Word: paganisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gerrymanders in the Bush. To counter the Sardauna's majority, the leaders of the South hoped to gerrymander a "Middle Belt" out of the Moslem North, consisting of some 6,000,000 pagan tribesmen who since slave days have hated the Moslems. Zik himself nurtures a private plan to carve some non-Yoruba areas out of his chief rival's Western territories, while his opponents want to set up a new state among the non-Ibos in Zik's own Niger River delta...
...Testament (most notably that of Saul of Tarsus, persecutor of Christians, to Paul the Apostle) was of this type. In modern times, thinks Sargant, many conversions to and from Communism (e.g., Arthur Koestler's carefully recorded experiences) followed the pattern. So, too, did religious and pagan dedications among Voodooists in Haiti, among some tribes on the west coast of Africa, among the Quakers (says Sargant, because they "shook and trembled before the Lord"), among the lamas of Tibet and among U.S. revivalists, including those who induce frenzies by the handling of venomous snakes...
...between black, white and Asian. Proud white settlers in Rhodesia, who now consider themselves more African than European, refer contemptuously to their advanced black partners as "Fags," short for Federated African Gentlemen. The Moslem Fulani of Nigeria's north consider the energetic Ibos of the nationalistic, Christian and pagan east no better than barbarians...
Historically, the Roman Catholic Church is identified with nationalism in Poland as it is in few other countries; Poland became Catholic to avoid being gobbled up. When the pagan Polish ruler Mieszko I was attacked A.D. 963 by Saxon Warlord Count Wichman, Mieszko cannily guessed that this early German Drang nach Osten would disguise itself as a Christian missionary enterprise. To undercut this excuse, he married a Bohemian Catholic princess, took himself and country to the Church of Rome in 966. The office of primate, which in many countries degenerated into a mere courtesy title, remained in Poland...
...himself thought it too scandalous to confide to posterity. It can be said of Ovid, as Hilaire Belloc once hoped for himself: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." Rarely have they read more delightfully than in Humphries' jaunty recreation of the urbane amorist's pagan high spirits...