| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
02 Apr 2005 10:54:39 AM |
| Object: |
Misc. |
We need a post-Zionist leap of faith
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1450719,00.html
Assimilation with space for Jewish identity offers us a better future
John Rose
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
Does the religious and historical attachment of so many Jews to the
"land of Israel" justify the Zionist project? The idea of a Jewish
homeland continues to pose two problems. The first is the denial of
Palestinian rights, especially the rights of the dispossessed
refugees, who see an Israel built on their homeland. And the second is
what "homeland" means for the Jewish majority that lives outside
Israel.
There is an interesting and unexplored link between these two
problems. Resolving the second can contribute to resolving the first.
But that means Jews in the west renouncing our automatic right to be
potential citizens of Israel.
John Rose
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22John%20Rose%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22John+Rose%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22John+Rose%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22John+Rose%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Bonhoeffer: a martyr for our collective soul
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1450618,00.html
Richard Chartres
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
Of the many events planned to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of
the second world war, one of the most haunting yet hopeful is the
gathering in Poland next Friday to remember the hanging of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer in Flossenburg annihilation camp.
Bonhoeffer was an intellectual who joined thought and action. He began
as a systematic theologian and became a leader in the German
resistance to Nazism. He had leanings to pacifism, but became a
fighter against evil and an associate of the would-be assassins who
planned the July plot against Hitler.
Richard Chartres
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Richard%20Chartres%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Richard+Chartres%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Richard+Chartres%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Richard+Chartres%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Dietrich%20Bonhoeffer%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Dietrich+Bonhoeffer%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Dietrich+Bonhoeffer%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Dietrich+Bonhoeffer%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
'Super spike' fears push oil price to $56 a barrel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1450726,00.html
Larry Elliott
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
Fears that oil prices could double to more than $100 a barrel sent
tremors through the world's energy markets yesterday, pushing up the
price of crude and threatening fresh increases in fuel bills for
consumers and businesses.
After prices fell earlier in the week, a report from Goldman Sachs
predicting that the cost of crude could reach $105 a barrel in a
"super spike" helped push them above $56 a barrel in New York last
night.
Larry Elliott
http://tinyurl.com/3hgad
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/6abecf9451ceafb8
Oil
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/4eb8934a3462c679
No home fit for heroes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1449045,00.html
Around 130,000 veterans of the Iraqi conflict have already returned to
the US. For some, all that awaits is a life of virtual destitution. So
far, the numbers are small, but the fear is that they are just the
start of a chronic problem that America will be dealing with for years
to come. Gary Younge reports
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
Like Martin Luther King, Herold Noel had a dream that was "deeply
rooted in the American dream". It did not involve anything as lofty as
racial harmony or the brotherhood of man. Herold was after something
far more basic. "I wanted to have a white house with a picket fence,
without drugs and all that," he says. "That was my dream. I grew up in
the ghetto, and in the ghetto you will see a 10-year-old smoking weed.
That's what I was raised around, and I wanted a better life for me and
my kids. I didn't want to be like Puffy and pour $1,000 bottles of
Cristal on the floor. I just wanted to throw a barbecue in my own
backyard."
Gary Younge
http://snipurl.com/dlq1
http://tinyurl.com/25fkh
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/59db27ad3617e2e3
Words count
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1449513,00.html
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was published 250 years ago this month.
Beryl Bainbridge describes how a failed teacher and celebrated 'hack'
worked for nine years in a London garret to redefine the English
language - and his reputation
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
In 1746, some months after his 36th birthday, Samuel Johnson, that
great literary figure of the 18th century, affectionately referred to
as the Good Doctor, began work on his monumental Dictionary of the
English Language . It took him nine years. April 15 marks the 250th
anniversary of its publication.
Johnson was already an established man of letters, famous for his
epitaphs, his parliamentary debates, his translations of the Odes of
his favourite poet, Horace, numerous essays written for the
Gentleman's Magazine and for his epic poem, "The Vanity of Human
Wishes". His contemporaries were the giants of the age, Joshua
Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, David
Garrick, yet it is his name that resounds the loudest in the 21st
century.
Samuel Johnson
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Samuel%20Johnson%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Samuel+Johnson%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Samuel+Johnson%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Samuel+Johnson%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Life, the universe and everything?
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1449523,00.html
Ted Honderich revels in AC Grayling's philosophical ruminations, The
Heart of Things
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
The piece in this book on Abelard and Heloise, that original academic
affair that ended worse than badly, is memorable for glorifying the
sanctity of her passion over what is correctly called his
post-testicular thought. The piece on partings in general goes off on
an informative tangent. What do you do when you come to a fork in the
road and are faced with a consistent liar and a consistent
truth-teller, and you don't know which is which, and you can ask one
question about which way to go? You ask one of them to say what the
other would say is the right way, and you don't take it.
AC Grayling makes a good argument that reading the novel enlarges our
sympathies, to which is added that it is necessary to the good life in
the good society. There is an excellent piece on a closeness between
two peoples that is indicated by a lot, including "shalom" and
"salaam". There are fine pieces on achieving a philosophy of life of
the ancient Epicureans, Stoics and the like that will help us with the
fact of death to come. There is eloquence on eloquence as distinct
from rhetoric.
Grayling (AC OR Anthony)
http://snipurl.com/71al
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=Grayling%20(AC%20OR%20Anthony)&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=Grayling+(AC+OR+Anthony)&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=Grayling+%28AC+OR+Anthony%29&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=Grayling+(AC+OR+Anthony)&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
In search of reason
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1449524,00.html
***** Taverne inveighs against the doomsayers in The March of Unreason.
A little knowledge and a lot of bombast are dangerous things, says
Margaret Cook
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy and the New Fundamentalism
by ***** Taverne
320pp, OUP, £18.99
Most people don't know much about science, don't want to know, and
what is most disturbing, "seem proud of not knowing", writes *****
Taverne. He confesses that in his youth he too was among the
unenlightened leftie doomsters and joined Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace. Mea culpa. As if this was a disclosure too painful to
dwell on, he then makes the first of several disorientating deviations
to tell of his devotion to cycling in London. It is a bit like a
meandering after-dinner conversation - not the best technique for
convincing your reader, as he clearly wants to do, that you are a
polymath.
The cycling story does establish a trace amount of environmental
credentials, which is needed because antipathy to environmental
activists is a recurrent theme. Taverne envisions them as threatening
green crusaders driving out the pure-minded, inspired scientist and
crippling the future of techno-innovation. In spite of his stated
commitment to evidence-based science, much of his discussion is rant
rather than reason.
***** Taverne
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Dick%20Taverne%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Dick+Taverne%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Dick+Taverne%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Dick+Taverne%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Einstein's general theory of writing
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1449554,00.html
Aphorist, poet, diarist - the physicist was a man of many talents,
says Alice Calaprice
Saturday April 2, 2005
The Guardian
Although Albert Einstein was a prolific writer, he did not think of
himself as one. "In the past, it never occurred to me that every
casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I
would have crept further into my shell," he wrote in a fit of
frustration to his biographer, Carl Seelig, in 1953. By this time, two
years before his death, his archive contained more than 20,000 items,
thousands of which were written by him personally. Today, the archive
has more than doubled in size.
A physicist, philosopher, humanitarian, pacifist, political agitator
and cultural Zionist, Einstein was also a formidable writer, and very
quotable. Because he wrote almost exclusively in German, his words
have been translated into dozens of languages - though, as everyone
knows, much can be lost in translation.
Einstein
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/8ea10049a79a604c
Protests grow as Mugabe heads for 'fraudulent' election victory
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=625547
By Basildon Peta and Christopher Thompson in Bulawayo
02 April 2005
Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, called on Zimbabweans to
defend their vote, as President Robert Mugabe appeared to be on course
for a disputed victory in elections that have attracted near-universal
condemnation.
"This government has fraudulently once again betrayed the people,"
said Mr Tsvangirai in what was seen as an indirect call for a mass
uprising in response to what the opposition called "rigged results".
Mugabe
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/2f1c6d1171ad3a81
Zimbabwe
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/8c65526e2c0dad4e
America's religious right lashes out at judges over Schiavo
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=625539
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
02 April 2005
Terri Schiavo is dead but the political storm unleashed by her passing
shows no sign of abating - with the polarising and embattled figure of
Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill,
squarely in its eye.
A day after Ms Schiavo died in a Florida hospice, the unseemly battle
between her parents and her husband moved into a new phase, this time
over her funeral arrangements.
Religious right
http://groups-beta.google.com/=ADgroup/alt.atheism/msg/8ba03c3b=ADe221ade4
Terri Schiavo
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/7baa3fa63fbd4741
Torture and repression exposed in holiday paradise of Maldives
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=625538
By Daniel Howden
02 April 2005
Behind its picture postcard façade, the Maldives are being run as a
"secret dictatorship" engaged in "arbitrary arrest, detention and
torture", according to a human rights report.
The Indian Ocean archipelago, a favourite luxury holiday destination
for well-heeled Westerners, relies on a culture of repression and fear
to prop up a brutal regime, said the report by the Asian Centre for
Human Rights, entitled Maldives: The Dark Side of Life.
Maldives
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/cafdd2953a4b0284
'Return to Greatness': A New New Deal
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/03ROSENL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By GARY ROSEN
Published: April 3, 2005
WHEN liberal rabble-rousers get fed up with Republican duplicity and
Democratic fecklessness, they write books full of invective and rude
humor, with titles like ''Stupid White Men'' and ''Lies (and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them).'' When liberal intellectuals feel the same
impulse, they lash out with paradigms and sprawling historical
analogies, in earnest tomes with titles like, well, ''Return to
Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to
Do to Recover It.'' Neither sort of book is especially edifying, but
at least Michael Moore and Al Franken deliver an occasional laugh.
RETURN TO GREATNESS
How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to
Recover It.
By Alan Wolfe.
239 pp. Princeton University Press. $22.95.
Alan Wolfe
http://news.google.com/news?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22Alan+Wolfe%22&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22Alan+Wolfe%22&sa=N&tab=nw
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=+%22Alan+Wolfe%22&sa=N&tab=wd&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Alan%20Wolfe&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
'The Confederate Battle Flag': Clashing Symbols
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/03MCWHORT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By DIANE MCWHORTER
Published: April 3, 2005
THROUGHOUT its history of controversy, one thing the Confederate
battle flag has consistently stood for is the tendency of human beings
to muddle their best instincts and their worst. As the banner of
Southern nationalism, the star-spangled cross is an emblem of heroic
self-determination, of the Confederacy's rebellion against federal
''oppression.'' But the ideal that urged the secessionists on to their
blood-drenched sacrifice was the freedom to subject a race of people
to enslavement.
THE CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAG
America's Most Embattled Emblem.
By John M. Coski.
Illustrated. 401 pp. The Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press.
$29.95.
John Coski
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=John%20Coski&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=John+Coski&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=John+Coski&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=John%20Coski&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&sa=N&tab=wg
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=John+Coski&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
Confederacy
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/a9f665cc6b1dc1e0
Wolfgang Schivelbusch
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=Wolfgang+Schivelbusch&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=Wolfgang+Schivelbusch&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=Wolfgang+Schivelbusch&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=Wolfgang%20Schivelbusch&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
'When the Mississippi Ran Backwards': Tecumseh's Revenge
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/03GENZING.html
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: April 3, 2005
Kismet and coincidence drive ''When the Mississippi Ran Backwards,''
Jay Feldman's study of what may have been the biggest earthquakes ever
to hit the United States. But the most striking accident of timing
associated with the book is one Feldman could never have foreseen: as
it was nearing publication, another monstrous earthquake brought a
devastation to Asia that stunned the world.
WHEN THE MISSISSIPPI RAN BACKWARDS
Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes.
By Jay Feldman.
Illustrated. 305 pp. The Free Press. $27.
Jay Feldman
http://news.google.com/news?tab=gn&q=%22Jay%20Feldman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
http://www.google.com/search?tab=nw&q=%22Jay+Feldman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Jay+Feldman%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&cat=gwd%2FTop
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=%22Jay+Feldman%22&start=0&scoring=d&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&
The Crusades as History, Not Metaphor
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/03KENNEDY.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By HUGH KENNEDY
Published: April 3, 2005
The air is full of talk of crusades. Few ideas generated in the early
Middle Ages have shown such resilience. Monasticism is a shadow of its
former self, chivalry is only a rhetorical device, monarchy is robbed
of the power and magic that once made it formidable. The idea of the
crusade, however, seems to have acquired a new relevance and vitality.
The memory of these medieval expeditions from Europe to the Middle
East haunts the political discourse of our relations with the Muslim
world. The word ''crusade'' is used by Western politicians almost
without thought to describe a war fought for idealistic and
ideological motives, rather than for naked gain. For many Muslims,
brought up to see themselves as innocent victims and the idea of the
crusade as essentially anti-Islamic, the apparent survival of the
crusading ideal is threatening and sinister.
THE FIRST CRUSADE
A New History.
By Thomas Asbridge.
Illustrated. 408 pp. Oxford University Press. $35.
THE FOURTH CRUSADE
And the Sack of Constantinople.
By Jonathan Phillips.
Illustrated. 374 pp. Viking. $25.95.
FIGHTING FOR CHRISTENDOM
Holy War and the Crusades.
By Christopher Tyerman.
Illustrated. 247 pp. Oxford University Press. $26.
The Crusaders
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/c5f8238b6491cae5
'The Great Mortality': Plague to World: Drop Dead
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/03LEWISL.html
By MARK LEWIS
Published: April 3, 2005
THE tsunami that scoured the Bay of Bengal inevitably prompted
speculation that it was nature's revenge against humanity for
despoiling the earth. But if Gaia really were out to get us, she'd
unleash another plague like the Black Death, which killed an estimated
25 million Europeans, a third of the population, in less than five
years. That pandemic, John Kelly plausibly asserts in ''The Great
Mortality,'' still stands as ''the greatest natural disaster in human
history.''
THE GREAT MORTALITY
An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of
All Time.
By John Kelly.
364 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.
Facing Tough Race, Santorum Moderates
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19749-2005Apr1.html
By Mike Allen and Brian Faler, Page A04
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has recently made a series of gestures
toward the center as he gears up for a tough reelection race against a
moderate Democrat. For one of Capitol Hill's most ardent
conservatives, the adjustment has been pronounced enough that the
liberal American Prospect sarcastically referred to him as a "man of
the people."
Santorum
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/9eb9fc50c54a6d93
Whitman's Moderation in Opposition Won't Win Her Fight Within GOP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2005Apr1.html
By Dana Milbank
Saturday, April 2, 2005; Page A06
Christie Whitman has brought a knife to the political equivalent of a
gunfight.
The former New Jersey governor and Bush Cabinet member is warning that
religious extremists have taken over the Republican Party and the
administration in which she served. It's a devastating critique -- or
at least it would be if she backed it up with the sort of actions that
would get the party to take her seriously.
Christine Todd Whitman
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/7b265c20d7291b77
.
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
