Religion Dispatches
…o much baggage. When you use it, everybody thinks of this theistic, personalistic, transcendent God—no, I don’t buy that. The way I always define the divine is the rising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away or, as I have already suggested, the infinite creative process. There isn’t a divine creator, but creativity is divine. Creativity is an emergent process, and creation always entails destruction. I’ve rethought this in ter…
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…regularly opining that God is punishing America for some sins. Only their list of sins for which America deserves punishment is different from those of Wright. In the words of Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, “I really believe the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, the People for the American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America, I p…
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…a access is also controlled. Monks (like all Tibetans) are prohibited from listening to the Tibetan language broadcasts of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, and members of the clergy especially are subject to interrogation and punishment if caught. —The government sees itself as having the right to implement “patriotic re-education” campaigns of ideological indoctrination whenever this is seen as necessary (see below). What is more, only a spe…
Read More…udes Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, employed and unemployed—the list is endless. What if the opening prayer at the inauguration were a call to recognize that we are all a part of each other in the deepest and most profound way? What if the invocation to the inauguration served as a profound reminder that unless we learn to live together, everything will fall apart. It is true that the majority of religious devotees in America identify t…
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…nie Madoff has claimed significant parts of the fortunes of celebrities, B-list millionaires, charities, and foundations, another outfit has left a trail of a slightly different sort over the years: the broken dreams of middle-class wannabe entrepreneurs left only with garages full of products, motivational tapes, and get-rich-quick books doing little but gathering dust. If you’ve watched any television at all since the holidays, you might have wo…
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…he years Indian militants have also been called communists, fascists, socialists, and radicals bent on destroying America. In fact, those names—which cancel each other out in any logical mind—have been applied in recent months to another tribal man, Luo of Kenya, who occupies the Oval Office at the moment. As an Indian militant I am discouraged, but not surprised, that the mainstream media has so far failed to recognize the stomp-down amazing fact…
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…ions within the primitive trappings of “The Green Peril.” Following a long list of European intellectuals such as Oriana Fallaci, Michel Houellebecq, and Caroline Forest, he argues that Europe is succumbing to an “Islamic culture” incompatible with its “core” political and cultural values. The intriguing question is: Why is Caldwell’s book receiving more attention in the American media (such as the front page of the New York Times Book Review sect…
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…nger of religion. God as Prozac creates a paradigm shift for defense specialists requiring them to find the suspect Sufi mystics before their entranced followers go ‘self-annihilative’ and take down the world with them, as they blow themselves into a state of divinely mediated pleasure. The first suspects who spring to mind are: Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, Hamza Yusuf, and Pir Zia Khan. All three are notable Sufi practioners in the diverse fie…
Read More…that Jesus is asking his followers then or now to simply give assent to a list of doctrinal statements about him and his alleged divinity, “because he was making no such claim,” she writes. Instead, Armstrong asserts, Jesus was asking his followers, then and now, for “commitment.” ”He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay a…
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…d up conservatives and put them in concentration camps—selling its mailing list to the Republican National Committee and doing all kinds of business with them. And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s a surfeit of these right-wing organizations who specialize in far-right wingnuttery that are closely enmeshed with the GOP’s Beltway operations. So trying to blame it all on a couple of prominent pundits doesn’t come close to addressing the re…
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