Articles

Quick, when was the last time you personally experienced dismembered bodies randomly strewn across a roadway after a high-speed, head-on car crash? The bloody ravage left behind after a gruesome murder fueled by rage? The soul-emptying silence after a suicide by hanging? The bullet-shredded corpses of children and uncomprehending pleas of the wounded moments after yet another mindless school massacre mercifully ends?
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Even though Americans unaffiliated with any religion now make up nearly a quarter of the United States’ population, our political influence is disproportionately slight and likely could remain underpowered for a good while. The problem is that “Nones,” as demographers call us, are a surprisingly disparate group whose fragmented nature undermines developing the unity and interconnectivity necessary for an effective national political base.
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What do skydivers and mystics, for example, have in common? Their thrilling payoffs are completely psychological and essentially identical. This fascinating nexus between fear and faith—and their close cousin, pain—is investigated in a thoughtful recent essay by Guy Claxton in the e-zine Aeon, which calls itself an online “sanctuary for serious thinking.” The gist of the essay is that skydivers, self-harming teens, people paralyzed ...
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Why Does American Christianity Perpetuate? Reason #1: Skeptics Inadvertently          Enable It By Rick Snedeker, published by Patheos Nonreligious Channel's Secular Spectrum blog, March 7, 2018. As I read the new March 2018 edition of Church & State, the monthly magazine of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I was reminded of one important reason Christianity so relentlessly perpetuates in America: committed secularists often feel they must enlist Christians to...
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Last week, “America’s pastor” Billy Graham became the first religious leader ever to lie in honor at the US Capitol Rotunda, a precedent criticized by secular groups and others as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution. Graham’s treatment was hardly the first time Christianity has been notably elevated inside the Capitol Building. During National Bible Week late last year, I was frankly stunned to hear a speech of ...
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Contrary to what ancient Christian theologians hypothesized, the universe was not necessarily created from a pre-existing something. I was recently reminded of this while watching a captivating two-hour British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) documentary, Everything and Nothing: The Amazing Science of Empty Space, first released in 2011. Program host Jim Al-Khalili, an Iraq-born British theoretical physicist, University of Surrey professor ...
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During the decades I lived in Saudi Arabia, I eventually stopped noticing the dense black veils that hid the faces of local Muslim women. It was just the way it was, like the endless sandy sabkha (salt flats) in every direction. Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Saudi women generally accepted their veils as a religious obligation, ...
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