TRANSGENDER EQUALITY: “Bernie Sanders was for Transgender Rights Before it was a Thing ” / Secular Talk / Kyle Kulinski ☮
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Category Archives: Religion
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: “Does the U.S. President Need to be Christian?” ☮
US POLITICS: “Donald Trump’s Campaign Has Turned Into One Long Hate-In” / The Nation / Laila Lalami ☮
The candidate demonizes Muslims while pandering to vets.
Whether Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination, no one can tell—but what’s already clear is that he’s brought fascism back into the mainstream. At his rallies, Trump promises to make America great again by pouring scorn on women, Mexicans, African Americans, Asians, immigrants, LGBT people, the disabled, his opponents, and reporters who dare to criticize him. Every time he comes up with a new insult, his supporters whoop and cheer, seemingly confident in the belief that they are not now, nor would they ever become, one of his targets. Lately, he has taken to picking out individual protesters—a Black Lives Matter activist, a Muslim woman, a Sikh man—and offering them up to the jeering crowd, before having security escort them out.
The message is unmistakable: There is no room at these gatherings for anyone who isn’t white and Christian. A Trump rally is nothing more than a hate-in.
ABRAHAMIC RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY: “Dalia Mogahed: What do You Think When You Look at Me?” ☮
ATHEISM: “Atheism has Ancient Roots and is Not ‘Modern Invention’, Claims New Text” ☮
Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.
In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.
Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.
His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.
SCOTUS: “Scalia” ☮
h/t: Being Liberal
ACADEMIC STUDY: “Roots of Homophobia More Pronounced in Individuals With an Unacknowledged Attraction to the Same Sex” / University of Rochester / Professor Richard Ryan ☮
Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, co-authored a [April 5, 2012] study that looks at the roots of homophobia and how this attitude is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires. The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. The study was conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara.
To read more about the study, please visit http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.ph…
WHITE-WING CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN HYPOCRICY: “If Churches Really Cared About People” ☮
h/t: Evolution and Reason
ATHEISM: “Put an Atheist on the Supreme Court” / The New Yorker / Lawrence M. Krauss ☮
Who should replace Antonin Scalia? On Monday, the Times reported that the Justice himself had weighed in on the question: last June, in his dissenting opinion in the same-sex marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges, Scalia wrote that the Court was “strikingly unrepresentative” of America as a whole and ought to be diversified. He pointed out that four of the Justices are natives of New York City, that none are from the Southwest (or are “genuine” Westerners), and that all of them attended law school at Harvard or Yale. Moreover, Scalia wrote, there is “not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination” on the Court. (All nine Justices are, to varying degrees, Catholic or Jewish.)
Scalia’s remarks imply that an evangelical Christian should be appointed to the Court. That’s a strange idea: surely, the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution strongly suggests that court decisions shouldn’t be based on religious preference, or even on religious arguments. The Ten Commandments are reserved for houses of worship; the laws of the land are, or should be, secular. Still, I’m inclined, in my own way, to agree with Scalia’s idea about diversity. My suggestion is that the next Supreme Court Justice be a declared atheist.
CHRISTIANITY AND CHILD RAPE: “On Christian Protesting” ☮
Always Question Authority 