Category: Religion

Finding spiritual world’s middle ground

USATODAY.com – Finding spiritual world’s middle ground
President Bush is a classic obligation-keeper — pro-life and pro-traditional-family, with a strong focus on moral clarity. His approach to faith goes back to God’s original covenant with Abraham, whom God promised to make fruitful if he will walk before God and be blameless (Genesis 17:1-2). Bush supports laws banning gay marriage and partial-birth abortion and uses his position to stress the importance of religious obligation and personal morality.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is a liberation-seeker — determined to help people in need and protect freedoms such as gay rights and abortion rights. His style of religion can be traced back to Moses and the exodus from Egypt, in which God liberates his people from the oppression of Pharaoh (Exodus 3:7-8). Clinton sees the political profession as a way to answer a call from God to help people, and his focus is on freeing people from captivity, discrimination, injustice and poverty.

Socialism Dead?

TCS Daily – Why Isn’t Socialism Dead?

The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail.

How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth.

Men need myths — and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century — the myth of revolutionary socialism.

The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam

The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (Hardcover) > Read an Excerpt

The first of these is that a Muslim’s relationship with his God is one of fear. A Muslim’s conception of God is absolute. Our God demands total submission. He rewards you if you follow His rules meticulously. He punishes you cruelly if you break His rules, both on earth, with illness and natural disasters, and in the hereafter, with hellfire.

The second element is that Islam knows only one moral source: the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad is infallible.

The third element is that Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time the Prophet received his instructions from Allah, a culture in which women were the property of their fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, or guardians. The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Continue reading “The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam”

Why China Fears Falun Gong

Independent Online Edition > Asia
In the 19th century the Taiping Rebellion sprang from a religious cult which provoked perhaps the bloodiest civil war in human history when the forces of the Qing Empire clashed with those of a mystic named Hong Xiuquan who said he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and claimed to be the new Messiah. At least 20 million people ­ and perhaps as many as 100 million ­ perished.

Not long after that came the Boxer Rebellion in which rebels also saw the world in more metaphysical terms, claiming that movement exercises influence the fundamental forces of the universe. They even went so far as to insist that their breathing exercises would allow them to ward off bullets. Nor wonder the normally inscrutable President Hu looked taken aback when the Falun Gong woman screamed.

The Role of Sacrifice

All religions have this theme of sacrifice and repentance, but one religion has finessed it in a brilliant way that few commentators have grasped. The story starts in Genesis. Instead of making Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, God lets him sacrifice a ram instead, which you will probably agree is much more sensible. The Jews developed this form of sacrifice into a fine art. The Temple in Jerusalem had a special system to drain away all the blood when the rich brought hundreds of animals at a time to the slaughter.

But then came a radical change. About 2000 years ago in a confusing episode over which people still furiously argue, God said: Enough of all this wasteful sacrifice. Because I so love the world, I will sacrifice my own Son for your sins so you don’t have to sacrifice your sons or your livestock.

This Christian doctrine can have a practical effect. In China, when non-Christian villagers experience sickness or misfortune they often sacrifice their livestock to appease the evil spirits. But Christian villagers don’t sacrifice, for Jesus already died for their sins.

They end up being more prosperous.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Teenager killed his sister for living a Western life

Teenager killed his sister for living a Western life – World – Times Online
AYHAN SURUCU was so angry when his sister started to wear make-up and date German men that he put a gun to her head at a bus stop and killed her. Kids at a nearby school, attended mainly by the children of immigrant Muslim families, cheered and applauded when news of the murder reached them

Militancy in Pakistan

Reuters AlertNet – FACTBOX-Militancy in Pakistan

Here are few facts about religious strife in Pakistan.

The Muslim group percentages are just the reverse of Iraq.
* Most Pakistanis are Sunnis — who regard Abu Bakr, one of the companions of Prophet Mohammad, as his successor. Shi’ites, who account for 15 percent of Pakistan’s 150 million people, revere Ali, a cousin and son-in-law of Mohammad, as his successor.

The West in an Afghan mirror

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan
Islam differs radically from Christianity, in that the Christian god is a lover who demands love in return, whereas the Muslim god is a sovereign who demands the fulfillment of duty. Christian prayer is communion, an act of love incomprehensible to Muslims; Muslim worship is an act of submission, the repetition of a few lines of text to accompany physical expression of self-subjugation to the sovereign. The People of Christ are pilgrims en route to the next world; the People of Allah are soldiers in this one.

Islamists are Imperialists

by Christopher Chantrill
Are the Muslim peoples helpless victims or ruthless imperialists? Should we treat their aspirations are worthy attempts to build an authentic Islamic culture or should we treat it as a naked imperialist quest?

In an article in Commentary Efraim Karsh reminds us that Islam has always organized itself upon the model of the desert raiding party, living off the loot seized from the victims of its military raids. Asserts Karsh: Mohammed “devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans.”

This pattern was followed by all the inheritors of Mohammed’s mantle. It was always expansionist, always using the jihad as an excuse to colonize and expropriate other peoples’ wealth and labor. This “shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions throughout the empire,” rebellions that were ruthlessly and bloodily put down right down to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The great question before us today is whether this ancient imperial model of conquest and plunder can work in the modern world, or whether the jihadists can make it work. We westerners like to think that the rise of commerce and industry in the last millennium has made the old imperial model obsolete. Continue reading “Islamists are Imperialists”