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If you believe your opponents are evil does it makes sense to “respect them?”

Penance, a new iPhone app, gathers its sacred power through agnosticism. While existent applications for socially-networked religion like Prayer Wall or Manistone facilitate shared reflection on sacred realities beyond the crowds they attract, Penance draws instead upon the growing faith that social networking can miraculously generate spiritual orientation, evading with sacrilegious humor where one expects guidance. Behold: crowdsourced Catholicism.

The Tea Party-inspired constitutional recitation of January 6 immediately ran into the problems any fundamentalism has with sacred scripture: what do you do with the parts that speak to the original intent of an entirely different era—stoning adulterers, casting down fire on one’s enemies, selling all one’s possessions and giving to the poor, requiring the return of runaway slaves, and counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation?

While I might have some kind of God-experience, unlike testing aspirin, I can’t easily carry out my God-experience simultaneously on statistically significant large numbers of people, write up the experience, repeat it, compare the same number of people at the same time who don’t believe in God, but are otherwise similar, see if they have the same experience, and then have someone repeat my experiment and see if they get the same results. This method is what science is supposed to be about; this is scientific proof, this is what scientists believe in. But, says Jonah Lehrer, it’s not that simple. He describes what he calls ‘the decline effect’: many experimental results that are strikingly positive and statistically significant are not replicable.

The truth is that the administration simply caved before the still potent specter of so-called “Death Panels”—a specter created last year by the likes of Sarah Palin, John Boehner, and other disingenuous opponents of health care reform. Let’s just say that in this new year, Team Obama is worried to death (pardon the expression) about defending its signature health care law from further assaults from the newly-emboldened Republicans.

Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and that task continues unabated today. He warned that there was only one thing that really threatened to undo it: party-thinking. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.

Religion and the assault weapons ban.

Right-wing Christians truly believe that the government exists to take away all of their freedoms as Christians. Huh?

The next best thing to a living, breathing Muslim is an approximation of one—that is, the silver screen. Why not? Movies explore the lives and experiences of Muslims in a format that can be watched as easily at home as on the train. Plus, a lineup of cool movies, foreign and domestic, will only make you, your friends, or your community look intimidatingly more sophisticated.

This week in religion news.