This provocative Spiegel interview with Czech moral economist Tomas Sedlacek nicely dovetails with the conversation surrounding David Graeber’s work on debt. The issues are framed as religious allegory:
SPIEGEL: Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?
Sedláček: Mankind’s oldest stories tell us [...]
Tags:Adam and Eve·David Graeber·Edenic myth·greed·Marshall Sahlins·Tomas Sedlacek
In this powerful interview with Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, Philip Pilkington poses the following question:
If what you say is true – and I believe the evidence is unquestionable in this regard – then economics is not a science whatsoever. It more so resembles a school of morality or even a philosophical cult. [...]
Tags:Azande·Evans-Pritchard·impervious ideology·non-falsifiable·superstition·tautology·Voodoo economics·Yanis Varoufakis
Israel has an ultra-Orthodox problem. Males born into haredi families can look forward to the following:
Exempted from military service;
Exempted from work or employment;
Arranged marriage at very young age;
Supported by working wife; and
Supported by working parents.
The “job” of ultra-Orthodox males in Israel appears to consist of two things: inseminate wife and study Torah. While they are [...]
Tags:Gershom Gorenberg·haredi·Israel·Jews·The Unmaking of Israel·Torah scholars·ultra-Orthodox
There are many ways in which China remains a cipher for Westerners, most of whom labor under the misapprehension that “modern civilization” originated in ancient Greece and spread slowly outward, eventually reaching “backwards” China and even then only in attenuated fashion. This of course ignores parallel and in some ways more spectacular developments in Neolithic [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·ancient China·Anne Underhill·burials·China·Chinese archaeology·Chinese Neolithic·Confucius·cult of ancestors·Donald Holzman·filial piety·KC Chang·lineages·macrocosm·microcosm·parents·stratification·transcendence
Over at Slate, Rob Blackhurst examines the secrets to Rick Warren’s success. Warren helms one of the largest churches in the US and has sold upwards of 50 million books. The secret to Warren’s scrivener success? Brevity:
“There’s not a new idea in The Purpose Driven Life that hasn’t been said in 2,000 years of history. [...]
Tags:brevity·Rick Warrren·Saddleback Church·The Purpose Driven Life·writing
In 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids who worshiped something malevolent in the corn.
It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in [...]
Tags:agriculture·arousal·Aztecs·Children of the Corn·crucifixion·Daily Mass·doctrinal·Engels·episodic·Gatlin·Harvey Whitehouse·HRAF·imagistic·intensity·Linda Hamilton·Marx·memory·modes of religiosity·morphospace·Nebraska·neolithic·pagan·political economy·Quentin Atkinson·ritual form·Salah·Sarah Connor·scythe·semantic·Stephen King·Sun Dance·vision quest
According to the Ghostbusters Wiki, Gozer the Gozerian (known also as Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, and Lord of the Sebouillia) is an ancient entity who “was originally worshiped as a god by the Hittites, Mesopotamians, and the Sumerians around 6000 BC.” When not visiting retribution on New York in the form of the Stay [...]
Tags:Akitu·Alan Lenzi·Assyria·Assyriology·Babylon·dead religions·divine messages·Ghostbusters·Gozer·Hittites·ideology·kings·Lord of the Sebouillia·Mesopotamia·Mesopotamians·mythmaking·politics·power·prophetic texts·Sennacherib·Slavitza Jovan·social construction·Stay Puft Marshmallow Man·Sumerians·Tiamat·Ur·Volguus Zildrohar
While in Africa the past month I heard only two bits of news. The first was that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Good riddance. The second was that Harold Camping and his followers were preparing for the end of the world on May 21.
This concerned me given that I was in a plane for [...]
Tags:Billy Graham·Christian history·doomsday·end times·eschatology·Harold Camping·Osama bin Laden·rapture·Will Graham
By now you surely have heard about Colton Burpo (he is a real kid from Nebraska, not a character from an Upton Sinclair novel). When Colton was 3 years old, he allegedly went to the Christian heaven during an appendectomy. Young Colton “miraculously” lived to tell about it, and now at age 11, he and [...]
Tags:Buddhist·Colton Burpo·God·Gretchen Carlson·Heaven Is For Real·Hindu·Jesus·John the Baptist·Julie Bosman·Lynn Vincent·Muslim·NDE·near death experience·Robert Trivers·Sarah Palin·self deception·Todd Burpo·William von Hippel
Until recently, I knew nothing about Dhammakaya Buddhism, which is considered to be part of the Theravada tradition. For over a decade, this Thai-based movement has been making waves for its alleged commercialization of Buddhism. Some observers attribute its considerable success to the dislocations brought on by Thai modernization. Whatever the attraction, Dhammakaya is fulfilling many [...]
Tags:Buddhism·Buddhist·Close Encounters of the Buddhist Kind·cult·David Koresh·Dhammakaya·Dhammakaya Foundation·ethics·evangelical·globalization·Jim Jones·Khun Yay Ubasika Chandra Khonnokyoong·Lebensraum·Leni Riefenstahl·Luke Duggleby·meditation·modernity·morality·Nazis·Nuremburg·Ron Gluckman·Thailand·Theravada·Wat Phra Dhammakaya
