15 Scientology Revelations From Lawrence Wright’s ‘Going Clear’
Can’t wait to read this. Been waiting for its release since Wright’s epic long reads on Paul Haggis nearly two years ago.
A call for Mormon women to wear pants to church, begun this month by a small group of women, has stretched across the globe, but not before creating a backlash and even generating death threats.
“Wear Pants to Church,” an event on Sunday, was meant to draw attention to the role of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, using attire as a symbolic first salvo in a larger struggle over gender inequalities.
Though the Mormon Church has no official policy against women wearing pants to church, many say they feel peer pressure to wear a dress, particularly in the Western United States, organizers said. So on Sunday, thousands of Mormon women arrived at church in pants in places like Cambridge, England; Heidelberg, Germany; Austin, Tex.; the Marshall Islands; and Kotzebue, Alaska.
A number of the women posted their photos on Facebook and other Web sites. Others said they could not participate because they were fearful of ridicule or reprimand. A Google map, begun so women could show they participated, included posts like this one, from Kari White, in Sheboygan, Wis.: “felt free to be an authentic me for the first time in my nearly 5 years of membership in the church.”
Joanna Brooks, a professor at San Diego State University and the author of “The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith,” called it “the largest concerted Mormon feminist effort in history.”
I loved you at your darkest.
Romans 5:8
Reblogged from hsdflsfjjfgg-deactivated2013010 with 67,252 notes / Quotes Bible Religion Christianity
Interesting hour-long look at the Bible and what it says (and does not say) about homosexuality. As The Stranger put it:
Vines’ argument and his insights are highly relevant to gay Christians, to their families, to Christians who point to the bible to justify their bigotry and the pain they inflict on LGBT people (including their own LGBT children), and to anyone who happens to live in a country that is majority Christian.
Full transcript found here.
Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.
For many Mormons, reading Bott’s words was like unearthing a theological dinosaur long thought extinct but suddenly rediscovered in the corner of an obscure BYU office. His positions seem radically out of place in a modern church with an international membership that includes probably some 500,000 Mormons of African descent. The church’s expensive and ubiquitous “I’m a Mormon” public relations campaign has been carefully and deliberately multiethnic; Mormon leaders want the world to view the religion as the diverse global community it has become.
Unfortunately, Bott’s beliefs, though arcane, represent a strain of Mormonism that has persisted well past the 1978 revelation.
For most of the 182-year lifespan of the LDS Church, members of the church hierarchy—the senior-most of which are called prophets and speak to and for God—used similar racist rationalizations for excluding blacks from full membership.
Mormon Church and Racism: a new controversy in old teachings.
In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth. She accepts that Revelation was probably written, toward the end of the first century C.E., by a refugee mystic named John on the little island of Patmos, just off the coast of modern Turkey. (Though this John was not, she insists, the disciple John of Zebedee, whom Jesus loved, or the author of the Gospel that bears the same name.)
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back… Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look.
A conversation between Woody Allen and the Reverend Billy Graham, from a special that aired in 1969. The second part can be found here.
Santorum's Moral Delusions
Santorum takes it for granted that religious belief, at least of the Christian variety, is a powerful force for moral behavior. That’s not apparent from looking at this country.
He thinks America has been on a downhill slide for many years, thanks to feminism, gay rights, pornography, and other vile intruders. But where is the evidence that the developments cited by Santorum are producing harmful side effects?
In the past couple of decades, most indicators of moral and social health have gotten better, not worse. Crime has plummeted. Teen pregnancy has declined by 39 percent. Abortion rates among adolescents are less than half what they were.
The incidence of divorce is down. As of 2007, 48 percent of high school students had engaged in sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. What “decaying culture” is he talking about?
This piece doesn’t cite these claims, but if there is truth here, these are some interesting points.
What Makes a Vibrator Holy?
The evangelical Christian from California’s central valley had never had an orgasm alone nor with her husband of 25 years.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t having one,” the 59-year-old mother of two told The Daily Beast. Yet after chatting with some church girlfriends, she learned what she was missing. “’All that happens to you?’” she asked. “They looked at me like I was crazy.”
Joyce, who requested that we use only her first name, and her equally devout spouse never would have found the bullet-shaped vibrator or the array of “marital aids” they’ve ordered since, if it wasn’t for the Christian sex toy website Book 22—introduced to her by a friend after their chat. “I’m a Christian, but this is awesome,” she said. “It was like being newlyweds again.”
And thus begins Allison Yarrow’s fascinating look inside the word of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sex toy shops. Read the whole thing.
Reblogged from newsweek with 174 notes / Sex Religion Long Reads
The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.
Interesting look, regardless of religious beliefs, at the spread of Martin Luther’s message through social networks.
