In an odd article that attempts to situate Anne Rice’s very public proclamation that she is leaving the Catholic Church within the larger context of American Christianity, Los Angeles Times religion reporter William Lobdell makes two apparently contradictory claims:
American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical [...]
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In yesterday’s post on the religion of nationalism, I noted that Ground Zero is sacred ground for the believer-patriots of American national religion. If you questioned this assertion, doubt no more — the GOP has produced an incendiary video which declares that Ground Zero is “sacred ground” and that an Islamic mosque cannot be built [...]
Tags:American national religion·blasphemy·Christian America·Civil Religion·Ground Zero·Islam·jihad·Kill the Ground Zero Mosque video·Muslims·nationalism as religion·patriot·patriotism·radical Islam·sacred ground·sacred site
In a previous post, Religious Wars and Nationalism, I discussed two factors that play a major role in group cohesion. The first factor, which played a dominant role for the majority of human evolution, was extended and fictive kinship. This is what primarily held groups together during the Paleolithic. After the Neolithic Revolution, another factor [...]
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Over at HuffPo Religion, Matt Rossano has written a thought provoking piece — which some may find surprising — on the relationship between war and religion. In Why Religion Does Not Equal War, Rossano begins with the common knowledge that religious differences often lead to war, or that religious differences are often used to justify [...]
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There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the underlying economic system and palliate the suffering of the laboring masses. Durkheim thought that the function of religion was to enable [...]
Tags:Civil Religion·Durkheim·Engels·ethics·Freud·function of religion·Marx·morals·Philip Goldberg·proximate cause·Robert Bellah·Thomas Hobbes·transcendence·ultimate cause
Over the past 500 years, the rise of the nation-state has resulted in one of the most potent cultural forces in history. This force, which has much in common with religion in terms of both structure and influence, is nationalism. The sociologist Robert Bellah coined the term “civil religion” and has written much on the [...]
