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Currently viewing articles tagged with Religion.
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To Libya with God on our side
Grabbing other people’s land and interfering in their affairs became as American as apple pie before the annexation of Texas, and “Manifest Destiny” as the engine of U.S. foreign policy.
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Web Exclusive: The 3Rs of Theo-cons: Religious, Right, and Rude
If there was any doubt that the Religious Right was alive and well and living in Canada, a recent column by a fellow by the name of Dennis Thompsett in the Owen Sound Sun Times should put that doubt to rest.
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The New Secularism
I always learn something from going on right-wing U.S. talk shows like Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox. Once he introduced me as a columnist for “a left-wing Canadian newspaper.” I said I hated to use the pittance of time I was given between his long diatribes to defend the Globe & Mail. But I couldn’t let what he had just said stand: the Globe is in fact a conservative, business paper. He scoffed: “It’s a secular paper!” That’s what I mean by learning something. Alongside Afghanistan under the Taliban and the Iran of the mullahs, the U.S. is that rare nation that defines the left-right political spectrum in terms of the secular and the religious.
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Rude Conversation
Contemplating the return of the religious Right to worldwide prominence or even - God forbid! - dominance, Dimension is pleased to inaugurate this “rude conversation” about the secular state and the place of religion in politics.
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Reviving the Radical Critique of Religion
When we think of the alliance of church and state, we tend to think of Constantine and Christianity, Holy Russia and the Prussian Empire. In more recent times, we may think of the theocracies of Saudi Arabia and Israel, or George Bush’s de facto fundamentalist regime. Few of us think about Canada.
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The Perils of Faith-Based Multiculturalism
The controversies over decisions by the Ontario government to allow and then ban the use of Shari’a (and other religious laws) as the basis of arbitration are not over. Religious groups and their supporters continue to push for minority religious rights. In Canada, as in other parts of the world, religious sentiments are on the rise. Conservative religious leaders have become more vocal and demanding, and governments are giving in to their demands without much regard for the serious consequences for democracy and citizens’ rights.
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Conversations with God About Going to War
U.S. President William McKinley’s words should echo with President Bush and his evangelical zealots. Like the Republican who initiated U.S. overseas military expansion, the current president also talks to God and hears His words. Like McKinley, Bush understands that the stars and stripes stand for inseparable U.S. commercial interests and pious purposes.
After McKinley was assassinated in 1900, subsequent presidents sent troops back to Cuba three times in the next two decades, until finally “losing” the island in the 1959 revolution. Until 1933, 120,000 U.S. troops occupied the Philippines. “Pacifying” those “heathens” took longer than McKinley thought and brought out the brute in the soul of U.S. Christian soldiers. Long before troops destroyed the Vietnamese village “to save it,” and a century-plus before GIs decimated Falluja and killed thousands of its residents to bring democracy to Iraq, their predecessors committed atrocities in the Philippines.
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