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Prosperity Gospel Prayers Aren’t Sufficient to Save Hurricane Victims

…orgiven, confiscated properties are returned, and slaves and prisoners are freed. Osteen’s interpretation turns Jesus’s vision of legal, structural relief for the marginalized into a call for human self-improvement. Laurie and White-Cain present two prevalent views of free will that are often used to support Republican opposition to what they call “Big Government.” Whether believers are supposed to rely more on God or themselves as a hurricane des…

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What’s Islamophobia, and Do I Have It?

…fter years under an atheist and totalitarian regime, and in fear for their freedom—militarily superior Serbian militias preemptively engage in a mass rape and slaughter. This allegedly constitutes a rebuttal of my point about Islamophobia. But let’s continue with the argument, no matter how outraged we should be. Bosnian Serbs and Croats could have allied; with 56% of the country’s population, the two could have together demanded a secular constit…

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Not Cause, But Effect: Jared Loughner and Tea Party Rhetoric

…ment (or the expenditure of tax dollars). As Loughner explains, algebra is free. Charging a student for an algebra class amounts to selling a free product and is a scam.  If the world worked properly, grammar and currency would convey real value without distortion. But because of government practices of mind control and currency fraud, they do not. As a way out of these misrepresentations, individuals need to learn to dream, a practice that he lab…

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The Battle for the Meaning of Religious Freedom Day

…a long time. Indeed, what comes up first in a Google search for Religious Freedom Day is ReligiousFreedomDay.com, the work of a California-based Christian right agency called Gateways to Better Education. This group is part of a wider movement that seeks to evangelize children in public schools—as detailed in Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. Gateways states that they work w…

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Trump’s SOTU Address Was a Christian Nationalist Dog Whistle

…ludes the following line (emphases mine): In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a Christian nation. Time magazine’s transcript, meanwhile, reflects what the president actually said: In reaffirming our heritage as a free Nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. It’s entirely possible that the speech wasn’t deliberately edited; that Trump, who’s famous for ad-libbi…

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Is Accreditation of Religious Institutions a “Farce”?

…oard of overstepping the First Amendment and infringing on their rights to free religious exercise and free speech.” Among the colleges and seminaries that spurn regional accreditation, many justify their decision by citing freedom from governmental oversight, a position compatible with the conservative mentality often dominant at such institutions. Ideologically consistent, this claim has the ancillary benefit of helping its makers dodge the cost…

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The ‘Common Sense’ Argument Against Marriage Equality

…r and their children.” (The infertile, asexual, post-menopausal, and child-free by choice need not apply.) Anderson echoes precisely what same-sex proponents have been saying all along with regard to children: that the desire to marry is in fact a desire to be more traditional. As Frank Bruni put it, gays and lesbians are no longer cultural rebels; “We’re aspirants to tradition, communicating shared values and asserting a fundamentally conservativ…

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Are Religious Leaders Prepared to Engage “Religious Liberty” Questions Post-Hobby Lobby?

…ders need to help their congregations tell the story of American religious freedom, both its successes and its failures. Celebrate the ways religious liberty provides the crucial bulwark that allows for pluralism of belief and experience: offer special worship services, sermons, education programs, and social media outreach efforts that critically engage the tensions between freedom and liberty in religious practice and American citizenship; take…

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Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

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Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

…ing things like “go back to the Middle East, you pedophiles.” We should be free to criticize all religions, Islam included, but that doesn’t mean we should feel free to deride and scorn its adherents. It should go without saying that this isn’t a problem with atheism, but it is a problem among atheists and it’s one that is being largely ignored. 9/11 is frequently lifted up as the genesis of “New Atheism,” and it’s not uncommon to see people at at…

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