Religion Dispatches
…ly on being the ones with the oppressed religious views. If for no other reason, these other, quite conventional religious views are important to cover. Not because they should dictate policy, but because they show how a singular religious view should not….
Read More…ration (or two) of Catholic women from the church. Not only were women who used contraception selfish harlots, but the very use of contraception was leading them to have abortions: It may be that many people use contraception with a view to excluding the subsequent temptation of abortion. But the negative values inherent in the “contraceptive mentality”… are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation when an unwanted life is conceived. … Th…
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…would provide “Biblical guidance to your everyday ups and downs.” With it, users select from a scrolling list of “blessings” (friendship, new home) or “burdens” (anger, money), shake the phone, and get a Bible verse to guide reflection in the course of daily life. What is cool about apps like the Holy Roller is not, however, just what they contain and how that has been selected, but where they go and what comes back. That is, a user of the Holy Ro…
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…e Care Act, to pay for the abortion coverage. Experts believe this could cause insurance companies, for economic reasons, to drop abortion coverage altogether, leaving women without a way for paying for an abortion, even in situations in which a continued pregnancy poses severe health risk. In addition, the Smith bill would prohibit women from using flexible savings or medical savings accounts — which are funded by their own money, not taxpayer mo…
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…n recommended that LGBT individuals be banned from teaching in schools because they are supposedly disproportionately likely to be pedophiles and are therefore a threat to children. Unfortunately, in Russia such a rash legal initiative, based on views that have been entirely repudiated by actual science, is not outside the realm of possibility—and you can bet Cameron knows it. Cameron is among those made-in-America anti-LGBT activists who are expo…
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…assuming Christian’s guilt and possibly leading to his death. Noah deftly uses the racial contract to critique the anger directed at the social unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He suggests that this anger is rooted in what they see as people “destroying the contract that you thought they had signed with your society. Now imagine if you were them watching that contract being ripped up every single day.” This invitation to imagination r…
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…blast me across the face of the earth. I use strange abstract symbols and codes to communicate both useless and necessary threads of conversation to my species. Sometimes it just makes me want to sit back, put my feet up, and marvel. I’m a good old-fashioned humanist—or, at least, about two-thirds of me is. I’m an academic in that great behemoth we call “the humanities”; a humanist by training. I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time reflecting on…
Read More…g as they don’t then take that belief and beat me over the head with it or use that belief to write laws that enshrine my place as a second-class citizen in a country where I work and pay taxes and should be entitled to the same rights as everyone else. There can be no true tolerance until the guy with the club can be convinced to drop his weapon; to realize that no matter how scared he is of the snake, it is the snake that is the victim, and not…
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…eason, federal judges repeat the religion and ignore the treason when they use Duché’s prayer to interpret our Constitution. Justice Alito used the Duché story to uphold a 40-foot concrete cross on government land maintained with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. Alito spent a paragraph on the election of Duché as chaplain without mentioning his name or his perfidy: “…Thus, when an Episcopal clergyman was nominated as chaplain, some Congr…
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…would probably not seek to change other ex-gay ministries that continue to use “reparative therapy” or other harmful “treatments” on LGBT people. “We’re not interested in fighting anymore,” Rodgers said. We want to work on suicide prevention and anti-bullying causes. We’re more concerned with seeing human flourishing.” It’s all very promising and conciliatory talk from an outfit that has done much harm to the LGBT community in the past. But if the…
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