Religion Dispatches
…ntry. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he told me he woul…
Read More…and I’ll do an event, and the level of electricity, of excitement, and the number of people who say: “I always had these questions, I always wondered about this, I always knew there was another way to understanding this…” It’s really… It blows me away. Every night, at one of these events, I just… Wow. What an amazing thing to be a part of. [WG]: Tell us, what has been your favorite comment from a reader, or, one or two of your favorite comments. […
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…ments meant to prevent them from speaking out about their mistreatment. (A number of sources confirmed that similar non-disclosure agreements have been used at Cedarville, and Steele indicated that most members of Gordon’s LGBTQ working group signed confidentiality agreements, although he refused, in spite of pressure.) The conversation was over RD recently spoke with two former Asbury University professors who are part of the evangelical “brain d…
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…dings with the 11 subjects (from page 1555, see below). Bussee was subject number two and Cooper was number one. Both Bussee and Cooper were rated as Kinsey 6 (exclusively homosexual) before change and a 0 (exclusively heterosexual) after change. Since there was no follow-up, this study has been used to support the proposition that gays could change to straight via religious mediation. For instance, not knowing any of this background at the time,…
Read More…urdered more than 300 million individuals,” going so far as to divide that number up: “3/4 Hindu/Buddhist, Animist/Pagan 1/4 Christian/Jewish/Zoroastrian.” So, while it’s true that he borrows a lot of imagery and language from the Christian crusades, such a list of world religions indicates that Breivik also thought in terms of modern religious diversity. It wasn’t merely Christendom versus Islam, it was a world of peaceful religions defending the…
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…hurch in America (OCA). Both are, unsurprisingly, characterized by a large number of American converts in their ranks. Nearly 70% of those in the AOA are converts, while the OCA is about evenly split, 50-50. Similarly, the GOA, arguably the most progressive Orthodox body in America—“progressive” being a relative term—remains almost exclusively composed of ethnic Greeks. Focused on their own ethnic political concerns, including the position of the…
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…publicly proclaim their disbelief. These reactions to the increase in the number of people classified as “religious Nones” represent an assumption based on a market approach of religion and an understanding of religion as a binary reality. Just like any other business, success in the religious marketplace is the goal, and it is measured by the number of people who identify with your particular brand of religion (or irreligion as the case may be)….
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…ive the wrath that is to come in November. We’ll see. Ted Cruz opened door number three on Tuesday: “This man is a pathological liar,” Mr. Cruz said, ticking off Mr. Trump’s distortions, his infidelities, his penchant for conspiracy theories. “The man is utterly amoral.” As I mentioned the other day, the rejectionist route seems to be the one Baptist leaders are taking as well. Any of these options involves some risk, but door number three is a pa…
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…ctivity bubble to the surface. Lost in the debate is the large and growing number of thoughtful people who self-identify as “spiritual, but not religious” (that is, as non-affiliated), an admittedly complex phrase than doesn’t allow for easy analysis either. But, as has been frequently noted on RD, religion is highly dispersed in the modern period; it’s not going away, it’s just going elsewhere. Sometimes the “spiritual, but not religious” person…
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…human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…
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