Religion Dispatches
…they’re doing so over the advice of religious opponents, who echo a famous Indian guru: the Buddha. On July 7, 1993, Mia Zapata, lead singer for up-and-coming Seattle band The Gits, left a bar to walk home alone at 2 A.M. She never arrived. At 3:20, a prostitute found her body in an alley, raped, beaten, and strangled to death. Two decades later on December 16, 2012, after boarding a minibus in Delhi, India, Jyoti Singh Pandey didn’t make it home…
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…anization is the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation, in which India plays a dominant role but the group also includes Afghanistan along with Pakistan. Equally relevant is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), consisting of China, Russia, and four Central Asian countries; Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India have membership as observers. At a recent meeting of the SCO, Russia proposed an interesting solution to stabilize the A…
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…nly as being holy, of one people as specially chosen. Then he sets out for India. What happens there is predictable enough: “The common people were his friends, believed in him, and followed him in throngs. The priests and rulers were afraid of him” (31: 2-3). Already, it would seem, Jesus is the teacher, not the student; which raises an important question for this Gospel and for this whole spiritual style. Why does Jesus travel the world? To stud…
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…sh rule and what sociologist M. N. Srinivas called the “Brahminization” of Indian culture. Colonizing British deemed those religious activities in India that were closer to their own as more evolved and genuine than others. These were the hierarchical, centralized and vaguely monotheist (or deist) theologies of Saiva and Vaisnava Brahmins. The Brahmins themselves had been struggling with armed tantric monastic orders on one front, unsubordinated f…
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…or added to the pressure to cancel the Massimadi festival, saying it would promote homosexuality and that impoverished Haiti had other priorities.” Australia: Poll confirms majority support for marriage equality, rejection of plebiscite A new poll released this week that most Australians support marriage equality but not the government’s plan to hold a national plebiscite on whether the law should be changed to recognize same-sex couples’ right to…
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…aditional values against the decadent heresies, notably liberal democracy, promoted by the United States and what they frequently call “Gayropa.” “The church has become an instrument of the Russian state. It is used to extend and legitimize the interests of the Kremlin,” said Sergei Chapnin, who is the former editor of the official journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church and affiliated churches outside Russia. Q…
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…R’s activities internationally. ‘It’s a 7M world’ In his book, God’s Chaos Code, 7 Mountains strategist and NAR thought leader Lance Wallnau (who is an apostle in Ché Ahn’s network) mentions such Cyrus-type political rulers as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Poland’s Andrzej Duda and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. These rulers, he says, would “preserve their nations’ religious values from the Western virus of cultural decay.” It’s understood that when Cyrus-type aut…
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…off the southern tip of Spain. United Kingdom: Former Tory leader opposes ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools Lord Norman Tebbit, a former Conservative Party chair, spoke out against “promotion” of homosexuality in the schools, saying “I think it is damaging to children to introduce uncertainty into their minds.” Kenya: Activist profiled The Star’s Lydia Matata wrotes about gender non-conforming activist Joji Baro. China: Most LGBT people fear…
Read More…ty that the definition of marriage is protected, sustained and supported.” India: Couple’s high-profile marriage in defiance of anti-gay law BuzzFeed reported last week on a gay couple that was married in a religious ceremony at the end of January. “A Sanskrit teacher conducted the ceremony in a traditional Marathi fashion,” the couple told BuzzFeed India. “And all the ceremonies including Mehendi, Haldi, Sangeet were performed….The couple faced a…
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…le to live their life the way they want to,” he said. AP reminds us of the Indian legal context: Indian law makes gay sex punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Matiyani said the law is often used by the police and community members to threaten people or extort money from them. In 2009, the New Delhi High Court declared the law unconstitutional. But that was overturned four years later when India’s Supreme Court decided it should be a decision fo…
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