Religion Dispatches
…sly is. If we still had a Democratic Congress, we’d have a much fairer tax code (plus better health care, plus a thousand other things). But okay, that’s me. When I look at vast movements in history—fascism, socialism, American capitalism—they arise out of contexts that were, themselves, created by lots of large-scale circular movements which are impossible to trace precisely. Who knows, perhaps the collective weight of Occupy-style consciousness-…
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…conservatism. To show how definitions of “religion” and “spirituality” are used rhetorically we need only consider how AA Toronto Intergroup, when charged with discrimination on the basis of creed back in 2014, defended itself by invoking section 18 of the Human Rights code, which allows a religious group to restrict participation to the faithful. So while AA presents itself to the public as a “spiritual” program, distinguishing itself from “relig…
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…ype of church, one not attached to a monastery and thus not “regular” (because it did not operate according to a monastic “rule”). After the Protestant Reformation and over one hundred years of bloody inter-Christian conflict, most everyone understood that these in-house debates would not be resolved with further debate; the ideas by then were simply too entrenched. So a new political idea was born, that of secular politics. If we cannot achieve c…
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…answer everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are not actively promoting the use of “supplemental materials” like pro-intelligent design textbooks such as Pandas and People, used in Dover, and its follow-up, The Design of Life. Evangelicals may not realize it, but such an approach is a risky strategy. It’s not just bad science, it’s bad theology. Such dichotomy forces students to choose between faith and science. After Dover’s trial wa…
Read More…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Fo…
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…own social contingencies. It reflected an envisioning of the body that infuses our contemporary consumer culture and that denies a fundamental difference between the body and the self. It attributes sanctity to the body so thoroughly that enhancing the body is considered a part of the transformative and transcendent process of self-development. Attempts by others to oppress or violate one’s body, in turn, are not only physical violations, but als…
Read More…that there had been calls for the judges to resign after they “ruled the abuser’s acts should not be considered ‘gravely dangerous’ in legal terms because the boy already ‘was making a precocious choice’ of his sexuality, an apparent reference to homosexuality.” Cambodia: LGBT magazine debuts NCB News’s Kristi Eaton reported from Phnom Penh this week on Q Cambodia, a print magazine directed at LGBT people and their allies, the first in “a country…
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…xample, that Britain’s embrace of openly gay diver Tom Daley should not be used to excuse some of its politicians’ Islamophobia. Belize: Court overturns sodomy law that had been defended by religious right Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin ruled on August 10 that the law criminalizing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” violates constitutional protections for human dignity, privacy, and equality before the law. The case had been brought…
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…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…
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…nterviewer, “Gays must have legal protections in terms of their rights and freedoms.” But in 2004 the government removed language protecting LGBTI people from a draft penal code, with the justice minister at the time saying it was “unnecessary to add sexual orientation because gender already covers it.” The timeline tracks anti-LGBT statements from columnists and party officials, including one made in 2010 by Aliye Kavaf, “the then state minister…
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