Religion Dispatches
…ms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking t…
Read More…lobal Islamic Ummah.” While Breivik wants to ban race-mixing and limit the number of non-Europeans in his future Europe, he is quite happy to offer assistance “to our Buddhist and Hindu brothers if they request our help against Jihadi attacks or campaigns.” In the end, as long as everyone stays within their own ethno-religious territory, all is well. Fences make good neighbors in the wake of the clash of civilizations. Breivik hoped conservatives…
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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,…
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…awkins case at Wheaton may yet prove to be the exception to the rule, as a number of insiders are holding out hope that she will be reinstated. Perhaps there’s even a slight chance of a broader reversal. But whatever the outcome for Hawkins, the extent of the conservative crackdown on evangelical campuses is worth noting. One of the frustrations mentioned again and again by sources is how dishonest the schools have been about their motives for rem…
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…llion atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. 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…
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…ill respond to images already widely distributed and discussed is not very helpful. Intolerant extremists like the Afghan Taliban banned much more than images of Muhammad, but many earlier Muslims depicted their prophet in drawings out of reverence; Islamic manuscripts before the 17th century did, in fact, portray Muhammad; at times in full and otherwise with his face whited out or veiled. Most Muslim scholars today condemn the illustrating of the…
Read More…adical far right, described in the FBI’s Project Megiddo report as “a vast number and variety of groups, such as survivalists, militias, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, Christian Identity churches, the AN and skinheads.” The report called Christian Identity “the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism…
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…020, there have been 146 Covid deaths in Sri Lanka with a disproportionate number coming from the Muslim community; despite making up less than 10% of the population, Muslims account for nearly half of the reported deaths. A Muslim leader in Sri Lanka informed the authors that the number is actually higher, and that 82 Muslims have died, with over 70 cremations. The cremation of the victims was carried out by the state without the approval of the…
Read More…nod is to take up. The Supreme Pontiff may, if he so chooses, increase the number of members of the Synod of Bishops by adding bishops, or religious to represent the religious institutes, or clerics who are experts, to the extent of fifteen percent of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith…
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…, seven thousand black South Africans were killed under apartheid, and the number imprisoned was far higher. The Catholic Church neither kills nor imprisons ordained women and their supporters; excommunication, while painful, is not at all the same, even when financial losses accompany it. In 2007 I published an article in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion explaining in some detail why highly educated white women simply cannot say that t…
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