Category: Culture

… Not one aggressively secular, historically informed answer to the question? Really? OP is clearly looking for one: Some religions made it a main cause to conquer countries i.e. Islam, others’ was to unite religions i.e. Sikhism. I’m not contradicting the other answers, but there is a place for this answer too. If any of […]

A2A McKayla. McKayla, I squirm under this question. You and Jeremy are the two people that, when you started following me, I thought “… I should be a better person”. I’m not a better person in the past three months. But I did think I should be, for a moment. I’ve given a monthly tithe […]

I got a fifth of the way through the Temple on holiday (his complete works), before deciding that I needed to go back and get a listing of what the good stuff was. A couple of the short poems I read were good. Not transcendentally good, but good enough that I looked forward to finding […]

Let me preface this by saying that I am a cinematic dunce. At least, when I was a kid, Bill Collins was still presenting pre-1950 Hollywood films every Saturday night on Australian television. That was the 80s, of course. I think I got a lot more depth in my cinematic education then than the young […]

Yeah, when I was an undergrad, someone did a conceptual art thingy, involving nailing books into the lawn. And students had the kind of anguish that McKayla Kennedy spoke of in her Pinterest answer. And rescued the books; I got a Ulysses out of it. The books were going to be pulped by the publishers […]

Cyril of Alexandria. Patriarch of Alexandria. Doctor of the Church. Founder of Mariology, and formulator of the concept of the Mother of God. Establisher of Miaphysitism, the distinct belief of the Oriental Orthodox Church; yet his formulation was also foundational to the Chalcedonian Christianity of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church. Even if you don’t […]

The cumulative effect of the following: Patriarchy, and its concern to control fertility and access to fertile women as tribal commodities. The concern of archaic Judaism to associate fertility with religious identity (circumcision). The dismissal of bodily desire as more base than spiritual pursuits, to be regulated (already present in both Judaism and several strands […]

Consistency. There are lots of quotes on why consistency is overrated, which I won’t verify because I’m on my phone. Keynes’ “When things change, I change my mind; what do you do?” Emerson’s (?) “Hobgoblin of small minds”. Whitman’s “I contain multitudes.” But the world has ever admired, and the world has long been led, […]

Amazon.co.uk: Charles Freeman: 9780300170832: Books One of the few negative reviews on Amazon, by someone offended by Freeman’s secularism, says: If you are looking for a secular or fundamentalist liberal account of the Early Church, which presupposes that there is very little which needs to be understood about the person of Jesus, and his followers’ […]

I am blessed to have lived in a country with a state religion—which ends up tantamount to no religion at all—and in an aggressively secular country. So while I may have had the zeal of Voltaire in my teens about atheism, I no longer get, nor particularly care to get, strident atheism such as abounds […]