Religion Dispatches
…leader” will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China, at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel. As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains—and presumably any nonbelievers—into a “lake of fire burning with brimstone,” thus marking the beginning of his millennial reign. Of course Obama wasn’t motivated by Ezekiel’s war, but by political and national security calcul…
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…icle about Xiaoice, a Microsoft chatbot that’s gained a major following in China. Xiaoice carries on a lifelike conversation with users. Millions of people chat with it every day. In a Her-like twist, many express affection, even love, for their digital companion. “We’re forgetting what it means to be intimate,” Sherry Turkle told the Times. “Children are learning that it’s safer to talk to a computer than to another human.” My inclination is to a…
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…e disease in a Chinese school. In a little village called Fuhu in southern China, they call it suo yang or suk yang, depending on the language. One of the students was playing Ping-Pong and he felt his penis shrinking. He began to panic and went home to tell his parents. His mother held on to his penis while the dad called the local healer. She was an 80-year-old woman, and she remembered other panics. She believed it was caused by an evil wind th…
Read More…ars. I think it was successful. I mean, it went on for those years and the numbers who attended fluctuated a little, but I think the women appreciated the opportunity and I appreciated the company in worship and remembrance. This was our sacred isolation. For them they got a retreat from families, work, and other responsibilities for at least one day. We organized a collective fast-breaking meal and shared in the kitchen duties, as sacred work. Bu…
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…rm us? Travel to other places in the world, like the Persian Gulf, Turkey, China, India, Brazil, and so on and so forth, and people are hungry with ambition, eager to embrace the economic opportunities that our country’s desire for globalization enabled and sustained in the first place. Now, we are turning away; we are scared of monsters whose shadows stretch across the planet. But let me end with a note of hope. Consider that, for most Americans,…
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…at any point, except for a brief allusion to “the Zen people from ancient China” as folks who knew better than us. This is an example of what I call mystification: the obscuration of mindfulness’s roots and usual context so that it can be extracted from religion and recontextualized to fit new purposes. Instead of religion, the context for mindfulness on 60 Minutes is medical science. We’re shown headlines from journal publications that claim to…
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…a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election by destroying the economy. If that weren’t enough, they also played a key role in promoting the Plandemic video and the ObamaGate and #FilmYourHospital hashtag; and forced Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Duff to come out with statements declaring that they are not pedophiles. When taking into account how much neo-charismatics, Am…
Read More…minal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights. As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there. Zimmerman does an admirable job pointing out the problems with Bergevin’s bizarre proposal, so I’ll merely suggest, as I noted above, that th…
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…tensify your emotions. AL: I like the former much more. In fact, I have a pair of bone dice that I carry with me fairly regularly. I use them to make decisions. The idea that I can force my fate to be purely based on chance—not some previously determined algorithm—really is thrilling. It’s strange, though. I give up one kind of freedom in order to have another. MHS: You mean that you trade the freedom to choose for the freedom of a world that feel…
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…ent with strong religious beliefs. Trump cannot even pretend to qualify. A number of analysts, particularly liberal ones, see it as the big reveal, that the Christian right is right, not Christian. The political right has captured the Christians, not the reverse. It’s about politics, class and honor, not God. Arlie Hochschild, in her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, based on her ethnography of Calcasieu Parish in Southern Louisiana, explores…
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