In today’s news we learn that Saudi Arabia is on the one hand buying Western academic prestige and on the other beheading a woman accused of practicing “sorcery and witchcraft.”
The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could [...]
Tags:Allah·Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar·beheading·faith healing·Islam·King Saud University·Muslim·Neil Robertson·Saudi Arabia·sorcery·Wahhabi·witchcraft
While browsing at my local bookstore yesterday and looking for a diversionary read, I serendipitously discovered The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992) by Daniel Richter. Although I’m only halfway through, it seems to be the book for those interested in a comprehensive history [...]
Tags:Cayuga·competition·Daniel Richter·Deganawidah·evolutionary theists·Great League of Peace and Power·Hiawatha·intergroup·Iroquois·Mohawk·Oneida·Onondoga·prosocial·Seneca·The Ordeal of the Longhouse·warfare
Almost immediately after the German surrender in May 1945, people began trying to explain what had happened. The horrors of the Nazi regime were such that almost every explanation has been offered. The weakest of explanations is bewilderment. But Nazi depravity and German complicity is not inexplicable.
As the process of explication began to unfold, one [...]
Tags:anti-semitism·atheism·Coel Hellier·creationist·Darwinism·German Christianity·German theism·Hitler·materialist·Nazi religion·Nazism·race creation·racial ideology·special creation
Wondering whether this election will herald the coming of a presidential prophet, Harold Bloom is in rare form in this masterpiece of compression on Romney the Mormon. He hits all cylinders at the finish:
Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist [...]
Tags:Harold Bloom·Joseph Smith·Mitt Romney·Mormon·Southern Baptist·theocracy
Review: Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere, by Craig Martin (Equinox Pub. 2010)
“Separation of church and state.”
It is revealing that this phrase, a shibboleth of sorts, means so many things to so many different people. In law, there are endless arguments over the extent to which government may entangle itself [...]
Tags:Christian hegemony·Craig Martin·Establishment Clause·First Amendment·Genealogy of Liberalism·John Locke·Martin Luther·Masking Hegemony·public-private·secular-religious·separation of church and state·wall of separation
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
With this famous sentence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterful critique of political power. Less well known is another sentence from The Social Contract (1762): “No State has ever been founded without Religion serving as its base.”
My reading of history is that Rousseau was right. State-formation [...]
Tags:China·civic religion·disciplina·divination·Dominique Briquel·Etruria·Etruscan·Etruscan books·haruspices·haruspicy·J.G. Frazer·Jean-Jacques Rousseau·magic·politics·power·prodigia·religion·Roman·Roman epistemology·Rome·Romulus·science·Shang Dynasty·state formation·Tages Against Jesus
The actor David Carradine may have led a troubled life but he experienced no such trouble as Kwai Chang Caine, a Buddhist monk on the move in the old American west. From 1972-1975, the Kung Fu series was must watch television for kids my age, even if we had no idea that Caine was a [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·axial age·Buddhism·China·Confucian·David Carradine·David Keightly·divination·Jamil Anderlini·kung fu·Kwai Chang Caine·legitimation·monastery·power·Shang Dynasty·Shaolin Temple·Shi Yongxin·Ti·Zen
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
In polite American company, it is considered impolitic to declare that a presidential candidate should be disqualified by his or her religion. Perhaps this is why we have a British newsmagazine asking the tough questions about Michele Bachmann’s beliefs:
[Bachmann] recommends Christian books and films that suggest non-Christians are trouble, that the government may be poisoning [...]
Tags:Christian·creationism·evangelical·Fawn Brodie·Francis Schaeffer·Joseph Smith·Michele Bachmann·Mitt Romney·Mormon·Nancy Pearcey·politics·religion·Rick Perry
If you have ever suffered through an episode of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel, you might believe that every megalithic structure in the world was constructed by extraterrestrials:
Apparently inspired by the show, one credulous soul posted this question over at Answers.com: “Can scientists prove that Stonehenge was not built by ancient astronauts?” The pithy [...]
Tags:ancestors·ancient aliens·ancient astronauts·archaeoastronomy·Aubrey Holes·Benjamin Ray·Bronze Age·chieftains·cycles·Durkheim·elites·form·function·Giorgio Tsoukalos·lunar·megalithic·megaliths·neolithic·power·ritual·sarsen stones·solar·Solstice·Stonehenge·Wessex·Woodhenge
