would be further proof that the nation’s walls and…
Read More…genitalia, they were told that any parody of religious art is offensive and cannot be displayed. The SBAS stall was then removed entirely from a student fair. Publically mocking religious truth claims probably isn’t very productive, and not all government institutions must be “religion-free zones.” But in a democratic society, the same rules must apply to everyone. These cases point to a pattern of de facto censorship of atheism. The good news is…
Read More…n development as individuals, as well as for social belonging. Much of the freedom Americans enjoy as individuals has evolved in relation to the freedom enjoyed by their corporate organizations, mediated by constraints imposed on those organizations by federal and state governments. As documented in a 2011 article in the NYU Law Review by Darrell Miller, for-profit corporations already possess an impressive list of constitutional rights: some Firs…
Read More…e American Family Association, Donald Wildmon states: America’s most basic freedoms of speech, conscience and the free exercise of religion are under attack and the time to act is now. If President Obama succeeds with his priority of passing the Hate Crimes law, H.R. 1913 – the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, it could lead to the criminalization of the Biblical view of homosexuality in sermons and elsewhere. An offended homosexua…
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…st of the Transatlantic Christian Council, Muntarbhorn said that religious freedom is not absolute and must yield to homosexual rights. “There are some absolute rights,” he said in apparent reference to LGBT rights, “but there are some that are not absolute.” He went on to explain that “freedom of expression and expression of religion” are not absolute rights and that they can be curtailed when necessary. While praising a desire to engage with the…
Read More…f freedom. Labor unions, in this view, could only be biblical if they were free associations and if any other laborer was free to undercut the wages they negotiate by agreeing to work for less. Specifically, in terms of developments in Wisconsin, fifty years of spreading “biblical economics” has created a religiously sanctioned battle against labor unions: Labor unions are gangs of legalized thugs. They do not believe in allowing employers and emp…
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…ion to what we hope will merely be our greatest recession, the doctrine of free market fundamentalism remains the alpha and the omega of American conservatism. That doesn’t prevent Christian conservatives from favoring government subsidies for the rich; they simply reframe it as God’s will, recruiting the creator as a crony. Biblical capitalism isn’t, ultimately, a supply-and-demand religion. Between business conservatism’s love of laissez-faire a…
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…mean accepting a duty that is imposed by any force beyond the individual’s free choice in the immediate present. For Gandhi, such glorifying of free choice was the antithesis of true spirituality. Yet why dwell on the differences between these two spiritual giants, whether in their ideology or their views of the Jewish plight under Nazi rule? Why not focus on the very important areas of agreement? Buber and Gandhi agreed on the central value of tr…
Read More…ences such as radical gay sex education being taught in school, threats to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” At Crikey, Amy Coopes responds to critics within the LGBT movement who dismiss the marriage equality movement as a form of assimilationism: Some in the Yes camp wish to paint this as, quite simply, a question about amending the Marriage Act to allow two consenting adults to marry, and in a sense, of course, that is true. But as wi…
Read More…the Manhattan Declaration, which appears as a blueprint for the “religious freedom” wars, and in the opposition to the HHS contraception benefit requirement, and in opposition to the jurisprudentially accepted understanding of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. Chaput has made his views clear in other venues. In 2004, he suggested that because abortion was a “foundational” issue, there was only one way a faithful Catholic could vote. In…
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