Word: religion
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...surprised that none of your heroes are focusing on the root cause of Earth's numerous environmental challenges: unchecked population growth. This issue is apparently so fraught with religion and nationalism that to bring it up would stain the reputation of any heroes and cast their virtuous achievements as questionable. As our little planet hurtles toward a projected 9.4 billion humans by 2050, however, I suspect the topic will eventually come into vogue. Stephen Ehrenberg, Stavanger, Norway...
...human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state.” About a decade earlier, his predecessor Philip Mitchell had outlined this duty in starker terms still: “The African has the choice of remaining a savage or of adopting our civilization, culture, religion and language.” (Incidentally, both were eventually knighted.) Blinded by an unshakable conviction in their own tradition’s superiority, it mattered little to these administrators that numbers, facts, and figures told a very different story about barbarity and civilization in almost-independent Kenya...
Especially in Sydney, we still tend to embrace the disreputable. Organized religion doesn't play one-tenth the part in Australian life that it does in American. The churches have power, but compared with the U.S. our civilization is almost entirely secular. Our state-sponsored education is excellent, and we do not give a cent in subsidies to church schools. And we have fierce democratic commitments that hardly exist in America. It is, for example, a (lightly) punishable offense not to vote in a national election. As for campaign contributions, and all the corruption and perversion of democracy that...
...field of exception to this unseemly prejudice is sport, the real religion of Down Under. The idea of nonelitist sport is, of course, an absurdity. No Australian would waste time watching a football match in which nobody was better than anyone else, or a horse race in which every nag plunked along at exactly the same speed. And (of course) Australians find no contradiction in that. Ours is the meritocracy that dare not speak its name...
...turmoil in the streets of Pakistan stems from a mercurial mix of history, religion and politics - with explosive results. Here is a guide to the crisis...