Religion Dispatches
…w need to prove he’s not a secret Hindu as well. According to the Times of India, a group of supporters in New Delhi have sent Obama a two-foot, gold-plated statue of the monkey god Hanuman. According to Indian politician Brijmohan Bhama, “Obama has deep faith in Lord Hanuman and that is why we are presenting an idol of Hanuman to him.” The apparent source of this pronouncement of Obama’s newly-discovered faith is this photo from Time magazine, wh…
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…tionalism’ also exists among extreme Copts in Egypt and the Hindu right in India. Google-ocracy But two years into the second decade of the 21st century we’re seeing a difference, not only in the assault on Islam, but in the Muslim response to that assault. The difference between today and yesterday, between the Muhammad video and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, is the rapidity and ubiquity of image-making. Images can be, and are, made and remade, remix…
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…nism. Kasich supports balancing the budget and lowering corporate taxes to promote growth and to encourage companies to bring profits earned overseas back to the U.S. But he also supports training those at the bottom for meaningful work. He wants secure border controls but also a legal means for law-abiding undocumented immigrants to pay a penalty, stay here, and work. To back up this policy, he cites Ronald Reagan, the most popular Republican pre…
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…sumably, not just to get atheists to be liked. Among other things, it’s to promote critical reasoning; it’s to advance the view that faith is decidedly not a virtue. Calling our worldview a faith does not seem the best way to achieve these objectives.” Unsurprisingly, the thought that interfaith work requires significant tongue-biting makes many atheists very uncomfortable; it was certainly a concern I had before I started working in the interfait…
Read More…, Moses is just another in a long line of law givers that includes Manu of India, Minos of Greece, and Mises of Egpyt. (See, they even all start with M, the film points out, suggesting a mysterious connection.) Similarly, the Ten Commandments are a derivative version of passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. For Zeitgeist, there’s nothing new under the sun-worshipers. The Bible is an “Astrotheological Literary Hybrid.” At the conclusion of P…
Read More…inals. Is corrupt football coach Jim Tressel an evangelical embarrassment? India’s leading yoga guru, Swami Ramdev, is declaring a hunger strike against governmental corruption. No word on how the guru feels about NCAA recruitment violations. Bernice King left Eddie Long’s church in the wake of Long settling his scandal out of court. Texas is ridding public school graduations of prayers and religious terminology. In New York, a federal court ruled…
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…ess and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. King’s insights could very well be “mic checked” at any Occupy rally across our nation. They are even more important in this 2012 election, where the Republican candidates, in their desperation to be on top, have not hesitated to play the Willie Horton race car…
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…e and Chinese Americans, as well as to scuttle the flow of immigrants from India and the Philippines who had been taking laborer jobs from poor whites. Indeed, over the past fifty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, citizenship for people of color has been under constant attack. Though many of these attempts at disenfranchisement fail, or are overturned by courts, there has been a concerted attempt to use bogeymen (such as minorities…
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…ngerous “associations,” the nation of India launches a mission to the Moon today—a telling juxtaposition of national circumstance. It seems long, long ago that Walter Cronkite, lifted by awe and humility, looked at the astronauts’ television pictures of Earth as seen from the moon and stammered, “There she is, floating in space.” In stark contrast, today’s talking heads achieve neither awe nor humility. There are exceptions, but most are captured…
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…hism across Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence. Although the book only arrived at bookstores last month, it apparently touched some nerves in the academic community before its release. Some have objected to the cov…
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