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The Pagan Origin Of Easter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Easter is a day that is honered by nearly all of contemporary Christianity and is used to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The holiday often involves a church service at sunrise, a feast which includes an "Easter Ham", decorated eggs and stories about rabbits. Those who love truth learn to ask questions, and many questions must be asked regarding the holiday of Easter. Is it truly the day when Jesus arose from the dead? Where did all of the strange customs come from, which have nothing to do with the resurrection of our...

Ron DiFrancesco was at his desk at Euro Brokers…on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center…when the plane struck the North Tower...It was 8:46 am on September 11, 2001… A few minutes later...the second plane struck… DiFrancesco is normally unflappable. He is a broker in a high-stakes business that demands steel nerves. But he is also slightly claustrophobic, and with the intensifying smoke, he began to panic…Then, something remarkable happened: “Someone told me to get up.” Someone, he says, “called me.” The voice, which was male but did not belong to anyone in the stairwell,...

The only shocking thing about this book is the news that someone has found it shocking – has been “shocked, shocked” (as Claude Raines would have said) by the argument that people used to eat cows in ancient India. The Myth of the Holy Cow is a dry, straight academic survey of the history of Sanskrit texts dealing with the eating, or not-eating, of cows. The author, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, Professor of History at the University of Delhi, has marshalled indisputable evidence proving what every scholar of India has known for well over a century: (1) In ancient India, from...

Let’s begin by defining epistemology simply as the branch of philosophy that asks this essential question about knowledge: “How do you know that?” That job taken care of, we can turn to the topic of materialists and morality. It’s apparently no big deal to materialists (many of whom proclaim themselves intellectuals of one sort or another), but most of them aren’t interested in asking and then answering the epistemological question regarding their moral assertions. To complicate matters, this problem doesn’t represent just an academic exercise; for materialists disproportionately favor the liberal side of the American political spectrum and therefore exhibit...

The role of religion in public life in Sweden has been brought into sharp relief by a provocative ad campaign questioning the existence of God. Earlier this week, billboards went up in several Stockholm subway stations and elsewhere around the city proclaiming, “God probably doesn’t exist” (Gud finns nog inte). Accompanying the proclamation are images of three flags featuring symbols from Judaism, Islam, and Christianity fashioned in the same shades of blue and yellow found on the Swedish flag. The ads come from the Swedish Humanist Association (Humanisterna), and are part of a campaign to further debate about the impact...

God-fearing heavy metal fans in Sweden now have a place to go to bang their heads and worship Jesus at the same time. The church was formed from an ever-expanding network of Christians who “love hard rock and want to see the metal world transformed by God’s power,” according to a statement by the church’s founders. “We want to be a safe-haven for Christian hard rockers where they can feel at home and grow spiritually, and where newly-converted hard rockers can develop their faith and be protected,” said the group. The idea for Sweden's Metal Sanctuary came to life following...

Islam is, undeniably, a major source of inspiration for terrorism, oppression and barbarism. Many would even say the very nature of Islam is nothing but sheer evil and among these gainsayers of Islam we find plenty of well educated and highly literate individuals. Personally speaking, I can't say that I've grown more tolerant of Islam the more educated I've become. But could Muslim nations that today are run by advocates of pure evil eventually be transformed into well functioning democracies? Will Iran ever become a true democracy? Will Iraq? Will Saudi Arabia? - Or will Islam hinder such a development?...

"Freedom from indoctrination ought to be a basic human right for all children," argues ABBA star Björn Ulvaeus in a passionate plea for Sweden to rethink its policy on faith-based schools. Without thinking too much about it at the time, when I wrote the lyrics for ABBA's songs the message I wished to convey tallies well with campaigns launched recently by humanist organisations in the UK, US and Australia: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Earlier this month the Swedish Humanist Association (Humanisterna) launched a similar campaign. And in light of the growing influence of...

""Freedom from indoctrination ought to be a basic human right for all children," argues ABBA star Björn Ulvaeus in a passionate plea for Sweden to rethink its policy on faith-based schools."

He is said to have lived before as Lt James Huston Jnr, who was shot down by the Japanese in 1945. A book about him, Soul Survivor, is a best-seller in the US and tells how he began to have dreams about the war as a two-year-old. His parents Bruce, 59, and Andrea, 47, were initially sceptical about the idea of reincarnation but have now traced the relatives of the dead pilot who were impressed by James’s apparent memories of the war. Mrs Leininger told the Mirror: "In the throes of his nightmares you couldn't work out what he was...

Before the Islamic Revolution dimmed the Iranian literary imagination in 1979, and before an expanding Islam swept Iran into its Arab empire in the seventh century, there existed the rich and colorful Iran recounted in Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” or the Book of Kings. Nearly four centuries after the Arab conquest, the “Shahnameh” tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran—when Persian civilization was at its zenith. The epic proceeds through the reign of many monarchs, chronicling the at times legendary, at times mythological, and at times quasihistorical stories of each reign. Then, with the Arab conquest, the chronicle comes to an end. This...

Belmont Club July 14th, 2009 3:32 am Who saved GI Joe? <a href="http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=167&c=a9b065f5-2460-de11-908e-001a4befa6a0" target="_blank"><img src="http://harvest.AdGardener.com/noscript.aspx?s=167&w=300&h=250&c=a9b065f5-2460-de11-908e-001a4befa6a0" width="300" height="250" border="0" /></a> One of the actual models for the Hasboro action figure GI Joe was Marine Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Paige. Paige  who passed away in 2003, held a hilltop on Guadalcanal against more than a company of Imperial Japanese soldiers by manning each of the four machine gun positions in turn after everyone else had been killed. Paige tells the story of that frenzied Medal of Honor night, as each position was overrun and he finally held the ring alone...

Hindu scholars have poked fun at GWYNETH PALTROW for using religious terminology to promote her "mundane" weekly Goop blog. U.S. Hindu leader Rajan Zed suggests the movie star should take the trouble to learn more about the ancient religion before using taglines like "nourish the inner aspect" on her website. Zed fears Paltrow is leading impressionable minds astray by suggesting her weekly musings are deep and philosophical - and then just writing about material, "external" matters. He says, "There are not many deep, spiritual and philosophical thoughts in the blog, which are an essential part of nourishing the inner self....

One idea is that religion is related to evolution, in that belief confers some survival advantage. Another idea is that as with other supernatural beliefs, religion is appealing because it offers answers to things that otherwise seem inexplicable (and before modern science, a lot of things were inexplicable, from the stars in the sky to stormy weather to human illness and death). But throughout history, just feeling better by having an explanation for things would not necessarily confer much of a survival advantage. As James Dow at Oakland University in Michigan sees things: "Religious people talk about things that cannot...

Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley's argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe "out there" into which we have each individually arrived....

Grammys in a cabinet? Check. Movie theater? Check. Jewish artifacts? Check. Back up. The Baptist-raised country star, who says he once confused "menorah" with "manure," displays a Jewish candelabrum on the mantel, and a Hebrew book sits on the coffee table. Adding to the cross-cultural confusion, the Rhinestone Cowboy soon breaks into a plaintive cry, "Jeee-esus ... Help me find my special place." His German Shepherd joins in on the last bit. It's not a hymn or a prayer. It's a line from an old song by the 1960s rock band the Velvet Underground. "Jesus" appears on the semi-retired singer's...

In a recent book entitled The Hindus: Alternative History, Wendy Doniger claims that Hinduism was invented by the British. Doniger is a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. She argues that Hinduism's unity and its holy Vedas are primarily a myth created by Protestants who sought a "unified Hinduism." She further argues that upper-caste Brahmins and other elites in India collaborated with the British and invented a "British-Brahmin version of Hinduism - one of the many invented traditions born around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries." These "bad Hindus" are accused of having an inferiority...

A fired British executive is suing his former employer on the grounds that he was unfairly dismissed due to religious views – his belief in global warming.  According to the Independent: “In the first case of its kind, employment judge David Sneath said Tim Nicholson, a former environmental policy officer, could invoke employment law for protection from discrimination against him for his conviction that climate change was the world's most important environmental problem.� The judge ruled that Nicholson’s extreme green views fit the definition of “a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003.�  So strong were...

A church in Ashland, Ore., can import and brew a hallucinogenic tea for its religious services, under a federal court ruling issued March 19. Judge Owen M. Panner issued a permanent injunction that bars the federal government from penalizing or prohibiting the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen from sacramental use of "Daime" tea. The church, which blends Christian and Brazilian indigenous beliefs, uses tea brewed from the ayahuasca plant in their services. The tea contains trace amounts of the chemical dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. According to the church's lawsuit, the tea is the central ritual and sacrament of...

Like many other soldiers who took part in the Gaza operation, Omer, 20, occasionally took a few moments to pray, but he did not pray to the Lord of Israel. Omer considers himself pagan, and has sworn allegiance to three ancient gods. During combat, he says they appeared before him, giving him strength during the most arduous moments. Omer is still in the army, and therefore refused to be interviewed for this story. Yet he did say he belongs to a religion whose goal is to revive worship of ancient gods. In an online Hebrew-language paganism forum, Omer's accounts of...

Today the John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), snip D'Espagnat boasts an impressive scientific pedigree, having worked with Nobel laureates Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr. De Broglie was his thesis advisor; he served as a research assistant to Fermi; and he worked at CERN when it was still in Copenhagen under the direction of Bohr. snip Third view Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If...

WE HAVE A good idea what was passing through the minds of the Sept. 11 hijackers as they made their way to the airports. Their Al Qaeda handlers had instructed them to meditate on al-Tawba and Anfal, two lengthy suras from the Koran, the holy scripture of Islam. The passages make for harrowing reading. God promises to "cast terror into the hearts of those who are bent on denying the truth; strike, then, their necks!" (Koran 8.12). God instructs his Muslim followers to kill unbelievers, to capture them, to ambush them (Koran 9.5). Everything contributes to advancing the holy goal:...

Jesus was a Palestinian? That's what one public school textbook says. Although Jesus lived in a region known in his time as Palestine, the use of the term "Palestinian," with its modern connotations, is among the hundreds of textbook flaws cited in a recent five-year study of educational anti-Semitism detailed in the book "The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion." Authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research found some 500 flaws and distortions concerning religion in 28 of the most widely used social studies and history textbooks in the United States.

The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors. The thinness of the...

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (ABP) -- Writings of Balthasar Hubmaier, one of the most well known and respected Anabaptist theologians of the Reformation, will soon be available for online research, thanks to a project of European Baptist scholars. The Institute of Baptist and Anabaptist Studies at International Baptist Theological Seminary in Prague, Czech Republic, and the German Baptist Seminary in Berlin recently announced that photographic reproductions of all of Hubmaier's surviving works would be scanned into digital images and made available on the Internet. IBTS Rector Keith Jones called it a long-term project likely to take six months to a year...

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science. It is perhaps no surprise that several leading atheists—from biologist Richard Dawkins to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker to physicist Victor Stenger—are also leading scientists. The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator. But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now...

"Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have...

Why I Became a ConservativeBy Roger ScrutonThe New Criterion | February 5, 2003 I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was...

The average Viking lived a life in which spirituality and thoughts of immortality played a far more important part than the rape and pillage more usually associated with his violent race, according to new research. A study of thousands of excavated Viking graves suggests that rituals were performed at the graveside in which stories about life and death were presented as theatre, with live performances designed to help the passage of the deceased from this world into the next... Detailed analysis of the burials revealed a remarkable variety of objects found alongside the bodies - from everyday items to great...

The seemingly nonsensical Zen practice of "thinking about not thinking" could help free the mind of distractions, new brain scans reveal. This suggests Zen meditation could help treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (so-called ADD or ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression and other disorders marked by distracting thoughts. < > "It is important that this type of research be conducted with high scientific standards because it carries a long-standing stigma - perhaps well-deserved? - of being wishy-washy," said researcher Giuseppe Pagnoni, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "Constructive skepticism should always be welcomed as a great sparring...

Will the world soon experience a return of patriarchy? That is the question raised by Phillip Longman in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Policy. The magazine's cover features a rather stunning headline: "Why Men Rule--and Conservatives Will Inherit the Earth." That headline would be surprising in almost any contemporary periodical, but it is especially significant that this article should appear in the pages of Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The publication of this article set a good many heads to spinning. Phillip Longman is Bernard L Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation....

The Da Vinci Code's gnosticism is not something that disappeared centuries ago. It survives as the religious substance of today's liberalism and its kindred sects of socialism. Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs. Gnosticism has surfaced repeatedly over the ages, in modern times in the philosophical underpinnings of the 1789 French Revolution. The Da Vinci Code's depiction of gnosticism as the preserver of the "truth" about Jesus and Christianity falls into the...

In mind over matter, scientists say the brain really matters By Steve Connor, Science Editor 02 September 2003 Scientists trying to find whether there is any truth to "mind over matter" say brain activity can control resistance to influenza. They have demonstrated a direct link between the brain's emotional state and the body's immune defences to explain why depressed people are more likely to catch a cold. Although there is considerable research showing a person's mood can influence their susceptibility to a virus, no previous study has found a direct link to the brain. Neuroscientists led by Richard Davidson, of...

Tradition attributed the prophetic inspiration of the powerful oracle to geologic phenomena: a chasm in the earth, a vapor that rose from it, and a spring... The ancient testimony, however, is widespread, and it comes from a variety of sources: historians such as Pliny and Diodorus, philosophers such as Plato, the poets Aeschylus and Cicero, the geographer Strabo, the travel writer Pausanias, and even a priest of Apollo who served at Delphi, the famous essayist and biographer Plutarch... in about 1900, a young English classicist named Adolphe Paul Oppe['s] opinions were so strongly expressed that his theory became the new...

CANTON, Ohio, Dec. 11 - Religious prophet Muhammad suffered from epileptic seizures, according to a book recently released by a Tehran- native and Muslim-raised neuropsychologist. Abbas Sadeghian delivers these findings in the book Sword & Seizure, which is based on historical text, including the Koran. Sadeghian was inspired by a comparable paper he presented in 2001 at New York University's Fielding Institute. He says Muhammad had suffered from "complex partial seizures," which are displayed through "excessive sweating and light trembling, olfactory, auditory and visual hallucinations, epigastric sensations (bad taste), excessive perspiration and hyper-religiosity." He says evidence of these is recounted...

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times An art handler at the Queens Public Library cleaned the display case Tuesday where the Flushing Remonstrance will be shown. The Flushing Remonstrance made a rare visit yesterday to the old neighborhood. ...the] Remonstrance...an important early recorded defense of the freedom to worship that has been called the religious Magna Carta of the New World. Relatively little known, this 1657 appeal by some 30 Flushing farmers for freedom to practice their Quaker religion goes on display... snip... According to historians, a group of about 30 freeholders in Flushing, which was then called Vlissingen,...

Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith ___ The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity. The Carmelite nun...

Hinduism pertains to Hindus but the word Hindu itself is actually a Persian word coined by Cyrus the great in the 6th century B.C. to describe people who lived beyond the river Indus which was the eastern boundary of the ancient Persian empire. The Persians had a phonetic problem with the letter ‘S’ hence, Sindhu became Hindu just as Rigveda’s Soma came from Zend Avesta’s Hoama. Such fascinating phonetic affinities! Even the word Shudra in Hinduism’s caste-system came from the Persian word Hatoksha. Originally, there were only three castes but the camp followers collected by Persians on their travels were...

Claims galore as Buddhist history claims new territory Parul Sharma “High time Orissa got its due as a prominent centre” Making a point: Professor James Freeman in New Delhi. Photo: V.V. Krishnan NEW DELHI: Even as there are claims and counter-claims about Lord Buddha being born in Kapileswar village near Bhubaneswar and not Lumbini in present-day Nepal as believed all along so far, an American anthropologist says it is time Orissa got its due as one of the most prominent centres of Buddhism in the world. “The numerous Buddhist sites in Orissa, the antiquities and sculptures found there reflect many...

A startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python's head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals. Scientists had thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40,000 years ago. But inside a cave in remote hills in Kalahari Desert of Botswana, archeologists found the stone snake [image] that was carved long ago. It is as tall as a man and 20 feet long.