Religion Dispatches
…d appendix of the mind.” Faith is completely redundant. It may take a long time for people to figure out it’s redundant, but given what we know about psychology and the way the brain works and the way evolution has taught us not to just battle each other into submission, but to cooperate and help each other, there will come a time when people see it as unnecessary, a philosophical distortion of reality. Does religion make people do bad things? Fre…
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…ia WikiCommons During my decade as the religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, I spent a lot of time with the cardinal in Chicago and abroad. In fact I probably wrote more words about Francis Eugene George than anyone else. We had our disagreements, some of them quite public. Yet despite our differences—and they were doctrinally, philosophically, and culturally legion—we developed a mutual respect and genuine affection for each other. While I w…
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…ual sex. Free Community Church Executive Pastor Miak Siew told The Straits Times: “He was the first religious leader to voice support for LGBT people. He discerned that in the time of his retirement, he was called to minister to the lost sheep of the LGBT community – to speak up for the voiceless and the marginalised.” Dr Yap was consecrated the first Asian bishop of the Methodist Church in Singapore and Malaysia in 1968. After retiring from full-…
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…e Apocalyptic AI movement receive attention or accolades from the New York Times or Time the more we can expect their movement to grow. This will present a serious challenge to traditional religious communities, whose own promises of salvation may appear weak in comparison to the “scientific” soteriology offered by Kurzweil. If Moravec was right in proposing that we will upload our minds into machines, then traditional offers of heavenly afterlive…
Read MoreSources inside the LDS Church say that a woman will for the first time in the history of Mormonism offer an invocation or benediction at the Church’s worldwide General Conference, this April 6–7, veteran religion journalist Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune reports. The announcement comes after Mormon feminists and their allies mounted a “Let Women Pray” letter-writing campaign this winter. (LDS officials say that the Conference progr…
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…ortunity Herod gave him to educate the women into the New Age: “We measure time by cycle ages, and the gate to every age we deem a milestone in the journey of the race. An age has passed; the gate unto another flies open at the touch of time. This is the preparation age of soul, the kingdom of Immanuel, of God in man; and these, your sons, will be the first to tell the news” (7: 12-14). In short, there was already a spiritual underground in Roman…
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…d loudly through 130 years of Zionist thinking, casting self doubt and sometimes even a sense of shame. It must have echoed loudly in Netanyahu’s mind as he pondered his response to the Obama administration’s new pressures upon him. He has built his career as a symbol of the self-esteem Israeli Jews gained by showing their strength. If he simply knuckled under to the Americans, he might easily trigger enough doubt and shame in his followers to bri…
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…believers’ feelings, and/or the defamation of religion can lead to prison time . The laws in these countries are not just dead-letter relics, but are sometimes enforced. For example, in 2006, a German court handed down a one-year suspended prison sentence and 300 hours of community service for the offense of printing the word “Koran” on toilet paper, while a 2008 case in Finland led to a two-year prison sentence. Amusingly enough, there is also a…
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…the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses—in the rejection of the Trinity or End Times beliefs—but other times his theology diverges sharply from Jehovah’s Witnesses, such as his belief that Hitler got the idea of a “1000-year Reich” from Jesus, and that, therefore, the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany was in accordance with divine will. (Jehovah’s Witnesses were in fact persecuted and sent to concentration camps in Nazi Germany.) While a lot of…
Read More…the most dramatic demonstration of these mysterious ruptures in space and time. By one of those fortuitous coincidences that almost make otherwise rational people a bit superstitious, it’s been almost exactly a century since those lights were askew in the heavens; this week we were all gifted with a vision of one of those most terrifying and wondrous predictions, the unblinking eye of a black hole some 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, about…
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