Readers may recall the fuss that ensued when former pope Benedict ordered an investigation into the largest organization of American nuns, saying that they were too concerned with social justice issues, too supportive of health care reform, and not enthusiastic enough in pushing the Catholic church’s anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-contraception message.
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Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show has stumbled on to new, hipper, variants of that old-time religion.
(This clip aired on April 1, 2015. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
Our university is currently going through the very last stages of renewing its accreditation as an institution of higher learning. It happens every ten years and is a big deal. We have to show the accrediting body that we are meeting our mission of providing a quality education to our students and have the resources to do so, so that our degrees actually mean something. The process requires a lot of work for the university because we have to collect all the evidence to support our case.
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One of the most powerful weapons that highly controlling religious groups have to prevent defections is to threaten apostates that leaving would mean they would lose contact with family members, especially their children. We know that Scientology does this as do fundamentalist religious groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church and the Exclusive Brethren. Mormons who defect also tend to be shunned by those who remain but it is not a formal policy of the church or as severe an excommunication.
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Back in 2000, journalist William Greider wrote something that immediately resonated with me as being an accurate statement about the way society’s views change on major issues. He said:
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Bob Jones University is an extremely fundamentalist Christian institution that not only denounces homosexuality but also even prohibited inter-racial dating and marriage. When that policy was challenged by the IRS that denied its tax-exempt status because of its discriminatory policies, the university took its case against the IRS all the way to the US Supreme Court, where they lost.
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In America we are used to having religion-based educational institutions that teach an anti-science, anti-gay, anti-sex, and anti-women curriculum. It is appalling that these schools, because they shelter under the mantle of religion, benefit from tax-exempt status which means that all of us are essentially subsidizing the propagation of odious viewpoints. But apparently there are also schools in Great Britain that have tax-exempt status that promote the most appalling views.
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Seven children died in a fire that was caused by a hotplate that had been kept on all night and set their apartment on fire. The hotplate was not left on due to oversight but was done deliberately to avoid breaking Jewish law that prohibits working on a Sabbath, and turning a hotplate on is apparently considered ‘work’.
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The premises outside St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco has four tall side doors with sheltered alcoves that were apparently being used by homeless people as a place to sleep. The church apparently did not like this and came up with a novel way to discourage them, as one reporter observed.
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One of the benefits of religion, if you want to think of it that way, is that it enables one to shift responsibility to god if things go wrong. A new study by my friend and colleague Julie Exline and her graduate student Joshua Grubbs, who are in the department of religious studies at my university, finds that “people are likelier to blame God for their bad moral behavior when they believe they were born to act that way.”
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