Posts under ‘World Culture’

8-14-2010

http://www.aina.org/news/20100814184359.htm
By Mary Abdelmassih

Assyrian International News Agency
(AINA) — On August 13 Sheikh Tobah, Imam of the village of Shimi 170 KM south of Giza, called during Muslim Friday prayers for Jihad against Christians living there. As a result the Christian Copts living in the village were assaulted over two consecutive days. Eleven Copts were hospitalized and many Coptic youths were arrested.

The assaults begain a couple of hours after the Sheikhs incitement. An argument between Copt Maher Amin, who was washing his taxi, and Mohamed Ali Almstaui, a Muslim extremist from the village, escalated into violence as Mohamad assaulted Maher. The altercation was stopped by bystanders. However, after the evening break of Ramadan fast, Ahmad, the brother of the perpetrator Mohamad, who is reported to belong to an extremist organization, together with twenty other men, went to Maher’s family home, breaking down the door and assaulting him and his family with batons, including his old mother and his paralyzed sister, injuring them and breaking their furniture.

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J Felix Raj, SJ

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, a great Jesuit of the century, was thought to be a controversial Christian. While reading his book The Phenomenon of Man, his great contribution to the world, especially to the world of philosophy, one is touched by his humble and simple religious life and by his exceptionally wide knowledge and the new way he looks at existence. At the same time, the reader is disturbed to know that Teilhard was sent to China as a punishment for his scientific approach.

Teilhard, a prophet, a mystic, a scientific philosopher, and a committed priest, was born in 1881 at an Auvergne in the heart of France. He was the fourth in a family of 12 children. At the age of 12 he was sent to the Jesuit college of Longre. His teacher, Henri Bremond, said that he was a serious student, “perhaps too serious”.

At the age of 18, he joined the Jesuit Order. He had hardly started his studies in geology in Paris when the World War I broke out. He was enlisted as a stretcher-bearer and served during the whole period of the war. When the war was over, he returned to his scientific research and became a Professor of Geology in 1920 at the Catholic Institute of Paris.

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One of the greatest poets of the English language, best-known for his epic poem PARADISE LOST (1667). Milton’s powerful, rhetoric prose and the eloquence of his poetry had an immense influence especially on the 18th-century verse. Besides poems, Milton published pamphlets defending civil and religious rights. 

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden.”
(from Paradise Lost) 

John Milton was born in London. His mother, Sarah Jeffrey, a very religious person, was the daughter of a merchant sailor. Milton’s father, named John, too, had risen to prosperity as a scrivener or law writer  he also composed madrigasl and psalm settings. The family was wealthy enough to afford a second house in the country.  

Milton’s first teachers were his father, from whom he inherited love for art and music, and the writer Thomas Young, a graduate of St Andrews University. Milton took part in small domestic consorts, he played often a small organ and he had “delicate, tuneable voice”. At the age of twelve Milton was admitted to St Paul’s School near his home. Five years later he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge. While considering himself destined for the ministry, he began to write poetry in Latin, Italian, and English. One of Milton’e earliest works, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant’ (1626), was written after his sister Anne Phillips had suffered from a miscarriage. ‘In inventorem bombardae’ (On the inventor of gunpowder), a piece in a series on the occasion of the Gunpowder Plot, contains Milton’s first portrayal of Satan. 

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The Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is the acknowledged master of the historical novel. He was one of the most influential authors of modern times.Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771, the son of a lawyer with a long family tradition in law. By birth Scott was connected with both the rising middle class of Britain and the aristocratic Scottish heritage then passing into history. He was educated at Edinburgh University and prepared for a career in law, but his avocations were history and literature. He read widely in English and Continental literatures, particularly medieval and Renaissance chivalric romances, German romantic poetry and fiction, and the narrative folk poems known as ballads.

Translations and Poetry

From these intense interests Scott’s earliest publications derived: a translation of J. W. von Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1799) and other translations from German; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1803), a collection of ballads that generated great interest in folk poetry; and a succession of narrative poems, mainly of chivalric or historical action. These poems–including The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810)–became best sellers, and Scott established his first literary reputation as a poet of the romantic school.
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Anarchism – Mutualism

Anarchism, meaning “no rule”, includes any belief system which is opposed to the creation of a centralized government. Anarchism as a formal ideology became popular in 19th century Europe, where it was often the ideology of extreme social reformists and terrorists alike.

Mutualist anarchism is a modern variant which shares elements in common with social anarchism and anarcho-capitalism (although in practice its advocates have much more in common with the former). Mutualist anarchism holds that the means of production should be owned by the workers, who then function in a market economy.

What this means is that productive organizations – think of them as fulfilling the function of corporations or communes – must be owned and controlled by all of their workers as a group. These collective organizations can then trade with each other in a free market. Exactly how this is supposed to work is not something I have ever seen well specified – anarchists of any stripe are usually vague or simplistic when it comes to the practical economic and organizational side of their ideas.

At any rate, a Mutualist anarchist system is approximately what you would get if you took a modern democratic capitalist society, abolished the entire government, and somehow retained a free market without allowing any businesses not collectively owned by their workers. The greatest weakness of this idea, as with all branches of anarchism, is that without a central authority the system cannot be maintained unless the society believes in anarchism strongly enough that individuals and groups throughout society are willing and able to enforce it independently.

Anarchism-Social

Also known as: Anarcho-Socialism, Libertarianism (Left/European), Libertarian Socialism, Libertarian Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism. “ANARCHISMSOCIAL”Anarchism, meaning “no rule”, includes any belief system which is opposed to the creation of a centralized government. Anarchism as a formal ideology became popular in 19th century Europe, where it was often the ideology of extreme social reformists and terrorists alike.
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Dinesh D’Souza

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on September 16, 2008, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Colorado Springs.

In recent years there has arisen a new atheism that represents a direct attack on Western Christianity. Books such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, and Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, all contend that Western society would be better off if we could eradicate from it the last vestiges of Christianity. But Christianity is largely responsible for many of the principles and institutions that even secular people cherish-chief among them equality and liberty.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he called the proposition “self-evident.” But he did not mean that it is immediately evident. It requires a certain kind of learning. And indeed most cultures throughout history, and even today, reject the proposition. At first glance, there is admittedly something absurd about the claim of human equality, when all around us we see dramatic evidence of inequality. People are unequal in height, in weight, in strength, in stamina, in intelligence, in perseverance, in truthfulness, and in about every other quality. But of course Jefferson knew this. He was asserting human equality of a special kind. Human beings, he was saying, are moral equals, each of whom possesses certain equal rights. They differ in many respects, but each of their lives has a moral worth no greater and no less than that of any other. According to this doctrine, the rights of a Philadelphia street sweeper are the same as those of Jefferson himself.

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Mention the Crusades and the assumption is of a ruthless Church driving Europe into a barbaric war of aggression and plunder against a peaceful Islamic population in the Holy Land. As the common portrait paints it, led by mad preachers and manipulating power-hungry popes, the Crusades were a Church-sponsored invasion and slaughter that descended into a massacre at Jerusalem, the sack of Constantinople and the persecution of European Jews.

The Crusades, of course, are a far more complicated series of events in history than these anti-Catholic assumptions. Narrowly and traditionally defined, the Crusades involved a military attempt under a vow of faith to regain the Holy Land – containing the sites of the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus – from its Islamic conquerors.

This papal purpose, however, would become caught up in dynastic feuds, schism and heresies, economic warfare over Mediterranean trade, the reunification and rise of an aggressive Islamic military movement, and the final destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Jerusalem had been captured from the Byzantine Empire in 638 by Islamic forces just six years after the death of the prophet Mohammed. It was part of an aggressive military campaign that would seize Syria, North Africa and Spain from the old Roman Empire now based in Constantinople.

At the same time, differences within the Church as it developed in the East and West became more pronounced over the centuries. The Eastern Church resented the juridical authority of Rome. Thorny theological issues would divide the Church in the East far more than the West. Schisms and heresies would breakdown the unity of the Church in the East even before the major break between East and West in the schism of 1054.
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Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual … into a part of a much greater whole, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

We are all socialists nowadays.
-Edward, Prince of Wales, 1895

The most important political event of the twentieth century is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.
-Irving Kristol, 1976

We owe the term “socialism” to some followers of Robert Owen, the nineteenth-century British industrialist who founded New Harmony, a short-lived utopian community on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. Owen’s initial reception in America was impressive. In an 1825 address to Congress, Joshua Muravchik reports in Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, Owen’s audience included not only congressmen but also Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, President Monroe, and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Owen described to this august assemblage how his efforts to replace the “individual selfish system” with a “united social” system would bring forth a “new man” who was free from the grasping imperatives that had marred human nature from time immemorial. (And not only human nature: the utopian socialist Charles Fourier expected selfishness and cruelty to be obliterated from the animal kingdom as well: one day, he thought, even lions and whales would be domesticated.)

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“The mind can not conceive what man will do in the Twentieth Century with his chained lightning.”—Thomas A. Edison

Some years ago, a law was passed out in Ohio, making any man ineligible to act as a magistrate who had not studied law and been duly admitted to the bar. Men who had not studied law were deemed lacking in the sense of justice. This law was designed purely for one man—Samuel M. Jones of Toledo. Was ever a Jones so honored before?

In Athens, of old, a law was once passed declaring that every man, either of whose parents was an alien, was not a citizen and therefore ineligible to hold office.

This law was aimed at the head of one man—Themistocles.

“And so you are an alien?” was the taunting remark flung at the mother of Themistocles.

And the Greek matron proudly answered, “Yes, I am an alien—but my son is Themistocles.”

Down at Lilly Dale the other day, a woman told me that she had talked with the mother of Edison, and the spirit-voice had said: “It is true I was a Canadian schoolteacher, and this at a time when very few women taught, but I am the mother of him you call Thomas A. Edison. I studied and read and wrote and in degree I educated myself. I had great ambition—I thirsted to know, to do, to become. But I was hampered and chained in an uncongenial atmosphere. My body struggled with its bonds, so that I grew weak, worried, sick, and died, leaving my boy to struggle his way alone.
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