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| Home » Writings, Speeches, Broadcasts » Credo » 2004 |
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| To Defend A Civilisation, You Need Education |
| 1/12/2004 |
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The Jewish community is in the midst of celebrating Chanukkah, our festival of lights. Although the events it commemorates are very ancient — going back almost two centuries before the birth of Christianity — its message remains powerful and of our time.
On the surface, Chanukkah is about one of the great battles for religious freedom. In the third and second centuries BCE, Israel had come under the rule of the Alexandrian Empire — first the Ptolemies in Egypt, then the Seleucids in Sy... |
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| Secularism is not Inevitable or Desirable |
| 1/11/2004 |
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Religion persists at the centre of world concerns. Sunni and Shia battle in Iraq. Religious divisions fuel ethnic conflict from Chechnya to China, Thailand to Turkey. The European Parliament was recently riven over the proposal to appoint Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian who holds orthodox Catholic views on homosexuality.
We have witnessed an American presidential election in which, according to the polls, moral issues — “Christian values” — were at the top of voters’ concerns, outweighin... |
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| The Children of Israel Dance for their Portable Homeland |
| 1/10/2004 |
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Imagine the following scene. The Lord Chief Justice, together with his senior judges, decide that law is a wonderful thing. They resolve to set aside a day each year to celebrate it. They write poems and compose songs in its honour. When the day comes, they each take a weighty tome — Halsbury’s Statutes would do nicely — and dance round the House of Lords, singing the songs and reciting the poems.
Whacky? Undoubtedly. Impossible? Probably. Yet this, more or less, is what Jews do at thi... |
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| 'I Am A Religious Fundamentalist & Very Proud Of It" |
| 1/8/2004 |
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I am a religious fundamentalist, and very proud of it.
In our abrasive culture, where it sometimes seems that to get ahead you need postgraduate qualifications in rudeness, the worst thing you can call someone is a fundamentalist. You believe? You must be crazy. You pray? You must be a fanatic. You keep religious laws? You must be dangerous. No wonder a well- known press officer is reported to have once said: “We don’t do God.”
Lurking beneath the surface of these put-downs is fear ... |
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