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• OKCupid wants people to stop using Firefox for a 1,000 donation pro prop 8
• ARS Technica

• Rolling Stone
• and Cosmo

Men and women are both partaking in Guyland’s culture of silence on college campuses, which results in what Wade calls the whoever-cares-less-wins dynamic. We all know it: When the person you hooked up with the night before walks toward you in the dining hall, you try not to look excited… and maybe even look away. When it comes to dating, it always feels like the person who cares less ends up winning.

CT

Sistine Chapel

There is an enduring irony with Noah. Those who assert the story is literal history, that God drowned the world usually jump to justify the drowning. Those who dismiss it as fable jump to condemn the drowner who didn’t drown anyone according to their take on history. Why condemn a fiction? You might as well despise Loki from the Thor movies or Darth Vader for blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star.

For an ancient pretending to stand in judgment over a god was pointless. If the god was real a puny man’s condemnation is like an ant beneath my home cursing me. Am I losing sleep over that?

Moderns evaluate the gods, religions and philosophies as if they are choosing a metaphysical vender. The gods ought to be flattered by our validation of their existence and stories. We assume that this mere flattery puts them sufficiently in our debt to bow to our wishes and reciprocate with good favor.

American evangelicals tend to act like God somehow has to win an election so we bicker like it’s an election year. It doesn’t work in politics, why do we think it will work in religion?

Comfort, wealth and power tend to groom us towards hubris. Our estimation of our power grows. Why is it that the poor and desperate tend to pray and believe?

“I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.”

— John Wesley (1703-1791).

My definition of a Christian is someone who trusts Jesus more than himself/herself.

Link Basically the author says the difference is in the intention of the giver.

The Rise of Secular Religion Review HT The Dish

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.

• And another from The Week
• More from the Dish with pushbacks
• Alan Jacob’s Take
• Linker’s Take: this is recycled Richard John Neuhaus
• Dougherty

In a rigged monopoly game Paul Pif shows how when we do well we credit ourselves.