Religion Dispatches
…t’s not so much that people are using the “wrong” psychological mechanisms, but they need to be offered the information that allows them to make slightly better use of the psychological mechanisms that they have and inevitably will use….
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…e been very slow in writing this letter to you, Mahatma. I made repeated pauses—sometimes days elapsed between short paragraphs—in order to test my knowledge and my way of thinking. Day and night I took myself to task, searching whether I had not in any one point overstepped the measure of self-preservation allotted and even prescribed by God to a human community, and whether I had not fallen into the grievous error of collective egotism. Friends…
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…ous criminal enterprises. The Black P Stone Nation has always recognized a use for religion. Whether this use ever went beyond mere camouflage, like a clerical collar worn for the purposes of a scam, remains an open question, and it’s not a question that gets answered in this fascinating but frustrating book, a chronicle of the shifting organization that, helmed by Jeff Fort (later Prince Malik) cornered a sizeable chunk of the Chicago heroin mark…
Read More…We, the scholars. You, the voters. We believe him against the evidence because it feels better to believe that his life—his survival, bound and tied, long ago—is a testimony to Jesus’ mercy. We feel better believing that nobody would ever, or could ever, lie about loving God, or lie about loving Christ. And despite our own schismatic compulsions (in daily life, in sectarian divide), we like to believe that all denominations look the same in the da…
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…ers are made real: in blood. I look at Pakistan and I sigh. I wish so much better for it, and its people. But I don’t see where that better will come from. Unless maybe that was Tahrir. I was warmly envious of my Egyptian friends in part for this very reason, as during their uprising it seemed that they had figured out how to move forward. I cheered with them as Mubarak’s regime teetered and the pompous strongman fell; I prayed the uprisings would…
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…the most visible example. Do they remember that their parents were little better than “slaves in America”? The disparity between Deuteronomy’s commandments and those that one might extract from their policies could scarcely be more stark. The new right-wing bible reads, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of America, so be sure to extract every dollar from your operations so that you don’t end up as one again.” At a personal level,…
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…ade, after I’d spent some years in New York City. The experience still confuses me. Because where I grew up, I was one of the few minorities. My white friends, classmates and pretty much every white person around me had no specific ethnic identity. They often claimed that they were this percentage Irish or that percentage Lithuanian, but these differences seemed perfunctory. They were just white Americans, to me and to themselves. Their subculture…
Read More…each other. It would have been easy to craft a story that divided Copts in Egypt from Muslims and Jews and Muslims because of these stereotypes. Although, if you actually watch the film, you see that it is filled with recycled anti-Semitic portrayals of the man interested only in money and “good” women. Instead of looking for “savages” over “there,” perhaps we should look at home. The creators of this film wanted it to create violence and almost…
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…ndeed, elites often prove more dangerous than the average citizen, not because of their cluelessness, but because their cluelessness is amplified by their power and privilege. The best example might be Walt’s. What was the point of the 2003 Iraq War? What did we hope to accomplish? How did we make so many mistakes? It’s a tenacious fatuousness that can tie it to some kind of conspiratorial project. Now walk “confusionism” over to the Arab and Mus…
Read More…ia industry have portrayed the Brotherhood as treasonous, fundamentally un-Egyptian, criminal, and, importantly, not truly Muslim. Since the coup, Egyptian media have described the Brotherhood as a “cancerous tumor,” “foreign agents,” “unpatriotic,” and as having “kidnapped” Egypt in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising that ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood has also been described as Zionists who are loyal to the state of Israel, and b…
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