Religion Dispatches
…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…
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…sle. Nevertheless, his ambition outstretches any run-of-the-mill author of cheap thrillers. For better or worse, after two runaway bestsellers that claim to upend the traditional story of Christianity, he has become America’s most important pop philosopher and historian. In the earlier books, he hatched a version of the faith that spoke to many people in ways that churches no longer seem able to. Now, by turning to Freemasonry in The Lost Symbol,…
Read More…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….
Read More…r. This government then enacts foreign policy decisions hostile to US (and Israeli) interests and hence serves to “destabilize the region.” The US and Israel lose a key ally in the region, ushering in a new period of unrest. Forestalling this scenario, commentators are arguing that this is not an Islamic Revolution. I argue that it is, or rather, it could be, for four reasons. 1. Political Islam is alive and well in Egypt. The lack of Islamic s…
Read More…ulticulturalism” and lauding those who do not. He describes the latter as “Israeli nationalists (who want to deport the Muslims from Israel)” (apparently something he approves of). Here, Breivik laments that he can’t discuss this issue with neo-Nazis, and how such a discussion got him banned from the American white supremacist site Stormfront and another “national socialist forum.” He goes on to maintain that because America has “nation-wrecking m…
Read More…ck hurled them at Soros, pointing out that he’s an atheist and a critic of Israel. He accused Soros of helping Nazis steal Jewish property as a teenager and of feeling no remorse about it. In fact, when Soros was 14 in Nazi-occupied Hungary, his father bribed an agriculture official to pretend that the boy was his Christian godson. Soros once had to accompany his protector to inventory a confiscated Jewish estate. Asked by 60 Minutes if he felt gu…
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…d in the American Jewish community. None of us is (or was) Black or Hebrew Israelite or Jewish. All of us are (or have been) Black and Hebrew Israelite and Jewish—for part or all of our life. What this means is that we’ve experienced the non-Jewish Black person who starts a statement with, “You know the Jews…” only to become flustered and embarrassed when they discover that we too are Jewish. All of us have felt the sting of anti-Black racism in a…
Read More…t scholar Meyrav Wurmser warns that post-Zionism threatens the security of Israel by challenging Israeli nationalism and Judaism itself. Both films deal with the question and quandaries of post-Zionism; but it is telling that the films, like much public discourse, depict a crisis in Zionism while ignoring Judaism (apart from a recitation of Kaddish in Restless). As Gershom Scholem argued almost a century ago, Zionism cannot be either severed from…
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…w dozen yards of the riders and take pictures of the scene with their cell phone cameras. Traffic on College Avenue begins to pick up. “You’re protesting God!” a motorist hollers when he catches sight of one of the Soulforce banners. Finally a slender young man wearing a “CBC Soccer” jacket ventures all the way to the sidewalk. “I just kind of want to show them I care,” says Jonathan Jacobs, a junior at the college. Jacobs, whose family moved to C…
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…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…
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