Reading Time: 6 minutes Putin has enlisted the Russian Orthodox Church to justify his war on Ukraine as a crusade sanctioned by God, and the head of the church, Patriarch Kirill, has been only too happy to assist.
Religious Morality
Posted inReligion
God is a stick
Reading Time: 4 minutes God is the ultimate ad baculum argument. By claiming to be following God’s will, religious believers can concoct rules justified not by reason, but by the threat of force.
Posted inSex & Gender
Christians against pronouns
Reading Time: 5 minutes A private Christian university punishes employees for mentioning their preferred pronouns. It’s the latest cruel, futile attempt to hold back an incoming tide of cultural change.
Posted inReligion
Hell is more important than heaven
Reading Time: 5 minutes Hell is at the center of evangelical Christian theology, more so than heaven or even Jesus. Without belief in hell and the exclusionary politics it inspires, Christianity would cease to exist.
Posted inDeep Dive
How we create truth
Reading Time: 10 minutes White women have a storied history of fabricating assault at the hands of BIPOC men. On March 14, 22-year-old Eleanor Williams became part of a small subset of people to face legal consequences for false claims of abuse, which here sparked a season of hate crimes and drove three men to attempt suicide. Her elaborate […]
Posted inIdentity
‘They’ll know we are Christians by our love’
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been twenty years since the Supreme Court struck down anti-gay laws in Lawrence v. Texas. Same-sex marriage has been the law of the land since the Obergefell decision in 2015, and the sky hasn’t fallen. In December, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying this decision into law, with a filibuster-proof bipartisan majority. […]
Posted inReligion
The atheist has the moral foundation, not the Christian
Reading Time: 4 minutes Christians sometimes tell us that only Christianity can ground morality. Atheists can be moral, but they can’t justify their morality. Here’s an argument that inverts that and shows that only atheists can justify conventional morality.
Posted inLaw
Black collar crime
Reading Time: 2 minutes Big-money evangelists who get rich from religion are a blemish on America—and one currently is tangled in criminal charges.
Posted inCulture
Give me a head with hair
Reading Time: 2 minutes When it comes to hair and the religions: similar strokes for similar folks. For most religions, long well kept hair signifies full-bodied sexuality. Given the ambivalent relation between holiness and sex, it stands to reason that the religions would insist upon certain dulling arrangements for hair. Holy hairstyles for men For some sects of Hinduism […]
Posted inDeep Dive
Who owns morality?
Reading Time: 4 minutes At some point during our merry journey through secularism, we all encounter some benighted religious people who incredulously ask: “If you don’t believe in a god, where does your morality come from?” Religious people believe that the source of their morality is their god and that their religious belief is the exercise of that morality. […]