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A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…lmost make the demonization of psychology sound like a stand-in for anti-Semitism. For example, Hubbard wrote that psychologists control finance and alleged that a conspiracy of psychologists was behind every major world conflict. Is this a fair reading? I don’t know. I don’t necessarily think he was anti-Semitic, no more so than any other white guy in the 1950s. He was a man of his time. There was a lot of discrimination in our country and a lot…

Punks vs. Monks: Rockers Speak Out Against Genocide in Myanmar

By M. Sophia Newman

…violence appears to have been incited by Buddhist monks. The Rohingya, who number almost one million, have been denied citizenship since 1982 and subjected to denials of the rights to travel, marry and have children. The discrimination appears rooted in the ethnic group’s Muslim faith, which makes them a tiny minority in the majority-Buddhist nation. The most notable participants in the violence are a movement of Buddhist monks called “969”. The…

Like a Virgin

By Donna Freitas

…out fear of rejection). Reclaiming virginity allowed some young women to admit their sexual experiences and pasts to others in the middle of communities where many young people felt afraid to acknowledge their sexual behaviors for fear of losing friends, respect, and even their ability to stay in a community. Granted, this particular benefit of born again virginity highlights a religious system obviously oppressive and, for many, broken when it co…

If You Liked The Martian You’ll Love These 3 Sci-Fi Shorts

By Andrew Aghapour

…nce. Is this a god, or the story of sci-fi itself? Antihypoxiant. Here at The Cubit we’ve been tracking shifts in our cultural attitudes towards health, diet, and medicine. In “Antihypoxiant,” Weir pushes a fictional scientist to the limit of a certain kind of care. The Egg. By far Weir’s most popular story, “The Egg” has been translated into over 30 languages and adapted into a number of short films. No spoilers. Just read it. Seriously, it’s a t…

Feeding on the Faithful: How Supernatural Thinking Empowered the Third Reich

By Eric Kurlander

…the sheer scale of the Second World War; and because of the unprecedented number of documents preserved in hundreds of archives and libraries across dozens of countries, this is obviously not the case. The second is that there’s little to no reality behind popular cultural representations of the Nazi supernatural. While many of these representations are exaggerated or erroneous, many others have some basis in reality. In the case of Hitler’s Mons…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…from reuniting, Cavid applied for asylum in Germany. He was assigned a dormitory room in a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia which “is situated among the mountains and my dorm is at the highest point.” Cavid has a disability that causes nerve pain and impairs his mobility. He walks with a cane. Isolated by language barriers and the landscape, bereft after his losing his partner, Cavid was pushed to his limits when Azeri immigrants recognized h…

Is Abortion No Longer Significant for Evangelicals — or Has it Just Become Like Water?

By Bradley Onishi

…ite evangelicals view the ability of a woman to receive an abortion: These numbers lead Burge to conclude that “there’s ample reason to believe large numbers of white evangelicals don’t place a great deal of importance on abortion and don’t think it’s likely it will ever be outlawed in the United States.” Burge makes a good argument for a shift in evangelical priorities. The numbers suggest that single-issue voters on reproductive rights are less…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

The Dirty Little Secret of Every Ponzi Scheme, or: Bernie Madoff’s 150 Year Sentence

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ff and Law stories has something to do with the confusion created by large numbers. The point is, in the financial sector, numbers need to correspond to some reality. Law’s paper notes were supposed to correspond to the gold held in his bank’s reserves. When the gap between numbers and real things grew too great, his system collapsed. It became, almost unwittingly, a nationwide French Ponzi scheme. Law was encouraged by the French regent to covert…