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Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
American Fascists
Holy Shit! Can you believe this guy? The scariest part is that he has loyal followers. These people are dangerous to all that is right and real. I mean, what century are we in?
This piece is cadged from Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/120233/).
Try not to panic, maybe you can calm me down...Pete
In Bruce Wilson's video, on April 17, 2005 Rick Warren tells 30,000 of his followers at a rally in Angel Stadium, right next to Disneyland, that he had been given a vision, a three point plan for the next 25 years:
It is the global expansion of the Kingdom of God.
It is the total mobilzation of this church.
And the third part of this dream is a radical devotion of every believer.
Warren goes on to deliver this horrifying homily:
This piece is cadged from Alternet (http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/120233/).
Try not to panic, maybe you can calm me down...Pete
In Bruce Wilson's video, on April 17, 2005 Rick Warren tells 30,000 of his followers at a rally in Angel Stadium, right next to Disneyland, that he had been given a vision, a three point plan for the next 25 years:
It is the global expansion of the Kingdom of God.
It is the total mobilzation of this church.
And the third part of this dream is a radical devotion of every believer.
Warren goes on to deliver this horrifying homily:
In April 1939, In a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium those with the brown shirts formed a sign that said in in the whole stadium "Hitler we are yours." And they nearly took the world...Warren then decribes the dedication of Lenin and Mao's followers and then in a jaw dropping moment says:
When I hear those kinds of stories, I think, what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium said, "Jesus, we are yours"? What kind of spiritual awakening would be have?Warren then exhorts the crowd to hold up the sign by their seats that say "Whatever it takes" and concludes his speech with:
I'm looking at a stadium full of people saying, "Whatever it takes, god".Holy Shit!
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Hate-filled christ-worshippers just being themselves...
Every time I get into a discussion on the topic of religious extremism - after acknowledging that my discussion partner naturally has some good points regarding fascist Muslims - I try to point out that just about all religions taken to their logical, legalistic, fundamentalist extremes are dangerous as hell (no pun intended). Yes, radical Islam is a threat to peace, harmony, liberty, true democracy, and co-existence on the only planet we have, but so is extremist Christianity. These fascists actually believe that they are so much better than us simply for their worship of a deity purported (by their preferred religious tome) to be the true son of god (that god being Yahweh, an ancient pre-judeo tribal god whose name is sometimes mispronounced Jehovah). So much better, in fact, that among themselves, those of us who don't subscribe to their superstitions are often referred to as "the unsaved".
In a cobbled-together myth known as "The Rapture", taken from bits and pieces of many books in their bible but mainly from a mushroom trip called Revelations, it is said that the "saved" will rise to Heaven on the final day of judgment while the rest of us have to tough it out here on Earth. Sweet, huh? This from their "loving" god. Many of these special souls also believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, a main character in this absurdity. So many, in fact, that Newsweek actually devoted a main article in their Belief Watch section to this insanity.
Anyway, here's some of 'em playing one of their favorite games, "Hate Those Who Aren't Just Like Me".
In a cobbled-together myth known as "The Rapture", taken from bits and pieces of many books in their bible but mainly from a mushroom trip called Revelations, it is said that the "saved" will rise to Heaven on the final day of judgment while the rest of us have to tough it out here on Earth. Sweet, huh? This from their "loving" god. Many of these special souls also believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, a main character in this absurdity. So many, in fact, that Newsweek actually devoted a main article in their Belief Watch section to this insanity.
Anyway, here's some of 'em playing one of their favorite games, "Hate Those Who Aren't Just Like Me".
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Statistics show that religious belief harms countries
Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society. It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. . .
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world.
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: "The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America."
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. "I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states," he added.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society. It compares the social performance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. . .
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly skeptical world.
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
"The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from " uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: "The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America."
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. "I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states," he added.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Remember: A heartbeat away from the White House
This woman belongs to a sect of Christian fundamentalists known as Dominionists. They are, simply put, theocratic fascists whose fevered imaginations conjure up horrible death and destruction for their perceived enemies - the "unsaved". An indispensable book about them is Chris Hedges's American Fascists, which I highly recommend.
This woman is far more dangerous than most of the media will allow themselves to say or even imagine.
She is obviously self-obsessed and dangerously narcissistic. She never speaks about the future (she believes that we are in The End of Days). Her eyes betray an arctic coldness.
She fully and without question believes in The Rapture and Final Armageddon.
She will have the nuclear codes.
That said, watch this:
This woman is far more dangerous than most of the media will allow themselves to say or even imagine.
She is obviously self-obsessed and dangerously narcissistic. She never speaks about the future (she believes that we are in The End of Days). Her eyes betray an arctic coldness.
She fully and without question believes in The Rapture and Final Armageddon.
She will have the nuclear codes.
That said, watch this:
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Hitchens vs. Hedges; Atheist vs. Believer Clash Ignites Audience
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52449/
Visualize this spectacle: a debate between a neocon and a progressive. The subject is religion. One of them is there to defend religion, to praise God, to cheerlead for even the most devout. The other -- his opponent -- is an atheist. He skewers deities and those who follow deities. He calls them evil. Toxic. Childish. He mocks doctrine. Railing that the devout want to kill us and control the world, he is on a mission, as it were, to vanquish missions. You'd expect the liberal to be the atheist and the neocon to vouch for the devout. No-brainer, right? Well, no.
As Christopher Hitchens debated Chris Hedges in a Berkeley auditorium last Thursday night, it was Hedges who praised the pious. And it was 9/11-neocon Hitchens who railed against "Abrahamic man-made filthy propaganda," proclaiming that "human emancipation begins when this nonsense ends."
Both men are the authors of brand-new books, both of which share a basic premise. Truthdig columnist Hedges, who won an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights in Journalism five years ago for his New York Times reportage on terrorism, has just published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007, $25). Hitchens' latest is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, $24.95), its title saucily skewering the English translation of Allahu Akbar.
While in American Fascists, Hedges lambastes fundamentalist Christianity and what he calls its divisive good-vs.-evil, us-vs.-them "binary worldview," he is also a Presbyterian minister's son and has a Harvard divinity degree. Which qualifies him for the ostensibly odd role -- a game of Twister unto itself -- of supporting religious ritual and belief in the supernatural while being denounced as a callow hypocrite by a world-famous colleague who might once have agreed with him on everything.
That colleague now disagrees with him on nearly everything, though before the night was over both expressed a loathing for the KKK. That was a hard bill to fill: chewing the fat about faith with a celebrity atheist -- an "ex-socialist," as the evening's emcee would call Hitchens, succinctly -- in a stalwartly secular college town, during an arguably religious war, at an event bristling with contradictions.
Its cosponsors were Cody's independent bookstore, Berkeley free-speech-radio station KPFA and the Zaytuna Institute -- a traditionalist Islamic education center and seminary in nearby Hayward that maintains a strict dress code including long-sleeved shirts and scarves for female students and whose Web site outlines its mission to use "the most effective tools of our time as a means of serving our Lord and honoring our Prophet, sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam."
Sharing the middle-school auditorium lobby with a Zaytuna table and a book-selling table were representatives of the Revolutionary Communist Party. A Christian booth of some kind would have made for an even more provocative mix, but that contingent -- along with Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i and, for that matter, Berkeley's thriving neopagans -- was either not invited to set up a table or declined. Hitchens spoke first, smirking that "since I'm in Berkeley, California, the mush-headed view" pervading the audience was surely that faith inspires ethics. Yet "our morality, our human solidarity," he avowed, "are innate."
Rather than springing from some religious code whose every behavioral prompt is "either a bribe or a threat," drawn from doctrine that "either demands total abjection or proposes that you are the egomaniacal center of the universe," acts of kindness and activism and the saving and taking of lives spring, he believes, from some universal interior monitor that gauges right and wrong.
"It also makes me rejoice in the deaths of my enemies," he said and stood back, as if the hostility in the hall was palpable. "I can't change that. And neither can you, pray as you might." Scorning a classic Christian tenet, Hitchens snarled, "Go ahead and love your enemies. Don't go loving mine."
His enemies are "the enemies of civilization" and they "should be beaten." He spoke of hordes aching to kill us and our children and burn our libraries. He cited "the Iranians, [who] have a tooth-fairy god called the Twelfth Imam," and who "managed by piracy to have acquired an apocalyptic weapon to drive the lesson home. These people are coming after you, too, and it's time you woke up to it." Hedges bristled. "The problem," he countered, "is not religion. The problem is religious orthodoxy." Religion isn't as toxic as "that disease of nationalism" from which "comes a blind racism." What spurs evil acts, he told the crowd, was "the clamor of the tribe or the nation" -- though anyone might argue that the lines between faith, tribalism and nationalism are fuzzy these days at best.
"God is better understood as a verb than as a noun," he ventured. "God is a process." Invoking Tillich, Flaubert and Freud, Hedges finished his introductory remarks by proposing that "the danger is not Islam. ... The danger is the human heart." Thus began a discussion around a low coffee table with KPFA's Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley moderating.
Hitchens mocked the leisurely arrangement. Leaning far back in his flexible chair and describing his posture as "semi-reclining," he offered to "do it lying down if you want me to," before calling Hedges simplistic and self-serving and asking him to reconsider -- "if you can think at all." "I hate institutionalized religion as much as Christopher does," Hedges put in. Cheers erupted when he called the Christian Right "the most frightening mass political movement in American history."
Hitchens broke in, repeatedly overrunning Lilley, disdaining as "callow leftism" the "evil nonsense taught by Hedges ... that Palestinian suicide bombers are driven by despair.... These are people in a state of exaltation [for] their mullahs and their filthy religion," Hitchens raged, dismissing at once "any other explanation of Islamic jihad" besides a religious one, then likewise dismissing "anyone who eulogizes this evil wicked thing." Boos shook the hall. But so did cheers. As Hitchens rocked back in his chair, it was clear from the clamor that a fair portion of the crowd supported him: maybe thirty percent, maybe forty. What trumps what, these days, in Berkeley?
Hedges likened Hitchens to The End of Faith (Norton, 2004, $24.95) author Sam Harris, condemning the "binary worldview" both men share. Taking up the jihad gauntlet, Hedges riposted that "the only route we have given these young kids is [that of] affirming themselves through death," with its attendant promise of paradise and huge funeral processions. "Self-immolation is the only route they have," he insisted, to wild and lasting applause. Hitchens eyed him, incredulous, across the coffee table strewn with water glasses and stacks of notes. "Who makes excuses for suicide-murderers?" Hitchens marveled. "Shame on you." From the crowd came a shout: "Shut up!"
Hitchens shook his head: "You rationalized murder." As Lilley and Hedges struggled to restart the dialogue, Hitchens kept repeating that phrase with mingled accusation and wonder: You rationalized murder. "I haven't finished," Hedges protested.
"You have finished," Hitches snorted. "You are finished." Debates are fights, but bloodless ones. They are our teensiest, cleanest, most demure wars. And their frontline artillery comprises words: not just their meanings, not just Hitchens drawling "Comrade Hedges" but their sound, the whole Toastmasters rimshot rise-and-fall, that performative badda-bing that makes us flinch in principle but which works behind a mic. In those stage-lit, miniature wars our secret weapons are whatever we know of our adversaries' pasts. Missteps. Alliances. In that vein, Hedges could have asked Hitchens why in November 2005, under the auspices of an overtly Christ-centered far-right think tank known as the Family Research Council, he addressed fundamentalist Christian college students who received course credit for attending that event.
Yet Hedges did not broach that subject. And luminous as his writing can be, onstage he was rather trounced, at least in a Toastmasters sense. "What's dangerous," he declared as the evening drew to a close, "is when one person thinks he has an absolute truth.... To believe that we have an understanding of the truth ... is to carry out an evil."
Funny how truth keeps popping up everywhere these days. Well, not truth itself so much as its spectre: now you see it, now you don't, either dazzling or puzzling, changing in the shifting light from a right to an ideal to a bludgeon. How to get this straight? We seek truth. Well enough. But how much? Because its opposite is ignorance, or lies. On the evil-absolutism connection, Hitchens seconded Hedges -- but again, and ironically, only up to a point.
"We can't use the word 'totalitarian,'" he boomed sarcastically, "about the one religion that actually practices totalitarianism." He meant Islam. He waxed nostalgic for bygone days when his debates about religion were predictable: when the devout would just come right out and announce that unbelievers were doomed. "At least we knew where we were," he mused. "Now it's all relative. It's made up a la carte and cherry-picked." Applause shook the hall. Sometimes, even in Berkeley, you don't know where you are.
Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/52449/
Posted on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52449/
Visualize this spectacle: a debate between a neocon and a progressive. The subject is religion. One of them is there to defend religion, to praise God, to cheerlead for even the most devout. The other -- his opponent -- is an atheist. He skewers deities and those who follow deities. He calls them evil. Toxic. Childish. He mocks doctrine. Railing that the devout want to kill us and control the world, he is on a mission, as it were, to vanquish missions. You'd expect the liberal to be the atheist and the neocon to vouch for the devout. No-brainer, right? Well, no.
As Christopher Hitchens debated Chris Hedges in a Berkeley auditorium last Thursday night, it was Hedges who praised the pious. And it was 9/11-neocon Hitchens who railed against "Abrahamic man-made filthy propaganda," proclaiming that "human emancipation begins when this nonsense ends."
Both men are the authors of brand-new books, both of which share a basic premise. Truthdig columnist Hedges, who won an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights in Journalism five years ago for his New York Times reportage on terrorism, has just published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007, $25). Hitchens' latest is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve, $24.95), its title saucily skewering the English translation of Allahu Akbar.
While in American Fascists, Hedges lambastes fundamentalist Christianity and what he calls its divisive good-vs.-evil, us-vs.-them "binary worldview," he is also a Presbyterian minister's son and has a Harvard divinity degree. Which qualifies him for the ostensibly odd role -- a game of Twister unto itself -- of supporting religious ritual and belief in the supernatural while being denounced as a callow hypocrite by a world-famous colleague who might once have agreed with him on everything.
That colleague now disagrees with him on nearly everything, though before the night was over both expressed a loathing for the KKK. That was a hard bill to fill: chewing the fat about faith with a celebrity atheist -- an "ex-socialist," as the evening's emcee would call Hitchens, succinctly -- in a stalwartly secular college town, during an arguably religious war, at an event bristling with contradictions.
Its cosponsors were Cody's independent bookstore, Berkeley free-speech-radio station KPFA and the Zaytuna Institute -- a traditionalist Islamic education center and seminary in nearby Hayward that maintains a strict dress code including long-sleeved shirts and scarves for female students and whose Web site outlines its mission to use "the most effective tools of our time as a means of serving our Lord and honoring our Prophet, sallallahu `alayhi wa sallam."
Sharing the middle-school auditorium lobby with a Zaytuna table and a book-selling table were representatives of the Revolutionary Communist Party. A Christian booth of some kind would have made for an even more provocative mix, but that contingent -- along with Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i and, for that matter, Berkeley's thriving neopagans -- was either not invited to set up a table or declined. Hitchens spoke first, smirking that "since I'm in Berkeley, California, the mush-headed view" pervading the audience was surely that faith inspires ethics. Yet "our morality, our human solidarity," he avowed, "are innate."
Rather than springing from some religious code whose every behavioral prompt is "either a bribe or a threat," drawn from doctrine that "either demands total abjection or proposes that you are the egomaniacal center of the universe," acts of kindness and activism and the saving and taking of lives spring, he believes, from some universal interior monitor that gauges right and wrong.
"It also makes me rejoice in the deaths of my enemies," he said and stood back, as if the hostility in the hall was palpable. "I can't change that. And neither can you, pray as you might." Scorning a classic Christian tenet, Hitchens snarled, "Go ahead and love your enemies. Don't go loving mine."
His enemies are "the enemies of civilization" and they "should be beaten." He spoke of hordes aching to kill us and our children and burn our libraries. He cited "the Iranians, [who] have a tooth-fairy god called the Twelfth Imam," and who "managed by piracy to have acquired an apocalyptic weapon to drive the lesson home. These people are coming after you, too, and it's time you woke up to it." Hedges bristled. "The problem," he countered, "is not religion. The problem is religious orthodoxy." Religion isn't as toxic as "that disease of nationalism" from which "comes a blind racism." What spurs evil acts, he told the crowd, was "the clamor of the tribe or the nation" -- though anyone might argue that the lines between faith, tribalism and nationalism are fuzzy these days at best.
"God is better understood as a verb than as a noun," he ventured. "God is a process." Invoking Tillich, Flaubert and Freud, Hedges finished his introductory remarks by proposing that "the danger is not Islam. ... The danger is the human heart." Thus began a discussion around a low coffee table with KPFA's Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley moderating.
Hitchens mocked the leisurely arrangement. Leaning far back in his flexible chair and describing his posture as "semi-reclining," he offered to "do it lying down if you want me to," before calling Hedges simplistic and self-serving and asking him to reconsider -- "if you can think at all." "I hate institutionalized religion as much as Christopher does," Hedges put in. Cheers erupted when he called the Christian Right "the most frightening mass political movement in American history."
Hitchens broke in, repeatedly overrunning Lilley, disdaining as "callow leftism" the "evil nonsense taught by Hedges ... that Palestinian suicide bombers are driven by despair.... These are people in a state of exaltation [for] their mullahs and their filthy religion," Hitchens raged, dismissing at once "any other explanation of Islamic jihad" besides a religious one, then likewise dismissing "anyone who eulogizes this evil wicked thing." Boos shook the hall. But so did cheers. As Hitchens rocked back in his chair, it was clear from the clamor that a fair portion of the crowd supported him: maybe thirty percent, maybe forty. What trumps what, these days, in Berkeley?
Hedges likened Hitchens to The End of Faith (Norton, 2004, $24.95) author Sam Harris, condemning the "binary worldview" both men share. Taking up the jihad gauntlet, Hedges riposted that "the only route we have given these young kids is [that of] affirming themselves through death," with its attendant promise of paradise and huge funeral processions. "Self-immolation is the only route they have," he insisted, to wild and lasting applause. Hitchens eyed him, incredulous, across the coffee table strewn with water glasses and stacks of notes. "Who makes excuses for suicide-murderers?" Hitchens marveled. "Shame on you." From the crowd came a shout: "Shut up!"
Hitchens shook his head: "You rationalized murder." As Lilley and Hedges struggled to restart the dialogue, Hitchens kept repeating that phrase with mingled accusation and wonder: You rationalized murder. "I haven't finished," Hedges protested.
"You have finished," Hitches snorted. "You are finished." Debates are fights, but bloodless ones. They are our teensiest, cleanest, most demure wars. And their frontline artillery comprises words: not just their meanings, not just Hitchens drawling "Comrade Hedges" but their sound, the whole Toastmasters rimshot rise-and-fall, that performative badda-bing that makes us flinch in principle but which works behind a mic. In those stage-lit, miniature wars our secret weapons are whatever we know of our adversaries' pasts. Missteps. Alliances. In that vein, Hedges could have asked Hitchens why in November 2005, under the auspices of an overtly Christ-centered far-right think tank known as the Family Research Council, he addressed fundamentalist Christian college students who received course credit for attending that event.
Yet Hedges did not broach that subject. And luminous as his writing can be, onstage he was rather trounced, at least in a Toastmasters sense. "What's dangerous," he declared as the evening drew to a close, "is when one person thinks he has an absolute truth.... To believe that we have an understanding of the truth ... is to carry out an evil."
Funny how truth keeps popping up everywhere these days. Well, not truth itself so much as its spectre: now you see it, now you don't, either dazzling or puzzling, changing in the shifting light from a right to an ideal to a bludgeon. How to get this straight? We seek truth. Well enough. But how much? Because its opposite is ignorance, or lies. On the evil-absolutism connection, Hitchens seconded Hedges -- but again, and ironically, only up to a point.
"We can't use the word 'totalitarian,'" he boomed sarcastically, "about the one religion that actually practices totalitarianism." He meant Islam. He waxed nostalgic for bygone days when his debates about religion were predictable: when the devout would just come right out and announce that unbelievers were doomed. "At least we knew where we were," he mused. "Now it's all relative. It's made up a la carte and cherry-picked." Applause shook the hall. Sometimes, even in Berkeley, you don't know where you are.
Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/52449/
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