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What’s the Problem With a Good Placebo?

…ldare to ER. In Chinese culture, acupuncture is similarly reinforced and encoded as effective therapy. Antibiotics, and apparently also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been…

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Australian Prime Minister, Church Leaders Resist Marriage Push; South Korea’s Anti-Gay Christians Block Pride Parade; Morocco Arrests Men for ‘Obscene Act’ of Kissing; Global LGBT Recap

…the most tolerant toward homosexuality, while a connection can be observed between societies in which religion tends to hold a central position and greater intolerance in this area. As a citizen of a democracy that is still young, allow me to show how proud I am of the level to which Spain accepts homosexuality and to recognize how valuable this acceptance is. Because I do not believe that tolerance can be divided. There is no middle ground betwee…

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The Revolution Will Not Be Fetishized: Taking Resistance Beyond the Spiritual Industrial Complex

…ve resistance even if it means putting those toned, spandex-clad bodies in between Trump’s administration and the most vulnerable populations—Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, queers, disabled people and women. To be activists against poverty and hunger, they would need to embody resistance through concrete action. They would need to support the efforts of groups like the anti-war Code Pink that resorts to reason, empirical evidence and visibility to cha…

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Stephen Broden, Beck’s Black Robed Regiment In Action

…who has spoken at tea party rallies and who claimed at Michele Bachmann’s Code Red rally against health care reform that health care reform was “against the law of nature and nature’s God” and “against the Judeo-Christian ethic that this nation was built upon.” Broden also appears in Maafa 21, a propaganda film that claims that reproductive rights are a conspiracy to commit “black genocide.” The film has been promoted by the Frederick Douglass Fo…

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Cherry-Picking in the God Gap: A Post-Election Conversation on the Religious Vote and the Battle to Spin it

…that I guess? Look, it’s hard to argue that the Biden campaign didn’t do a better job of faith outreach than Clinton’s campaign did. But that also needs to be put in the context of Clinton herself: we know that Christians overall and particularly evangelicals are not as friendly to women leaders as secular folks are, and we know that Clinton has been relentlessly demonized for decades. It’s hard to say for sure, then, but it’s entirely possible th…

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Pope Tweeted into Retirement

…interactive nature of communications, he says, relativizes the distinction between producer and consumer so that “communication appears not only as an exchange of data, but also as a form of sharing.” The Pope’s recent creation of a personal Twitter account in December 2012 seems to have been an attempt to engage with this interactive world without compromising papal authority (though as Elizabeth Drescher notes here on RD, this is a nearly imposs…

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Hillary Flirting with Fear

…close enough for vote-tampering to give him a victory. Was it “values” (a code word for conservative religiosity) or national insecurity? When Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville asked “Why America Wanted Change But Voted for Continuity” in 2004, they came up with the best answer: “A narrative is the key to everything, and the Republicans had a much more coherent attack and narrative… The president was able to keep the ele…

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In its Battle for ‘Life’ the Antiabortion Movement is Willing to Expose its Enemies to Death — And There’s an Old Christian Theology that Supports Them

…heology that pits life and death against one another in a battle. This war between life and death weaponizes life against mortals who live and die, and it’s this militant theology that animates reproductive politics in America. For years, it’s been clear that giving birth in America is life-threatening. Maternal mortality rates here are shockingly high, especially for a nation with this much wealth. This is especially true for Black women, whose m…

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South Dakota Bill Could Legalize Killing Abortion Doctors

…e made in the committee hearing on the bill last week. “If you look at the code, these codes are dealing with illegal acts. Now, abortion is a legal act. So this has got nothing to do with abortion.”  Here is the bill in its entirety: FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:      Section 1. Th…

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Supreme Court OKs State Funding Scheme for Religious Schools and Bars Challenges

…ayer of my persuasion (we’ll call her Petra from Yuma) finds using the tax code to benefit such schools offensive to the First Amendment. In the past, Petra from Yuma could go into court to challenge the tax credit as a form of state-subsidized religion. But Petra (or a Thomas Jefferson redivivus, for that matter) is now out of luck. The core issue is whether providing the tax credit has the exact same practical impact as simply giving tax revenue…

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