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Yoga, "mindfulness" exercises, meditation: quite a few spiritual practices have become increasingly popular in recent years, many of them divorced from the religious world views that gave birth to them. But what troubles me here is that they are used as a kind of symptom suppressant for systemic...

Nowadays, people commonly believe that it was Roe v. Wade that prompted conservative Evangelicals and fundamentalists to push into politics and establish what is nowadays called the "Christian Right". But it's even more distasteful than plain old sexism and viewing women as breeding stock...

Let's talk about L. Ron Hubbard's... well, what is it? A religion? A cult? A money-making scam? All of the above? Is there anybody here with some first-hand experience of Scientology, or is your knowledge as detached and academic as mine?

In an interview with Nina Hartley, zen master Brad Warner observed: "Well, a lot of religion is based on making you feel guilty about something you can't possibly help [such as finding other people sexually attractive after getting married]." NH: "They create the problem, then say, "Here, I'll...

Most traditional religious world views still around today originated in a male-dominated age shaped by agriculture and animal husbandry, with clearly circumscribed, narrow gender roles that clearly placed women at the bottom of the hierarchy. (The ten commandments even count wives among a man's...

Know your place. Follow orders. Accept your fate. Do as you are told. Social systems of control (including religions) tend to demonize those who do not fall in line and become a neat little cog in the greater machine. Greek mythology is brimming with such motifs (Prometheus being chained to a...

The Republican Party likes to portray itself as the voice of Religion in the United States. That is true - provided that the religion we are talking about is Ayn Rand's "Objectivism", and not anything supported by the New Testament. Leading members of the party profess their infatuation with...

I've read some hypotheses stating that the Biblical story of the "Fall" echoes the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture - as well as some of the environmental disasters that followed from it. See, contrary to popular belief, hunter-gatherers live a relatively...

In another thread, somebody recently suggested that religion was (perceived as) superior to atheism on account of religion's moral teachings, and the absence of a codified atheist morality. This is a misleading half-truth. Atheism is a blanket term, a neutral descriptor encompassing every...

As most religions that are practiced today were created in the Agrarian age, they tend to reflect the dominant gender roles and relationship models associated with that particular era in global history: A patriarchal family, with husbands and fathers in a position of uncontested authority, and...

Babylon 5 is a SciFi-series that was strongly infused with religious themes and social commentary. The particular topic I want to discuss today is the Drafa Plague, and what it's got to tell us about the religious idea to link diseases or natural disasters to divine punishments for moral...

The logic behind ritual sacrifice can be traced back to early animist analogies that most likely existed since before the dawn of recorded history. It was a mistake that was easy enough to make, if you basically looked at everything in terms of human-like purpose. If your neighbour came and...

What do you make of religion as a capitalist-consumerist article marketed and sold to specific target groups? "New Age" spirituality is notorious for this, but this also extends to Buddha statues or Hindu gods sold as decoration, Yoga courses or Ayurvedic cooking as lifestyle fads, and - last...

Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition qualifies as the company's crowning achievement in terms of complex and multi-faceted story-telling wrapped around what seems a seemingly straightforward quest fantasy narrative. On the surface, the game is nothing more than the kind of scenario you've seen a...

"The Wicked + the Divine" is an ongoing comic book series dealing with themes of religion, pop culture, mythology, fandom, the media, and many other issues. The title's premise is that "The Pantheon", i.e. a group of diverse "deities" from various mythological backgrounds, reincarnate every...

There's almost as many conceptions of hell as there are Christians, but I want to talk about a very specific one, and ONLY that. So if you believe that Hell is God's absence, or his presence as experienced through the mind of the unregenerate sinner, or annihilation, or a temporary place of...

When does a sect qualify as a TRUE representative of the religion it claims to embody? Particular in relation to distinctly unpleasant groups (Westboro Baptists, IS(IS), etc), less fanatical adherents are quick to dismiss them as "No True X". But how do we determine whether a particular version...

As virtually all established religions originated after the agrarian and before the industrial revolution, it does not come as much of a surprise that they reflect the moral and cultural norms of an era that revolved around land ownership, chains of succession, and the repression and controlling...

In this thread, I will give you a couple of direct quotes from Islamic and a Christian fundamentalists, and anonymize them. It is your task to figure out who said it - Christians or Muslims: 1. "Bring up your daughters with manners, otherwise they're going to be divorced in the first week...

A lot of discussions on these forums revolve around the question of whether Islam qualifies as a religion of peace or not - but I think we need to ask a much broader question: Can a religion that regards itself as the One True Way, sees itself charged with spreading across the globe until...