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Greed, Socialism and the Free Market

…ut human greed and human nature, then how does that become an argument for free markets? If human beings naturally compete, and are inclined to take more than their share, then why is this not an argument for greater regulation of such markets, not less? And while we are at it, what is an economic system for? Does it serve the ends of efficiency and innovation, or of justice? To be sure, an economic or any other social system should serve all of t…

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“Freedom” vs. “Liberty”: Why Religious Conservatives Have Begun to Favor One Over the Other

…liberty suggests a “defensive response.” “I think you could say we are all free, but what does free mean? It’s such a general concept,” said Green, noting that liberty can have more immediate and personal connotations, when spoken to the right audience. “That word seems to resonate with a particular segment of society,” he said. It’s very clear which segment that is. Over the past ten years, lobby groups on the religious right have latched onto “r…

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‘Atheizing’ the Dead, Religious Doughnuts, & Tax-Free Witching

…e Church of Body Modification has run into trouble with her school’s dress code. The 14-year-old is looking at a ten day suspension if she returns to school wearing her prohibited nose ring. In Roswell, New Mexico, a group of students have been suspended for giving their teachers boxes of doughnuts with religious messages attached to them. Romania has decided not to tax its witches and fortunetellers. One reason being that the witches and fortunet…

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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

…shed Bahgat’s account of his ordeal, which concludes defiantly: I wish for freedom for the thousands of people unfairly detained in Egyptian prisons. I reassert my rejection of the criminalization of journalistic work, the use of the Penal Code to imprison journalists, and the trial of civilians in military courts. Azerbaijan: Activist Flees Persecution, Struggles in Germany Alturi.org has published a profile of Cavid, an Azerbaijani human rights…

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Original Spin: Progressives Dismiss Conservative Theology at Their Peril

…w it, of the truly great evil: the subordination of every kind of personal freedom to the arbitrary will of the government. “Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline,” he said in his 1957 State of the Union address. “Should we persistently fail to discipline ourselves, eventually there will be increasing pressure on government to redress the failure. By that process freedom will step by step disappear.” Since, in this view,…

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Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

…oorly reconstructed Ba’athists on the Muslim margins.) Suleiman stressed: “Freeing slaves” is so frequently mentioned as a meritorious act in the Muslim tradition that, in the 8th and 9th centuries, biographies of Prophetic companions cited, as virtues, manumission; Muhammad’s wife, Aisha, was lauded for “freeing six hundred slaves.” All well and good: Muhammad changed what slavery meant, or at least sought to, and the tradition developed in respo…

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The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

…her successes. Faith, as that Pope never tired of repeating, can never be promoted by force; truth’s power lies its truthfulness, nothing more. Now in a great many ethical and political matters, John Paul II was as anti-modern a Pope as the Church has seen in recent memory; his successor even more so. But on the devilish topic of religion, science and free enquiry, these same Popes have elected to stand emphatically on the side of the moderns. Th…

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Free Will, Fate and FiveThirtyEight: The Theology of Election Polls

…kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feels unconstrained by predetermined trajectories? AL: Precisely. Which, bizarrely, means that free will is actually more constrained! MHS: Well, that’s kind of the ethic behind big data, right? That, at least in aggregate, decisions that feel like free choice actually follow very clear and pre-determined patterns, and these…

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Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, & Foodie Faith

…or our own culture. People ask me, what’s the harm? Why not just go gluten free? And the answer is that going gluten free has all sorts of effects. It affects your relationship with your friends and family. It affects your relationship with your own past and foods that you love. While there might be some culture in which celebratory foods don’t typically contain gluten, that’s not our culture. Do you think there’s an incentive to setting yourself…

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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…tisfied customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service age…

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