Word: paganisms
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...nature of an object from its apparent purpose; just as the ear is for hearing, the argument runs, the sexual organs are for generating. In the name of natural law, which is really God's law, and in defense of the sanctity of life, the bishops of pagan Rome went on record early in condemning abortion and contraception...
...colonists, American Indians and African-descended slaves used effigy and icon as a part of their religious rituals. In San Antonio, Girard displays pre-Inca dolls found inside burial shrouds, Christian saints and angels, Haitian voodoo fertility symbols. Among the tableaux that most colorfully mix the half-Christian, half-pagan customs are those depicting All Souls' Day (Nov. 2), a festival celebrated in Latin America as a cheerful holiday for the dead...
...free era. God is not only dead, there never was a birth announcement. The book is a catchy packaging job of the familiar semi-exaggerations about how the super-rich and super-famous flit mindlessly from pleasure to pleasure in ever-tightening circles that lead to self-destruction. With pagan innocence, Melinda herself commits incest, adultery, child neglect, international outrage and multiple murder. Because she is not a character, but the author's representation of nascent id, Melinda cannot suffer hell and damnation. She must be ticketed to limbo on a Russian moon rocket that gets irretrievably rutted...
...homosexual life. He records the loveless, brief encounters, the guilt-ridden, blackout reliance on alcohol, the endless courtship rat race of the gay bars with its inevitable quota of rejection, humiliation and loneliness. Crowley underscores the fact that while the homosexual may pose as a bacchanal of nonconformist pagan delights, he frequently drinks a hemlock-bitter cup of despair...
...undeniable that all through history, violence has been the chief means of social reform. Even primitive Christians, proclaiming love, destroyed pagan temples to dramatize their cause. The Boston Tea Party had the same purpose. The 13th century King John's Magna Carta illustrated the oldest inducement for social reform: fear of "revolution or worse." To his credit, Marx argued against violence until societies were really ripe for change; most Western European labor terrorism disappeared as a result. But in romantic countries, including the U.S., revolutionary violence often became a mystique for purging feelings of inferiority. Explains Brandeis University Sociologist...