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Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…

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6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

…ons. I don’t mean a simplistic parity (e.g., giving each religion an equal number of words or lines). Religious balance instead means presenting each religious tradition as fairly and accurately as possible. While that might seem an obvious good to most RD readers, the textbook review process also taught me that entrenched, politically powerful, and well-organized forces in Texas and beyond are working to undermine that kind of religious balance i…

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Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

…d the 2008 election; as I’ve argued before, he gained support across the a number of demographic groups, and it’s difficult to make the case that Obama won because he finally shed the Democrats’ (imagined) hostility to religion. If you’re a religious person whose faith compels you to favor government programs to support the less economically blessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury…

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Demonized and Demonizing No More.

…to identify myself within a queer narrative was the fact that there were a number of different narratives available to me. Identifying as an atheist, I went through a similar process, but there weren’t the same range of narratives. And I kept meeting other atheists who felt the same way I did—who felt like their identities and their stories weren’t represented in the most dominant atheist narratives.   How would you characterize narrative American…

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Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

…call for racial justice in his community as “ideological” rather than as reflecting the lived experiences of his PoC sangha members. Why did he not include any of the first-person reports by Triratna members of color who have experienced racism within and beyond white dominant Triratna spaces? In fact, in a commonly employed reactionary reverse victim strategy, the only identity group he does name as vulnerable in Triratna are conservatives. One a…

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A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…

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Oklahoma Bill Would Violate Basic Freedoms, Rewrite the Ten Commandments

…m the Lord your God … You shall have no other gods before me,” directly conflicts with the principles on which the United States was founded. No law—and this would be a law—can tell an American to worship a god, let alone which god. Americans are free to be godless (as a growing number are), or, if they wish, to worship every god from every holy book. Olsen’s commandments would prohibit free expression and art by outlawing the creation of graven i…

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Are You Rapture Ready?

…n exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning. Since one day equals 1,000 years for God, that means there was a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture. “We hope that anyone would get a Bible out and try and prove that this is wrong,” he said. I suspect the advent of May 22,…

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‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

…. Simply identifying as an atheist at first felt uncomfortable to me for a number of reasons. All of my family members remained Christian, so it was easier for me to tell them that I was “searching,” or at least agnostic, rather than atheist. Additionally, I wasn’t sure that the label applied to me. Finally, now, as a historian of religion, when I introduce myself to strangers, they inevitably ask me about my religious commitments. When I explain…

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What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

…commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportionate number of Covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week’s shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let’s see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more. All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, b…

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