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Feared Taliban Leader Killed, But Military Strategy is Not the Answer in Afghanistan

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…estroy. Like the North Vietnamese, many Afghan activists—and an increasing number of Pakistanis—are motivated to fight against the American presence because of their love of freedom. They see the US military, like the Soviet forces before them, as a foreign occupying power. The Taliban, as draconian as they may be, are seen as enemies of the enemy: us. It is the US military presence, paradoxically, that is uniting the Taliban and marshaling wide p…

Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy

By David Frankfurter

…account of this process of inspiration in a lecture recently published in French in the journal Le Terrain (#50, 2008). What’s the most important take home message for readers? The most important take-home message is that “evil” is a way of evaluating atrocities and misfortunes, both real and imagined, rather than something “out there,” and that when people historically have talked, conceptualized, and believed themselves to be confronting real e…

The Magic of the Higgs Boson Particle

By Yoni Pasternak

…supposedly asked Pierre Laplace, a famed late 18th and early 19th century French scientist, why the word “God” hadn’t appeared in his Celestial Mechanics. “Sir,” Laplace is supposed to have responded, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” With the purported discovery of the Higgs boson particle, you’d think the explanatory urge to turn to supernatural concepts has been further mitigated, but coverage of the event seems to suggest otherwise. Here i…

Purpose Driven Atheism: Secular Maharishis Seeking True Believers

By Frank Schaeffer

…oiled down to just our family! In The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, French philosopher André Comte-Sponville tries to present a “humanitarian foundation” for the life of unbelief. Comte-Sponville says that his “way of being an atheist,” was influenced by the Catholicism of his youth. He acknowledges the positive aspects of faith. And then there is Ronald Aronson, a philosopher teaching at Wayne State University and contributor to Religion D…

Is the Boson Particle “Hated by God”?

By Arri Eisen

…nd last week one of the scientists working at the collider was arrested by French police for those possible terrorist connections mentioned above. But, this is just the beginning. Two well-known physicists, Holger Boch Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, have a wild idea they’ve posited in actual research publications. They hypothesize this particle, the Higgs boson, might be, well, hated by God. And hated by God to such an extent that if one occurred it…

How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…hile that corner of the night sky near NGC 6809 is still pulsing out prime numbers. –Rome, December, 2055 _________ The article that may one day be written about religious responses to E.T. will of course bear little resemblance to the fiction above. But, religion aside, the possibility of confirming alien life is less remote than you might think. On May 21, 2014, Dan Werthimer, scientific director of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life) at…

Civil Religion v. Uncivil Religion; With Deadly Consequences

By Daniel Schultz

…an his own ratings. Rousseau had that faith, too. It drove the mobs of the French Revolution. It doesn’t take much of a prophet to see that the Trumpist civil religion—so intolerant of anyone who would disagree, so contemptuous of the health, safety, or flourishing of others—cannot last long before the arrival of the fire next time. American partisan conflict has nothing on the sectarian battles of Europe, but it’s getting old, and people are dyin…

Reza Aslan’s Missed Opportunity

By Micha'el Rosenberg

…nities in which I participate, my Facebook newsfeed has a disproportionate number of people who are both passionately liberal and deeply religious. So it didn’t take very long—especially on a Sunday, when what else should a person do besides post videos on Facebook?—for this interview to spread like wildfire. The video was shared with the headline “The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done,” and was, in my newsfeed, invariably accompa…

Olympic Ritual and Religion, Hosted by a Religion-less State

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…the god worshiped at the altar of his revival was supposed to be. He had a number of suggestions, among them the spirit of internationalism and common (not cosmopolitan—he was insistent on this point) humanity… and even peace which, as he wryly noted, “has become a sort of religion among us.” He suggested still more coyly, in a famous essay composed in 1929 (and entitled simply “Olympia”), that there was a kind of paganism at the heart of his revi…

3 Takeaways from #Easter2015

By Michael Schulson

…nd then again around 1:00pm CT. Accordingly, #Ostern (German) and #Pâques (French) both peaked around the European noon. (The data for #Pascua is more messily distributed, seemingly a weird postmodern artifact of Spain’s distinctive colonial reach). 2) “Like invitations to a hipster wedding” Tags like #jesus arise organically. So, seemingly, do popular 2015 tags like #mygodisnotdead and #thetombisempty. But, along with billboards, TV commercials,…