Sometimes you have to question if there is a difference that makes a difference. And also, is it true that a people can make themselves holy through a dedicated study of sacred texts? Or, is this strictly a Platonic idea that has become embedded in our thought processes, part of the normative bias that short-circuits the earlier more shambling, disorganized and archaic religious traditions, according to Harold Bloom and shoveled them into the dung heap to ferment as compost.
Bloom promotes a historical view, a template of explanation based on a gnostic vision of the world, what is a “Yahweh” based vision, a fascination that competes against the indifference, denial, or according to the source; intrinsic truths of atheism. For Bloom, gnosticism is imaginatively more intriguing and poetically more stimulating to follow Yahweh as a kind of muse instead of the absence or hostility one encounters in a Hitchens or Bill Maher; equally blasphemous in a sense but with more overall empathy and a less visceral anti-clericism.
---In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt. Feeling the pressure of rising unemployment in France, and seeing the power that British colonies had given England, Napoleon set forth with his fleet, first picking off the riches of Malta and then heading to Alexandria, in Egypt. Admiral Nelson was in hot pursuit, and though he was unable to cut off the French fleet before they got to Egypt, he trapped the French in Aboukir Bay and at the Battle of the Nile wiped out all but 4 French ships, who were able to escape. Hence, Napoleon and his army were, for all practical purposes, trapped in Egypt. Napoleon, never one to miss a chance to turn misfortune into opportunity, seized Egypt (and later Lebanon and Syria), and began to carve out a French Empire in the Levant.--- Read More:http://www.rosenblumtv.com/2009/06/what-is-journalism/
Harold Bloom: Because I think the category—you know any time you want to say that some text is more sacred than another then you’ve made a political statement, and I don’t like political statements. It is utterly insane that by vote of the United States Congress, the Church of Scientology has a tax exempt status. That means that Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard, which I challenge anybody to try to read, is a sacred text, by vote of Congress. And of course what it is is very ninth rate science fiction. Though it now has distinguished believers like, I believe, Tom Cruise and—isn’t John Travolta also a Scientologist? ….
---The legend of the Golem—a man made from clay brought to life through kabbalistic magic in 16th century Prague by the actual historical rabbi Jehuda Loew to protect the Jewish community from pogroms—is one of the most enduring and resonant stories in all of Jewish mythology. The 1920 silent film "THE GOLEM, How He Came Into the World", directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, is considered the definitive version of this amazing tale.--- Read More:http://garylucas.com/www/golem/
…I never quite make up my mind about Allah, though I’m fascinated by the fact that the Koran is the only book I’ve ever read in which every single phrase is spoken by God himself. It is the voice of Allah that you hear from the beginning to the end, supposedly by mediation of the angel Gabriel, being dictated to Mohammed, who however doesn’t write it down because supposedly he’s an illiterate, which baffles me, because he’s a successful merchant, and how could you have been a successful merchant if you were illiterate, and couldn’t read or write? But supposedly he memorizes it and then he dictates it—a very suspicious process of course, but then no more suspicious than the formation of Tanakh or the Greek New Testament….
---Zizek:Yes, yes. I don’t care about the social services and so on. The question is: when it is a question of workers, of women, and so on, where do you see any promise of emancipation? It’s not a rhetorical question. I want to see it, and I don’t. The big question for me—and here I am an unashamed Eurocentrist—is the political solution in Palestine, namely the necessity of a single, secular state. Is the goal of Hezbollah or Hamas a single, secular state, or not? I totally support the Palestinian cause, and even Palestinian "terror," provided it is publicly oriented toward a single, secular state. The option proposed by Hamas and Hezbollah is not a single secular state, but the destruction of Israel, driving the Jews "into the sea." I don’t buy the anti-imperialist solidarity with these forces. --- Read More:http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php image:http://prathama-raghavan.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html
…How is it that we don’t have an Aramaic Gospel? Why is there no Nazarene Gospel? Even though we know that no one who wrote anything that is now in the New Testament had ever seen the historical Jesus, had ever heard him say a word, nevertheless, for any of this to make even an iota of sense, that person did not go around speaking Koiné, speaking demotic Greek. He went around speaking Aramaic. Aramaic and demotic Greek are totally different languages. The nuances of thought, expression and spirituality of one are not readily translatable into the other. How could you believe that you were hearing the ipsa verba, the actual words of the incarnate God, and not write them down and preserve them? And what makes me even more suspicious is, you will notice, as though they throw it in to show the authenticity of this inauthentic schmaltz, all through the Gospels suddenly you’re thrown a phrase or two in Aramaic, including, you know, the last words spoken from the Cross. Why? And where’s the rest of it?… Read More:http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/bloom_hartman/bloom/bloom.html
Read More:http://atlasshr
000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/the_truth_about_islam/ADDENDUM:
Zizek:
Islam thus functions as what Freud called Liebesstoerer: the intruder/obstacle of the harmonious sexual relationship. This harmonious relationship, of course, would have been the one under the predominance of femininity: the male West would have rejoined the feminine East and thus “remain woman,” locate itself within femininity.
François Regnault defined Jews as our objet a – but are here not Muslims this a-sexual “partial object”? We usually speak of the Jewish-Christian civilization – perhaps, the time has come, especially with regard to the Middle East conflict, to talk about the Jewish-Muslim civilization as an axis opposed to Christianity. (Recall a surprising sign of this deeper solidarity: after Freud published his Moses booklet in 1938 depriving Jews of their founding figure, the most ferocious reactions to it came from the Muslim intellectuals in Egypt!) Was Hegel not already on the trace of it with his insight into the speculative identity of Judaism and Islam? According to a commonplace, Judaism (like 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:
In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.
This, perhaps, explains why there is so much anti-Semitism in Islam: because of the extreme proximity of the two religions. In Hegelese, what Islam encounters in Judaism is ITSELF in its “oppositional determination,” in the mode of particularity. The difference between Judaism and Islam is thus ultimately not substantial, but purely formal: they are the SAME religion in a different formal mode (in the sense in which Spinoza claims that the real dog and the idea of a dog are substantially one and the same thing, just in a different mode). – Against this, one should argue that it is Judaism which is an “abstract negation” of polytheism and, as such, still haunted by it (there is a whole series of clues pointing in this direction: “Jehovah” is a plural substantive; in one of his commandments, God prohibits Jews to celebrate other gods “in front of me,” not when outside of his gaze; etc.), while Christianity is the only true monotheism, since it includes self-differentiation into the One – its lesson is that, in order to have truly a One, you need …Read More:http://www.lacan.com/zizarchives.htm
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