This Week in Religion and Spirituality

Tags

abortion, biblical, book of mormon, choice, christian, church, comicbook, convert, criticisms, enemies, fred phelps, freedom, gita, hate, immigrant, inerrancy, islam, jesus christ, latter-day saints, lds, liberty, love, mahabharata, manual, mark driscoll, morals, mormons, muslim, ordination, prayers, pro-life, religion, religious, revert, sanskrit, secular, student, superhero, supreme court, white men, women, worship, zinnia

For Love or Threat: Pro-Life Prayer Includes Names, Photos of Abortion-Rights Advocates

Watching the abortion debate play out online rather than in real life, it can appear to the casual observer that violence and threats are primarily things of the past—a vague and dark period of the early 1990s sandwiched between Waco and Mogadishu. But with an impending Supreme Court decision over clinic buffer zones and large numbers of clinics shutting down in the face of new regulations, hostilities between activists outside abortion clinics have escalated in recent years. [Read more]

Secular Pro-Life “Fetus Worshippers”?

Should we defend freethinking spaces from anti-choicers like Secular Pro-Life? I wanted more information on this organization as I have seen them at conventions. [Read more]

Muslim, Immigrant, Teenager…Superhero: How Ms. Marvel Will Save the World

It’s not often that the launch of a new comic series gets a lot of attention in the mainstream media, but Ms. Marvel #1 is an exception to the rule. Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American teenage girl, the first Muslim superheroine, got a lot of press. When the first issue was released earlier last month, I was eager to pick up a copy. [Read more]

LDS Church “Non-Negotiable” on Women’s Ordination

“Divisiveness is a result of unrighteousness,” declares the Book of Mormon Student Manual, before discussing how foolish it is for a group of people to insist on a particular name—an odd complaint coming from an organization that really wants you to call it The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and gets annoyed if you capitalize the d in day or forget the hyphen, or if you apply its nickname, Mormon, to someone it thinks doesn’t deserve the name even if they share a lot of Mormon history and belief. [Read more]

The Only True Church

What do Mormons mean when we say that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is “the only true church”? It’s easy to see the offence that claim can cause. It smacks of arrogance, as if to say “we have the truth and others don’t.” [Read more]

Is Coverage of Liberal Religion a Media Fail?

Anyone following the fortunes and controversies around the hottest new media start-ups last week saw criticisms that these ventures, led by white men, have failed to hire a diverse staff of reporters and editors. [Read more]

You Can’t be the Face of Religious Liberty and Spew Hatred of Religion

A favorite game of outspoken atheists is “Punch the Low Hanging Fruit.” It comes often in the form of social media flame wars in which intellectuals take on nonsensical believers making asinine claims about things like biblical inerrancy and Christian morals with no basis in the Gospels. [Read more]

What Drives Muslim Reverts/Converts to Distance Themselves from Other Muslims?

Nancy Qualls-Shehata, a revert/convert who blogs as the “Muslimah in Progress” at Patheos Muslim, wrote this great post two years back about how Islam has room for everyone. [Read more]

What “Religious Freedom” Looks Like

So-called “religious freedom” bills are springing up like maggots on corpses. Some of you may wonder what such freedom looks like. Zinnia can tell you: she knows just what that freedom looks like to a trans person. Think about that, the next time you blithely make an appointment, never once worrying that your doctor will refuse to treat you because you’re gay or a trans person or someone who makes their shitty little god angry. Think about that the next time you see people legislating hate. [Read more]

Phases of the Convert

I go back and forth on whether I call myself a convert, sometimes depending on the circumstance. The truth is that I am a weird hybrid where I grew up on stories from The Mahabharata, chanting Sanskrit prayers, practicing transcendental meditation, and reading the Gita. At the same time, I didn’t identify those things as Hindu things. Despite all these things, I figured I was Christian because that’s what everyone else around who looked like me was. [Read more]

We’re Running Out of Enemies

I’m sure there will be another Fred Phelps, that some CEO will take the culture warrior role that Cathy is vacating and that Driscoll will relapse. But for the moment, we’re running short of people to mock. [Read more]

 

You are viewing this email from eAtheist.com – Visit our website for news, podcasts, free ebooks, quotes, videos, debates, and see how to join a local non-theist group near you.