Rachel Ford is a programmer, and since 8:00 to 5:00 doesn't provide enough opportunity to bask in screen glare, she writes in her spare time. She was raised a very fundamentalist Christian, but eventually "saw the light." Rachel's personal blog is Rachel's Hobbit Hole, where she discusses everything from Tolkien to state politics.
Fourteen years ago, London’s Metropolitan Police recorded its first case of abuse stemming from accusations of witchcraft against a child. This year so far, it has recorded 27. The majority of these cases spring from a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity, blended with other supernatural concepts. NBC News reports: Most of the cases involve pastors or religious leaders in African communities who have incorporated elements of witchcraft or spirit possession into their version of fundamentalist Christianity. These beliefs are widely held in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo… Read more
Mike Huckabee has terrible news for Republicans: If they accept the legal reality of marriage equality, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful will be done with them. Not just a little done, but completely done. Huckabee was on the American Family Association’s radio broadcast this week discussing the Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the same-sex marriage cases before them — leaving in place lower court rulings that declared those bans unconstitutional — when he made the comments in question: Read more
On New Year’s Day, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard (below), a newlywed planning to start her family, got some awful news: she had brain cancer. After months of treatment and doctor’s visits, she received even worse news: her tumor had not only come back, but grown larger. She wrote in an essay for CNN: Read more
Holy Moses, the afterlife is real! Or such is the impression that you might get, reading about the “AWARE” study (recently published in the Resuscitation Journal). The Telegraph’s headline, for instance, trumpets, “First hint of ‘life after death’ in biggest ever scientific study.” This is followed by a far less exciting, but more accurate, description: Read more
On Thursday, the Supreme Court declared that it would hear a religious hiring discrimination case, stemming from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Abercrombie & Fitch store’s decision in 2008 not to hire then 17-year-old Samantha Elauf because she wore a hijab. What makes this case particularly interesting is that Abercrombie & Fitch is openly admitting that their refusal to hire Elauf was based on her wearing the hijab and not some other reason. They argue that this was not an instance of religious discrimination, though, because they didn’t have “actual knowledge” that wearing the hijab was religious. Read more
