religion

[Originally posted on the NCSE site.]

Note - This is the text of the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document," prepared in 1998. It lays out "the Wedge strategy" by which the newly-formed Center for Renewal of Science and Culture would promote "intelligent design" creationism.

THE WEDGE
CENTER FOR THE RENEWAL OF SCIENCE & CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

Many — if not most — Americans think of the creation and evolution controversy as a dichotomy with "creationists" on one side, and "evolutionists" on the other. This assumption all too often leads to the unfortunate conclusion that because creationists are believers in God, that evolutionists must be atheists.

Ipsos MORI reports 'Teachers Dismiss Calls For Creationism To Be Taught In School Science Lessons'.

During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population.

There can be little doubt that this article appeared with the agreement of the Fascist Party in Italy, and the Italian Army had already begun to stand between the Ustase and their victims in zones of the NDH under their authority.

Like many frustrated Southerners in the aftermath of the hurricane named Katrina, I drove a small truck-and-trailer full of food and water to South Mississippi. I met some refugees at a camp site, during the trip down. They appeared to be poor whites. One, a native of Bay St. Louis, was snarling against the "looters", using racial epithets.

French left-communist journal Troploin doing exactly what they say on the tin. The social function of religion; "The quest for the supernatural does not stem from an excessive but from a limited imagination built by millenniums of exploitation and oppression: the incapacity to be free on Earth incites humans to situate freedom out of this world. Dreams and desires are displaced persons. This is the stuff religion is made of."

It can’t be often, unfortunately, that the bishop of a major country’s capital city having visited an elderly priest, feared to be dying, and then phones a past archbishop’s former chaplain, a sometime mentor of the present archbishop, to say ‘he spoke of the kingdom of God and proclaimed his undying belief in Anarchy’.

According to a commonplace, Judaism (and Islam) is a "pure" monotheism, while Christianity, with its Trinity, is a compromise with polytheism; Hegel even designates Islam as THE "religion of sublimity" at its purest, as the universalization of the Jewish monotheism:

Leaders from the Roman Catholic church have helped to draft legislation outlawing abortion in all cases, including cases of rape and abortion to save the pregnant woman's life.

It is important today not only because it is a part of our history that has been denied space in the school books but also because it was a living demonstration that the sectarian barrier can be breached.

The crucifixion of El Salvador
For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by the US government, a matter of no interest in the US. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the government began to be concerned about a couple of things.

Following the success of the revolution, the Islamists instituted a theocratic dictatorship and wiped out the workers' movement and the left.

The following slightly edited report is from the Australian:

An aggrieved monk and his band of truculent acolytes have formed the first Japanese union for temple workers.

The fledgling union, comprising a handful of monks and other workers from the famous Zenkoji temple in Nagano, is sending a chilling message to Buddhist priests across Japan.

Religious Discrimination
Ms. Ayala is a practicing Wiccan and as a religious observance never takes off the necklace. She wore the necklace at Starbucks without interruption for three years until the company started harassing her after she and a group of her co-workers went public as members of the Starbucks Workers Union on November 18, 2005.

Over 130 years ago the anarchist Micheal Bakunin wrote "I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him." Writing of the Christian churches in Europe, he said "In talking to us of God they propose, they desire, to elevate us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary, they crush and degrade us.

published May 4-11, 1882 in Sozialdemokrat

In Berlin, on April 13, a man died who once played a role as a philosopher and a theologian, but was hardly heard of for years, only attracting the attention of the public from time to time as a "literary eccentric". Official theologians, including Renan, wrote him off and, therefore, maintained a silence of death about him. And yet he was worth more than them all and did more than all of them in a question which interests us Socialists, too: the question of the historical origin of Christianity.