Decalog XXI

TELEVISION GENERATES INSTABILITY

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:26:24 GMT

The destruction of culture and the growth of extremism in "problem regions" is a price paid for the "exclusive status" of the elite television "crowd"
In a book entitled "The Death of the West" by a prominent leader of American conservative traditionalists Patrick J. Buchanan he stressed more than once the part television had played in destruction of culture which he believed was equal to destruction of his country’s sovereignty and turning it into transnational corporations’ appendage. Buchanan gives us lots of evidence that transnational elite is hostile towards traditional values and that its control over society’s informational channels leads to breaking up social stability, decline of morality, family and demography indices, and to the growth of ethnic conflicts and ignorance.

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Why the icons do not smile

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 06:17:11 GMT

One of my most diligent students, Alex, at the end of our meetings came to me and excitedly, as though they were something very personal, said:
- And yet I do not understand why you do not write Christ smiling. After all, it means that you ignore the fact that He became man, and he was inherent in the emotional world. Yes He smiled, laughed and cried. You depicted him by God, Giver of Life, Judge - all this is important and right. But when Christ is without emotion, I, and others, it is difficult to believe that He became one of us!

The Scots, in contrast to the English people are very lively and in many ways similar to us, so rarely talks ended with only the specified topics. Lectures - a different matter. Here especially, highlights the difference between Protestants and Catholics. The first was diligent, never late, carefully keep such records, corrosive asked questions. With the second I felt at home in Russia. After the lecture Catholics remained a feeling that I was trying to sow the wind. Entries for the most part students were not carried out - all permeated the atmosphere warm and friendly sloppiness ...

Struck me the question was asked just a "Protestant side." Hot promise usually restrained Alex threw me in bewilderment. And this was several reasons.

In the first place. On the basis of specially selected material I had built an entire lecture on "What is not an icon." Not an icon, in particular, is the work of Filipino artist "Laughing Christ", which depicted a nice guy with a neatly trimmed beard, dead-some oblivious laughter.

I immediately recognized him - a hero of parties and campaigns with the guitar on the nature of man nature of light, a favorite of women and their very big fan, good friend. On what basis this guy was awarded the name of God - an enigma. We discussed the legality of such images - and all together, including Alex, have agreed to their admissibility.

Secondly. I explained patiently, and not just why our worship is inherent in a rhythm and a different mindset than the emotional Protestant assembly.

The question "why are you in the service does not express the joy of the Lord?" Will never make sense to respond to the forehead. On the contrary, it was necessary to use the opportunity to tell people about the daily, weekly and annual liturgical terms, the symbolism of our liturgy and that the burden of great meaning, which falls on the shoulders of our pastors, with their literally difficult vestments. Usually this was enough and no more questions repeated, and the most negative feedback was: "Yes, Christianity is very high, very. It is not for people. " But I carefully explained the relationship of the icon and the liturgy and the fact that the icon bears the highest order of our worship. It seems that everyone agrees.

And, finally, was a third reason to think hard. Until I realized that, as it is now fashionable to say, "Mission Impossible" and that the goal is not reached. I am very attached to his soul heretics and he highly appreciated their sincere effort to comprehend the world of Orthodoxy and the value of the icon, but covered with writing a notebook ... Alex was a wasted effort - he did not understand.

"The meaning of the icon with the words did not pass them. Without the experience of prayer, we looked at the icon, upremsya in themselves "- I thought.

Pause too long, and I brought the first argument that came to mind - "the Scriptures":

- The Gospel does not say that he was smiling and laughing. He knew what the outcome of his earthly journey. On the other hand said that he wept.

- Well, so write him cry! You can! Oh no, we can .. I was reminded of a Greek icon, which the Lord holds crying in her arms the corpse aborted baby on a hill of the same corpse, - and my sorrow was perfect. I was leaving a church hall in deep thought.

- You lift? .. I was asked a young mother of many children with typical British cheeks. I do not remember her name: for obvious reasons she came infrequently. We sat in the car and almost immediately fell into a rare for the city traffic jam. Using the time I shared his grief about Alex. She vividly answered:

- I do not understand why Alex's problems. It's so simple. If we ascribe to the Lord some emotion, if we represent it on the icon, we are preventing him from acting. I wondered: where did Protestant such knowledge?

- Oh yes! - She continued.

- Let's ideal man to icon, begins to pray - and the Lord of the icon looks favorably. And another suit - he looks menacing. Or as he sees fit - and people feel this.

Of course, this does not change the icon of the face, everything happens inside us. But if we represent the kind of emotion, then the Lord, and deprive themselves of the possibility of contact.

Imagine - always smiling and always cries ...

Machines began to move.

- I personally have never had any problems with the icons ... Cork resorbed, and before us there was a net highway.

- And in general, "Philokalia" - this is my favorite book - suddenly she confessed. And then, pressed the gas pedal
Paul BUSALAEV

PETER HITCHENS traces his journey back to Christianity

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:17:18 GMT

How I found God and peace with my atheist brother

During his teenage years and early 20s, Peter Hitchens lost his faith and rebelled against everything he had been brought up to believe in. Here, in a moving and thought-provoking account from his controversial new book, he describes his spiritual journey back to God - and the end of his feud with his brother

I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967. I was 15 years old. The book did not, as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly.Only after much blowing and encouragement did I manage to get it to ignite at all, and I was left with a disagreeable, half-charred mess.

Most of my small invited audience drifted away long before I had finished, disappointed by the anticlimax and the pettiness of the thing. Thunder did not mutter.

It would be many years before I would feel a slight shiver of unease about my act of desecration. Did I then have any idea of the forces I was trifling with?
Hitchens

Peter Hitchens, left, tells how he made peace with his atheist brother, Christopher

In truth, it was not much of a Bible. It was bound in shiny pale blue boards with twiddly writing on the cover, a gift from my parents and until that moment treated with proper reverence, and some tenderness.

But this was my Year Zero. I was engaged in a full, perfect and complete rebellion against everything I had been brought up to believe.

As I had been raised to be an English gentleman, this was quite an involved process. It included behaving like a juvenile delinquent, using as much foul language as I could find excuse for, mocking the weak (there was a wheelchair-bound boy in my year, who provided a specially shameful target for this impulse), insulting my elders, and eventually breaking the law.

The full details would be tedious for most people, and unwelcome to my family. Let us just say they include some political brawling with the police, some unhinged dabbling with illegal drugs, an arrest - richly merited by my past behaviour but actually wrongful - for having an offensive weapon and nearly killing someone, and incidentally myself, through criminal irresponsibility while riding a motorcycle.

There were also numberless acts of minor or major betrayal, ingratitude, disloyalty, dishonour, failure to keep promises and meet obligations, oath-breaking, cowardice, spite or pure selfishness. Nothing I could now do or say could possibly atone for them.

I talk about my own life at more length than I would normally think right because I need to explain that I have passed through the same atheist revelation that most self-confident British members of my generation - I was born in 1951 --have experienced.
Hitchens

We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the Welfare State, the United Nations and ' science', which explained everything that needed to be explained.

The Britain that gave me this self-confidence was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me as a child. Of our many homes, I was fondest of a modest house in the village of Alverstoke, just across the crowded water from Portsmouth.

It is almost impossible now to express the ordered peace which lingered about the quiet shaded gardens and the roads without traffic, where my parents let me and my brother Christopher wander unsupervised.

Dark green buses with conductors wearing peaked caps would bear us past a favourite toyshop to the Gosport ferry, from which we could view the still substantial Navy in which my father had served.

Then we made our way to the department store where my mother took me and Christopher, neatly brushed and tamed, for tea, eclairs and cream horns served by frilly waitresses.

There was nothing, however, peaceful about my relationship with Christopher. Some brothers get on; some do not. We were the sort that just didn't. Who knows why?

At one stage - I was about nine, he nearly 12 - my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall.
Hitchens

To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since. Our rivalry was to last 50 years, and religion was one of its later causes.

My own, slow return to faith began when I was 30, in 1981. By this time, I was doing well in my chosen trade, journalism. I could afford pleasant holidays with my girlfriend, whom I should nowadays call my 'partner' since we were not then married, on the European continent.

I no longer avoided churches. I recognised in the great English cathedrals, and in many small parish churches, the old unsettling messages.

One was the inevitability of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius, a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it.

No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion, specifically a painting: Rogier van der Weyden's 15th Century Last Judgement, which I saw in Burgundy while on holiday.

I had scoffed at its mention in the guidebook, but now I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open, at the naked figures fleeing towards the pit of Hell.

These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions.

On the contrary, their hair and the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me, and people I knew.
Hitchens

I had a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. My large catalogue of misdeeds replayed themselves rapidly in my head.

I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death.

At around the same time I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen.

I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, although I was unwilling to admit it. I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.

I am not exactly clear now how this led in a few months to my strong desire - unexpected by me or by my friends, but encouraged by my then unbelieving future wife - to be married in church.

But I can certainly recall the way the words of the Church of England's marriage service, at St Bride's in London, awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed. I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being. It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done.

The swearing of great oaths concentrates the mind. So did the baptisms first of my daughter and then of my wife who, raised as a Marxist atheist, trod another rather different path to the same place.

Word spread around my trade that I was somehow mixed up in church matters. It was embarrassing. I remember a distinguished foreign correspondent, with a look of mingled pity and horror on his face, asking: 'How can you do that?'
Hitchens

I talked to few people about it, and was diffident about mentioning it in anything I wrote. I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so.

It is a strange and welcome side effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now overcome this.

Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge - for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.

The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

While I was making my gradual, hesitant way back to the altar-rail, my brother Christopher's passion against God grew more virulent and confident.

As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more convinced we cannot know such a thing in the way we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it better by far to believe.

Christopher and I are separate people who, like many siblings, have lived entirely different lives since our childhood.
hitchens

But since it is obvious much of what I say arises out of my attempt to debate religion with him, it would be absurd to pretend that much of what I say here is not intended to counter or undermine arguments he presented in his book, God Is Not Great, published in 2007.

I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument.

It is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time.

It is also my view that, as with all atheists, he is his own chief opponent. As long as he can convince himself, nobody else will persuade him. His arguments are to some extent internally coherent and are a sort of explanation - if not the best explanation - of the world and the universe.

He often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience - which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.

Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.
hitchens

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers' assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher's supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.

I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'.

The huge differences which can be observed between Christian societies and all others, even in the twilit afterglow of Christianity, originate in this specific injunction.

It is striking that in his dismissal of a need for absolute theistic morality, Christopher says in his book that 'the order to "love thy neighbour as thyself" is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed'. Humans, he says, are not so constituted as to care for others as much as themselves.

This is demonstrably untrue, and can be shown to be untrue, through the unshakable devotion of mothers to their children; in the uncounted cases of husbands caring for sick, incontinent and demented wives (and vice versa) at their lives' ends; through the heartrending deeds of courage on the battlefield.

I am also baffled and frustrated by the strange insistence of my anti-theist brother that the cruelty of Communist anti-theist regimes does not reflect badly on his case and on his cause. It unquestionably does.

Soviet Communism is organically linked to atheism, materialist rationalism and most of the other causes the new atheists support. It used the same language, treasured the same hopes and appealed to the same constituency as atheism does today.

When its crimes were still unknown, or concealed, it attracted the support of the liberal intelligentsia who were then, and are even more now, opposed to religion.

Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

I tried to present these arguments to Christopher in April 2008, at a debate on the existence of God and the goodness of religion before a large audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Normally, I love to argue in front of audiences and we had been in public debates before. We had had the occasional clash on TV or radio. We had debated the legacy of the Sixties, in a more evenly matched encounter than Grand Rapids, 11 years ago in London.

Not long after that, there had been a long, unrewarding fallingout over something I had said about politics. Both of us were urged by others to end this quarrel, and eventuallyif rather tentatively, did so.

When I attacked his book against God some people seemed almost to hope that our personal squabble would begin again in public. No doubt they would have been pleased or entertained if we had pelted each other with slime in Grand Rapids.

But despite one or two low blows exchanged in the heat of the moment, I do not think we did much to satisfy them. I hope not.

Somehow on that Thursday night in Grand Rapids, our old quarrels were, as far as I am concerned, finished for good. Just at the point where many might have expected --and some might have hoped - that we would rend and tear at each other, we did not.

Both of us, I suspect, recoiled from such an exhibition, which might have been amusing for others, because we were brothers --but would have been wrong, because we are brothers.

At the end I concluded that, while the audience perhaps had not noticed, we had ended the evening on better terms than either of us might have expected. This was, and remains, more important to me than the debate itself.

I have resolved that I will not hold any more such debates with him, because of the danger that they might turn into gladiatorial combat in which nothing would be resolved and enmity could be created.

I am 58. He is 60. We do not necessarily have time for another brothers' war.

Here is another thing. When our Grand Rapids hosts chose the date of April 3 for this debate, they had no way of knowing that it was the 63rd anniversary of our parents' wedding: an optimistic, happy day in the last weeks of what had been for both of them a fairly grim war.

Not all the optimism was justified, and with the blessed hindsight of parenthood, I cannot imagine that our long fraternal squabble did much for their later happiness.

They are, alas, long gone but my brother and I had both independently become a little concerned at how we should conduct ourselves on such a day. We had each reached the conclusion, unbidden, that we did not want this to turn into a regular travelling circus, becoming steadily more phoney as it progressed.

Something far more important than a debate had happened a few days before, when Christopher and I had met in his Washington DC apartment. If he despised and loathed me for my Christian beliefs, he wasn't showing it.

We were more than civil, treating each other as equals, and as brothers with a common childhood, even recalling bicycle rides we used to take together on summer days unimaginably long ago, which I did not even realise he still remembered.

To my astonishment, Christopher cooked supper, a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven't got over it. He had even given up smoking.

I am not hoping for a late conversion because he has won the battle against cigarettes. He has bricked himself up high in his atheist tower, with slits instead of windows from which to shoot arrows at the faithful, and would find it rather hard to climb down out of it.

I have, however, the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything.

Beyond that, I can only add that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case which is most effectively couched in poetry.

My brother and I agree on this: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions; closer, sometimes, than we would particularly wish to be.

The same paradox sometimes also makes us arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier than it might appear. This will not make us close friends at this stage. We are two utterly different men approaching the ends of two intensely separate lives.

Let us not be sentimental here, nor rashly over-optimistic. But I was astonished, on that spring evening by the Grand River, to find that the longest quarrel of my life seemed unexpectedly to be over, so many years and so many thousands of miles after it had started, in our quiet homes and our first beginnings in an England now impossibly remote from us.

It may actually be true, as I have long hoped that it would be, in the words of T. S. Eliot, that 'the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'.

read on Dailymail

Spirit of modern capitalism: a Protestant ethic?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:41:07 GMT

If one takes a look at the location plan in any part of the City of London, high density of churches and cathedrals on the map would be the first impression that comes to mind. Indeed, before the Square Mile became a global sky-scrapping financial centre in the 20th century, it was “the” London – urban residential settlement that had evolved from Roman Londinium. One of the City’s streets is even called London Wall: the remains of Roman walls are carefully preserved, just as millenary ruins of the Mithras temple neighbouring major banks. The Londoners gradually ceased to dwell here, commuting to the City as workplace destination. Thus this district has been turning into desert in the evening time and on weekends – by strong contrast with a sea of clerks in the working hours. On weekends the City is mostly visited by a handful of tourists, whilst most of public premises are closed, including many churches. This is not surprising, given the fact that Great Britain is on one of the bottom places EU-wide in terms of church attendance. But after the indelicate sound of thunder of recent financial crisis, the Christian worship places were again refilled with hearers. Some of them coming from the offices next door with fancy suits and ties on.

London_church Paradoxical as it may seem, but it would be not quite fair to call the global financial hub between West and East Ends an absolutely atheist place. Bank officer wearing a skull-cap is not a rarity, while those who embrace Islam benefit from a welcoming neighbourhood – areas eastward of City count a growing Muslim population. When young Londoners are returning home from fashionable night clubs in East London, the mu’min – often of South Asian descent – hurry to the mosque for namaz, hearing the muezzin’s call. At the same time, if the congregation count of Albion’s Christian parishes has increased, especially among younger believers, that would mostly be due to the significant inflow of Polish and other Eastern European immigrants. Otherwise, British churches have been finding it increasingly difficult to attract such key audiences as men, youngsters and citizens with lower income. In the meantime the share of those obedient “in good standing” was diminishing.
Blessed are the usurers

Recession and turmoil in the financial sector, accompanied by job cuts, bankruptcies and sometimes even suicides, created a climate in which lunch for many City workers started to mean the day-hours. The same situation has happened on the other side of the Atlantic – on New Your’s Wall Street, repeating the trend after the stock exchange crash in 1929 and the Great Depression.

Most often the communication of various clergies (Christian, Jewish and Muslim) with the business community representatives takes a form of seminars and discussions of anxieties about the future, usually with the help of professional psychologists. Getting the sack means for many mid- and junior level white collars not necessarily a loss of fabulous premium, but such vital problems as, for instance, the impossibility to pay back the mortgage – which may lead to house repossession. The list of concerns is not exhaustive and can be further continued. In this sense the crisis has provided the British clergy an opportunity to solidify the Church’s cracked reputation.

It is necessary to specify: the case here is not made about the trends of religion’s glamourification similar to the placement of valuable icons in elite Muscovite gated villa communities. Britain is observing a rise in the interest towards divinity studies as education major. In 2005 it was theology that boasted the largest growth as a choice for A-levels. The number of entries to the faculties of divinity of the British universities has also increased recently.
On the compatibility of bonuses and religion

However, in the context of further financial deterioration and development of state rescue packages for the banks, the issue of ethics for financiers has returned to the agenda – both of the church discussion groups and throughout the society, in general. It was caused by the indignation regarding the payment of exorbitant bonuses in some banks despite the ongoing economic turbulence. In fact, the bankers who are charged with the financial perturbations at first drove the financial sector to a critical state, then were rescued by the state with the taxpayers’ money and later came down handsomely on bonuses. Nonetheless, many City workers would counter that those who had engaged in risky speculations with troubled assets and started the whole mess, have by now safely moved to hedge funds where they can successfully use the prior knowledge of the books where the toxic assets are now for recommending appropriate insurance strategies to the new clients.

In this light the aspiration of certain financiers to be heard and not only to seek advice is comprehensible. Many high-ranked bankers concerned with evidently negative reputation – affiliation with this professional community is less positively perceived in Britain today – went to the London churches in order to speak before the believers on the compatibility of Christian values and financial art, and, in particular, to address the moral aspects of their activity. According to Bloomberg, such meetings were initiated by Goldman Sachs International Advisor Brian Griffiths, chairman of Lazard International and investment banking guru Ken Costa, as well as by John Varley, CEO of Barclays – one of Britain’s top banks.
Fresh is the story…

Yet no radical revelations were made to the hearers. Catholic Varley considers that banking and fair remuneration do not contradict Christian principles, while the profit is not something Satanic, because, firstly, the banking system is the backbone of the British economy and, secondly, if talented financiers are not paid sufficiently they flee to another bank. Griffiths went further and argued in St. Paul’s Cathedral – landmark of the City - that the injunction “to love others as ourselves” is recognition of self-interest, which implies that inequality should be tolerated, since it brings about greater prosperity and better opportunities for all.

Ken Costa stood apart and criticised bankers’ immoral here-and-now profit interest detrimental to long-term responsibility towards the society. A propos, Costa is serving as warden in one of London’s Anglican churches, at the same time being a chairman of Alpha International – organisation that runs the Alpha Course, created by the British priests in order to explain to modern laymen the basics of Christian faith. According to the course managers, two million Britons have already attended it. Alpha is also famous for its participation in the London bus billboard campaign on the God’s existence, which has entailed a response campaign from atheist organisations.
…yet hard to believe

Predictably, the public opinion in Britain rather tends to give heed to Lazard’s top-manager than to his two fellow professionals. The income gap between the rich and the poor in Great Britain has hit its 50-year high, while the relevant position of the United Kingdom within the EU is a “top” one. At the same time, according to Bloomberg, the aggregate level of the famous bonuses is expected to grow 50% in comparison to the previous year and attain 6 billion pounds. Bankers’ reluctance to admit their guilt in the crisis and repent was acknowledged even by the Church of England’s highest-rank hierarchs, including the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Neither is the financiers’ apologetics shared by politicians and regulators especially as the General Election is approaching, and hardly are taxpayers facing ballot boxes likely to forget the unprecedented multibillion bail-out programme alongside someone’s bonuses, that are now discussed in Britain almost as frequently as the weather. Speaking on the Labour congress, British PM Gordon Brown has directly affirmed that markets need moral regulations. Head of Financial Services Authority (British equivalent of the Russian Federal Service for Financial Markets) Lord Turner declared that certain types of financial activity that have become widespread recently were of no utility for the society. Furthermore, the “City minister” of the British Government Lord Myners has made public his intention to turn closer to the religion having seen enough of greed and immorality of the financial district’s inhabitants. Lord Myners, who has a thirty-billion pound fortune from his financial career prior to joining the government, is intending to become a theologue upon retirement and does not even exclude a possibility of further adherence to the clergy.

The Christian Socialist Movement – Christian organisation affiliated with the Labour Party – is also actively involved in the polemics. Alongside the parishes, Christian socialists regularly hold discussions on the new ethics and values for the international financial system.
Quae sunt Caesaris Caesari?

Anyway, the politicians on either side of the Atlantics do not have much legal leverage that could be applied to financiers on the bonus issue. President Obama, whose electoral campaign featured social problems as a key element, also regularly makes critical speeches with regard to the rowdy financiers. On the one hand, Kenneth Feinberg appointed by Obama as “pay czar” has promised to make sure that all companies that participated in the American state rescue programme return funds to the taxpayers. On the other hand, having criticised the astronomic premium paid by AIG to its traders, Feinberg has admitted that their volume is regulated by the contracts signed in the past, the conditions of which are not subject to change. So far the “pay czar” has noted the volume of bonuses and reiterated his intention to limit the annual salary of the rescued companies’ top-managers to the level of 500 thousand US dollars, with bonuses to be distributed in stock options.

read on eastwest-review.com

by Nicolai Mourachkine

Adam, Where Are You? Reflections on Adam, Christ, and Us

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:20:52 GMT

Many think about Adam and Eve from the perspective of debates about the age of the universe and the origin of human beings. The Church Fathers and the liturgy have a completely different starting point, less in terms of cosmology than Christology. The Church rarely mentions Adam without speaking of Christ, so that we reckon the “Old Adam,” or “First Adam,” in terms of the “New Adam.” This orientation of thinking about Adam helps us to understand our lives as baptized Christians, as human beings who are both fallen and raised, distorted and renewed, dying yet redeemed from death. In our baptism and sacramental life, we have died to the Old Adam and put on the New Adam – yet we are somehow partaking of both. Our cosmological questions may remain, but they receive new perspective from the Church’s reckoning of Adam. Let us humbly ask God and his Church about Adam, and see what we find.

In Genesis, we hear God calling to his creature, Adam, who has just disobeyed the divine command and who has hidden himself: “Adam, where are you?”

We also may ask, with love and in a spirit of holy inquiry, “Adam, where are you?” And perhaps, “Adam, who are you?” “Adam, what are you?”

“Adam where are you? You have hidden from God in shame, but you are also hidden from our view. You are there at the beginning of our Bible and at the very end, and nowhere in between.

“Adam, who are you? Your name in Hebrew means both ‘humanity’ and ‘of the earth.’ Are you ‘man’ as a totality, or a single person? Or both at once? Or are you me and am I you, when I disobey God’s command in my own life? Or are you all of these things, and perhaps more than all? Adam, can you tell us something about ourselves, and our life in this world? For the divinely inspired Scriptures have surely told us about you so that you may teach us about God’s purpose.”

St. Silouan of Mount Athos brings far more beautiful words to Adam. In a deeply moving meditation, he sees Adam at first lamenting painfully at the loss of his closeness with God, and then completely enraptured with joy in the Lord who has given him a still greater Paradise in communion with the Holy Trinity.

O Adam, sing unto us a heavenly song

that the whole earth may hearken,

and delight in the peace of love toward God.

In St. Silouan’s writing, we have an important clue to who and what Adam was in the paradise of old: he was in a state of sweetness and gladness, looking upon God. But he was not perfect. He was not yet in the state of a fully redeemed, deified, immortal man in the “fairer Paradise” given in Christ through his cross.

It is important for us to recall that the Adam we meet in the book of Genesis is not the icon of perfected humanity. He and Eve were “naked and unashamed,” but they were neither perfect nor immortal. As the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great puts it, God put his human creature in Paradise with the promise of immortality. Adam and Eve are human beings in the making. They are works in progress.

This is the conviction of several of the Church Fathers, including St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Ephrem of Syria. The forbidden tree in Paradise was not evil in itself, and was meant for human beings, but it was meant to be eaten of at the right time and in the right disposition. Adam and Eve’s tragedy was to eat of it when they were still as children – innocent and immature.

The biblical story shows us that Adam and Eve are not perfectly fulfilled human persons. What was it in Eve that made her listen to the voice of the serpent? That is not perfection. We speak of God-given “freedom,” but their freedom to forget God is not the genuine freedom of the deified human person. True freedom is freedom in God, the freedom to do the good, not the freedom to listen to this pathetic snake.

Adam and Eve are creatures of potential, on the way to fully realized perfection. They – we – were created for life, not death – for life in union with God. But they do not attain it. And so Adam, in the mind of the Fathers, and in the hymns of the liturgy, never represents royal, deified man, but fallen man. When the hymns speak of “Adam” they mean “fallen humanity.” Nearly every feast of Christ recalls this. At the feast of the Transfiguration, for example, we sing:

You were transfigured, O Christ,

And made Adam’s darkened image to shine again as lightning,

Transforming it into the glory and splendor of Your own divinity….

Here we are not talking about an ancient historic man, “Adam.” If Christ came only to raise some single person, that would certainly not have the effect of reshaping the whole cosmos. Christ comes to raise fallen humanity. He comes to raise us.

This leads to the question not just “who is Adam,” but “who are we?” If Adam is fallen humanity, and Adam is us, then are we fallen humanity? Yes we are. But aren’t we renewed humanity, in Christ? Yes we are. We are both, and must choose between orienting ourselves in Christ or orienting ourselves in Adam. As we sing at the Matins of Holy Saturday:

You descended to the depths of the earth to fill all with Your glory;

For my person that is in Adam was not hidden from You.

And when You were buried,

You renewed me who am corrupt, O Lover of mankind.

So I can consider “my person that is in Adam” and at the same time I know my person that is in Christ. I am both. We are back to the paradox with which we began. We are baptized in Christ and in principle dead to Adam – i.e., to fallen humanity – yet we still sin. And our every sin reveals us to be still living in Adam.

This is another theme throughout the Church Fathers and our hymnography: Adam is us as “fallen humanity,” but also we are Adam. We are creatures of potential who constantly repeat and perpetuate the sin in the garden. Everything that is reported in the garden of paradise, with regard to Adam’s sin, pertains to us and our sin. “I came to know my nakedness and clothed myself in a garment of skin, and fell from the garden” (St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 19.14). “My ancestor’s weakness is my own” (Or. 38.12). “We were entrusted with Paradise that we might enjoy life. We received a commandment so that we might obtain a good repute by keeping it…. We were deceived because we were the objects of envy. We were cast out because we transgressed. We fasted because we refused to fast, being overpowered by the tree of knowledge.” (Or. 45.28)

Who is the subject of this sad tale? It is, again, not an ancient historical Adam. It is us. We sing, on the eve of Great Lent:

Long ago the crafty serpent envied my honor

And whispered deceit in the ear of Eve.

Woe is me! I was led astray

And banished from the dance of life.

And so, Adam is our forefather. But the next question is: is he our forefather in the spiritual sense, the moral sense, or in the genealogical sense? In other words, can we be said to have descended from Adam, in the same way that I have descended from a particular line of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents? Genealogically and genetically? This is a further question we are led to ask, especially in view of new perspectives from history and science.

“Adam, where are you: in our historical past? Are you in the same plane of history as Winston Churchill, Leonardo DaVinci, and Plato?” On what basis may we approach this question? To whom may we pose it? Can we look to the Fathers to answer it? Were they even concerned with “historicity” as we are in our post-Darwin era?

In fact some of the Fathers were interested in this question. There were those who answered in a very literal way, such as Theophilus of Antioch, who provided a date in history for the creation of the world and of Adam. (To this day, there are those who assert, in order to be harmonious with the Scriptural genealogies, that the universe was created somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. St. Augustine noticed that if we were to take literally all the chronologies in Genesis, Methuselah would have had to be present on Noah’s Ark.)

Other Fathers were a great deal more open about the Paradise story and what it may have represented. Possibly the best example of this open inquisitiveness was St. Gregory the Theologian, who writes that God placed the human person in Paradise, “Whatever that may mean.” He speculates that the tree of knowledge may have represented theoria, contemplation. He sees the Paradise story as one open to several interpretations. St. Gregory endorsed Origen’s view that the Paradise described in Genesis did not reside in our historical space and time:

Who will be found simple enough to believe that, like some farmer, “God planted trees in the garden of Eden, in the east” and that he planted “the tree of life” in it, that is a visible tree that could be touched, so that someone could eat of this tree with corporeal teeth and gain life, and further, could eat of another tree and receive the knowledge of “good and evil?” … [T]hese are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events. [De Principiis 4.3.1. The passage cited here is part of the Philokalia of Origen, an anthology of Origen’s texts compiled by Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian.]

Some Fathers were interested in the question as to whether Adam and Eve and Paradise existed in the same way that, for us, Hyde Park – and those walking within it – exist in London. They answered this question in different ways. Most probably believed that Adam existed as a historical person rather than in a mythical realm, for they had no scientific reason not to. Yet none of their theological conclusions about Adam and what he represents require him to exist as a particular historical human being.

The Orthodox theologian Jean-Claude Larchet proposes two categories of history, or temporal orders. He says that the chronological history which we try to document scientifically is already the history of fallen humanity. Our history resides on a different plane from the “spiritual history” described in Genesis:

The original condition of man as it is presented by Scripture and the Fathers is situated in another temporal order than that of historical knowledge: it does not belong to the time of sensible realities (chronos), but to the duration of spiritual realities (aiфn), which eludes historical science because it belongs to the sphere of spiritual history.[Theology of Illness, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 23 n. 51]

Larchet’s model helps us make sense of modern science while retaining the inspired integrity of the scriptural story.

We may conclude that Adam is our forefather in the sense of representing what we came from, representing a failure of potential, representing us whenever we repeat that failure, representing the Old Man whom we shed in our baptism in favor of the New Man Jesus Christ. He is also our forefather in the sense of showing that there was a beginning to sin and death. Sin and death are not an eternal reality. They began, and spread to all.

When “Adam” means “fallen man,” he is rarely mentioned in our hymns apart from Christ — who by clothing himself in Adam (= humanity, = us), restores Adam, recalling the divine image, bringing fallen humanity to the place that was always intended for it: into union with God himself. Christ, therefore, is the New Adam, the Second Adam.

Aside from representing the “Old Man,” Adam is also the prefiguration of Christ. In theological and scriptural language, Adam is a “type” for Christ. In Romans, St. Paul already calls Adam “a type of the one to come” (typos tou mellontos). Adam is a “place-holder” for Christ. Adam/humanity was given the vocation to be a true human person — and failed in every respect. It is Christ — being the Word of God (the prophet), the living sacrifice (the priest), and the king of glory — who fulfills the human vocation perfectly.

Indeed, as several of the Fathers put it, you can either see Adam as the “type” for Christ, or more properly you can see Adam as being made in the image of Christ – even, in the eternal perspective, in the image of the crucified Christ. As St. Nicolas Cabasilas wrote:

It was not the old Adam who was the model for the new, but the new Adam for the old. … For those who have known him first, the old Adam is the archetype because of our fallen nature. But for him who sees all things before they exist, the first Adam is the imitation of the second. [The Life in Christ 6.91-94.]

As St. Irenaeus has it, “it was necessary that one who would be saved [Adam] should also come into existence, in order that the One who saves should not exist in vain.” [Adv. Haer. 3.22.3]

All of this is a part of the Church’s rich tradition of typology, which we will probably recognize from the Church’s hymnography. Adam is a type for Christ, Eve a type for Mary. The tree in Paradise is a type for the tree of the cross, and paradise itself is a type for the Church, which is God’s Kingdom on earth. In fact, the Fathers leave almost no element in the Old Testament unexplored for its typological potential. Moses’s outstretched hands are a type for the crucified Christ. Christ himself, in the gospels, repeatedly tells his disciples that what was written in the Scriptures, in other words written in the Old Testament, was all written about him. “Moses wrote of me,” says the Lord in John 5:46 and in Luke 24. Christ explains to his disciples how the entire Old Testament concerns himself.

This is illustrated in a beautiful liturgical act. During Lent, at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, we read from the Old Testament, beginning with Genesis: the creation of the world in six days, and the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. And just after this reading, we all bow down to the ground, our faces to the floor, while the celebrant comes out of the sanctuary with a candle placed on the gospel book, proclaiming, “The light of Christ illumines all.” Indeed, the light of Christ illumines all that is told in the Old Testament Scripture.

And so Adam, who represents fallen man, represents a type or prefiguration of the New Man, Christ. St. Gregory the Theologian makes a poetic one-to-one relationship between the two, contrasting the hands of Christ – stretched out in generosity and fixed by nails – with the hand of Adam, stretched out in unrestrained self-indulgence. Christ is lifted up (on the cross) to reverse Adam’s downward fall. Christ ingests vinegar instead of Adam’s fruit. Christ dies for Adam’s death, and is raised so that Adam may be raised. He says, also:

All of us …partake of the same Adam, and were led astray by the serpent and slain by sin, and are saved by the heavenly Adam and brought back by the tree of [the cross] to the tree of life from which we had fallen. [Oration 33.9]

This brings us back to the paradox of our lives in this world, both fallen and redeemed, redeemed and fallen. We revisit this paradox in the light of the Old and New Adam.

Let us look at what is practically the last mention of Adam in the Old Testament, in Genesis chapter 5, drawing from the Septuagint Greek translation:

This is the book of the origin of human beings. On the day that God made Adam, he made him according to the divine image; male and female he made them, and he blessed them. And he named their name “Adam” on the day that he made them. Now Adam lived two hundred thirty years and became a father, according to his form and according to his image, and named his name Seth. And the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth amounted to seven hundred years, and he had sons and daughters. And all the days of Adam, that he lived, amounted to nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

God makes “Adam” – meaning humanity, male and female – in his image. And then Adam, having fallen, has a son according to his image. And what follows in this chapter is a long genealogy that leads to Noah, who lives in an age of violence and depravity. This shows us what “the fall” is: human beings, created in the divine image, are now in the image of Adam. God is not gone, nor is his image in us, but now everyone who is born, is in Adam’s image as well as in God’s.

We know what follows. Jesus Christ, the living image of God, is born in history. The pre-eternal Son of the Living God, is born of a woman, a virgin – herself born in the image of Adam, and he lives a fully human life. It is this Jesus, this New Adam, fully divine and fully human, who restores the image of God. And so, now we may live in Christ, we may die in Christ, and be raised in Christ.

The paradox remains, but it is entirely redefined. Life and death are transfigured by God, in the life and death of his Son. The divine image is restored in all its splendor, and that image, or icon, is Jesus Christ, the New Adam. But like every dimension of our life in the world as Christians in the Church, this restoration is both a gift and a calling.

Our baptism is our death. From that point onward we are alive in Christ, in the Church, through the sacraments. Death, which continues to bind us biologically, no longer defines us spiritually. This is a gift, given to us freely. It is also our calling to take it up, at every moment of our lives. At every moment we may choose to live in the Old Adam – to yield to the self-justifying call of the serpent and pursue a deification without the cross – or to live in the New Adam, taking up the cross and following Christ.

Our call, “Adam, where are you?”, now finally yields to the constant seeking out of the New Adam, and the constant calling out to him by his holy name: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Our paradoxical life as fallen yet redeemed persons is now taken up by the task of constantly reorienting our perspective, training our sites on Christ, the true image of God. That’s what we’re to do in and through the Church, Christ’s body. This is the meaning of asceticism, our universal calling: the redirection of our whole person, mind, body and soul. Living in Christ, we continue to suffer, we continue to be tempted, we continue to sin. But all this is decisively overcome, changed.

But that is not the only message of the gospel. The other vital message that God gives us in the New Adam is that he loves us beyond measure. He gives everything to us. And he knows our suffering in this life of paradox, because he enters it. He is not simply watching passively. No, he knows our pain, and he comes to experience it to its very fullest extent.

With our gaze thus fixed on the New Adam, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we cry out with all conviction and all joy: Christ is Risen!

Peter Bouteneff teaches dogmatic theology, patristics, and spirituality at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. He has a doctorate from Oxford University, where he studied under Bishop Kallistos Ware. This is a shortened version of a paper he delivered in May at the 13th Western European Orthodox Congress, held in Amiens, France. He is the author of Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Baker Academic, 2008).

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HOW TO BECOME A demigods?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:08:24 GMT

Percy Jackson and the new atlanticist conservative mythology
Announced his intention to make the correct kinosagu for teens that will make Americans forget about Harry Potter, the corporation Fox would not let things slide a single detail. The head of Fox, Rupert Murdoch is very concerned about the situation with the upbringing of the younger generation. In the latest series of House »(Fox) House thrice advises young soldier who wants to slope from the army to cease to suffer foolishness and go to Iraq. When he triumphantly demonstrates doctor stumps on site their feet, we see a lack of understanding in the eyes of the Haus. Why do young soldiers, the children of the Navy, a disgrace to the country, not wanting to fight, and literally steal the fighting spirit of America?

The answer to this question should give a new youth saga "Percy Jackson". As a basis for a series of novels, films taken by Rick Riordan Percy Jackson and the Olympians ". The main idea of the saga is striking in its majestic simplicity. Greek gods - Olympians - patrons of the Western world and its values. In worshiping the Olympians, the Greeks and Romans invented democracy and freedom of trade, laid the foundation of technological innovation. Over time, the gods of Olympus are following centers of the Western world and are now in America, reaching a peak of power.

The three most influential Olympian, three brothers, who once killed his father Kronos - Zeus, Poseidon and Hades - the main actors are gradually beginning of the great battle for the future of the Western world. Zeus - stern white man who personifies the idea of a new imperial power. His residence is in the Empire State Building. He owns a superweapon - the celestial lightning, which can destroy entire cities. Poseidon - no less harsh white man with short hair, draws its strength in the marine element. At any point of the world's oceans, he could reveal the devastating naval demonstration.

Hades - has chosen the dark side. He - the lord of Hell and the dark desires of man. He wears long hair and plays the electric guitar (which surely must point to the organizer of the revolution flower children in America, 70). Recently Hades achieved considerable success in discrediting the brothers. In this he secretly helped the god of world trade and finance Hermes. Somehow, Hermes managed to steal the main weapon of Zeus - the celestial lightning, and now Zeus can only helplessly sky clouds, haze, unable to make the military threat in a decisive victory. The situation is complicated by the fact that Zeus is sure that the lightning had stolen the son of Poseidon and a simple American - schoolboy Percy Jackson.

Percy Jackson, as the neoconservative Project

In contrast to the restless and soft Harry Potter - Percy Jackson is positive and determined. Potter goes to an elite private school. Percy in a normal state. Potter led the wise Dumbledore buried in ancient tomes. Percy led centaur Chiron is engaged in physical training. Generally for the demi-god in the film are only three things - physical training, physical training and short cropped hair. Image botany, Nerd, who romanticized almost all profitable for the setting of American youth is clearly bad for the creators of Percy Jackson.

The first film series, for the most part simply induct. He acquaints us with the monsters, gods, weapons, and, most importantly, with the scheme of the heroic quest. This scheme will continue to faithfully reproduced with slight variations, so now it is as simple, lucid and very instructive.

As a basis to Greek myths. Percy (Perseus) wins the Gorgon Medusa, devyatigolovuyu hydra and avoids the trap lotosofagov. Also in the film begins confrontation Percy and evil genius Lucas, son of Hermes.

All three major tasks during the execution of which is becoming the hero run in different parts of America. United States clearly fall into three major cultural regions - North-East and South (who fought in the Civil War), West. The first deed is committed in New Jersey. The second feat in Nashville (Kentucky). The third deed in Las Vegas. That is the correct response to all three jobs in America collects one unit on the basis of eternal values conservative, cleans from a false sense (monsters), and gives every American students an intuitive understanding of good and evil in the simplest of behavioral practices.

It would be a mistake to try to cram a rich cultural content, which Europe has invested in the ancient Greek myths, in the explanation of certain points the film. The main thing in the film - simple and clear presentation. Therefore, the most correct explanation here is very simple. For example, the characters give Charon, which should take them into the realm of the dead, paper dollars as payment. Dollars are burned in his hand. Then Percy gives him a full-fledged gold drachmas. Charon takes charge. The moral is simple - paper dollars not backed by anything except a huge debt and must be destroyed. Collision with reality (and what could be more meaningful conservative reality than death) can withstand only gold coins. America needs to abandon unreliable papers (thalers) and move to a strong national currency (drachma).

Percy Jackson and the Gorgon Medusa

The first feat of Percy - the victory over the Gorgon Medusa stands very simple. Long hair - this is bad. It's like a snake on his head. Another Gorgon Medusa (Uma Thurman) is dressed in very fashionable cyberpunk outfit, like Neo in the Matrix. A cyberpunk - it is a very frightening future for the Conservatives. Hairy hackers something there excrete on computers, and suddenly people are dying of unknown causes. In the series Flash Forward hairy scientists something namutili with a powerful transmitter, and all people on earth to disable and fell as dead for several minutes. Why not petrified by the Gorgon views of the people? Heroes are in the lair of the Gorgon gold drachmas. In them we see the stylized images of the Gorgon's head. A key detail - the protruding tongue, which does not fit in the mouth. This is painted Gorgon ancient Greeks. This is the portrait of Einstein is in every American school.

Evil genius and rival Percy - Luke equipped at his home in the camp for demigods this computer paradise. "To me a permanent place. People are a little tired of this reconstruction. Well, yes, in the camp dressed in ancient Greek armor, and from morning till night lupyat each other with bronze swords. But this reconstruction of the return of children to eternal values. The teenager sees the reconstruction of the lies and the parents said that will not celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, will not pray before eating, because it's all true. It is better to go and play a computer game.

So - with modern technology to cut down. Can not look them straight in the eye, although the temptation is great, otherwise you turned to stone. Technology can be useful only under full control. They bring the country drachmas. Gorgon's severed head heroes carry him into the sack. Only this technology will help solve other problems that are successfully proved in the second deed of Percy.

Percy Jackson and the Hydra

In Nashville, Kentucky, in a replica of the Athenian Parthenon heroes fighting the devyatigolovoy hydra. In hydra become scavengers-Mexicans. In the primary source of the film - the book Riordan is a curious passage, "But most importantly, I could smell: nauseating combination of wet wool, rotten meat and the wonderful sour smell that always comes from the monsters as vonyuchek from those who eat only Mexican food."

Uncontrolled migration is perhaps the main problem for the American conservative. What kind of a future America can say when enough to look out the window and see the "skunk", a haircut is your lawn? Therefore, when a conservative says about America - he talks about white America. With creeping migration does not meet the usual methods. Percy regularly cut off the hydra's head, but in full agreement with the myth of China ABC severed head grew two. Then Percy thought of turning to stone hydra prudently captured Gorgon's head.

A conservative believes that one day the problem of illegal migration will be solved. What would it be - racial biological weapons, secret rays - no matter how important, that the problem will be resolved quickly and definitively. Incidentally, the film is striking the Gorgon eyes of another person - his stepfather Percy - skunk Gabe Uliana - idler and podnoka, who lives on velfer. According to the authors, a man such as cleaner-Mexicans, have no place in the "new America".

Percy Jackson and the consumer society

But the most important test is waiting for Percy in Las Vegas. Nation saps over-consumption, the pursuit of the pleasures of youth, the obsession with drugs and gambling. All of this is concentrated in the casino "Lotus". All visitors casino charming hostess offering pink cookies in the form of lotuses. After eating biscuits heroes stupid smile, laugh and totally within reason to forget about the purpose of his journey. In my head, only one thought - to entertain. The revelation comes when Percy meets a long-haired hippie who believes that it is now 1971 and the party is just beginning. Seventies were stopped in their mad flight of time and kept him to one moment. Only it was not a conservative return to the eternal, and the preservation of vice and debauchery.

The idea of a new film for young people is simple: young people should avoid drugs, discos, casinos and general desire for an easy life and should be adjusted on the exploits and physical training. Then he has a chance to look like a demi-god Percy Jackson and save America (the mother of the hero) from Hell.

In conclusion, I want to say the main thing. Do not see the article in the attacks on conservatism. There are a lot of conservatism. Including Atlantic conservatism. And Hitler was a conservative. Overall these conservatism - one - complete oblivion of Christianity. Hitler revived the era of Scandinavian gods. Atlantic conservative based on Ancient Greece and Rome, and Christianity is considered acceptable, except that, an exotic Old Testament dispensationalism. And he is doomed to failure as Hitlerism. Wins Christian meekness and humility.

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by Vadim BULATOV

Losing Our Religion. Christianity will be history if we cut ourselves off from our roots.

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:56:22 GMT

Even with its centuries-old roots throughout the continent, is Christianity history in the West?
In a speech at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., the visiting archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Cardinal Scho"nborn, warned that “trends questioning the Christian foundation of Europe, and aggressively opposing it, are becoming stronger in several countries and in the European political arena in general.”
He explained that “Christianity is for many a foreign element in a world determined by reason, Enlightenment and democratic principles.” He contends that “this Europe, and the Western world as a whole, will not survive without the foreignness Christianity brings. In other words: Europe can only play its role in the concert of world cultures when it retains Christianity, this foreign body, as a part of its identity.”

Almost simultaneously across the pond, the British seemed to get the message, putting aside negotiations that would have placed unprecedented restrictions on religious freedom in the name of a faux freedom. Mandates proposed by the so-called “equality bill” would have removed existing exemptions for religious organizations regarding whom they can employ and to whom they must provide services. Catholic officials in Britain believed that the legislation would force them to ordain women to the priesthood — both an untenable position for the Church and one that the government certainly had no business forcing them into.

The bill was referred to as “an existential threat” to Christian churches in Europe. Sir Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi in England, said: “When Christians, Jews, and others feel that the ideology of human rights is threatening their freedoms of association and religious practice, a tension is set in motion that is not healthy for society, freedom, or Britain.”

Britain appears to have put a stop to this — for now. It probably helped that lawmakers were shepherded by the pope himself: During a gathering of bishops from England and Wales in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI heralded Britain’s “firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society.” But he had critical words for the pending legislation. “The effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs,” he said. “In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

Demonstrating his familiarity with the tyranny of not-so-tolerant tolerance, the Holy Father proclaims that “fidelity to the Gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others — on the contrary, it serves their freedom by offering them the truth.” He reminded the bishops there that their participation in the debate is in the best “traditions” of Britain — “freedom of expression and honest exchange of opinion” while “giving voice to the convictions of many people who lack the means to express them: when so many of the population claim to be Christian, how could anyone dispute the Gospel’s right to be heard?”
The attitudes expressed in the bill are not foreign to us here in America. Pres. Barack Obama’s nominee for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a Georgetown University professor named Chai Feldblum, wrote in 2006 that “just as we do not tolerate private racial beliefs that adversely affect African-Americans in the commercial arena, even if such beliefs are based on religious views, we should similarly not tolerate private beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity that adversely affect LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people.” Feldblum believes that there is a “zero-sum game” being played between religious freedom and the homosexual activists, in which “a gain for one side necessarily entails a corresponding loss for the other side.” Religious liberty, in Feldblum’s estimation, must give.

This conversation about religious liberty, homosexuality, and rights will be a prominent one this term as the U.S. Supreme Court takes up Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, in which it will decide whether religious groups on college campuses must be open to members and leaders who do not share their beliefs. The Court will decide, in other words, whether we’re still free to associate or not.

Religious liberty and LGBT activists simply shouldn’t be at odds. Christian churches don’t seek to eliminate LGBT groups, and LGBT groups needn’t threaten the existence of religious congregations that can’t in their moral consciences do as that British equality law — and some laws we’ve seen proposed in the United States (and even passed by the U.S. Senate!) — would have them do.

As David French, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, which specializes in religious-liberty litigation, recently put it: “If your idea of law is that it is an instrument of domination and exclusion, then, yes, legal disputes between ideological opposites are ‘zero-sum games.’ But if your idea of the Constitution is that it protects the fundamental liberties of all citizens (which happens to be the way the document is written), then — quite literally — everyone wins when those liberties are vindicated.”

Christianity will be history if we cut ourselves off from our roots — moral, yes, but legal, ethical, and political, too. And while more of us need to have a heightened awareness that this threat exists throughout the West — mercifully, it’s not only a pope and a cardinal and even a rabbi who get that.

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by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Human rights as a weapon of the geopolitical games

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:37:48 GMT

I suggest my dear reader to use his fantasy and imagine that it was the Nazi Germany that won the Second World War, rather than the Allied countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. Europe — from Ireland and Portugal to the Ural Mountains — fetched itself under the rule of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen.

But even for the mighty Nazi army it was impossible to conquer the whole planet — plenty of independent states still exist at the other continents and they consider the Hitler’s regime to be absolutely totalitarian and inadmissible. The fight against this regime remains to be the goal of all the free nations.

Nazis, in their turn, appropriate the right for the “only correct” view of the human rights and freedoms (rights and freedoms of the true Aryans of course, as long as the rest are not considered to be the people of the full value). They create several allegedly non-governmental organizations, which are obliged to form the “rating of the oppressed countries” from time to time — countries, where the rights of the Aryan minority are allegedly infringed and suppressed — and they use these organizations as a tool for the constant pressure against their political opponents. If, for example it’s impossible to conquer and bend Brazil and Australia to your will, then why not to discredit these states by the permanent profuse talks about their “lack of freedom”, “repressions”, “suppression of the fascist oppositions” and other terrible things?

While retired Reichsfu"hrer SS Heinrich Himmler — this fine gentleman is well-known to know much about the matters of rights and freedoms for Aryans and non-Aryans — can be appointed the head of such body.

Now imagine, what attitude would the leaders and the very nations that didn’t submit to the Millennium Reich have towards the activity of such organization. This organization — having achieved Nazi blessing — usurped the right to possess the ultimate truth. Now it states that only its very opinion is considered to be absolutely right while all the nations of the world are obliged to bring its decisions to life.

Have you imagined that? Does it look insane, fantastic or unreal? Not at all — such structures actually exist right now, in the 21st century. The only thing is they subordinate not to the long-ago vanished national-socialistic regime but rather to the government of the country that depicts itself to be “the most free and democratic country in the history of humanity”, which is quite alerting by itself. When someone is assuring the others of his exceptionality and perfection, it means that there is something wrong in the business and there might be very unsightly flaws behind the shining publicity facades.

Of course, we’re talking about the USA and the “Freedom House” organization now — it is overseeing the “human rights situation in the different parts of the world”. Its chief is James Woolsey, ex-director of CIA — which is not surprising as well. Who else rather than head of the largest intelligence service of the planet is to judge the rights and freedoms of people — after all, they’ve been consequently putting them to practice in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib prisons, secret prisons of the Eastern Europe and other cozy places where its visitors always feel themselves safe and secure. They firmly know that their integral rights — from the right of humanistic treatment to the right to have a lawyer and the right for the open legal procedure — would definitely be observed.

“Freedom house” — protecting the human rights or asserting the U.S. interests with the illegal means?

So what is the “Freedom House”? Let’s go deep into the history and recall what this organization was made for. According to the Wikipedia data, “Freedom House” was created in 1941 in order to fight with isolationism and neutralism and also to urge the USA to enter the Second World War. Then there were few such organizations: Ring of Freedom, Fight for Freedom и Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Not long before the Pearl-Harbor attack these associations have united and — with the aid from the White House — have established a shared head-quarters in New York City — “Freedom House”. By the end of the war the “Freedom House” wasn’t dismissed but it rather started to support the new battles of the White House. This organization was conducting the demarches supporting the Marshall Plan and NATO, decolonization of the French and British empires, against the communism. More than the rest of the organizations, it promoted the motto “The United States is a country of freedom”.

It were the halls of the “Freedom House” where in 1949 the “Congress for the freedom of culture” initiated — extensive CIA operation intended to manipulate the Western European intellectuals (direct link — 'Quand la CIA finansait les intellectuels europeens' Denis Boneau, Voltaire, 27th of November, 2003). During the Cold War “Freedom House” — an organization that positions itself as the “non-governmental” and “non-commercial” one — was “protecting the freedom” in the different parts of the world but — and that’s quite curious — only in the places where direct threat to the U.S. interests emerged. Funded by the State Department, these zealots of the human rights somehow didn’t pay attention to the pro-American regimes of such bloody dictators as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Augusto Pinochet in Chili or Fulgensio Batista on Cuba. It’s rather indicative that President of the USA — “the most democratic country in the world” has characterized Somoza — one the most ruthless tyrants of the South America — with the worldwide known wording: “Somoza might be son of a bitch but he is ours son of a bitch”. What rights can we be talking about when the man is “ours”…?

However, when the “communist threat” appeared in any region of the world, “Freedom House” was right there. In 60s Leonard R. Sussman organization has encountered rather tough task of protecting the American intervention to Vietnam. In 1982 when President Ronald Reagan has formed the National Endowment for Democracy — NED in order to strengthen the succession of the certain CIA activity under the reliable cover, “Freedom House” was integrated into this new system. In 1986 “Freedom House” employed Melvin Lasky, ex-chief editor of the “Congress for freedom of culture”, who has opened the agency of promotion of the invited papers in the international media. Just like the “Encounter” magazine, which he was once headed, the “Exchange” program was funded by the CIA.

There were plenty of such programs at any times and all the demarches of the “freedom fighters” had the ideological and financial aid of the U.S. State Department and the CIA. Let’s ask a question: what “independence” and “non-governmentalness” of the “Freedom House” can we be talking about? Dif the former and present special services employees have the right to decide who is free and who is not free in this world?

According to the information of the French "Voltairenet” newspaper, current members of the “Freedom House” are a bare reference book of the intelligence services. In particular, following people form its governing board: J. Brian Atwood (former NDI President and former coordinator of the U.S. humanitarian aid); Thomas S. Foley (chairman of the trilateral commission, ex-president of the consultative president council for intelligence affairs), Malcolm Forbes (Forbes magazine), Theodore Forstmann (President of “Empower America”), Samuel Huntington (“clash of civilizations” theoretic), Jeane Kirkpatrick (UN ambassador in Geneva, member of the Pentagon defensive consultative council), Diana Villiers (spouse of ambassador John Negroponte) and ambassador Mark Palmer (founder of the CME consortium, that acquires or sets up the Television companies across the Eastern Europe).

All these people claim that they are protecting the human rights and freedoms. We’d like to know why is their activity limited just with the countries possessing the natural resources inaccessible for the United States and the states situated at the strategically important regions of the planets and at the crossroads of the trading paths then. They are only interested of the countries that do not support the neo-imperial U.S. policy and capable of posing a serious threat to America and the American business. Where is such discrimination coming from?

Has the “Freedom House” the right to decide who is free and who is not?

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of the organization has recently confessed: “‘Freedom House’ is helping the U.S. government and the global community to improve the situation with the human rights and democracy in the oppressed countries”. Thus Mrs. Windsor has indirectly confirmed that activity of her organization is dedicated not to the abstract “fight for the human rights” but rather for the White House and State Department that usurped that right to decide who is behaving himself “well” in this world (i.e. in concordance with the U.S. interests) and who is an ill-behaved person (i.e. conducts the independent policy, not paying attention to the “recommendations” or even the evil shouts from Washington).

Objects of the “Freedom House” criticism are well-known: starting from Russia — during the last decade, it, however has actually got rid of the American influence in its political and social environment — and finishing with Iran — as long as Iran has a lot of fuel and its leadership doesn’t like the United States that are fighting the “small-scale Cold War” against the Islamist Republic since the time of the Islam revolution. In 2009 “Freedom House” has moved the small Middle-Asian Kirghizia from the “partially free countries” to the list of the “oppressed” countries in the rating of the company — just because Kirghizes told the USA to demount the USAF military base out of its territory. Kirghizia was immediately punished, of course.

As we may see, such terms as “freedom”, “democracy” and the “human rights” are mercilessly exploited by the people that evaluate them just to that degree when they can be manipulated for the benefit of the “Freedom House” general sponsor — Central Intelligence Agency.

Let’s cite the simplest example ever. The so-called “young democracies” of the Eastern Europe that formally form the part of the European community — while in reality they resemble the overseas U.S. colonies much more — have fetched themselves amidst the scandal with the illegal secret CIA prisons at their territories. Had something like this happened in the countries of Old Europe it would all finish with the immediate resignation of the government, defeat of the governing party at the elections and the big legal proceedings of the participants and masterminds of these crimes — in the Old Europe human rights are not the meaningless words. But in Lithuania where the secret prison complex, which construction was paid by the CIA, has been discovered recently, everyone just pretended that nothing happened — there were no violations of the state constitution, EU laws and of course the human rights of the very citizens, whom American intelligence services have moved to and probably detained in this prison. No responsible officials were put on trial.

What, in your opinion, is the Lithuanian rating at the “Freedom House” list? Yes, that’s right: that is a “free country”. As long as the degree of “freedom” is determined not by the factual democracy and real observance of the human rights but rather the degree of loyalty to the Central Intelligence Agency and the interests of the United States of America.

It’s rather rhetorical question: whether you would entrust the protection of your rights to the foreign intelligence service, personified by the “Freedom House” organization or not? Because in case of the affirmative answer you may once fetch yourself in the underground casemates of the Lithuanian prison — what if you would be suspected of terrorism? In the casemates of the prison that is located in the “free country”, according to the “Freedom House” opinion.

And don’t count on having a lawyer — according to opinion of the “Freedom House” sponsors, human rights are not for everyone. They are just for the chosen ones.

read on eastwest-review.com

Securing Disaster in Haiti

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:02:16 GMT

Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. [1] It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren't just connected, they are mutually reinforcing.

These same tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.

Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the world, it is also one of the most polarised and unequal in its disparities in wealth and access to political power. [2] A small clique of rich and well-connected families continues to dominate the country and its economy while more than half the population, according to the IMF, survive on a household income of around 44 US pennies per day.[3]

Mass destitution has grown far more severe in recent decades. Starting in the 1970s, internationally imposed neo-liberal 'adjustments' and austerity measures finally succeeded in doing what no Haitian government had managed to do since winning independence in 1804: in order to set the country on the road towards 'economic development', they have driven large numbers of small farmers off their land and into densely crowded urban slums. A small minority of these internal refugees may be lucky enough to find sweatshop jobs that pay the lowest wages in the region. These wages currently average $2 or $3 a day; in real terms they are worth less than a quarter of their 1980 value.

Haiti's tiny elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, and it is only violence that allows it to retain them. For much of the last century, Haiti's military and paramilitary forces (with substantial amounts of US support) were able to preserve these privileges on their own. Over the course of the 1980s, however, it started to look as if local military repression might no longer be up to the job. A massive and courageous popular mobilisation (known as Lavalas) culminated in 1990 with the landslide election of the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Large numbers of ordinary people began to participate in the political system for the first time, and as political scientist Robert Fatton remembers, 'panic seized the dominant class. It dreaded living in close proximity to la populace and barricaded itself against Lavalas.’ [4]

Nine months later, the army dealt with this popular threat in the time-honoured way, with a coup d'e'tat. Over the next three years, around 4,000 Aristide supporters were killed.

However, when the US eventually allowed Aristide to return in October 1994, he took a surprising and unprecedented step: he abolished the army that had deposed him. As human rights lawyer Brian Concannon (director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti) observed a few years later, ‘it is impossible to overestimate the impact of this accomplishment. It has been called the greatest human rights development in Haiti since emancipation, and is wildly popular.' [5] In 2000, the Haitian electorate gave Aristide a second overwhelming mandate when his party (Fanmi Lavalas) won more than 90% of the seats in parliament.

II

More than anything else, what has happened in Haiti since 1990 should be understood as the progressive clarification of this basic dichotomy – democracy or the army. Unadulterated democracy might one day allow the interests of the numerical majority to prevail, and thereby challenge the privileges of the elite. In 2000, such a challenge became a genuine possibility: the overwhelming victory of Fanmi Lavalas, at all levels of government, raised the prospect of genuine political change in a context in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism -- no army -- to prevent it.

In order to avoid this outcome, the main strategy of Haiti's little ruling class has been to redefine political questions in terms of 'stability' and 'security', and in particular the security of property and investments. Mere numbers may well win an election or sustain a popular movement but as everyone knows, only an army is equipped to deal with insecurity. The well-armed 'friend of Haiti' that is the United States knows this better than anyone else.

As soon as Aristide was re-elected, a systematic international campaign to bankrupt and destabilise his second government set the stage for a paramilitary insurrection and a further coup d'e'tat, and in 2004, thousands of US troops again invaded Haiti (just as they first did back in 1915) in order to 'restore stability and security' to their 'troubled island neighbour.' An expensive and long-term UN 'stabilisation mission' staffed by 9,000 heavily armed troops soon took over the job of helping to pacify the population and criminalise the resistance. By the end of 2006, thousands more Aristide supporters had been killed.

Over the course of 2009, a suitably stabilised Haitian government agreed to persevere with the privatisation of the country’s remaining public assets, [6] veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day, and to bar Fanmi Lavalas (and several other political parties) from participating in the next round of legislative elections.

When it comes to providing stability, today's UN troops are clearly a big improvement over the old indigenous alternative. If things get so unstable that even the ground begins to shake, however, there's still nothing that can beat the world's leading provider of peace and security.

III

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that struck on 12 January 2010, it might have seemed hard to counter arguments in favour of allowing the US military, with its 'unrivalled logistical capability', to take de facto control of such a massive relief operation. Weary of bad press in Iraq and Afghanistan, US commanders also seemed glad of this unexpected opportunity to rebrand their armed forces as angels of mercy. As usual, the Haitian government was instructed to be grateful for whatever help it could get.

That was before US commanders actively began – the day after the earthquake struck – to divert aid away from the disaster zone.

As soon as the US air force took control of Haitian airspace, on Wednesday 13 January, they explicitly prioritised military over humanitarian flights. Although most reports from Port-au-Prince emphasised remarkable levels of patience and solidarity on the streets, US commanders made fears of popular unrest and insecurity their number one concern. Their first priority was to avoid what the US Air Force Special Command Public Affairs spokesman (Ty Foster) called another 'Somalia effort' [7] – which is to say, presumably, a situation in which a humiliated US army might once again risk losing military control of a 'humanitarian' mission.

As many observers predicted, however, the determination of US commanders to forestall this risk by privileging guns and soldiers over doctors and food has only succeeded in helping to provoke a few occasional bursts of the very unrest they set out to contain. In order to amass a sufficiently large amount of soldiers and military equipment 'on the ground', the US Air Force diverted plane after plane packed with emergency supplies away from Port-au-Prince. Among many others, World Food Program flights were turned away by US commanders on Thursday and Friday, the New York Times reported, 'so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.' [8]

Many similar flights met a similar fate, right through to the end of the week. Me'decins sans Frontie`res (MSF) alone has so far had to watch at least five planeloads of its medical supplies be turned away. [9] On Saturday 16 January, for instance, 'despite guarantees given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic', delaying its arrival by an additional 24 hours. [10] Late on Monday 18 January, MSF 'complained that one of its cargo planes carrying 12 tonnes of medical equipment had been turned away three times from Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday,' despite receiving 'repeated assurances they could land.' By that stage one group of MSF doctors in Port-au-Prince had been 'forced to buy a saw in the market to continue the amputations' upon which the lives of their patients depended. [11]

While US commanders set about restoring security by assembling a force of some 14,000 Marines, residents in some less secure parts of Port-au-Prince soon started to run out of food and water. On 20 January people sleeping in one of the largest and most easily accessed of the many temporary refugee camps in central Port-au-Prince (in Champs Mars) told writer Tim Schwartz, author of the 2008 book Travesty in Haiti, that 'no relief has arrived; it is all being delivered on other side of town, by the US embassy.' [12] Telesur reporter Reed Lindsay confirmed on 20 January, a full eight days after the quake, that the impoverished south-western Port-au-Prince suburb closest to the earthquake's epicentre, Carrefour, still hadn't received any food, aid or medical help. [13]

The BBC's Mark Doyle found the same thing in an eastern (and less badly affected) suburb. 'Their houses are destroyed, they have no running water, food prices have doubled, and they haven't seen a single government official or foreign aid worker since the earthquake struck.' Overall, Doyle observed, 'the international response has been quite pathetic. Some of the aid agencies are working very hard, but there are two ways of reporting this kind of thing. One is to hang around with the aid agencies and hang around with the American spokespeople at the airport, and you'll hear all sorts of stories about what's happening. Another way is to drive almost at random with ordinary people and go and see what's happening in ordinary places. In virtually every area I've driven to, ordinary people say that I was the first foreigner that they'd met.' [14]

Only a full week after the earthquake did emergency food supplies even begin the slow journey from the heavily guarded airport to fourteen 'secure distribution points' in various parts of the city. [15] By that stage, tens of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents had finally come to the conclusion that no aid would be forthcoming, and began to abandon the capital for villages in the countryside.

On Sunday 17 January, Al-Jazeera's correspondent summarised what many other journalists had been saying all week. 'Most Haitians have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armoured personnel carriers cruise the streets' and 'inside the well-guarded perimeter [of the airport], the US has taken control. It looks more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than a centre for aid distribution.' [16] Late on the same day, the World Food Programme's air logistics officer Jarry Emmanuel confirmed that most of the 200 flights going in and out of the airport each day were still being reserved for the US military: 'their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed.' [17] By Monday 18 January, no matter how many US embassy or military spokesman insisted that 'we are here to help' rather than invade, governments as different as those of France and Venezuela had begun to accuse the US of effectively 'occupying' the country. [18]

IV

The US decision to privilege military over humanitarian traffic at the airport sealed the fate of many thousands of people abandoned in the rubble of lower Port-au-Prince and Le'ogane. In countries all over the world, search and rescue teams were ready to leave for Haiti within 12 hours of the disaster. Only a few were able to arrive without fatal delays – mainly teams, like those from Venezuela, Iceland and China, who managed to land while Haitian staff still retained control of their airport. Some subsequent arrivals, including a team from the UK, were prevented from landing with their heavy lending equipment. Others, like Canada's several Heavy Urban Search Rescue Teams, were immediately readied but never sent – the teams were told to stand down, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon eventually explained, because 'the government had opted to send Canadian Armed Forces instead.' [19]

USAID announced on 19 January that international search and rescue teams, over the course of the first full week after the disaster, had managed to save a grand total of 70 people. [20] The majority of these people were rescued in quite specific locations and circumstances. 'Search-and-rescue operations', observed the Washington Post on 18 January, 'have been intensely focused on buildings with international aid workers, such as the crushed U.N. headquarters, and on large hotels with international clientele.' [21] Tim Schwartz spent much of the first post-quake week as a translator with rescue workers, and was struck by the fact that most of their work was confined to places – the UN's hotel Christophe, the Montana Hotel, the Caribe supermarket – that were not only frequented by foreigners but that could be snugly enclosed within 'secure perimeters.' Elsewhere, he observed, UN 'peacekeepers' did their best to make sure that rescue workers treated onlooking crowds as a source of potential danger rather than assistance. [22]

Until the residents of devastated places like Le'ogane and Carrefour are somehow able to reassure foreign troops that they will feel 'secure' when visiting their neighbourhoods, UN and US commanders clearly prefer to let them die on their own.

Exactly the same logic has condemned yet more people to death in and around Port-au-Prince's hospitals. In one of the most illuminating reports yet filed from the city, on 20 January Democracy Now's Amy Goodman spoke with Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health/Zamni Lasante from the General Hospital, the most important medical centre in the whole country. Lyon acknowledged there was a need for 'crowd control, so that the patients are not kept from having access', but insisted that 'there's no insecurity [...]. I don’t know if you guys were out late last night, but you can hear a pin drop in this city. It’s a peaceful place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that’s ongoing [...]. The first thing that [your] listeners need to understand is that there is no insecurity here. There has not been, and I expect there will not be.' On the contrary, Lyon explained, 'this question of security and the rumours of security and the racism behind the idea of security has been our major block to getting aid in. The US military has promised us for several days to bring in machinery, but they’ve been listening to this idea that things are insecure, and so we don’t have supplies.' As of 20 January, the hospital still hadn't received the supplies and medicines needed to treat many hundreds of dying patients. 'In terms of aid relief the response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been sent to places that were, quote, “more secure," that have ten or twenty doctors and ten patients. We have a thousand people on this campus who are triaged and ready for surgery, but we only have four working operating rooms, without anaesthesia and without pain medications.' [23]

Almost by definition, in post-quake Haiti it seems that anyone or anything that cannot be enclosed in a 'secure perimeter' isn't worth saving.

In their occasional forays outside such perimeters, meanwhile, some Western journalists seemed able to find plenty of reasons for retreating behind them. Lurid stories of looting and gangs soon began to lend 'security experts' like the London-based Stuart Page [24] an aura of apparent authority, when he explained to the BBC's gullible 'security correspondent' Frank Gardner that 'all the security gains made in Haiti in the last few years could now be reversed [...]. The criminal gangs, totalling some 3,000, are going to exploit the current humanitarian crisis, to the maximum degree.' [25]

Another seasoned BBC correspondent, Matt Frei, had a similar story to tell on 18 January, when he found a few scavengers sifting through the remains of a central shopping district. 'Looting is now the only industry here. Anything will do as a weapon. Everything is now run by rival armed groups of thugs.' If Haiti is to avoid anarchy, Frei concluded, 'what may be needed is a full scale military occupation.' [26]

Not even former US president (and former Haiti occupier) Bill Clinton was prepared to go that far. 'Actually', Clinton told Frei, 'when you think about people who have lost everything except what they're carrying on their backs, who not only haven't eaten but probably haven't slept in four days, and when the sun goes down it's totally dark and they spend all night long tripping over bodies living and dead, well, I think they've behaved quite well [...]. They are astonishing people. How can they be so calm in the face of such enormous loss of life and loved ones, and all the physical damage?' [27]

Reporters able to tell the difference between occasional and highly localised bursts of foraging and a full-scale 'descent into anarchy' made much the same point all week, as did dozens of indignant Haitian correspondents. On 17 January, for instance, Cine' Institute director David Belle tried to counter international misrepresentation. 'I have been told that much US media coverage paints Haiti as a tinderbox ready to explode. I'm told that lead stories in major media are of looting, violence and chaos. There could be nothing further from the truth. I have travelled the entire city daily since my arrival. The extent of the damage is absolutely staggering [but...] NOT ONCE have we witnessed a single act of aggression or violence [...]. A crippled city of two million awaits help, medicine, food and water. Most haven't received any. Haiti can be proud of its survivors. Their dignity and decency in the face of this tragedy is itself staggering.' [28]

As anyone can see, however, dignity and decency are no substitute for security. No amount of weapons will ever suffice to reassure those 'fortunate few' whose fortunes isolate them from the people they exploit. As far as the people themselves are concerned, 'security is not the issue', explains Haiti Liberte''s Kim Ives. 'We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for many years.'[29] But while the people who have lost what little they had have done their best to cope and regroup, the soldiers sent to 'restore order' treat them as potential combatants. 'It’s just the same way they reacted after Katrina', concludes Ives. 'The victims are what’s scary. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave revolution in history. What could be more threatening?'

'According to everyone I spoke with in the centre of the city', wrote Schwarz on 21 January, 'the violence and gang stuff is pure BS.' The relentless obsession with security, agrees Andy Kershaw, is clear proof of the fact that most foreign soldiers and NGO workers 'haven't a clue about the country and its people.' [30] True to form, within hours of the earthquake most of the panicked staff in the US embassy had already been evacuated, and at least one prominent foreign contractor in the garment sector (the Canadian firm Gildan Activewear) announced that it would be shifting production to alternative sewing facilities in neighbouring countries.[31] The price to be paid for such priorities will not be evenly distributed. Up in the higher, wealthier and mostly undamaged parts of Pe'tionville everyone already knows that it's the local residents 'who through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses' will once again pocket the lion's share of international aid and reconstruction money. [32]

In order to help keep less well-connected families where they belong, meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken 'unprecedented' emergency measures to secure the homeland this past week. Operation 'Vigilant Sentry' will make efficient use of the large naval flotilla the US has assembled around Port-au-Prince. 'As well as providing emergency supplies and medical aid', notes The Daily Telegraph, 'the USS Carl Vinson, along with a ring of other navy and coast guard vessels, is acting as a deterrent to Haitians who might be driven to make the 681 mile sea crossing to Miami.' While Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade offered 'voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to [the land of] their origin', American officials confirmed that they would continue to apply their long-standing (and thoroughly illegal) policy with respect to all Haitian refugees and asylum seekers – to intercept and repatriate them automatically, regardless of the circumstances. [33]

Ever since the quake struck, the US Air Force has taken the additional precaution of flying a radio-transmitting cargo plane for five hours a day over large parts of the country, so as to broadcast a recorded message from Haiti's ambassador in Washington. 'Don’t rush on boats to leave the country', the message says. 'If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.' Not even life-threatening injuries are enough to entitle Haitians to a different sort of American reception. When the dean of medicine at the University of Miami arrived to help set up a field hospital by the airport in Port-au-Prince, he was outraged to find that most seriously injured people in the city were being denied the visas they would need to be transferred to Florida for surgery and treatment. As of 19 January the State Department had authorised a total of 23 exceptions to its golden rule of immigration. 'It’s beyond insane,' O'Neill complained. 'It’s bureaucracy at its worst.' [34]

V

This is the fourth time the US has invaded Haiti since 1915. Although each invasion has taken a different form and responded to a different pretext, all four have been expressly designed to restore 'stability' and 'security' to the island. Earthquake-prone Haiti must now be the most thoroughly stabilised country in the world. Thousands more foreign security personnel are already on their way, to guard the teams of foreign reconstruction and privatisation consultants who in the coming months are likely to usurp what remains of Haitian sovereignty.

Perhaps some of these guards and consultants will help their elite clients achieve another long-cherished dream: the restoration of Haiti's own little army. And perhaps then, for a short while at least, the inexhaustible source of 'instability' in Haiti – the ever-nagging threat of popular political participation and empowerment – may be securely buried in the rubble of its history.

NOTES

[1] An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in The National, 21 January 2010, http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100121/REVIEW/701219960.

[2] See Pa*l Sletten and Willy Egset, Poverty in Haiti (FAFO, 2004), 9.

[3] IMF, Haiti: Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (November 2006), 7.

[4] Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 86-87, 83.

[5] Brian Concannon, ‘Lave Men, Siye Ate`: Taking Human Rights Seriously', in Melinda Miles and Eugenia Charles, eds. Let Haiti LIVE: Unjust US Policies Towards its Oldest Neighbor (Coconut Creek FL: Educa Vision, 2004), 92.

[6] See for instance Jeb Sprague, 'Haiti's Classquake', HaitiAnalysis 19 January 2010, http://www.haitianalysis.com/2010/1/19/haiti-s-classquake.

[7] BBC Radio 4 News, 16 January 2010, 22:00GMT.

[8] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, 'Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises', New York Times 17 January 2010.

[9] 'Me'decins Sans Frontie`res says its plane turned away from US-run airport', Daily Telegraph 19 January 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7031203/Haiti-earthquake-Medecins-Sans-Frontieres-says-its-plane-turned-away-from-US-run-airport.html.

[10] 'Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince', 18 January 2010, http://doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165&cat=press-release.

[11] 'America sends paratroopers to Haiti to help secure aid lines', The Times 20 January 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6994523.ece.

[12] Email from Tim Schwartz, January 20, 2010.

[13] 'No aid [in Carrefour]. In the morning at UN base they said they would distribute there, but it didn't happen' (Reed Lindsay, Honor and Respect Foundation Newsletter, 20 January 2010, http://www.hrfhaiti.org/earthquake/). Cf. Luis Felipe Lopez, 'Town at epicenter of quake stays in isolation', The Miami Herald 17 January, 2010.

[14] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, 18 January 2010.

[15] Ed Pilkington, 'We're not here to fight, US troops insist', The Guardian 18 January 2010.

[16] 'Disputes Emerge over Haiti aid control', Al Jazeera 17 January 2010.

[17] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, 'Officials strain to distribute aid to Haiti as violence rises', New York Times 17 January 2010.

[18] 'Haiti aid agencies warn: chaotic and confusing relief effort is costing lives', The Guardian 18 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/18/haiti-aid-distribution-confusion-warning.

[19] Don Peat, 'HUSAR not up to task, feds say: Search and rescue team told to stand down', Toronto Sun 17th January 2010, http://www.torontosun.com/news/haiti/2010/01/17/12504981.html.

[20] USAID, http://www.usaid.gov/helphaiti/index.html, accessed on 20 January 2010.

[21] William Booth, 'Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation', Washington Post, 18 January 2010.

[22] Tim Schwarz, phonecall with the author, 18 January 2010; cf. Tim Schwartz, 'Is this anarchy? Outsiders believe this island nation is a land of bandits. Blame the NGOs for the “looting,”' NOW Toronto, 21 January 2010, http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=173333.

[23] 'With Foreign Aid Still at a Trickle, Devastated Port-au-Prince General Hospital Struggles to Meet Overwhelming Need', Democracy Now! 20 January 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/devastated_port_au_prince_hospital_struggles.

[24] Stuart Page is chairman of Page Group, http://www.pagegroupltd.com/aboutus.html.

[25] Gardner then explained that, with the police weakened by the quake, 'thousands of escaped criminals have returned to areas they once terrorised, like the slum district of Cite' Soleil [...]. Unless the armed criminals are re-arrested, Haiti's security problems risk being every bit as bad as they were in 2004' (BBC Radio 4, Six O'clock News, 18 January 2010). In fact, when some of these ex-prisoners tried to re-establish themselves in Cite' Soleil in the week after the quake, local residents promptly chased them out of the district on their own (see Ed Pilkington and Tom Phillips, 'Haiti escaped prisoners chased out of notorious slum', The Guardian 20 January 2010; Tom Leonard, 'Scenes of devastation outside Port-au-Prince "even worse"', Daily Telegraph 21 January 2010).

[26] BBC television, Ten O'clock News, 18 January 2010.

[27] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, 18 January 2010. It sounds as if Clinton, in his role as UN special envoy to Haiti, may be learning a few things from his deputy – Zanmi Lasante's Dr. Paul Farmer.

[28] David Belle, 17 January 2010.

[29] 'Journalist Kim Ives on How Western Domination Has Undermined Haiti’s Ability to Recover from Natural Devastation', Democracy Now! 21 January 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades. Ives illustrates the way such community organisations work with an example from the Delmas 33 neighbourhood where he's staying. 'A truckload of food came in in the middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular organization was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members [...]. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the [Matthew 25] house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN. [...] These are things that people can do for themselves and are doing for themselves.' Kershaw makes the same point: 'This self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over "security" for what it is and make use of Haiti's best resource and its most efficient distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They will find the means to collect it. Fill up their trucks and cars with free fuel. Any further restriction on, and control of, the supply of aid is not only patronising but it is in that control and restriction where any "security issues" will really lurk. And it is the Haitians who best know where the aid is needed' (Andy Kershaw, 'Stop treating these people like savages', The Independent 21 January 2010).

[30] Andy Kershaw, 'Stop treating these people like savages', The Independent 21 January 2010.

[31] Ross Marowits, 'Gildan shifting T-shirt production outside Haiti to ensure adequate supply', The Canadian Press, 13 January 2010, http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/headline_news/article.jsp?content=b131693719.

[32] William Booth, 'Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation', Washington Post 18 January 2010.

[33] Bruno Waterfield, 'US ships blockade coast to thwart exodus to America', Daily Telegraph 19 January 2010; 'Senegal offers land to Haitians', BBC News 17 January 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8463921.stm.

Read on Haitianalysis.com

by Peter Hallward

PROFANITY ON THE EDGE OF THE ANNIVERSARY

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:14:07 GMT

Who ordered the theft of the Auschwitz sign?
On 27th of January, the 65th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation — one of the most terrible Nazi concentration camps freed by the Soviet forces — is about to take place. But it turned out that not only the winners were preparing for the anniversary but also the neo-Nazis. In the end of December, last year, right on the catholic Christmas Eve, world information agencies reported of the shocking incident in Poland: sign from the entrance gate of one of the most dreadful Nazi camps has mysteriously disappeared. Metal sign that used to hang on the gates to this hell ran "Arbeit mach frei" which means "Work sets you free".

Read more...

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By Gregory TINSKY

Can A Science-Minded Child Be Raised Religious?

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:00:29 GMT

A few years ago, my husband and I took our three children to Pompeii - the ruined and partially buried Roman city near Naples, Italy. As one of the most spectacular sights one can see in a lifetime, I was sure my children would be forever affected by their firsthand encounter with the history of this special place, destroyed during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. but rediscovered in 1738.
As I looked upon the children, my chest puffed out with the pride of a parent trying desperately hard to show her children the world. My suddenly very bored 6-year-old son turned to me and said: "Mommy, I wonder if anyone has ever made an M&M as big as a cookie. Could we try sometime? How could we do that?"
What? How could he say such a thing? Doesn't he realize where he is? I'm reminded of this story today as I struggle with a different and much more complex issue: how to elicit an interest in religion from my overtly cynical and science-minded children.
For years I've been a foreign correspondent and more recently became the author of a biography called "The Fossil Hunter" about an English woman named Mary Anning who helped launch the debate over extinction, evolution, and the earth's real age in the early 1800s.

As a result, I've found myself writing and speaking a great deal these days about the reconciliation of science and religion, often preaching to the choir in rooms filled with educated people who understand that the two are not incompatible. But somehow I fear I've failed to make a connection with my own children as I've attempted to get this same message across.
Raised a Christian, I was always taught by my mother to go through life with the faith of a child, a wisdom spelled out in both the Gospels of Luke and Mark. Although I grew to become an endlessly curious reporter, I was never one of those children who asked a heap of searching questions like "Why can't I see angels?"
But the mustard seed of faith planted during my childhood has never left me even at a time where in some circles it's a badge of honor to skate over issues of religion. Today we live in a world marked by one scientific discovery after another, an age when scientists are extracting DNA with the hopes of resurrecting the woolly mammoth while talking about human cloning as a very real possibility.
My children love this stuff. They make straight As in science and physics classes and when they search out information they like to find answers that make sense to them. I'm thrilled about their pursuits but also have worked hard to try to force them to get excited over something they have a tougher time getting their young heads around - religion.
I've read them Bible stories and then cringed when they've begun to laugh. I've prayed with them for friends to get well only to get irritated with them a week later when they ask why the friends are still ill.
Most importantly I've emphasized the mysteries that science can't explain. For example, despite centuries of astronomical observations it is thought that more than 90 percent of the mass in our universe is still undetected.
But I fear that I've been trying too hard and that I need to be sending them the same message I send when I speak to adults about my book: that both science and religion can give explanations that are not in any kind of competition with each other, but rather are complementary. In other words, we can believe that the earth is close to 4.5 billion years old - and also look toward religion for answers about our ultimate purpose in life.
Many of the early scientists were themselves people who saw their faith as the key driver in exploring and understanding the natural world God had created. According to Denis Alexander, director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion based in England's Cambridge University, Isaac Newton would have looked puzzled in the 18th century if asked what he thought about the relationship between science and religion.
Alexander says:

For so many centuries science and religion were so closely intertwined that I'm not sure that people would have thought about the 'relationship' between them with the implication that they represent two distinct bodies of knowledge.

In a recent study, Elaine Howard Ecklund, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, found that 52 percent of scientists in the United States express no religious affiliation compared with 14 percent of the general public. But - interestingly -- she also found that younger scientists are more likely to express a religious affiliation than older scientists.
And so when my 11-year-old son tells me enthusiastically that - according to new theories -- the earth didn't start with a big bang but actually with an endless series of expansions and rebirths, I will not immediately recoil and wonder why I can't evoke the same sort of elation over Sunday school. Certainly I will continue to encourage my children to see the big picture and not to be blind to the possibility that religion is hugely important. But I will also emphasize and appreciate that they can have an interest in both religion and science and remind myself that belief and inquiry are not mutually exclusive.

read оn Huffington Post

by Shelley EMELING

Top 10 Born Again Christian's in Metal

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:02:31 GMT

My good friend over at Noise Creep, Carlos Ramirez posted a Top 10 list of Christcore bands. I took that as a challenge and since I really don't listen to much Christcore, except Demon Hunter (which wasn't on Carlos' list by the way = fail), I couldn't say anything. Anyways, I decided to do a Top 10 list of Born-Again Christians in Metal.

10. Fieldy - Korn

He quit drugs cold turkey when his father, a born-again Christian, told him his dying wish was for his son to find God.

9. Dan Spitz - Anthrax

I always thought Dan Spitz was Jewish? I guess he gave up on that and became a Christian. It must be why he and Dave Mustaine are such good friends.

8. Tom Araya - Slayer

"If guitarist King writes a good song, Araya puts his beliefs aside, "I'm not one that's going to go, 'This sucks because it's contrary to my beliefs.' To me it's more like 'this is really good stuff. You're going to piss people off with this.'" Drummer Dave Lombardo is also a born-again Christian.

7. Peter Steele - Type o Negative

"I was born a Roman Catholic and I think that I have gone back to my faith. You know, people ask me are you a born-again Christian and I said no I am a dead-again Christian I have always been dead. I believe in Jesus Christ and God and the whole thing but, you know, I don't shove it down anyone's throat. You know, it's a very private personal thing and faith is really strong and I really want to see my mother and father again. And also I can't believe that somebody like Hitler and Mother Teresa are going to the same place after death. I can't believe that." Besides, you don't get a cock that big unless you are blessed by the Lord.

6. Nicko McBrain - Iron Maiden

"Without this church and this relationship with God, I don't know where I'd be right now. I just know that I want to be able to use my life for God.

5. Dee Snider - Twisted Sister

At the PMRC hearings, Dee Snider mentioned in his Statement to the Senate that he considers himself Christian, saying "I was born and raised a Christian and I still adhere to those principles.

4. C.C. Deville - Poison

Deville became a born-again Christian a few years back. we wrote about it, got lot's of hate mail, nuff said.

3. Alice Cooper - Alice Cooper

Although Alice Cooper originally tended to shy away from speaking publicly about his religious beliefs, he has in recent years been quite vocal about his faith as a born-again Christian. "Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's real rebellion!"

2. Brian 'Head' Welch - Korn, Head

In 2005, Head stated that he has "chosen the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior, and will be dedicating his musical pursuits to that end." Not many quit a major band like Korn for their beliefs. I think the only guy that quit a metal band over his religious convictions.

1. Dave Mustaine - Megadeth

Dave has had Satanic bands tossed from shows before. He has also stated "I got saved in 2002."

read on Gauntlet

Reality Check: Dancing the Apocalypso

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:19:43 GMT

Millions of religious believers around the world share a passionate belief in the coming of doomsday -- and that means that the End of Days will remain a factor in politics at least until, well, the end of humankind.
As a year and a decade draw to a close, it seems to be an appropriate moment to contemplate the end of time itself. Then again, maybe it's just that Hollywood focuses the mind on last things. This year, Roland Emmerich's 2012 upped the cataclysmic ante by flooding the Himalayas and tipping cities into the ocean.

The filmed version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road took the micro view, following a father and son on a journey through a post-apocalyptic world. In January we'll get Denzel Washington as Mad Max squared in The Book of Eli, another movie that takes the end of civilization as we know it as an excuse for some really cool fight scenes.

These sorts of disaster movies have been around for a while, of course. Over the past few decades, the apocalypse has given moviemakers a perfect opportunity to indulge in humongous spectacle and wallow in the darker aspects of the human character. (If you can't deal with the idea of people eating other people, don't buy a ticket for The Road.) A pity we can't just leave it at that. Current events would suggest that the persistent popularity of Go"tterda"mmerung scenarios speaks to something deep in our psyche, and that our interest in the End of Days goes a lot farther than the multiplex.

Just take modern-day Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a firm believer in the second coming of the Mahdi, Islam's version of the messiah. Ahmadinejad and his followers have allocated millions of dollars from the Iranian government budget for renovating the city of Jamkaran. That's where Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, once appeared and offered prayers before disappearing into the supernatural realm from which he will one day re-emerge when history comes to its end. To Israelis, unsurprisingly, the prospect of a passionate Shiite millenarian at the helm of the Iranian state is not exactly inspiring. "You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told an American interviewer in March 2009. "When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran."

Netanyahu's remark about the "wide-eyed believer" may have been based on moments like the one in 2005, when Ahmadinejad concluded a speech at the United Nations with a prayer to hasten the "emergence of the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace." And ironically enough, it's that longing for justice and peace that appears most dangerous in religious readings of the apocalypse. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share the notion that a messianic figure will appear at the end of time to wash away the muddle, violence, and injustice of the world we live in now and usher in a new era of utopian purity. (Sadly for most of us, most of the scenarios require a cleansing fury of war and cataclysm before the age of sweet holiness can be achieved.) As a result, the appeal of Judgment Day seems to be at its greatest among groups who seethe with feelings of victimization. That, of course, can be particularly inviting for politicians and religious leaders, who are happy to play on such a potent mixture of longing and fear.

As a result, even the craziest eschatologies can have very specific real-world effects. Cult leaders have repeatedly used apocalyptic views to goad their followers into violence (as in the Jonestown mass suicide that took 918 lives in 1978 or the 1995 subway gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Tokyo that left 12 commuters dead). The American terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people when he bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, claimed to have drawn his motivation from a millenarian racist novel, popular among U.S. right-wing extremists, called The Turner Diaries.

The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of a book on Islamic theories of the apocalypse, says that grassroots doomsday scenarios have tended to proliferate throughout the Muslim world at moments of particular crisis. Many Iraqis who resisted the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 did so for reasons that would be entirely understandable to guerillas and partisans in conflicts elsewhere. Yet the fight against the Coalition presence also inspired a dramatic revival of homegrown apocalyptic ideas -- with the United States usually cast in the role of the dajjal, Islam's version of the Antichrist. It was not for nothing, of course, that the Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr called his militia "the Mahdi Army." In his speeches Sadr has frequently alluded to the notion that the war in Iraq is setting the stage for the Mahdi's imminent reappearance -- echoing the Iranian revolutionaries who made similar claims back in 1979.
In fact, in November of 1979, a group of Saudi religious extremists took over the Great Mosque in Mecca, claiming to usher in the age of righteousness on behalf of a man they believed to be the Mahdi. The fighting that resulted, as Saudi government forces moved in to retake the mosque, left hundreds dead. As the journalist Yaroslav Trofimov has shown in his study of the mosque seizure, that event also triggered a wave of Islamic revivalism around the world and prompted the shocked Saudi royal family to curb its Westernizing ways and fund Islamic activism abroad in the hope of thwarting religiously motivated rebellion at home. The hostage-takers in the Grand Mosque would also offer inspiration to a later generation of Sunni millenarians whose ranks include Osama bin Laden.

Yet visions of the end times don't have to inspire violence to in order to affect politics. Take the city of Jerusalem, where the doomsday scenarios of the world's three great monotheistic religions overlap and, in some cases, compete. For Jewish, Christian, and Islamic messianists, control of the Temple Mount -- where Solomon's Temple presumably once stood and where the Prophet Mohammed ascended into heaven -- is about competing visions of the sacred future as well as the past. The Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, in his remarkable book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, explores how members of all three religions posit doomsday scenarios that pivot around the site. Gorenberg shows how visions of the end of time can subtly color this-worldly intrigue as groups around the world maneuver for a piece of the holy real estate.

Perhaps the most intriguing case in Gershom's book involves the Christian fundamentalists who believe that their own messiah won't be able to appear until the Third Temple has been constructed on the spot where Jews now pray at the Wailing Wall and Muslims worship in the Dome of the Rock. Prominent among these Christian "dispensationalist" groups are the Assemblies of God, the church of potential presidential candidate Sarah Palin (who proudly displayed an Israeli flag in her gubernatorial office in Alaska). It would be stretching things to say that believers in the Rapture control U.S. politics, but the alliance between Zionists and born-again U.S. Christians whose own eschatological views give prominent place to the "regathering" of Jews in the Holy Land has undeniably exerted a disproportionate influence on Washington's policy toward the Middle East in recent years.

Still, of all the places where politicians thematize ideas of apocalypse, Iran offers a particularly vivid example of the benefits for those who invoke the Second Coming. Ahmadinejad's enthusiasm for mahdaviat -- the need to make all necessary preparations for hastening the Mahdi's return -- dovetails nicely with his own populist claim to leadership of the Iranian nation. It's an approach that has opened him up to criticism even from within the country. He has been accused of manipulating religion to political ends by no less than Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the recently deceased senior cleric who was once designated as Khomeini's successor before becoming a dissident later on. "One objection [to the government] is they take advantage of Islamic religion and Imam Zaman [Mahdi] - they exploit them," Montazeri told The Christian Science Monitor in a 2005 interview. "If the government uses religious slogans and religion as a tool [to gain power], this makes people fed up with religion and is wrong."

Some political scientists, like Michael Desch, argue, meanwhile, that even an Iranian leader who sincerely adheres to messianic beliefs will still find good reason to adhere to the dictates of realpolitik. These analysts argue that Israel's large nuclear arsenal is enough to deter Iranian leaders from unleashing a first strike on the Jewish state -- just as the prospect of megadeaths dissuaded even marginally rational leaders like Mao Zedong from launching nuclear conflicts. Still, given the dark rhetoric from Tehran, it's hard to blame Israelis for wondering whether Iran's leaders might take it upon themselves to speed up the coming of the apocalypse by a few years.

read on Foregin Policy

by Christian KARYL

As spiritual films bring in the bucks, Hollywood gets more religious

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:56:53 GMT

It's everywhere at the multiplex these days: religion. Or if that word makes you uncomfortable, you can go with the more general "spirituality."

In movies as varied as the dead serious "The Road," the uplifting family picture "The Blind Side," the biting comedy "The Invention of Lying" and even James Cameron's sci-fi opus "Avatar," issues of faith and morality and mankind's place in the universe are all the rage.

Not all of these movies embrace religion. Some question human gullibility. Some ask for evidence of a higher purpose in what often seems a random universe. But whether they encourage prayer or doubt, they're all part of the zeitgeist.

"There are two schools of thought about that," said Greg Wright, an editor at HollywoodJesus.com, which examines popular culture from a religious perspective.

"The more paranoid elements of our culture tend to think Hollywood has a proactive agenda, that producers have a grand scheme to use movies to shape the thinking of audiences. I don't subscribe to that school.

"I believe that Hollywood gives audiences what audiences want to see. If people don't want to see movies with certain messages, they won't buy tickets.

"So if there's a trend out there, it's one reflecting what people are already thinking and feeling," Wright said.

No coincidence

And what are we thinking?

Sister Rose Pacatte, who reviews movies for the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles, said it isn't mere coincidence that a new animated version of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" came along in 2009. The film was released in the wake of an economic crisis fueled by greedy self-interest on an unprecedented scale, she said.

"Being a good man of business will not save your soul. That's an essential message of 'A Christmas Carol' and one emphasized by this version," she said.

Dickens's tale may have little to say about God and Jesus, but it stresses charity and the dangers of poverty and ignorance, she said.

Other current films, while not overtly religious, stress the idea of human beings as dependent on one another and responsible for one another's well-being.

Pacatte pointed to "Up in the Air," in which George Clooney plays a loner whose job is to fire downsized employees and who has attempted to insulate himself from all human commitment.

"In some ways it's a modern 'Christmas Carol,' with Clooney's character becoming a bit more human, becoming more aware of himself and others," Pacatte said.

"Avatar" depicts humanity as a rapacious race represented by a soulless corporation and largely incapable of appreciating the simple ecological spiritualism of an alien race.

A runaway hit, too

Of course, some films put religion front and center.

"Of these films, 'Blind Side' has the most evangelical world view," said Mark Moring, senior associate editor at Christianity Today. "It's a movie based on real people who are devout Christians and whose faith clearly played a big part in their reaching out to this young homeless man and turning his world around." That "The Blind Side" has become a runaway hit should further encourage Hollywood to deal with religious themes, Moring said.

"When 'The Passion of the Christ' came out in '04, it showed Hollywood they could make lots of money with in-your-face spiritual themes. It taught them they don't have to be afraid of going with religious if not specifically Christian ideas. 'Blind Side' reinforces that," Moring said.

Wright at HollywoodJesus.com said, "The market dynamics of film are just beginning to sort out what happened in the wake of 'The Passion of the Christ.' Given that film production cycles can take several years, I expect to see more religious-themed films in coming months."

Not all of these will be big-budget Hollywood productions. Wright noted the box-office success of the low-budget "Facing the Giants" and "Fireproof," two unabashedly religious dramas made by Sherwood Pictures, which is affiliated with a church in Georgia.

"We're finally getting some decently crafted movies aimed at the faith audience," Wright said. "In the wake of 'Passion,' lots of titles were rushed to market to take advantage of the religious audience, and they just weren't very well written or produced. It's taken a while to get the quality."

Most likely the big studios quickly will lose interest in faith-themed subject matter, Wright said.

"Hollywood is all about cycles. This one will pass," he said. "The films that really matter, that actually have something to say, are the indie titles that sneak into the Hollywood distribution system or make their way to home video or the film festivals.
"That's where the real future of spiritual movies is -- with niche independent filmmakers who are finding distribution channels that work for them. Hollywood will always have a huge appetite for big tent-pole films. But that leaves an opportunity for others to make more modest movies about things that matter," Wright said.

Big-screen offerings

Recent or upcoming releases with religious themes:

"The Road": Earth is dying. In the wake of an undisclosed disaster, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wander a barren land, searching for sustenance and avoiding roaming bands of cannibals. Unrelentingly bleak, this cinematic version of Cormac McCarthy's novel is about one man's attempt to preserve what's left of humanity's goodness and innocence in his child. Though the film is never openly religious, many see it as a spiritual quest; McCarthy has spoken of his book as a sort of Christian allegory.

"The Lovely Bones": Life after death? It's a given in Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel about a murdered teen (Saoirse Ronan) who, from the afterlife, continues to watch over both her family and her killer (Stanley Tucci).

"The Invention of Lying": Ricky Gervais's comedy unfolds in an alternate universe where everybody compulsively tells the truth. But one man learns how to fib, and before long he's telling whoppers. In an effort to placate his unhappy fellow men, he declares that the world is run by a big man in the sky. He codifies rules of behavior and writes them down on the lids of pizza boxes. (What . . . no stone tablets?) And, having no defense against prevarication, everyone believes him. This comic parable on the origins of religion is biting, but Gervais's beaming delivery softens the blow. (No longer in theaters; due on DVD this month.)

"The Book of Eli": Denzel Washington plays a lone man fighting his way across post-apocalyptic America to protect a sacred book that allegedly holds the secrets to saving humankind.

"Legion": God has lost all hope in humankind and sends his legion of angels to Earth to bring on the Apocalypse in this supernatural action thriller. In a remote truck stop diner named Paradise Falls, the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) joins a group of strangers to defend the diner's waitress, who may be pregnant with the Messiah.

"The Last Station": The eternal battle between spirituality and materialism is waged in the soul of acclaimed Russian author Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), who is torn between his own need for transformation and the demands of his wife (Helen Mirren) and disciples.

"A Serious Man": The Coen brothers retell the biblical story of Job, relocating it to the late '60s Minneapolis suburbs of their adolescence. A Jewish college professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) finds everything in his life -- from his marriage to his car -- going down the tubes. In the original, God and Satan strike a deal to see how much grief one man can absorb before renouncing righteousness. This being a Coen brothers effort, God is nowhere in sight. Misery is just a universal fact of life; you'll survive only if you can laugh at it. (No longer in theaters; due on DVD in February.)

"A Christmas Carol": Charles Dickens wasn't particularly religious, but he sure knew how to punch our spiritual buttons. This computer-animated retelling from director Robert Zemeckis (with Jim Carrey as a superlative Scrooge) doesn't diminish Dickens's message: Devote your life to the almighty dollar (or pound sterling) and you'll spend eternity in the chains of your own making.

"Avatar": James Cameron's futuristic epic is about the efforts of humans to exploit the mineral wealth of a distant moon. Problem is, it's already occupied by blue-skinned primitives who believe that everything on their world -- animals, plants, the very dirt they walk on -- is imbued with spiritual power that must not be disturbed. Human greed vs. spiritual enlightenment: a timely theme.

"The Blind Side": In the holiday season's unexpected sleeper hit, a homeless boy (Quinton Aaron) is adopted by a wealthy Memphis family (Sandra Bullock is the force-of-nature mom), and with the family's love, dedication and disposable income, the kid raises his grades and becomes a terror on the football field. It's the true story of Baltimore Ravens lineman Michael Oher, and writer-director John Lee Hancock lets us know that the family's charity is rooted in their Christianity. Hollywood movies rarely know how to handle persons of faith; this one does.

read on Washington Post

By Robert W. Butler

Russians will answer for everything

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 07:45:10 GMT

“Is it nice to be Russian?” – My four-year-old daughter asks me while I sit, having buried into the news website. “Sometimes it’s is bloody interesting to be Russian” – I reply scrolling the news nervously. I’m stopped by the news title saying that “Russia is guilty for the war in Iraq”. I’m blinking. It didn’t work… I’m blinking again, rubbing my temples. It’s useless, though – the article is still in front of my eyes.

    “Head of SIS MI6[1] John Sawers named Russia to be one of the perpetrators of unleashing the war”, - the BBC Russian Service reports. Sawers made such announcement during the public hearings in London, concerning the circumstances of the Western Alliance’ forces invasion into Iraq.

    According to Sawers, who has been foreign advisor of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair in the beginning of 2000s, Russia is responsible for the failure to impose a number of sanctions to Iraq that could’ve helped to avoid an armed conflict.

Well, I was so interested of who was guilty for all that, while the answer was so close. It means that the lies about the Weapons of Mass Destruction have nothing to do with that. “Saddam Hussein had these weapons and he wanted to use them against the democracy.” I still clearly remember who said that and under what circumstances did it happen. It turned out that there was no weapon. “What do you mean – no weapon” – American and English secret services asked, - “We personally gave it him!” In my opinion, simple and natural question “Why?” is inappropriate here. It is an indecent question. Because answering it may lead to the fact that it has nothing to do with Russians, and it’s out of all reasons, because it doesn’t fit the traditional worldview.

Recently, Russia and France have started the negotiations about selling the helicopter carrier “Mistral” and transfer of license for the construction of three similar ones at the Russian dockyards. Georgia and Estonia writhe in hysteria. And it doesn’t matter for them, that the “Mistral” – is an oceangoing ship and neither of these two countries have an outlet to the ocean. It doesn’t matter much to them. “Russians decided to demolish Estonia and build up a bowling instead of it[2]”.

No one’s interested whether Russia itself and Russian citizens care about it. Russians – are predatory bears with the sharpened balalaikas and endless thirst for blood and vodka. Besides that, they live on the huge hydrocarbon reserves, and it turns little drama into the full-fledged tragedy. Russia, as opposed to Iraq, really owns the Weapon of Mass Destruction and the means to deliver it. So there’s not a slightest chance to democratize Russia on the model of Iraq, Afghanistan or Yugoslavia in the nearest future. It’s quite annoying, you know.

The issue is not just about the WMD. Two great consolidators of Europe – Napoleon and Hitler – found their death at the spaces of the Motherland. Mongolian hordes perished here, Crusader Orders’ hopes of the world domination went down the drain here, too. How could have these not-so-wealthy people refused to accept the benefits offered by the conquerors? What could have they countered to the up-to-date war machines of that time? It is incomprehensible. “Russia – is a riddle covered by a mystery”. It’s quite irritative — what secrets can be held there, when everything must be already clear and simple? Secrets are out of date; their place is at the museum of ancient history. And here you go — walking anachronism is looking at you and laying its claims to reality. It’s insanity!

Well, there is still some hope: demographic statistics of Russia is not so good. Russian people have the sharp issues with the alcohol-drinking and drug-using, so the riddle can solve itself. By the way, speaking about the drug-using:

     American experts, who were asked for help by the Russian Service of “Voice of America”, understand the anxiety of the Russian government but consider, the criticism of the USA to be ungrounded.
    “Drug-addiction issue – is a problem of demand but not of supply, - expert of libertarian Cato Institute in Washington Ted Galen Carpenter said during an interview. Calling on the USA and NATO partners to stop the drug flow from Afghanistan, Russian authorities seem to be seeking for a scapegoat. If we had tried to do this, it would have been a kind of suicide for the American politics. Drug turnover makes up more than a third of the Afghan economy, and if we’d try to destroy sown of opium poppy, we’d antagonize considerable part of country’s population. The majority of the Afghan elite are involved into the drug trade, whatever their ideological views are. Karzai and his office are involved into the drug trade.”
http://www1.voanews.com/russian/news/Analysis-and-perspectives/Afghan-Heroine-US-Russia-2009-12-09-78923902.html

Russians can only blame themselves for the drug-using. So perverted is the nation. Americans themselves don’t consider the drug production in Colombia to be a problem of demand having, to the contrary, flooded the drug plantations with defoliant. Because it is obvious for Americans, that the difference between the Americans and Russians is that if the Russian citizen is a drug-addict, he has to blame himself for it, but if the American citizen becomes a drug-addict, the Colombia is to be blamed. For the sake of establishing the democracy, we can forget and forgive the fact that the democratic president is also the first-rate drug dealer; it’s just not that important, you know. All the more, mind that he was elected by his own nation — they’ve filled in the ballots voting for the opposition candidates because of their illiteracy, however and the main contender broke the slate before the second tour.

Being Russian in a contemporary world seems to be as interesting as being Jew before the Second World War – you are constantly getting to know something new about yourself. You either directly participate in all the evil deeds in the world or you are suspected of it. “Hand of Kremlin”, “Intrigues of KGB” and “Russian trace” became an explanation for every shady deal. French have a beautiful saying “Chercher la femme[3]”. So, when some modern politician gets into a pretty mess he just has to start to “Chercher la Russe” to acquit the intent looks of his countrymen.

It is certainly very flattering to know that we are granted with such importance, but there is a nagging question: won’t this all finish for us as it finished for the European Jews? I saw the Nazi German comics dedicated to the Jewish issue. You know, they remind me of something…

That’s why, when my daughter asks me: “Is it nice to be Russian?” I don’t have the heart to say “Yes”. Although I’m sure to be cynical, but I still prefer not to lie to a child. I say that “it is very interesting to be Russian”. After all, isn’t it really interesting to be “a riddle covered with the mystery”, which is to be solved by yourself during your lifetime.

[1] SIS MI6 – Secret Intelligence Service, Military Intelligence

1 According to Russian standup actor Garik Martirosyan

[3] Look for the woman (Fr.)

read on eastwest-review.com

Roman NOSIKOV

Think Again: God

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:10:18 GMT

"God Is Dead."

No. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he thought that in the modern, scientific world people would soon be unable to countenance the idea of religious faith. By the time The Economist did its famous “God Is Dead” cover in 1999, the question seemed moot, notwithstanding the rise of politicized religiosity -- fundamentalism -- in almost every major faith since the 1970s. An obscure ayatollah toppled the shah of Iran, religious Zionism surfaced in Israel, and in the United States, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority announced its dedicated opposition to “secular humanism.”

But it is only since Sept. 11, 2001, that God has proven to be alive and well beyond all question -- at least as far as the global public debate is concerned. With jihadists attacking America, an increasingly radicalized Middle East, and a born-again Christian in the White House for eight years, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees. Even The Economist’s editor in chief recently co-authored a book called God Is Back. While many still question the relevance of God in our private lives, there’s a different debate on the global stage today: Is God a force for good in the world?

So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essentially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible.

These writers are wrong -- not only about religion, but also about politics -- because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

"God and Politics Shouldn’t Mix.

Not necessarily. Theologically illiterate politicians have long given religion a bad name. An inadequate understanding of God that reduces “him” to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secularism in government was meant to check this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.

In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population, who are still deeply attached to religion and find Western institutions alien.

In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired, making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical. In Egypt, for example, the remarkable reformer Muhammad Ali (1769-1849) so brutally impoverished and marginalized the clergy that its members turned their backs on change. When the shahs of Iran tortured and exiled mullahs who opposed their regime, some, such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, concluded that more extreme responses on the part of Iran’s future religious rulers were necessary.

Shiism had for centuries separated religion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini’s insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation. But moderate religion can play a constructive role in politics. Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905), grand mufti of Egypt, feared that the vast majority of Egyptians would not understand the country’s nascent democratic institutions unless they were explicitly linked with traditional Islamic principles that emphasized the importance of “consultation” (shura) and the duty of seeking “consensus” (ijma) before passing legislation.

In the same spirit, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social message of the Koran into a modern idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and factories that gave workers insurance, holidays, and good working conditions. In other words, he aimed to bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood’s resulting popularity was threatening to Egypt’s secular government, which could not provide these services. In 1949, Banna was assassinated, and some members of the Brotherhood splintered into radical offshoots in reaction.

Of course, the manner in which religion is used in politics is more important than whether it’s used at all. U.S. presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have invoked faith as a shared experience that binds the country together -- an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right. Still, this consensus is not satisfactory to American Protestant fundamentalists, who believe the United States should be a distinctively Christian nation.

"God Breeds Violence and Intolerance.

No, humans do. For Hitchens in God Is Not Great, religion is inherently “violent … intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry”; even so-called moderates are guilty by association. Yet it is not God or religion but violence itself -- inherent in human nature -- that breeds violence. As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you. Despite manifest failings over the centuries, this has remained the orthodox position.

In claiming that God is the source of all human cruelty, Hitchens and Dawkins ignore some of the darker facets of modern secular society, which has been spectacularly violent because our technology has enabled us to kill people on an unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly, religion has absorbed this belligerence, as became hideously clear with the September 11 atrocities.

But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism. Even the actions of so-called jihadists have been inspired by politics, not God. In a study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, American scholar Robert Pape concluded that 95 percent were motivated by a clear strategic objective: to force modern democracies to withdraw from territory the assailants regard as their national homeland.

This aggression does not represent the faith of the majority, however. In recent Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those questioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were entirely political.

Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative -- even heretical -- because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend. The Pakistani ideologue Abu Ala Maududi (1903-1979) was the first major Muslim thinker to make jihad, signifying “holy war” instead of the traditional meaning of “struggle” or “striving” for self-betterment, a central Islamic duty. Both he and the influential Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) were fully aware that this was extremely controversial but believed it was justified by Western imperialism and the secularizing policies of rulers such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

All fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim -- is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation. Qutb developed his ideology in the concentration camps where Nasser interred thousands of the Muslim Brothers. History shows that when these groups are attacked, militarily or verbally, they almost invariably become more extreme.

"God Is for the Poor and Ignorant."

No. The new atheists insist vehemently that religion is puerile and irrational, belonging, as Hitchens argues, to “the infancy of our society.” This reflects the broader disappointment among Western intellectuals that humanity, confronted with apparently unlimited choice and prosperity, should still rely on what Karl Marx called the “opiate” of the masses.

But God refuses to be outgrown, even in the United States, the richest country in the world and the most religious country in the developed world. None of the major religions is averse to business; each developed initially in a nascent market economy. The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.

Still, the current financial crisis shows that the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant. Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of capitalism. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the aggressive acquisitiveness of the human psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth -- a critique that speaks directly to the gap between rich and poor in our society.

To recover from the ill effects of the last year, we may need exactly that conquest of egotism that has always been essential in the quest for the transcendence we call “God.” Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.

"God Is Bad for Women."

Yes. It is unfortunately true that none of the major world religions has been good for women. Even when a tradition began positively for women (as in Christianity and Islam), within a few generations men dragged it back to the old patriarchy. But this is changing. Women in all faiths are challenging their men on the grounds of the egalitarianism that is one of the best characteristics of all these religious traditions.

One of the hallmarks of modernity has been the emancipation of women. But that has meant that in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortunately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven counterproductive. Whenever "modernizing" governments have tried to ban the veil, for example, women have rushed in ever greater numbers to put it on. In 1935, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi commanded his soldiers to shoot hundreds of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest shrines. Such actions have turned veiling, which was not a universal practice before the modern period, into a symbol of Islamic integrity. Some Muslims today claim that it is not essential to look Western in order to be modern and that while Western fashion often displays wealth and privilege, Islamic dress emphasizes the egalitarianism of the Koran.

In general, any direct Western intervention in gender matters has backfired; it would be better to support indigenous Muslim movements that are agitating for greater opportunities for improved women’s rights in education, the workplace, and politics.

"God Is the Enemy of Science."

He doesn’t have to be. Science has become an enemy to fundamentalist Christians who campaign against the teaching of evolution in public schools and stem-cell research because they seem to conflict with biblical teaching.

But their reading of scripture is unprecedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be interpreted allegorically.

The conflict with science is symptomatic of a reductive idea of God in the modern West. Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.

Popular fundamentalism represents a widespread rebellion against modernity, and for Christian fundamentalists, evolution epitomizes everything that is wrong with the modern world. It is regarded less as a scientific theory than a symbol of evil. But this anti-science bias is far less common in Judaism and Islam, where fundamentalist movements have been sparked more by political issues, such as the state of Israel, than doctrinal or scientific ones.

"God Is Incompatible with Democracy."

No. Samuel Huntington foresaw a "clash of civilizations” between the free world and Islam, which, he maintained, was inherently averse to democracy. But at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly all leading Muslim intellectuals were in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.

The 2007 Gallup poll shows that support for democratic freedoms and women's rights is widespread in the Muslim world, and many governments are responding -- albeit haltingly -- to pressures for more political participation. There is, however, resistance to a wholesale adoption of the Western secular model. Many want to see God reflected more clearly in public life, just as a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation.

Nor is sharia law the rigid system that many Westerners deplore. Muslim reformers, such as Sheikh Ali Gomaa and Tariq Ramadan, argue that it must be reviewed in the light of changing social circumstances. A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Muslims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free market of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.

Religion may not be the cause of the world’s political problems, but we still need to understand it if we are to solve them. "Whoever took religion seriously!” exclaimed an exasperated U.S. government official after the Iranian Revolution. Had policymakers bothered to research contemporary Shiism, the United States could have avoided serious blunders during that crisis. Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.

And study it we'd better, for God is back. And if "he" is perceived in an idolatrous, literal-minded way, we can only expect more dogmatism, rigidity, and religiously articulated violence in the decades ahead.

read on foreignpolicy.com

Karen ARMSTRONG

Avatar and the Faith Instinct

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:10:06 GMT

It’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion.
You probably don’t need a long synopsis of James Cameron’s half-billion-dollar epic Avatar, in part because even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve seen it. As many reviewers have noted, Cameron rips off Hollywood cliche's to the point you could cut and paste dialogue from Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves into Avatar without appreciably changing the story.

In short, Avatar tells the tale of a disabled Marine, Jake Sully, who occupies the body of a ten-foot-tall alien so he can live among the mystical forest denizens of the moon world Pandora. Sully is sent in mufti, like a futuristic Lawrence of Arabia, to further the schemes of the evil corporate nature-rapists desperate to obtain the precious mineral “unobtainium” (no, really). Jake inevitably goes native, embraces the eco-faith of Pandora’s Na’Vi inhabitants and their tree goddess, the “all mother,” and rallies the Pandoran aborigines (not to mention the Pandoran ecosystem itself) against the evil forces of a thinly veiled 22nd-century combine of Blackwater and Halliburton.

The film has been subjected to a sustained assault from many on the right, most notably by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, as an “apologia for pantheism.” Douthat’s criticisms hit the mark, but the most relevant point was raised by John Podhoretz in The Weekly Standard. Cameron wrote Avatar, says Podhoretz, “not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people.”

What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.

Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.

I’m certainly one of those cranky right-wingers, though I probably enjoyed the movie as cinematic escapism as much as the next guy.

But what I find interesting about the film is how what is “pleasing to the most people” is so unapologetically religious.

Nicholas Wade’s new book, The Faith Instinct, lucidly compiles the scientific evidence that humans are hard-wired to believe in the transcendent. That transcendence can be divine or simply Kantian, a notion of something unknowable from mere experience. Either way, in the words of philosopher Will Herberg, “Man is homo religiosus, by ‘nature’ religious: as much as he needs food to eat or air to breathe, he needs a faith for living.”

Wade argues that the Darwinian evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection but also on the natural selection of groups. And groups that subscribe to a religious worldview are more apt to survive — and hence pass on their genes. Religious rules impose moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a “cause larger than yourself,” as we say today. No wonder everything from altruism to martyrdom is part of nearly every faith.

The faith instinct may be baked into our genes, but it is also profoundly malleable. Robespierre, the French revolutionary who wanted to replace Christianity with a new “age of reason,” emphatically sought to exploit what he called the “religious instinct which imprints upon our souls the idea of a sanction given to moral precepts by a power that is higher than man.”

Many environmentalists are open about their desire to turn their cause into a religious imperative akin to the plight of the Na’Vi, hence Al Gore’s uncontroversial insistence that global warming is a “spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” The symbolism and rhetoric behind Barack Obama’s campaign was overtly religious at times, as when he proclaimed that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — a line that could have come straight out of the mouths of Cameron’s Na’Vi.

What I find fascinating, and infuriating, is how the culture-war debate is routinely described by antagonists on both sides as a conflict between the religious and the un-religious. The faith instinct manifests itself across the ideological spectrum, even if it masquerades as something else.

On the right, many conservatives have been trying to fashion what might be called theological diversity amid moral unity. Culturally conservative Catholics, Protestants, and — increasingly — Jews find common cause. The Left is undergoing a similar process, but the terms of the debate are far more inchoate and fluid. What is not happening is a similar effort between Left and Right, which is why the culture war, like the faith instinct, isn’t going away any time soon.

read on nationalreview.com

Jonah GOLDBERG

The God Gene

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:35:15 GMT

How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?
Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity.

They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related.We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene.

So how did this God gene flourish? Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behavior.

Wade walks us briskly through the history of religion to show how our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalization of worship: “A propensity to follow the ecstatic behaviors of dance and trance was built into people’s minds and provided consistently fertile ground for revolts against established religion,” he writes.

There’s a safari-hatted charm to Wade’s descriptions of what he calls, a little jarringly, “primitive” religion, filled with details of the rites of tribes cut off from the modern world but still available for anthropological observation. But his sketches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rush by quickly and confusingly and offer only superficial accounts of the spread of those faiths, which was in each case a dicier process than Wade makes it sound. (What if Constantine had held out against the Roman Empire’s Christian factions, instead of converting?) Judaism’s strict moral codes, he argues, held together the rival states of Israel and Judah in Biblical times and provided comfort to Jews in exile, but failed to accommodate the more diverse Jews of the first-century Hellenic world. Early Christians adapted Judaism’s attractive but exclusivist mores to a society that had outgrown tribalism, succeeding “so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilization.” Wade embraces a radically revisionist approach to Islam, which holds that it evolved out of a Syriac branch of Christianity whose members believed that Jesus was human and rejected the Trinity. This sternly monotheistic remnant was Arabized when a new dynasty needed to differentiate itself from a previous one. If the revisionist version of Islam is correct, Wade writes, it “furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes.”Wade would probably deny that being adaptive makes any religion better in a non-evolutionary sense than any other. His scientist’s neutrality slips toward the end of the book, however, when he starts making the case for Religion with a capital R. Like Robert Wright in “The Evolution of God,” Wade wants to defend religion from so-called “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. In chapters on religion and trade, religion and warfare, religion and nation, and the “ecology” of religion — the way in which religion regulates fertility and population size — Wade argues that our religious disposition can enhance social and national unity, manage scarce resources, even solve the tricky problem of how to get young men to die for the greater good when that’s called for. But Wade also knows that the faith-based preference for the group has engendered genocide, mass suicide and maladaptive cargo cults. Perhaps that is why he declines to draw one inference that proceeds from his arguments: that individual religions can be compared and ranked and, well, approved or disapproved of, since a religion can be good only insofar as it’s useful.

In any case, Wade says, religion is not going away, because it’s imprinted on the human genome. The first part of this claim is hard to argue with. The second part is probably true, too, but raises the question of how. Wade’s vision of religion as a socializing force is persuasive, but he does not do enough to distinguish socially efficacious religious beliefs from, say, socially efficacious political ideologies. There are biologically or at least neurologically grounded accounts of religion, like Boyer’s, that more successfully capture the weird particularity of religious experience while also revealing its tentacles in many other facets of mental and emotional life. Ask yourself: Why are our gods always equipped with recognizably human minds, even when they’re animals? How do sacred stories differ, if they do, from fairy tales, or from novels? What are holiness, impurity and ritual, exactly, and are they religious in essence, or categories implicated in everything we think and do?

The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviors and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, “religion”? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human.

read on New York Times

JUDITH SHULEVITZ

I am a closet Christian

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:44:16 GMT

It was Sunday morning in my scruffy Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, and I was wearing a dress. Walking to the subway, I ran into a friend heading home from yoga class. She wore sweats and carried her mat over her shoulder. "Where are you going so early all dressed up?" she asked, chuckling. "To church?" We shared a laugh at the absurdity of a liberal New Yorker heading off to worship.
The real joke? I totally was.

Inside the church, it's cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: "While we are placed among ?things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall? endure." My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I'm walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.

These moments are not only sacred; they are secret. Outside, on the steps of the downtown Manhattan church, I think I see someone familiar coming down the sidewalk, and I bolt in the other direction.

Why am I so paranoid? I'm not cheating on my husband, committing crimes or doing drugs. But those are battles my cosmopolitan, progressive friends would understand. Many of them had to come out -- as gay, as alcoholics, as artists in places where art was not valued. To them, my situation is far more sinister: I am the bane of their youth, the boogeyman of their politics, the very thing they left their small towns to escape. I am a Christian.

I certainly wasn't born one. I was raised bohemian in New York's East Village in the '80s. I was fascinated by religions but also baffled by them. (If anything, I assumed I was Jewish.) When I began traveling around the world alone at 18, I longed for a religious experience, something that would inspire me to cast my lot with a denomination the way you choose a political party. But nothing really clicked.

I got a taste of the divine at Hindu shrines in south India, and when Mother Teresa grabbed my head and blessed me while I was working for her ministry in Calcutta I felt a kind of electricity rush through my body. Later, when I almost died from amoebic dysentery in New Delhi, I did hallucinate that the Jesus poster on the wall of the clinic moved. But these experiences were no more formative than the Tolstoy books I read on those 24-hour train trips across India.

In college, I majored in Sanskrit and translated part of the Atharvaveda for my senior thesis. I studied Jewish history, Zen and Hinduism with equal interest. The closest thing to my religious sensibility back then was either Pure Land Buddhism ("the world is emptiness ... and yet") or Gnosticism (though my penchant for makeouts kept me from achieving their level of physical self-denial).

When I hit my early 20s I found existential gratification in that feeling at the end of the night, drunk and awake and looking out into the rain while the bar closed and not knowing what was going to happen next. I worshiped at the altar of the Replacements and had romances that only made sense in the context of a Paul Westerberg song. I felt closest to figuring things out when I drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes and stayed up too late.

Sometime later I got married, and the priest with whom my husband and I did premarital counseling had firsthand experience of closing bars, but he also was smart and eloquent and fulfilled. He showed me the best side of Christianity. Not how it's right or just, but how -- and this may sound stupid, but it's what I think about religion in general -- it works.

All of us need help with birth and death and good and evil, and religion can give us that. It doesn't solve problems. It reminds you that, yes, those challenges are real and important and folks throughout history have struggled and thought about them too, and by the way, here is some profound writing on the subject from people whose whole job is to think about this stuff.

The idea of an eternal community brings me comfort: I like the image of a long table extending backward and forward in time, and everyone who's ever taken Communion is sitting at it. The Bible at the 1920s stone church where my husband and I were married was filled with the names of people in the community who'd married, been born and died. When my son was baptized in our church in a traditional Easter eve service, the light spreading from candle to candle through the pews of the dark church made me feel, at least for one moment, we were united in a sense of gratitude for new life and awe in the face of the numinous.

Oh, I don't know. Unless you're William James or Saint Catherine of Siena it's hard to talk about any of this without sounding dumb, or like a zealot, or ridiculous. And who wants to be lumped in with all the other Christians, especially the ones you see on TV protesting gay marriage, giving money to charlatans, and letting priests molest children? Andy Warhol went to mass every Sunday, but not even his closest friends knew he was a devout Catholic until his death. I get that.

"[Closeted Christianity] definitely exists in Manhattan, some Democratic corners in Washington, and I'd bet parts of Northern California," says Amy Sullivan, author of "The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap." Sullivan says after her book about the Christian left came out, "colleagues in New York were taking me out for these clandestine lunches and leaning across the table and whispering excitedly, 'Pssst! I'm one of them!'"

The Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity asked people how they felt about those outside their close friends and family knowing they were religious. About 2 percent said they didn't want people to know, and that percentage is higher among people with liberal politics and people, like me, who are part of Generation X.

Barry Kosmin at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College says it's ridiculous that, in a city like New York, where there is a church on every corner, anyone would hide their religion. He says he was at a conference in Seattle recently where atheists complained about having to hide their lack of beliefs. "Everyone's paranoid!" he says.

But if you're in a place like New York City -- or Austin, Texas, or Portland, Ore., or Los Angeles -- the "new atheists" surround you. In October 2009, the atheist organization Big Apple Coalition of Reason (COR) started a poster campaign to celebrate non-belief. "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?" reads one such poster. A similar campaign in London led by the bestselling author Richard Dawkins reads, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger -- and, of course, performers like Bill Maher -- get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God's son. But come on. It's like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.

I'll give the atheists a lot: The Creation Museum is a riot. The psychos shooting up abortion clinics and telling gay couples they're going to hell are evil, and anyone of faith has an obligation to condemn them. Abominable stuff has been done in God's name for centuries. The Bible has a lot of crazy shit in it about stoning people for using the wrong salad fork. Up with science and reason!

And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know, and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art, no comfort in the face of death. Just dissipated Christopher Hitchens sounding off on "Larry King Live" and a stack of smug books with childishly provocative titles.

A lot of my best friends are atheists, and there's no reason they wouldn't be. They find what I get from religion elsewhere, like from music and art. Not long ago, I told a priest at my church that my friends equated religion with horrible things. I expected her to tell me I had some obligation to stop hiding my faith, but she said, pulling a scarf around her neck to hide her priest's collar, "Those preachers on the subways make me cringe." She said she prefers Saint Francis: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."

I could reassure my atheist friends that the Episcopal Church is a force for equality and social justice. It ordained its first gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. It takes the Bible as a mandate to fight hunger and disease and to rebuild after disasters. I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other politically involved religious groups who take the gospel as an excuse to spread hate and support specific candidates and propositions should have their tax-free status taken away.

Maybe, though, apolitical Christianity is on the rise. The Obamas are now in office -- a good Christian family in the truest sense of the term -- and the right wing is more marginalized than it was a year ago. My friend, the young (and kind of ridiculously hot) priest the Rev. Astrid Storm, whom I used to edit at Nerve.com, says she's sensing more acceptance:

"When I said I was a priest, it was always a conversation stopper," she says. "Recently someone asked what I did, and when I told him he said, 'How interesting. There are a lot of exciting things happening right now in the Episcopal Church, aren't there?' The diversity of opinion people are reading about in the news -- about gay marriage, female priests, poverty issues -- are showing how Christianity isn't monolithic."

Christianity in the popular imagination is decreasingly linked with evangelicals, agrees John Spalding, founder of the SoMa Review, so it's freed up people who were once embarrassed to self-identify as Christians. "It's no longer like, 'You're just like Pat Robertson. Leave this dinner party,'" Spalding says.

But faith and religion are hard to talk about; maybe they're not necessary to talk about. Even though I am a feminist, I've always had a problem with the personal being political. It gave me a lot of anxiety back in the '90s. If I enjoyed a book with a titillating rape scene in it, did that mean I should be stripped of my membership in the Women's Action Coalition? If I liked wearing Blackberry Revlon lipstick and an off-the-shoulder shirt, was I a tool of the patriarchy?

And now, too, I wonder: When I go to church, am I liable for every monstrous thing every denomination has ever done in the name of Jesus? Am I allowed to get spiritual fulfillment from something that has been, and continues to be, so disastrously invoked by other people? Am I allowed to just go to church sometimes and read the Bible sometimes without wearing a huge cross necklace and checking an official box on forms?

But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I'm getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from "Religulous," do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they're being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, "Excuse me, but these fools you're talking about? I'm one of them."

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Ada CALHOUN

WITHOUT A BIT OF CARE ABOUT THE GENEVA CONVENTION

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 06:24:13 GMT

How did the “progressive and humanistic” Western powers treat the Russian prisoners?
Almost every third Russian prisoner of the First World War period died at the Kaiser, Austrian-Hungarian or Turkish camps. This resembles the situation with the Great Patriotic War a lot, when two thirds of the Soviet prisoners were tortured to death at the fascist extermination camps. Destiny of those soldiers, who fought in the squads of the Allied forces in France or Macedonia wasn’t much joyful either. After the revolution in Russia, French commandment treated their former Russian combat allies the way the “Central powers” treated the imprisoned enemies.

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Yaroslav Butakov

Chrismukkah: between Christmas and Hanukkah

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:50:15 GMT

Postmodern era is no longer seeking the transformation of the image boundaries of Santa Claus, as well as questioned the very possibility of any identity. For example, in New York City television series inspired by teenage entrepreneur Ron Gompertz has taken the initiative to create a new holiday, which could unite the Christian Christmas and the Jewish Hanukkah holiday in one common Krismuka (Chrismukkah). In the opinion of the author's project, Krismuka should celebrate the beginning of Hanukkah and before Christmas the new style. Neither Catholics nor Jews, this idea is not supported, even though such projects are quite logical for the civilization that is aware of himself today as "Judaeo-Christian".

Analysis of language of various publications devoted to understanding the celebration of Christmas in the modern world (statements of representatives of traditional Christian denominations, sociological articles in the field of sociology of culture, explores new trends in global economic development, manifestos "left alternative" to the criticism of globalism representatives of the Islamic world) finds a word that largely expresses not only the atmosphere in the days of the celebration of Christmas in the era of postmodernism, but behind it a problem. This is the cult of consumption and commercialization of the holiday. In German-speaking world speak of "intoxication from consumption" - something like this can be translated into Russian German word «Konsumrausch», gradually went down in the everyday language of the Germans, Austrians, Swiss, etc. "Christmas madness" in almost all countries there appears roughly the same: Christmas discounts, Christmas sales, followed by the advertising support, create a real boom in shopping malls, which has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a holiday in the era of consumerism. It would be foolish to say that this holiday and limited. Christmas on all sides surrounded by an irresistible charm and a kind of Christmas mythology, foremost of which is a miracle: "On Christmas Eve, any true desire" and so forth, surrounded by images of the Christmas holiday illumination, a special romantic atmosphere, combined with a nostalgic personal memories, gifts, hearth create the illusion of recovery of lost integrity, the return of the Golden Age through the actualization of the deep archetypes of consciousness, still retains the memory of the main Miracle Stories - Miracle of Christmas and opened the possibility of salvation through a man towards God. However, the central "plot" celebration at the external level still remains consumption.

Santa Claus in Japan. Works

As a result, in that performance in the globalization era Christmas was celebrated in cultures far removed from their religious traditions from Christianity in China, Japan, in some Arab countries, Cambodia, etc. A striking example of the perception of the project of celebrating Christmas as a holiday, the main character which appears Santa Claus, was Japan, where Christians make up less than 2% of the population and where it is not a national holiday. Despite this, the popularity of the Christian holiday is steadily increasing, especially among young Japanese. The idea of a Christmas gift exchange perfectly fitted into the Japanese way of life where the gift acts as an important gesture of courtesy. And, accordingly, been a few weeks before Christmas, the cultural space of shopping malls and commercials filled with Christmas decorations and songs, according to the traditions of Christmas decorated houses and streets, which highlights the festive illuminations, organized numerous "Kristmaspati, Japan and gradually falls in Christmas «Konsumrausch» the sounds of Christmas songs. It is this scenario is realized in different countries around the world. And it seems that the project exported holiday celebration of Christmas does not imply any pre-Christian context.

War for Christmas. Two story: "Under the guise of Santa Claus" or "Who Stole Christmas"

In the modern world around Christmas there was a situation which can be described as a "war for Christmas, and this war is unfolding in the form of a kind of" conflict of interpretations, where the strategy of hiding under the guise of a holiday, or rather, imitating him, were opposed by various attempts "subversive readings", the mask of detachment. "War for Christmas" revolved around two key questions, "who is hiding under the guise of Santa Claus" and "who stole Christmas." It is around these two "stories" unfolding controversy, which face different voices era. Apparently, the identity of Santa Claus is the main problem area. The problem with identifying the essence of the Christmas has become, perhaps, its main characteristics in postsekulyarnuyu era.

Christmas and political correctness

Even a cursory analysis of the landmark Space Christmas holiday in the world today reveals a gradual dechristianization holiday, which, on the one hand, which is associated with the ideology of political correctness as achieving a democratic culture, concern for avoiding any form of discrimination in all spheres of life (racial, cultural, religious, sexual etc.), on the other hand, it can be perceived as the optimal situation for the expansion strategy of providing maximum inclusiveness and potentially immensely broad scope of influence. Centrifugal potential of political correctness, perhaps, sooner or later pit us with reality, when, under the guise of Santa Claus, we can see the women.

Anti-capitalist protests "left alternative"

Voices of protest are heard, and by various representatives of the "left-wing movement", which is connected to the thrust of Anti Globalize postmarksistskoy anticapitalist installation in the spirit of continuing the tradition of critical theory Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and others). In the context of anti-bourgeois critics of power of transnational corporations and anti-globalists see the project «Xmas», as it is now often called the Christmas celebration, a manifestation of the expansion of the capitalist world, expressed in a form of assimilation into the cultural consciousness of the various states in consumer strategies for establishing a new world order. Criticism from the "left alternative" is expressed in the form of appeal: "Workers of all countries that do not celebrate Christmas» ( »Proletarier aller La" nder: Feiert kein Weihnachten! »). Responded to this call, many movements and groups, positioning themselves as" anti - -Christmas ", of course in the meaning of" anti-capitalist "and not" anti-Christian ".

Japan: Dzenta Claus against Santa Claus

In Japan, it would seem, painlessly integrated celebration of Christmas in its cultural space at the same time came the draft alternative festival, whose main character was "Dzenta Claus", combining the traditional motives for Japanese Culture Zen Buddhism to the settings of environmental consciousness, the result was a call to make Christmas "Day without a basket." However, a reference to the traditions of Zen and "environmentalism" still, apparently, gives representatives of the "left alternative", which has always had sympathy for the "green" and love for the acentric and antiratsionalisticheskim spiritual practices.

The Christian world against the commercialization of Christmas

The most important thing - is the resistance of the Christian world and the commercialization profanizatsii holiday. Against the commercialization of the holiday was made by the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexy II. German Christians have expressed their dissatisfaction with the new roadmap for the country, released by the German government for newly arrived immigrants, where the chapter on the traditions of Christmas presents to the reader the full range of "Christmas industry, legends about Santa Claus, while the birth of Christ in book does not say a word. The protest against the commercialization of the main holiday of the Catholic Church has united numerous campaigns against the Santa Claus that unfolded on the eve of 2007 in Austria and Germany, in many places officially banned his presence at the Christmas fairs.

In the Western Christian world, the most radical attempt at resistance to the commercialization of the holiday in a draft American Art Conrad, who established in the yard white cross 4.5 meters in height, which was crucified Santa Claus. Christmas cards with a photo of the crucified Santa Claus Konrad sent to your friends. Postcards accompanied by the caption: "Santa died for your MasterCard». In England, the British church advertising service, commissioned a number of posters on which the baby-Jesus appears wearing a fur coat and hat of Santa Claus, one of the three Magi brought the baby Christ, his gift, which dangles shoplifter price tag, the baby Jesus appears in the image of a hero Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, have long since become a symbol of the counterculture in the advertising label. For this kind of cultural artifacts may be blasphemous to the orthodox perception, felt the desire to start the mechanism of memory, staying in the era of amnesia as a technique of "production of consciousness in the postmodern era."

Conclusion. Feast of the Nativity of Christ in a Pluralistic "haosmose" postmodern

In a pluralistic "haosmose" a postmodern tradition of celebrating Christmas and the associated image of Santa Claus takes on the horizon of potential transformations possible in the world to accomplish a "deconstruction", in which any identity is understood as a mask. Therefore, Santa Claus in the image of a bandit, a thief and a gangster in an American film as a logical and natural, as well as appearing in the head of one of New Yorkers under the influence of the TV series project holiday Krismuka connecting the Christian Christmas and the Jewish Hanukkah, which caused protests by both Catholic and the Jews of the city. In the culture of potentially unlimited "intertextuality" there can be no identity, identity is understood as the result of misuse of identification that derives from the "mystification of consciousness. The era of postmodernism can not agree with the fundamental ontological difference between the sacred and profane, the temple and shopping center, office and carnival, participate in the Christmas service, and "Christmas shopping". Carnival under the guise of the post - this is one of the images of transformation, undergoes a Christian culture in the postmetafizicheskom "world in which the politically incorrect and suspicious act any hints of such concepts as the center, Istok, Truth. The image of a carnival extremely accurately reflects the essence of socio-cultural situation, which is implemented as a spectacle. The image of the holy that promotes Coca-Cola - totally postmodern way, which is realized in the culture is not receding era of postmodernism, in which the advertising icon and label are equal forms. In the "society of the spectacle" Carnival is one of the main strategies of culture, aimed at demonstrating the "gay relativity of all".

A postmodern actively circulating in the world all kinds of technology amnesia, largely built on the strategy of "antipamyati. One of the figures such antipamyati is the image of Santa Claus, who, imitating the tradition of celebrating Christmas, acts as a reference simulacrum, not sent to any past, except his own. The image of Santa Claus does not correlate with St Nicholas, and not with Christ, and with such characters as Mickey Mouse, Pokemon, and other heroes of Disney animation, its cultural context, but rather refers to McDonald's, Hollywood and Disneyland. In this perspective the fundamental difference between erased holidays such as Christmas, Halloween and Valentine's Day.

During the Cold War the U.S. spent more than one million dollars to have his tongue to dislodge from the Russian word «sputnik» and replace it with «satellite».

One of the principles of postmodern architecture, as it is described Jenks, was that the architectural ensemble, should vytraivatsya around the center, with the proviso that the center itself will remain unoccupied. In such an absent and disengaged center in the postmodern era is gradually becoming the holiday of Christmas, where instead of Christ in favor of Santa Claus, a place which in some schools have already taken the Christmas clown.

read on the portal "Orthodoxy and the World"

Dmitry Razumovsky

Dreams - a gift or a temptation?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:53:00 GMT

The Holy Fathers are advised not to pay attention to dreams. But the modern priest is often encourages spiritual children refer to the psychologists and those studying the problems of patients are usually asked to talk about their dreams. So how do you treat this contradiction?
In the Scriptures, and sometimes sleep - like letters from God. "God spoke once, and if so will not notice, the second time: In a dream, a vision by night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, during nap on a couch. Then he opens the ears of men and imprinting their instruction to pull the man from any company and remove him from pride, to bring back his soul from the abyss and his life from destruction by the sword "(Job 33: 14-18).

With dreams were found Our Lady of Kazan and hundreds of other miracle-working icons. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich during the night in the woods in the dream was the St. Catherine, and reported the birth of his daughter. At this place was founded by Catherine's Monastery (now district Vidnoe near Moscow). Visions at the time of a thin (ie, shallow, when the consciousness is awake), sleep was at the St. Sergius, St. Seraphim and other saints. And not only the saints. Mother Decembrist Ryleeva otmolila him as a child from death during his illness, although it was predicted in a dream, that if the boy did not die, then it waits for a terrible fate. It was shown and what is - up to hanging. According to Archpriest John Lee, in February 2003, the cancer patient Bishop Anthony of London dreamed of his grandmother and, looking through the calendar indicated the date: August 4. Lord, in spite of the optimism attending physician, said that it was the day of his death. What came to pass.

But in the Old Testament is the reservation that not everyone is worthy of such a message. "... I've heard that they say prophets prophesy lies in my name. They say: "In my dream, my dream," <...> The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream, and from whom - my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord "(Jeremiah 23: 25, 28). In the New Testament, an angel in a dream calms righteous Joseph and warns the Magi, but most sleep here - a consequence of fatigue, weakness, a form of short-term death. God pronounces the apostles, because in Gethsemane, they slept in while he prayed. In the Gospel parable of the virgins careless sleep - a metaphor for spiritual relaxation. Paul followed Christ in his epistles calls on students to bring awareness of drowsy dusk: "Cheers and be sober!"

Modern psychology sees in dreams, an important mechanism of the human psyche: the work of the subconscious. "Consciousness, despite its multitude of possibilities, still being able to err, succumb to self-deception. In these cases, the part of the psyche, which is called the unconscious, one of the main manifestations of which are dreams, begins to carry out compensatory, or complimentary (complementary) function. Dreams - a sort of hints of the unconscious, which gives the answer to those questions with which our daily consciousness fails. But the language of the unconscious stranger to reason. It is the language of symbols. In order to reveal this shaped the symbolic language, it is necessary, as in the decipherment of the text in an unfamiliar language, subject meticulously analyze the whole context of sleep, the events on which it arose, daily experiences, "- says the candidate of psychological sciences, senior research fellow of the Institute of Psychology RAO Tatiana Snegiryov. Psychologists, began studying dreams in the middle of the twentieth century, came to the conclusion that dreams help to adapt to reality. "We studied characteristics of sleep in connection with the problem of adaptation of workers, on the one hand, to the night shift in a regime change of labor, and on the other - to the extreme environmental conditions (north-east Russia) - explains Snegireva. - Vigilant people such difficulties may react in different ways: it may feel a desire to surrender, retreat. But it turned out that at certain stages of sleep (called REM sleep, and when dreams occur) on the material snovidcheskih images involuntarily involved in prospecting activity, whose purpose - to compensate for the regressive state that sometimes occurs in awake, - waiver of search. This output is internal, psychological adaptation to the situation, rather than finding ways to change the situation itself, which is most often directed daytime behavior. A surprising feature: if the dreamer has not forgotten the subject of sleep and woke up and told the experimenter that he dreamed a dream that is fixed in his mind, there is a spontaneous adaptation to the conditions of life and activities that are at the level of consciousness in waking seen as impossible . Simply retelling of sleep, without any comprehension of its plot and imagery, positive impact on the adaptive abilities of man, extending them.

Let us examine what kind of attitude Orthodox Christianity to the very concept of the unconscious? "The unconscious as part of the personality may begin slowly, - admits Lorgus Father Andrew, a priest and a psychologist. - After the fall as they gain a sense of guilt before God and a man could ever drive out of his consciousness, many layers of their feelings, thoughts and impressions. So could accumulate unconscious, which eventually became permanent, innate part of the psyche.

In the Fathers can be found the view that the original man - Adam before the fall - do not have anything that would be hidden from his mind, that is unconscious. However, not all adhere to this opinion. For example, St. Augustine believed that only the grace of God could "illuminate" the soul of man completely, and by their nature, the soul was to consciousness, not all open. Because if Adam knew all the secrets of his soul, he would not have sinned, would have prevented even at the threshold of consciousness tempting thoughts. Perhaps part of psychic life and in pristine condition was not open to man and his consciousness.

From the psychological point of view of the unconscious is diverse and completely. Some of it belongs to psychophysiology, and some related set of relationships with consciousness. There is no doubt that the unconscious is actively influences the consciousness and behavior. Passions belong to the unconscious, and control - is the fight of awareness. Smart doing is also associated with the expansion and clarification of consciousness.

Part of dreams in psychology called the household residues. Their importance in mental life is not great. "The greatest importance attaches to the dreams of psychotherapy in which a distinct connection to reality is difficult to establish, - explains about. Andrew Lorgus. - They are considered in psychoanalysis, what happens is that day, rational consciousness excludes. To the fact that people live in such dreams, in reality people will not let happen and will not tolerate this in mind (the mechanism of displacement). It is believed that in dreams the unconscious man as it appeals to the rational part, to consciousness. Handling this is an impulsive nature. Thus the feelings and emotions in dreams do not match reality - a picture of his psychic life unfolds in front of a man in a transmuted form. It is also believed that such dreams are absolutely all the pieces of the plot, there are various "parts" of the man himself, his health, his body, his senses. It is believed that all the pieces of sleep are metaphorical in nature, not a single component of sleep can not be interpreted literally. The interpretation of dreams in contemporary psychoanalysis - the inheritance of the few highly qualified specialists. The man himself can not do so.

Five minutes after waking, we do not remember even half of his dreams, and in ten minutes, hardly able to remember 10% of them. Still, for various certificate (validity of which, incidentally, is comparable to the reliability of Dreams), written by the dreams of the world had a lot of masterpieces and geniuses of scientific ideas. For example, kerrollovskuyu Alice. Two stories by RL Stevenson, including - the history of split personality on the good Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde. Excerpt of Samuel Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan", a recognized model of English sladkozvuchiya. They say that the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in his sleep got in the room where the walls were entirely any cubes in them something boiling, bubbling. This mysterious room gave him an idea of the periodic table of elements. Last year, University of London Professor Darren Kroudi managed to find a solution to the Schwarz-Christoffel theorem, which the team tried unsuccessfully to resolve the nearly 140 years. According to the Times, Kroudi lit up when he fell asleep during the response of one student.

At one time placed back on stream processing Surrealists: they simply record ever, and passed off as works of art. Culture of the twentieth century modernist in its parts - that out of the unconscious to the surface, the hardened lava of dreams. Today snovidcheskie realities like to illustrate in the main figures of popular culture. Thus, in the American TV series "Twin Peaks" detective's work uses the tips of the unconscious, including - of dreams. Ends with the detective and himself is at the mercy of an evil spirit, who was the cause under investigation.

Dreams - a visual echo of the deep consciousness, and only seriously trained professionals able to extract the rational kernel of this colorful scene of porridge.

To protect themselves from the temptations of the unconscious, the holy fathers of the Council and in a dream calling the Lord Jesus Christ, not to leave prayer. Saint Anthony the Great advises: "When leaning on his bed, with thanksgiving, bring up the goodness and providence of God. Then ... a dream body will be your sobriety soul.

Saint Macarius Optina wrote: "The holy fathers are told not to believe in dreams to us, passionate and samomnitelnym. Rather than be embarrassed about the empty dream, one must watch their sins and always to reproach myself for failure to rectify and humble than privlechesh themselves God's help. The Bible explicitly says: "dreams have introduced many astray, and they were hoping to fall" (Sir. 35: 7). "Unconscious unsigned. It has everything: a high and low. And when we try to blindly and courageously introduced there, we are not immune from completely irreversible effects, the soul from harm. We can let the will of such sinful impulses, which can not cope. Even self-examination - something dangerous, always need another person whom we trust "- warns psychologist, presenter" pivot point "on the TV channel" Spas "Natalia Yining.

"From an anthropological point of view of dreams can not be" prophetic. " In the fabric of dreams no angels or demons, no other people. The phenomenon of grace or demons are, although in a sleepy state, but not in the dream, but as if in a dream. That is subject to the phenomena of sleep is irrelevant. In Lives and legends is expressed in the words "in a dream," in a thin dream, "which can be understood as" while you sleep. " Terrifying figures of dreams (a black man, black cats, scary specter is haunting) - all these pictures of his own consciousness of man. The phenomenon of spiritual forces are disguised as everyday figures. Demon is in the wrong images in an improper manner. Deception - his way. The phenomena of spiritual forces, as a rule, break the dreams that interfere in dreams. Such phenomena are rare, and the affliction of God in special cases, and against the will of God does not happen, - explains the Rev. Andrew Lorgus. - Distrust of devotees to dreams is justified. Only one percent of one hundred dreams can mean something serious for the spiritual benefit. But to take this benefit will only spiritually experienced man. An inexperienced person falls into the power of imagination and romantic self-deception, if trying to decipher dreams.

read on the portal "Orthodoxy and the World"

Andrew Kul'ba

Zemeckis' Christmas Carol: The time, money and Christmas

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:35:25 GMT

Glory to the movie "Forrest Gump", receives 6 Oscars from 13 nominations and box office receipts worldwide, has immortalized the name of Robert Zemeckis (although it took a lot of other fine films - "Back to the Future," "Outcast," "Who Framed rabbit Rozhdera? "). But the most surprising was the fact that this film was not only talented, but absolutely a Christian, not only popular, but also a moral, not just family, but also philosophical. The audience, reminiscing about the work of Zemeckis, mentally smile and feel joy in my heart.

More about this producer and we can not say. But let's say a little more about the new cartoon on the famous "Christmas Carol" Charles Dickens, written in 1843. The subtitle "Songs" states that this "Christmas story with ghosts."

It is our duty to Dickens emergence of this genre of literature, which, of course, became widespread in film, and if there is currently an ideal format for this classic story, it would, in my opinion, found Zemeckis. This is a fairly rare event for cash movies where special effects are the ideas of the director, and not vice versa. One remark is repeated in many rave reviews - that the film is not for children, because sometimes a frightening one. I would be up to 12 years to watch it is not advised, but years from the 14 shows would be mandatory.

This modern teenagers, this movie could not be more appropriate. Zemeckis is famous not only stunning special effects, not only the perfect sound, but the skill of cultural references. All this is in the "Christmas story. For example, the figure Ebinizera Scrooge, financier, a workaholic, and miser miser, a striking resemblance to a caricature of Uncle Sam with the Soviet posters 60-70 years. It is impossible not to recall also cartoon duck-millionaire Scrooge Mc Duck from "DuckTales", shown in the USSR in the beginning of perestroika as the personification of "fun greed."

Since the change of generations, after the ridiculous new Russian in crimson jackets came quite adequate managers and financiers, came the magazine Egoist, the poor are increasing, and almost all celebrate Christmas, especially since it closed. It's time to think, why in the New Year holidays to us all so well. Unfortunately, quickly adopting the European tradition of business people, we very slowly takes over as the conventional need for charity. Just like Uncle Scrooge, we place this obligation on the state, which includes "jails and workhouses. Are we no different from the early nineteenth century England? "It's happy days - days of mercy, kindness, forgiveness, - wrote Dickens. - It's the only day throughout the calendar, when people seemed to tacitly freely disclose to each other heart and see their neighbors - even in poor and disadvantaged - such as people, as they are, wandering the one with the road to the grave and not some other species of beings that ought to go another way.

Dickens, perhaps, first drew public attention to the social racism that permeates the Western, "developed" society - of course, because he did not just move up and down the social ladder. Therefore, he would have never said, as his hero Scrooge: "If poor people prefer to die, the better. This will reduce the surplus population. " Inner inferiority and unhappiness among people holding such views, shows the "Christmas Carol". The basis of it - greed, ambition and fear - in general, painful self-esteem. But the idea of population decline due to pseudo-scientific hypotheses about the impending shortage of resources is now the most senior minds! "Surplus population" - a "fad" of American politicians, they are sure that all resources are not enough, and that "high fertility rates in other countries - a threat to American security." 111111111 Something like Napoleon said - he thought that 500 thousand babies each year, in Russia, threatening its business in Europe. Other analogies provide readers think. Not only money is vertical Zemeckis - he is more interested in moving in time. Time as a place of discovery, while the real wealth or personal bankruptcy. For what its worth to spend? Not for nothing do you live?

In this sense, a new cartoon about Christmas is a huge philosophical and missionary potential. After viewing you can talk about passion, enslaving people, and the values true and false, and the after-fate, and of the ordeals Theodora, and of repentance, and on contemporary idols, and the joy of Christianity, and even depression, so prevalent in modern society. The slow time of childhood and the terrible infernal chase the horses death, grave static and momentary corruption of the Spirit of Christmas present, and the slow but inexorable machinery of hours of our life - all this reminds us of the emptiness that requires high-quality and immediate filling. Therefore, in general, the film gives us hope - the time Christians favorably to the man, he always has a chance to fix it. Typically, Zemeckis compares modern, profane filling time and its sacred contents. So after his films can start a cautious conversation about the Christian understanding. Again, that at the time Dickens was considered a great boon reduced working hours for children 16 hours a day to 12. Today, despite technological advances, a reverse process.

Zemeckis after Dickens tries to show why it is immoral. It seems to be, the thing is obvious, but how then this completely unscientific fear of overpopulation, and division of countries and citizens in the first, second, and so forth grade? And the reason is simple. Leonardo Boff says on this subject: "It is a dream to find happiness through material accumulation and the infinite progress, using science and technology, unlimited use them to exploit the earth resources. To post here has a quote from Charles Darwin, his "natural selection" survival of the fittest. But we know that the strong survive on the bones of the weak. " As you know, the ideas of Charles Darwin have been used as a cover for social Darwinism - the science of the inequality of people. "With each hour in me is growing old belief that our political aristocracy, combined with our parasitic elements is killing England. I do not see the slightest glimmer of hope. As for the people, then he abruptly turned away, and from the parliament and the government and shown in relation to that and the other is a profound indifference, that this order of things begins to inspire me the most serious and troubling concerns. "

read on the portal "Orthodoxy and the World"

Veronica AGAFONOVA

WEST seen the light: Financial speculators are dangerous to society

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:33:40 GMT

In Europe, the beginning of the economic catharsis. The crisis forced the Western society to revise its own system of values and move to self-criticism. In Britain, made a truly revolutionary conclusions, which are likely to lead to the birth of a new economic ethics. It is noteworthy that the outcome of the era of monetarism leads a country that has historically considered the "incubators" of the global financial elite.
Recent Media Corporation BBC released data agency New Economics Foundation. Research amazes main thesis: "The orderlies and cleaners in hospitals, bring to society more good than the bankers." Cleaner hospitals provide 10 pounds of surplus value for every pound, which they get paid. Bankers, on the contrary, for every pound invested produce 7 pounds of losses, notes the NEF.
The researchers compared the six specialties and their benefits. Thus, receiving from half a million to 80 million pounds per year, the country's leading bankers brought her 7 pounds loss on every pound they earned. Among the ruinous for the country's trades were also advertisers and lawyers - specialists to minimize taxes. Among the most profitable occupations were health care workers, education, and processors of waste. According to analysts, they bring the country "net profit".
Logic NEF is irrefutable. Every human life - is an economic project. There are projects profitable and is detrimental. Revolutionary in this study is that the economy is perceived as a moral category. The context arises NEF (albeit not give away) the notion of "common good", which is a measure of profitability. The question is, how "common" for the global system will be a blessing. European researchers have used the word "country", "benefit for the country."
That is happening involuntary rehabilitation of isolationism, at least at the level of economic ethics. This is a serious change in the mind, accustomed to enjoy the exceptional setting of postmodernism on unlimited personal enrichment. Rooted in the past an epoch financial empires, built on the bones and cloned strata of popular culture. Era, who lived by the law of absolute selfishness of the consumer.
The right person to meet the desires of the past 50 years has become sacred features, replacing the traditional asceticism of society where the needs commensurate with the religious attitudes and limited sense of "shame" in relation to others. And suddenly discovered that not all wishes come true identity until the end of legitimate. In particular - the desire to enrich themselves, not knowing the aisles. Researchers call for politicians "to take action, and reduce labor by measuring its social and environmental benefit, and introduce more progressive taxation."
This translates into an accessible language, this means that the bankers want to force share, increasing state presence in the economy. "Your work is unprofitable for the European economy", - said the bankers New Economics Foundation. It sounds fresh and bold. However, making such a conclusion, BBC does not encroach on the root of the problem, ie the principle of enrichment with speculative practices. There are only a little willingness to adjust, and nothing more. However, if we want to live in a stable society, we must build it on a fundamentally different model. Those who benefit should enjoy the respect and recognition, and easy money under any circumstances, should not become a "pass" in elite.

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Artem Serikov

Russian blood and revolution

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:35:41 GMT

The 1917 revolution and civil war continue to excite the consciousness of Russian, again and again, sparking fierce debate. Parties throwing each other all sorts of arguments and accusations. The basic motivation is the desire pripechatat his opponent, once again demonstrating the ideological conviction. But really want to understand what happened, very few. Meanwhile, it is necessary to sort out a few distractions from their own political predilections

One of the hottest issues - terror of 1917-1921 period. People are tormented by the question - who is to blame for the fact that in those hard times spilled blood of hundreds of thousands of Russian people? Many anti-communists of all stripes (from monarchists to the Democrats) to blame the Bolsheviks. Leftists continue to play the same old pattern of Soviet times, under which started white and red only answer (perhaps not always adequately). Both sides, of course, wrong.
Terror was a product of the revolution, but revolution itself was divided, ultimately, into two major camps. Was a camp of the Bolsheviks, who supported the October values of radical socialism. And he opposed the White movement, the correct values of the February national-liberalism. These camps are a delight to beat each other, actively resorting to savage reign of terror. And the motivation for different parties were different. Collate them - means to solve one of the major mysteries of the Russian Revolution. On the red terror in the last twenty years have written and said a lot. "Holy impulse" conviction was so strong that combined seemingly irreconcilable opponents - the nationalists and liberals. The Bolsheviks introduced a gang of political criminals who wanted to fill the whole of Russia with blood. They allegedly did nothing that practiced mass repressions. In this optics Russian looks a collective victim of a powerful sect of killers who have forced people to live large on their monstrous plan. Here there is a huge simplification. The Bolsheviks did not plan any mass terror and, at first, their policy was quite liberal. Punitive apparatus of the famous All-Russia Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was created not at once. Significantly, the local Cheka began to be formed only by a decision of 22 March 1918.
And they are not engaged in massive repression. Thus, the Petrograd Cheka, from March 1 to June 6, reviewed 196 cases, most of which was associated with speculation (102) and banditry. And only 18 cases was politically motivated, and that 10 of them stopped for lack of evidence, and 3 closed under the amnesty. The Bolsheviks even had time to serve as the liberators of political prisoners. Thus, immediately after the October revolution were released from prison royal dignitary. The former head of the St. Petersburg Police Department Gerasimov recalls in this connection: "About two weeks after the Bolshevik revolution to us in the prison was a Bolshevik commissar ...
We all gathered in the hallway, and who appeared Bolshevik commissar began to question of who is sitting ... When his turn came up to us, the warden said: "this is a political" commissar was surprised: what we now have politicians? The Chief explained that this was the old regime ... Commissioner ... stated that he believes our detention wrong and unfair: "They are serving their own government and carried out his orders. Why do they keep? ". Pointing to this point, the historian A. Maynsuryan leads, in his book "The Other Lenin, another oddity:" In autumn of 1917 was released on in-waiting of the Empress Anna Vyrubova (known for his friendship with Grigori Rasputin). She was taken to Smolny, and Lev Kamenev, even made a little feast in honor of her release. " (Well, yes, "time" were the more "Democrats" - the king's officials were arrested, newspapers closed monarchist, spit on the elected State Duma, dragged the Constituent Assembly elections, arbitrarily proclaimed a republic. When they began, and the mass killings of officers and agrarian revolt. ) In the first months of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks were more humane than in respect of their opponents. So, they let all four sides of General PN Krasnov, migrated its part in revolutionary Petrograd, with limited only by one word of honor - not to fight the new government. I call it his own, as is known, not kept. Yes, the Bolsheviks, with respect to the initial period of their activities, should be accused of softness and rotten liberalism! Almost immediately after the October Revolution in Petrograd was drafted branched anti-Soviet conspiracy led by monarchist VM Purishkevich.
Conspiracy uncovered, and its participants were made some really quite funny sentences. Thus Purishkevich received a four-year public works, and in the spring of 1918 was finally pardoned. (And naturally went south to white.) In Moscow, the establishment of Soviet power was accompanied by heavy and bloody battles. The opponents of the Bolsheviks seized the Kremlin and killed all the soldiers of his garrison - 500. But when the Bolsheviks won, they are freed and the rebels of the cadets and leaders of the uprising - in particular, the chairman of the Committee of Public Safety and VM Rudnev, who then also ran to the white. In January 1918, survived an assassination attempt on Lenin. Then Lenin asked to pardon the terrorists, and that was done - encroaching sent (at their request) to the front.
And here is some thing - most of the released again found themselves in the white camp. Nothing a gang of bloodthirsty killers! Yes, the Bolsheviks, in relation to that period of their activities, should be accused of softness and rotten liberalism. The conspirators do not forgive, and punished - it is an axiom. And if the Bolsheviks really punish this whole audience to really, in the future, many would be seriously considered - whether to raise arms against them. But the Bolsheviks were thinking not so much a political pragmatism, but of great accomplishments. Their minds seemed to them so beautiful that they are in my thoughts and not allow the possibility of a serious resistance to their policy.
The Leninists were covered by a sort of futuristic fervor. "When I talk about the terrible zhidah-Bolsheviks, who wanted only to destroy Russia, robbed of its heart's content, I have a wry face, - writes M. Kalashnikov. - If you look at the actions of even the young Soviet power, then they are too many things that can not pripishesh rabid criminals. Conversely, the red from the start was made to innovative development. Tell me why the gangsters ... create Radium Institute, as did Lenin? After the decision to launch the first plant to produce radium Supreme Economic Council (the Supreme Economic Council) adopted in July 1918 .. In August of 1918 he instructs Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich a Higher Geodetic Administration and the state enterprise "Aerial". In January 1918, the engineer (and future academician) Henry Osipovich Graftio on Lenin's instructions begin to develop estimates for the construction of the Volkhov hydroelectric station ... Outstanding Russian-Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa in 1919 (in the midst of famine and civil war) creates the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute of Physics and Mechanics Department, where specialists are unknown to the world of profession ...
Nicholas Rynin in 1920, creates the Ways of Communication Institute (Petrograd), the country's first department of air. Soviet government and it finances. Moreover, Rynin begins work on the theory mehzhplanetnyh flights, and in his ten-Soviet Encyclopedia "interplanetary communications" will be released in 1928-1932 years ...». ( "The Giants and Dwarfs") Unfortunately, tehnofuturizm combined with the Bolsheviks and the leftist radicalism. Leninists, no doubt, been characterized by nihilism and the pursuit of unrestrained social experimentation. And this created a basis for mass discontent. While it's not necessary to give any unambiguous assessment. In terms of relations with the urban bourgeoisie, many Bolsheviks expressed willingness to make substantial compromises. The guidelines have always been a trend, proposing to abandon the immediate socialization and involvement of the private initiative. A typical representative of such flows has been deputy chairman of the All-Russia Economic Council VP Milutin, who called for to build socialism in alliance with the capitalist monopolies. (Assumes a gradual socialization of the latter). He advocated to produce the corporatization already nationalized enterprises, leaving 50% in state hands, and the rest - back to the capitalists.
The most farsighted leaders of Bolshevism, in particular, Lenin proposed the NEP start in the spring of 1918, and if not civil war, then we would have a completely different story building socialism Lenin himself, this plan is not approved, but he did not intend to abandon the idea agreement with the bourgeoisie. Lenin put forward his own version of a compromise. He believed that industrial enterprises should be under workers' control and direct management by the former owners and their professionals. In March 1918 he even wrote an article entitled "The Immediate Tasks of Soviet power," which called on to suspend the attack on the capital and enter into a compromise with the bourgeoisie: "... We will not be so foolish as to put in the first place" Red Guards "methods in this when age appropriate Red Guard attacks largely over (and to a victorious), and when the door is knocking the era of the proletarian state power bourgeois experts ... "In other words, the most far-sighted leaders of Bolshevism, in particular, Lenin proposed the NEP is to begin in spring 1918 year. And if not civil war, then we would have a completely different history of socialist construction.
But the Bolshevik agrarian policy thrust away from the Soviet power the broad masses of the peasantry. The Bolsheviks took a course on the establishment of severe food dictatorship, based on the forced removal of grain from krestyan.Konechno, some of its elements in those difficult circumstances, were needed. Yes, they actually existed - the removal of bread, one way or another, practiced, and the Tsar and the Provisional Government. Policy had to be tightened somewhat, but the Bolsheviks, with their radical rejection of any (even small) private property, are pretty overdone, and this turned against themselves very many. But it's not so bad. Leninists had tried to split the village and rely on the poor masses in the struggle against "kulaks" (in which were recorded and middle). To wage the class war was entrusted with the new emergency government bodies - the so-called "committees of the poor".
It was they who carried out a grandiose redistribution of property in the village, depriving the rich peasants 50 million acres of land - more than were the landlords. As a result, the country erupted numerous peasant uprisings, during which the rebels ruthlessly suppressed with red functionaries. Thus, in January-September 1918 were killed 7309 members supply detachments. Overall, at the hands of the rebels killed 15 thousand people. But opponents of the Bolsheviks in July 4110 destroyed the Soviet workers. But the Bolsheviks did not sit with folded arms, on the ground was turning red flywheel repression. Especially strong inherited officers. Thus, the chairman of the Sevastopol Revolutionary Tribunal Yu Gavin boasted that his initiative had been shot by 500 officers. In general, anger grew from two sides - one blood begets. Moreover, the food policy of the Bolsheviks clearly did not give the desired effect. Legal trade in grain rolled, but started the illegal trade, the magnitude of which were enormous. Significantly, the urban population received from the state only 40% of bread, while private traders gave 60%. Therefore, in the worst moments of crisis the state had to allow private grain trade - on a limited scale. Here is this utopian policies provoked resistance million.
And for their suppression was organized as a mass terror. The number of victims is large and can hardly be estimated with great precision. After all, apart from fixed penalty were also numerous instances of unauthorized killings. Moreover, there were be no lynchings, which readily practiced, and many ordinary citizens. For example, a factory worker and the New Lessner "SP Petrov recalled:" We have taken out all the workers at its plant antieserovskie demonstrations ... We did not hesitate - inveterate enemies drowned in barges on Lisy Nos ... "Meanwhile, some numbers are called, and the views of historians fundamentally disagree. Thus, a western historian Robert Conquest put the figure at 140 thousand shot. And his Russia counterpart OB Mazohin, based on archival materials, considers it possible to talk about 50 thousand victims. Whatever it was, but the obvious enormity of the communist terror.
This is to anyone and never challenged. But it must make some significant refinements. The scale of terror often depended on the position of local authorities. Thus, in Petrograd, the fall of 1918 shot 800 people, while in Moscow - 300. (It should also be borne in mind that not all the dead and injured were innocent victims or political opponents of the Bolsheviks. Among fallen under the red braid had a lot of criminals - murderers, robbers, thieves, etc.) between the Bolshevik leaders, there were serious differences over the mass terror and the activities of the Cheka. It is widely known a shocking statement of one of the leaders of the Cheka MI Latsis, who probably knows by heart every conscious anti-communist: "We are not conducting a war against individuals, we are decimating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look at the investigation of material and evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question that we need to offer, to which class he belongs to, what he origin, education and profession.
These issues should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror. " Of course, remember these words should be. But we must not forget the words of colleagues Lacis, J. H. Peters, which he said in an interview with the Menshevik newspaper "Morning in Moscow:" As for the shootings, then I must say that, contrary, to popular opinion, I'm not so bloodthirsty how they think. Conversely, if you want to know, I first raised the cry against the red terror in the form as it appeared in St. Petersburg. By that - I would say hysterical - the terror of touch most are precisely those most mollusks revolutionaries who were withdrawn from the balance and become overly zealous ... "(a very significant moment - one of the leaders of the terrible" Cheka "gives an interview to the opposition, the legal newspaper and, while criticizing his colleagues.) Speaking of the red terror, we can not forget about the anti-Communist terror, which is not always a response to political repression of the Bolsheviks. Enough to quote themselves white.
Why, even though AI Denikin, who wrote in "Essays on Russian Troubles": "No peace of mind - every day - a picture of theft, looting, violence throughout the armed forces. Russian people from top to bottom has fallen so low that I do not know when he will be able to rise from the dirt ... I would not want to offend the many righteous, moral and languished in the heavy atmosphere of counter-intelligence agencies, but I must say that these bodies, a dense network covering the territory of the South, were sometimes foci of provocation and organized plunder. Particularly famous in this regard counterintelligence Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Rostov (Don). And here is what the Minister of War Kolchak government Budberg AP: "The arrival of the contingents of degenerates boast that during the punitive expedition, they gave the Bolsheviks in the massacre of the Chinese, pre-cutting the tendons of the prisoners under the knees (not to run away"); boast also that the Bolsheviks were buried alive, with carpeting the bottom of the hole inwards, released from bury (to be softer to lie.
"Budberg complements Shul'gin, a former staunch anti-communist and an active member of the White movement:" In one of the huts in the hands of suspended Commissioner -- says Shulgin, - kindled a fire under him and slowly roasted ... man. And all around drunken gang monarchists ... howled, "God Save the Tsar". Very valuable in this regard, the memories of the former editor of New Times ASSuvorin, which was entirely on the side of the Whites: "The first battle the army, organized and received its present name [Volunteer], it was offensive to Gukov in late January. Dismissing officer battalion from Novocherkassk, Kornilov, admonished his words ... "Do not take me to these scoundrels in captivity!

read on Russian Observer

Alexandr ELISEEV