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Western Buddhism and Pentecostalism are sometimes criticised as self-indulgent forms of religion. Is Bishop Spong's Christian humanism any different?
The term “atheist” seems too respectable for the position occupied by commentators such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. They are anti-theists, opposed in principle to every last attachment to the divine, leading many to accuse them of a kind of inverted fundamentalism that lacks the core modern virtue of tolerance or respect for others.
The notion of preventing Islamic influence has strong echoes of the simple Cold War ‘domino theory’. This powerful metaphor and enemy image, popular in the 1950s and 1960s and used to justify US military intervention in Southeast Asia, was later widely criticised for its undeveloped and unstructured generalisations about political systems that are quite different.
Morag Fraser's writes in to respond to Allan Gordon's letter.
Allan Gordon writes in with some thoughts on Morag Fraser's piece on Alan Jones.
The post-Enlightenment commitment to the rational testing of claims is important if we are avoid the excesses of fundamentalism. But it could be time to accept that the range of acceptable ideas has been too narrow.
Every attempt to curb capitalism's voracious appetite, to ‘humanize’ its world-wide dominion, to place the world economy back in the service of the greater good, and thus temper its lust for unregulated growth, has not only failed, but has been assimilated.
When I reflect on this conversation, I am also struck by how different what I see in daily life is from what I read and watch in the media about about Muslim militants, the clash between Christians and Muslims, fundamentalism, or terrorism. Every age has its own false ideas. In our time, it is the notion that identifies Islam with hostility and aggression.
Andrew Hamilton reflects further on the furore provoked by Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg.
In the ideal world, the Christmas stockings of politicians would be filled with books. No bottles of single malt. No Tom Waits triple CD (alas). Only books.