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The Gallery of Ghouls of Last Stage US Empire
The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event: The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems […]
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The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations
Orientation Power struggles between the two sides of the brain In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions […]
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Nationalism as the Religion of the Modern West
Orientation The emergence of a strange, secular god “I am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt not have strange gods before me” is not just a religious commandment. Every nation-state expects their citizens to give up or subordinate their regional loyalties, their class, their ethnicity and even their religion to this new god. If we […]
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Jesus, Gaza, and the Murder of Useless People
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. It is because of him that we celebrate Christmas. But it is in spite of him that what we celebrate is the opposite of what he stood for. The different stories of his birth, […]
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Battle for the Minds
During the first decade of the 21st century, a battle between the Religious Right and the New Atheists emerged. Both were gaining strength from charismatic leaders, able to articulate their beliefs and accumulate followers. Energized by George W. Bush’s faith-based presidency, the Religious Right, the most politically active of organized religions, attempted to direct local […]
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The Peace of Westphalia as a Lesson in Solving Religious Wars Past Present or Future
In 1999, a seemingly innocuous speech occurred in Chicago that unveiled a new paradigm in world affairs that was dubbed “the Blair Doctrine”. In this speech, Tony Blair asserted that the realities of the new age of terrorism had rendered the respect for sovereign nation states irrelevant and obsolete requiring a superior doctrine compatible with the need […]
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Converting to Christianity, Islam: Does It Prove Anything?
Religious conversions later in life are generally greeted as evidence that something terrible must have happened to the converter. The Onion published a satire in 2016, ridiculing Paul D’Amatol, who took up a life of Christian piety in late middle age. It must be ‘drugs or maybe he killed someone in a car accident. Something […]
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Christian Nationalism vs. the Separation of Church and State
We have a long tradition in America of Separation of Church and State that prohibits government’s promotion of religion on the one hand, and interference with its free exercise on the other. In their refusal to establish a state church or to favor one religion over another, the Founding Fathers didn’t think that religion was […]
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