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
Watching Germany grapple with its rough beast is sort of like cultural voyeurism — outsiders are weirdly fascinated even as Germans seem unsure of how to proceed. Two recent articles in Spiegel offer powerful reminders that gawking, a paradoxical product of attraction and revulsion, can be unsettling.
The first, by Frank Hornig and Michael Sontheimer, discusses [...]
Tags:Berlin·Bethlehem·Civil Religion·eschatology·Frank Hornig·Fuhrer·German History Museum·Germany·Hitler·Ian Kershaw·Jews·Michael Sontheimer·Muslims·National Socialism·nationalism·Nazi·Ole Reissmann·racism·rough beast·salvation·schadenfreude·The Second Coming·uncivil religion·W.B. Yeats·weltanschauung·xenophobia
In a recent poll of over 3,400 Americans, the Pew Forum on Religion ironically found that atheists and agnostics know more about religions than do believers. Here is the abstract:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on [...]
Tags:agnostics·atheists·blind faith·Catholics·comparative religion·ignorance·Jews·Maimonides·Pew Forum·Protestants·transubstantiation·U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey
This is awkward — a Spiegel (i.e., German) reporter interviews the Iranian Foreign Minister:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Foreign Minister, you are the senior diplomat of the Islamic Republic of Iran. You represent a nation that prides itself on a cultural history stretching back more than 2,500 years. Don’t you find it shameful that people are stoned to [...]
Tags:adultery·execution by stoning·Germany·Holocaust·Iran·Jews·religious crimes·Sharia law·stoning
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 [...]
Tags:aggression·Arabs·Civil Religion·conflict·Cyrus the Great·Darius the Great·Egyptian pharaoh·God & War: An Audit & An Exploration·god-kings·Greek-Persian wars·Greg Austin·group cohesion·Israelis·Jews·kinship·Matt Rossano·Muslims·nationalism·religion·Religious War Audit·religious wars·Thom Oommen·Todd Kranock·war·Why Religion Does Not Equal War·Xerxes the Great
When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method. So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality. We can therefore trace the history of the [...]
Tags:Assyria·Assyrian Empire·Aztec sacrifice·Babylolian captivity·Catholicism·Christians·demographics·demography·early Christianity·Egyptian captivity·fertility·group size·Hebrews·homosexuality·India's sacred cow·Jewish diaspora·Jews·Judaism·Levant·Lost Tribes of Judah·marriage·Marvin Harris·Mesopotamia·Michael Harner·Mormons·natural law·persecution·pork eating proscription·procreation·prohibition against homosexuality·Ralph Tanner·ritual regulations·same-sex preference·sin of sodomy·slavery·sodomy·taboo·taboos·The Social Ecology of Religion·Vernon Reynolds·warfare
