Cartoon of the day: David Fitzsimmons, © 2013 Cagle Cartoons

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“There is something profound and endearing about someone elected (anointed?) to an incredibly powerful lifetime job deciding, with years still left, to walk away. That in and of itself is a powerful example to set for everyone.”

Marc Ambinder, on the resignation of the Pope

A Hindu devotee flips his hair in the waters of the holy Ganges river during the auspicious bathing day of Makar Sankranti in Allahabad, India. The Maha Kumbh Melad festival is believed to be the largest religious gathering on Earth, attracting more than 100 million people. The festival is held every 12 years on the banks of Sangam, and is celebrated for 55 days. 

PHOTO: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

You’re probably familiar with the Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, a fringe religious group of anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-kindness-in-general people infamous for picketing at the funerals of fallen soldiers, protesting charitable organizations, showing up with hateful signs after national tragedies, and for being generally terrible, terrible people.

This weekend the WBC’s spokesperson announced their plans to picket at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

When six members of Westboro showed up at the University of Chicago to protest the school’s employment of Barack Obama, more than 100 students organized various counterprotests, which ran through the duration of WBC’s “visit.” Student events included a simultaneous picket featuring signs warning of America’s doom-by-figs, flyers deploring fig-eaters and speakers who told of God’s vengeance upon fig-loving nations (all sourced from a reference to evil figs in the book of Jeremiah). 

10 nonviolent ways to thwart a Westboro Baptist Church protest

(Source: theweek.com)

A Shi’ite Muslim boy, with blood stains freckling his face and body, looks on after beating himself with razor chains during the Ashura religious festival in Yangon, Myanmar. Even the youngest of the Shi’ite mourners will beat themselves or slash their bodies with knives during Ashura to mark the death anniversary of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who was killed during a battle in A.D. 680. PHOTO: REUTERS/Minzayar

More incredible photos from this week’s news

(Source: theweek.com)

Photo of the day: Thousands upon thousands of Muslim pilgrims gather in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The annual Islamic pilgrimage, or Hajj, which officially begins on Oct. 25, draws three million visitors each year, making it the largest annual gathering of people in the world. 

PHOTO OF THE DAY: A young Palestinian hurls a stone at Israeli border police during protests against the expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Kdumim, in the northern West Bank village of Kufr Qaddum. AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh

More telling photos from this week

Cartoon of the day — Eroding progress 
CHRISTOPHER WEYANT © 2012 Cagle Cartoons

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(Source: theweek.com)

Appearing with televangelist Pat Robertson in the key swing state of Virginia on Sept. 8, Mitt Romney thrust God into the center of the presidential race. Photo: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

While campaigning Saturday in Virgina, Romney brought up the Dems’ convention-floor fight to re-insert “God” in their platform and suggested that Obama would strike the words “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency.

“I will not take God out of our platform. I will not take God off our coins. And I will not take God out of my heart,” he said.

Team Obama called the implied attack desperate, divisive, and “absurd,” with spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki quipping that Obama “believes as much that God should be taken off a coin as he does that aliens will attack Florida.”

Will ‘playing the God card’ help Romney? 

(Source: theweek.com)

Photo: REUTERS/Lee Jae-Won

In his most publicized event, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, blessed the union of 2,075 couples, the grooms all dressed in identical blue suits and the brides wearing white lace-and-satin gowns. In May, Unification Church officials estimated that about 70 percent of those couples are still together thirty years later, a marital success rate that well exceeds the national average.

But the Madison Garden event was not his record: Moon joined 21,000 couples in Seoul’s Olympic Stadium in 1999, and as late as 2009 he presided over a ceremony at Korea’s Sun Moon University in which 10,000 couples were wed or renewed their vows, with hundreds more joining in via the internet.

Moon died on Sunday at the age of 92, leaving behind an empire worth billions upon billions of dollars. What happens to it now?

“I came into this project wanting to understand the question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?” — Tanya Luhrmann, anthropologist 

Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and “tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.” Members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

Luhrmann’s provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy conversations they’d have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response, they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more powerful — and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God.

How evangelicals hear the voice of God

(Source: theweek.com)

 ”You can’t let any parent for any reason hijack what you as a doctor believe is in the child’s best interest.” — Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center

A controversial new study by doctors at a London hospital concludes that deeply religious parents sometimes wind up unwittingly making terminally ill children suffer needlessly by prolonging aggressive but futile treatment, hoping that God will provide a miracle. 

The authors wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics that in these cases medical professionals should be given greater rights as advocates for patients, so they’ll be able to overrule decisions made by their parents that only prolong suffering.

Should doctors really have that much power?

(Source: theweek.com)