skepticaltheurgist

Trash talk

skepticaltheurgist — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:59:26 -0500

Counting the number of critical columns and blog entries on Huffington Post yesterday and today about Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue...

Minitrue

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:00:08 -0500
The historian Anthony Beevor has a new book out, called simply, D-Day. The book, going by reviews, is a ...

Why do people join cults?

skepticaltheurgist — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:08:35 -0500
Satisfyingly, there have been a number of online reviews now of Love Sex Fear Death. While most are at ...

A lesser Beast

skepticaltheurgist — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:38:27 -0400
Sometimes, you can buy or download a book with a high anticipation that’s only matched by the comedown produced in ...

They was us

skepticaltheurgist — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:59:21 -0400
Yesterday’s post about promoting Love Sex Fear Death observed that, "Had The Process and its successor groups, The Foundation Faith ...

Shameless promotion time

skepticaltheurgist — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:52:30 -0400
Promoting the book Love Sex Fear Death is obviously a labour of love for its publisher Feral House. http://feralhouse.com/titles/new_releases/love_sex_fear_death_the_inside_story_of_the_process_church_of_the_final_judgment.php. ...

The sky of unknowing

skepticaltheurgist — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:57:21 -0400
Having spent part of today – wasted, my employer might say – on looking at reviews of the work of ...

Boats, currents, ritual

skepticaltheurgist — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:12:23 -0400
You can’t go back, they always tell me. But then there’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, with his oh-so-quoted line about “boats ...

Out there

skepticaltheurgist — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:01:55 -0400
The end of democracy has been in vogue recently. I don’t mean in Islamist circles, where the blasphemy of replacing ...

Waiting on Netanyahu

skepticaltheurgist — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:29:49 -0400
For now, Iran is off the radar. Ayatollah Khamenei seems to have made whatever deals he needs to secure his ...

Danish furore

skepticaltheurgist — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:40:06 -0400
Denmark is not a country I have visited. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it peninsula of a country as you fly into northern ...

Closed circles

skepticaltheurgist — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:22:41 -0400
The headlines this week about the kidnapping and confinement of Jaycee Lee Dugard have underlined created huge amounts of comment. ...

Amir Taheri on Iran

skepticaltheurgist — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:53:32 -0400
The situation in Iran remains both tense and fluid, and discerning which faction(s) are on top is difficult. The Islamic ...

Love Sex Fear Death

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:56:33 -0400
My reviewing the book Love Sex Fear Death at http://www.feralhouse.com is inappropriate, since (a) the primary author, Timothy Wyllie, is ...

Endless denunciation

skepticaltheurgist — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:02:12 -0400
There’s not much that can be said about Charles Manson that isn’t repetition of the thousand-and-one previous denunciations. Even writing ...

Fortunate son

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:00:54 -0400
Julian Borger’s article on the second son of Ayatollah Khamenei in The Guardian a month ago drew little interest at ...

Great unwisdom

skepticaltheurgist — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:18:07 -0400
“The need (or craving) for transcendence may well be a great unwisdom, but without it we tend to become mere ...

Inescapable faces

skepticaltheurgist — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:34:29 -0400
The case of Taraneh Mousavi (whose picture I posted today) is an intriguing if grisly one. Unlike Neda Agha-Soltan, whose ...

A god of high places

skepticaltheurgist — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:18:51 -0400
Previous posts here have quoted Harold Bloom’s marvellous 2005 book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. Bloom, insisting he ...

And on the other, other hand

skepticaltheurgist — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:26:06 -0400
Commenting on what has happened in Iran since my last post on the topic isn’t easy. The whole governmental system ...

An ancient divide

skepticaltheurgist — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:26:50 -0400

Re-reading Vali Nasr’s 2006 book The Shia Revival, I’m struck by how the Saudis were able to fence in ...

Watching from far away

skepticaltheurgist — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:29:37 -0400

Salam,
Every time I email you now, I am concerned that someone will read what I write, and will make ...

The main man

skepticaltheurgist — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:55:35 -0400
Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani smiles a lot, but then the richest man in Iran – and, it’s often said, the country’s ...

Loneliness in Iran

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:37:59 -0400
One factor about the Iranian situation that is hard for us to grasp is the isolation from the outer world ...

Ebrahim Yazdi's view

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:16:19 -0400
There is a good analysis of the situation in the higher levels of the administration in Iran at www.asharq-e.com. ...

The unwanted revolution

skepticaltheurgist — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:53:45 -0400

Our entire appreciation of what has happened in Iran in the past week is skewed, and we don’t know by ...

Our reforms will be better than your reforms

skepticaltheurgist — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:16:01 -0400
Today I read that believing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad genuinely won re-election in Iran places me among right-wingers. I’ve never been here ...

Monday evening quarterbacking

skepticaltheurgist — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:15:20 -0400
The riots in Tehran and other Iranian cities are continuing as I write, but I seriously doubt if they will ...

The potato-based swindle?

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:40:50 -0400
Hossein thinks it was just a ludicrous swindle. Mind you, Hossein (who cuts my hair once a month) is an ...

History is so, like, yesterday... and today

skepticaltheurgist — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:41:30 -0400
History is back. Remember history? Sure you do.
Two things started it. One was all the talk about 2008 being ...