Thomas Ramey Watson

religion

The Fundamentalist Christian Chokehold On America

The fundamentalist chokehold on American politics seeks to destroy the religious and cultural plurality on which the country, and the Declaration of Independence, was based. These theological divisions – which pit believers against non-believers, and those who believe correctly against those who don’t – are a major contributor to America’s sharply divided politics. When someone …

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Religion Failed Us—but we Still Need It.

from Samuel Kronen’s excellent essay: To live a religious life, we must engage in a spiritual practice. I don’t think there is any way around this. To remain in contact with that what is beyond ourselves, beyond the domain of our individual thoughts, we must find some way of continually remembering that this connection exists …

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A Growing Movement Of ‘Death Doulas’ Is Rethinking How We Die

“All I can tell you is that from where I have sat there has been a calmness and a sense that I want to be nowhere else but by that person’s side,” Levine said in an interview with HuffPost. Levine is part of a growing movement of nurses, social workers and volunteers who are pushing …

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This vision of the world reduces everything to a battle between good and evil, between God and Satan.

From Pope’s Confidantes Pen Blistering Critique Of Steve Bannon’s View of Christianity: Spadaro and Figueroa accused this group of misinterpreting verses in the Bible to fit their own political stances on a wide range of topics ― from war-mongering to climate change to the idea of America as a “promised land” that is to be …

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Bannon, Deconstruction, v. meaningful readings of texts and life

Steve Bannon’s love of Deconstructionism has got me thinking that a good dose of traditional sign theory, which dominated Western culture for centuries, would be in order, even if people are not believers. It argues that we can make sense of texts by careful readings, believing that they–and by extension, our lives–have meaning. When I …

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New Year’s Thought

A big culprit in so many thorny issues facing us is religious dogma that keeps people from really seeing and from there getting ourselves and others in balance. As long as we remain dogmatic, locked in manacles of the mind, as the poet William Blake termed it, we make everything worse, not just for others …

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