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A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…ating the brain activity of temporal lobe epilepsy, which they linked to dramatic visionary religious experiences and to less dramatic feelings of sensed presences. It turns out, though, that hooking up a hardboiled atheist to a machine, known as the transcranial magnetic stimulator, produced no such experiences. “It was a great disappointment,” Dawkins related after 40 minutes on the machine. “Though I joked about the possibility, I of course nev…

Religion or Insanity? Two Upcoming Murder Trials Will Ask the (Burning) Question

By Joseph Laycock

On October 20, the murder trial of self-proclaimed Satanist Mark Dobson will resume in Barrie, Ontario. On May 2, 2012, Dobson was discovered in a hotel room where he had drugged and killed two female acquaintances—his girlfriend and an older woman he called “mom.” He had also attempted to take his own life and allegedly told the shocked hotel staff, “I did it, it was a satanic cult thing.” Dobson’s attorney has found three psychiatrists to testi…

Aliens To Arrive in Alabama Today!

By Ben Brazil

…o learn, only hours ago, that an alien craft will appear in the skies over Alabama sometime tonight, will remain for three days to prove the existence of extraterrestrials, and will remove the veil that has prevented human souls from being who we really are. The message—actually more a missive of hope than a warning per se—comes courtesy of “Cosmic Beings known as the Federation of Light,” as channeled by Australian medium Blossom Goodchild. Origi…

Friending Pope Benedict on Facebook?

By Kate Childs Graham

…h of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict sent the following text message to Italian mobile phone users: “Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help.” JPII had been texting Italians with a “thought of the day” while he was still alive, so Benedict was simply carrying on this tradition. Pope Benedict has more recently used text messaging to communicate with attendees throughout this year’s World Youth Day in Sydney,…

A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

…zen or so jumbotrons spread throughout the park. I’ll never forget hearing analyst David Gergen’s gaffe “Obama simply did not win the white vote…” (or something to that effect). I remember looking around in astonishment and raised the rhetorical question to myself “where is David Gergen talking about, because almost everyone around me is white?!” CNN was doing real-time roll calls of the states’ voting patterns. Whenever Obama was projected to hav…

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Sarah Posner

…vice on how to win over religious voters. Amy Sullivan, an editor at Time magazine, published The Party Faithful, both a castigation of Democratic elites for allegedly failing to understand or connect with religious voters and a blueprint for electoral outreach. Mara Vanderslice, the former director (and critic) of John Kerry’s religious outreach opened Common Good Strategies to advise Democratic candidates on faith outreach, before founding the M…

DeMint Uses Christian Reconstructionist Mailing List To Raise Money For Angle

By Julie Ingersoll

…a. Yesterday, Vision to America sent a fundraising appeal in support of Nevada’s Republican nominee to the U.S. Senate, Sharron Angle, from South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint’s political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund. Like Rand Paul in Kentucky, DeMint is bucking the Republican establishment by endorsing and raising money for candidates like Angle, whom he calls a “true conservative:” The Senate Conservatives Fund has endorsed Sha…

An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland

By Shabana Mir

…t Muslims miss. They miss the ability to pray outdoors, in airports and bazaars: they miss not only the ability to pray under the sky, but the knowledge that the act of praying in public might be shared vicariously by many. Or at least the act of praying would not be construed as something completely Other. The experience of prayer would not be clouded over the knowledge that it meant terror, alienation, and foreignness to onlookers. Nature and hu…

‘The Quiet Damage’ Details the Heartbreaking Effect of QAnon on Five American Families — But Critical Questions Linger

By Susannah Crockford

…QAnon on American families, which is Jesselyn Cook’s premise in The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. Through carefully researched individual narratives, Cook tells the story of people who got into QAnon and then rejected—or were rejected by—family members, and the grief and damage that ensues from these domestic ruptures. The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family Jesselyn Cook Crown July 23,…

First it Was an Insurrection Flag, Now Supreme Court Justice Alito is Caught Flying Another Far-Right Flag — An ‘Emblem for an Extensive Spiritual Warfare Campaign’

By Annika Brockschmidt

…cy proposal. It’s also pretty well known that he seems to be a deeply unpleasant person—something that can be confidently deduced from his snarky opinions as a judge on the Highest Court of the land; the way he behaves during oral arguments; and let’s be honest, his behavior during most of his public appearances where he performs a mightily embittered form of victimization. All in all, we’ve long known Sam Alito is as right-wing as the day is long…