That nice young neo-Nazi next door

The Vice News video of the events that unfolded in Charlottesville by reporters embedded among the marchers has had over 46 million views. When I was watching it, I was struck (and depressed) by the fact that most of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches and chanting racist slogans seemed to be young people. I like to think that the younger generation is more enlightened and tolerant than their predecessors, but of course that is an extremely broad generalization. There will always be those who are throwbacks to the past, embracing old abhorrent views even more strongly than their ancestors did.
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Evangelical Christian leader calls for war with North Korea

Robert Jeffress is an evangelical pastor who has been a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump and even said during the election campaign that he would never support a presidential candidate who embodied Jesus’s message, saying ” I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.” Now Jeffress claims that his god has given Trump the “authority to take out Kim Jong-Un” and go to war with North Korea.
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Inclusive Islam movements

Islamic mosques separate people by gender and assign inferior roles to women. Majority Islamic nations and many orthodox Muslims have also had a deeply hostile attitude towards the LGBT community. So it was with interest that I saw this story about a new mosque in Berlin, Germany that operates under quite different rules than traditional Islamic mosques and adopts a far more inclusive attitude.
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National Review on the New Atheists

The neoconservative magazine National Review has used the recent decision by San Francisco radio station KPFA to disinvite Richard Dawkins from an interview to publish an article by Elliot Kaufman that takes aim at atheists. It consists essentially of two points. Firstly it argues that ‘the left’ has ‘expelled’ the New Atheists like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens because of their “insufficient deference to Islam” and secondly that their arguments against god’s existence are wrong. Kaufman even goes on to say that ‘the left’s’ dislike of Islamophobia has morphed into a defense of Islamic radicalism and thus have joined “a long line of left-wing apologists for murderous anti-Western regimes”. (Thanks to reader Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write for alerting me to this article.)
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Satanist to give city council invocation

Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in the case Greece v. Galloway that ceremonial opening prayers were permissible at meetings of local government bodies provided that there was no consistent pattern of discrimination in favor of or against one sect, a Satanist will be giving the invocation at tomorrow’s meeting of the Grand Junction City Council meeting in Colorado.
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Book Review: Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (2017)

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is one of the great enigmatic characters in scientific history, an extremely reclusive and private man with a fascinating array of foibles and personality quirks. I just finished the newly released book by Rob Iliffe, professor of history at Oxford University, that looks closely at the religious studies of this famous physicist and mathematician, based on a detailed examination of his vast collection of private notes, papers, and correspondence. The book deals largely with the first fifty years of Newton’s life, stopping around the year 1696 when Newton left Cambridge University and took up a government position as Warden of the Mint where he vigorously pursued and prosecuted counterfeiters.
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Using three simple math puzzles to measure likelihood of belief in god

I had an amused reaction to this paper titled Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (Science vol. 336, p. 493-496, 27 April 2012) based on a set of studies that looked at the correlation between analytic thinking abilities and beliefs in god. The authors use the language of System 1 and System 2 thinking to describe intuitive and analytic reasoning respectively, terms that that I have discussed in some detail earlier here and here.

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Buddhist monks behaving badly

Some Buddhist monks in Thailand, where Buddhism is the majority religion, clearly seem to think that evangelical Christians in the US with their fancy mega-churches that provide them with luxury homes, cars, and private jets should not have all the fun. They too have decided to get on that gravy train and are living the high life from money they get from their followers.


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