Even Desperate Housewives is a victim of the culture wars (UK)

[CornField]

http://www.newstatesman.com/Life/200503070018

Violence and threats from militant religious groups are coming thick and fast, and the targets are widening. Francis Beckett argues that church leaders are among those who fail to express sufficient outrage

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This is the growing coalition between faiths which Odone identified in November. In the 21st century, religion is regaining the power, influence and intolerance that it lost in the 20th. Over the past hundred years, religion, in Europe at any rate, was partly displaced by the great secular religions: communism and fascism. Throughout its life, Britain's Communist Party attracted many ex-Catholics because it offered a total answer, which they were used to. And in the immediate postwar years, many former fascists gravitated towards the Catholic Church, which (though not itself fascist) offered the authority structure they were used to.

These secular religions behaved just as the old religions had done. They examined the sacred texts - the works of Marx - in the spirit that medieval scholars had once examined the Bible; and they persecuted those who arrived at different conclusions about what they meant in practice. As Catholics and Protestants had once persecuted each other, so Stalinists and Trotskyists did the same.

Today religion is back with a vengeance - and vengeance is often the right word. Amnesty International lists as many as 45 examples of religious persecution worldwide: attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, a crackdown on the Falun Gong movement in China, Christians held in metal cages and Jehovah's Witnesses tortured in Eritrea, for example.

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(much more)

[Miss Authoritiva]

1. It's a very, very fine line...

Today religion is back with a vengeance - and vengeance is often the right word. Amnesty International lists as many as 45 examples of religious persecution worldwide: attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, a crackdown on the Falun Gong movement in China, Christians held in metal cages and Jehovah's Witnesses tortured in Eritrea, for example.

It never fails to amaze me how very, very fine is the line between religion and psychopathology, and between politics and psychopathology. And a pathologic combination of religion and politics is always deadly.