Religion (general)

Which One God?

National Review Online Bat Yeor December 4, 2006

Comparing the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.

With the passing of time, hidden challenges, which for a long time had been growing unnoticed and unaddressed, can suddenly emerge into the full-blown light of current events with a force which seems quite overwhelming. Today the Western world, or Judeo-Christian civilization, shaken by jihadist terror, is being rudely awakened to theological realities blurred for decades. From clashes of civilizations to the jihad that is declaring to the planet its genocidal intentions, rational discourse concerning faith is becoming increasingly fraught.

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On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check

Jewish World Review Ira Rifkin September 11, 2006

He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic. No more.

In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.

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Pick-and-Choose Piety Makes Enemies

Ed. Interesting article from Rabbi Daniel Lapin that touches on our ongoing discussion of poverty but from a Jewish perspective.

Toward Tradition Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Heading an organization whose entire purpose is to promote friendship and mutual respect between Jews and Christians, egregious assaults on this friendship really bother me. As I reported last week, it gives me little pleasure to admit that most of these assaults come from my side of the fence. Well, here we go again.

In Bellevue, Washington, just a few miles from my home, a Jewish Reform temple has been upsetting its neighbors by insisting on hosting an encampment of homeless people on its property. Fearful neighbors in this upper middle class enclave of young families point to countless offenses, ranging from assault and relieving in public to drug possession, perpetrated by this group of homeless during their earlier sojourn on the grounds of a church in a neighboring city.
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Pope bans homosexuals from ordination as priests

World Net Daily September 19, 2005

Applicants with ‘gay’ tendencies won’t be admitted to seminaries

Pope Benedict XVI has given his approval to a new Vatican policy document that bans men with homosexual tendencies from being ordained as priests, reports Catholic World News.

The policy statement is a direct result of the pope’s concern about the pedophilia scandal in the church – especially in the U.S.

The new document, prepared by the Congregation for Catholic Education in response to a request made by the late Pope John Paul II in 1994, will be published soon. It will take the form of an “Instruction,” signed by the prefect and secretary of the congregation: Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski and Archbishop Michael Miller, according to the report.
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THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE OF SOCIALISM

The majority of the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement…are socialists because socialism appears to them…as “science applied in clear awareness and with full insight to all fields of human activity.”…

Compared with the work of the engineer that of the merchant is in a sense much more “social,” that is, interwoven with the free activities of other people…. His special knowledge is almost entirely knowledge of particular circumstances of time or place…. But though this knowledge is not of a kind which can be formulated in generic propositions, or acquired once for all, and though in an age of Science it is for that reason regarded as knowledge of an inferior kind, it is for all practical purposes no less important than scientific knowledge…
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