');
The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
Show by ⇅
Entire ArchiveReligion Items

Bookmark Toggle AllToCAdd to LibraryRemove from Library •�B
Show CommentNext New CommentNext New ReplyRead More
ReplyAgree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
AgreeDisagreeThanksLOLTroll
These buttons register your public Agreement, Disagreement, Thanks, LOL, or Troll with the selected comment. They are ONLY available to recent, frequent commenters who have saved their Name+Email using the 'Remember My Information' checkbox, and may also ONLY be used three times during any eight hour period.
Ignore Commenter Follow Commenter
Everything is a total disaster and everyone knows it. This whole thing – life, the universe, everything – is a complete mess. Modern reality is designed to suck the life out of you. This world eats souls. It chews the flesh of souls, leaving soul-bones. Everything is pressure, from all sides. However, what we must... Read More
“JD Vance” is a man without a basic identity. He’s a single mother disaster raised by multiple step dads who had a high IQ and went to Yale, then wrote a pretty good novel (I genuinely like the book). Then he married an Indian. And instead of trying to assimilate her, she assimilated him –... Read More
Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men, Weak men create bad times, and Bad times create strong men. The Past Is a Future Country. The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution Edward Dutton & J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles Societas, 2022 The end is nigh … * * * Part I: My Awakening The world is falling... Read More
Most of my thoughts these days don’t pertain to the political realm, rather I tend to focus on the level of spiritual depravity that has led to our fallen state—our fallen state as individual people, due to our fallen state collectively as a people. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, there is a spiritual war going on between... Read More
pagenpenfield-1
The Love Child of Subsidized Religion
An abundance of evidence suggests that *state subsidies* for organized religion result in weak leadership, a dull congregation and a dying society. Why do so many Christians, Jews and atheists put up with it? There are some practices so superficially alluring yet destructive and habit-forming that they linger on for generations with little attention to... Read More
Translated from the French and with the introduction by Tom Sunic Tom Sunic Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word ‘paganism’ may incite some to derision and... Read More
douglaswilsonbook
Analyzing Douglas Wilson’s new book, “Antisemitism, the Promise of Deuteronomy, and the True Israel of God”
Douglas Wilson, the prominent pastor of Christ Church, is almost always by turns provocative, brilliant, infuriating, dead wrong and plain right. This influential Calvinist (“Reformed”) theologian writes, lectures and broadcasts in a Geneva-like citadel in the north Idaho town of Moscow, where Christian conservative institutes and families have arisen like fields of sunflowers. He writes... Read More
Since independence in 1991, the Central Asian republics have had an up and down relationship with the American monitors of worldwide religious freedom, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the U.S. State Department Office of International Religious Freedom. In its 2023 report, USCIRF criticized four of the five Central Asian republics,... Read More
On the occasion of today's Mawlid al-Nabi
Since I came to Islam in 1993, I have attended plenty of Sufi get-togethers, both here in Morocco and back in the USA. They are generally modest affairs (except for the food, which can be pretty lavish). Typically a couple of dozen people at most gather in a circle if it’s a mosque, or a... Read More
“A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.” – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking. Forebodings everywhere. Everything broken.... Read More
It is part of nature(and human nature) to fear and ward off the different. Nature exists in a state of terror and aggression. All organisms are hungry and seek to devour others and fear being devoured by others. Organisms seek access to organisms they want to eat and distance from organisms that would eat them.... Read More
catholics-lg-1
In “The Failed Empire”, I have argued that the medieval papacy is responsible for the failure of Europe to reach political unity under German leadership in the medieval period. I did not deny that the “the enduring absence of hegemonic empire” and the “competitive fragmentation of power” had positive effects, as Walter Scheidel claimed in... Read More
ramatganisrael-september222017-torahyadpointerand
Subverting the Old Testament by Conflating it with the Talmud of Babylon
The recent essay by Thomas Dalton PhD. attacking Jesus—the subject of this critique—was written with a view toward engaging with figures on the white nationalist far-Right who allegedly hold some vestige of Christian beliefs, and disabusing them of those beliefs. There will be those who will assert that because Dalton’s views are demonstrably false there... Read More
In his New Year’s address, Russian president Vladimir Putin once again spoke of “the importance of traditional family values.” It is one of his most common themes. Two months earlier, Putin had angered Western liberals by saying that teaching children “that a boy can become a girl and vice versa...is on the verge of a... Read More
Related: Christians Now a Minority in England and Wales According to Census Data People need to wise up! God is about to do a Sodom and Gomorrah on this country! Probably too late already! That said: these churches we have in this country are really awful. Protestant ministers are stand-up comedians, they play rock music,... Read More
vdare-dysgenic-selection
Dr. Edward Dutton’s latest book, Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Politics and Religion in the 21st Century, is a collection of 10 essays that use evolutionary theory to explain the decline of the West. Less narrowly focused than most of the author’s books (Sent Before Their Time, Making Sense of Race, Churchill’s Headmaster), I warmly recommend... Read More
Some Words of Wisdom from Vox Day and Bruce Charlton
I don’t believe in God or Satan, but I increasingly wonder whether I should. I greatly admire and regularly learn from the writers Vox Day and Bruce Charlton, so perhaps I should adopt the Christianity that they make central to their work. At the same time, I can separate the ontics from the pragmatics in... Read More
ancestors-lg-1
...Back on the Family Altar
Asians show no sign of a collective death-wish. They are generally proud of their ethnicity and nationality. This, I will argue, has much to do with their general attitude toward their ancestors. Ancestor worship is an essential part of Asian traditions, and although it has receded in big cities, it is still widely practiced. Anthropologists... Read More
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” — Pogo First of all, let’s announce the good news. Professor David Hawkes has declared war on the forces of anti-Logos in our age, telling us that the “profound hostility to logos,” which “permeates every aspect of modern and especially postmodern culture” is “only the latest... Read More
I wrote the first draft of my recent article for LewRockwell.com a day after Biden’s statement and Putin’s response, then revised it with later information. Overall, it was a depressing subject on the topic of war with Russia—certainly upsetting, because it seems the answer to Professor’s Cohen’s Book titled War with Russia?: From Putin &... Read More
dscf2950gd
Lessons from the Collapse of Catholicism in France
Jérôme Fourquet’s The French Archipelago provides a kind of dynamic radioscopy of the French nation as she has developed in recent decades. The picture, as detailed in my review of the book, is one of the fading away of the old sociological left and right, leaving behind a fragmented subcultural and political landscape, divided in... Read More
Leftist women seem to be emerging as the “New Church Ladies”, as Jim Goad has called them. In an extraordinary expose, American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher recently reported that even Democrat operatives worry privately that “hard left women” incensed by Hillary Clinton’s defeat have “completely taken over the middle management of the party” and are... Read More
altargh
Feelings don’t care about facts. The mass hysteria that’s gripped the Western world after the death of George Floyd can’t be explained in rational terms. Police are shooting fewer unarmed black men each year, and most of the shootings are justified. Police are more likely to shoot a non-threatening white than a non-threatening black. In... Read More
Recently, Unz.com published “How Fake Is Church History?” the second in a series of articles which among other topics asks us to consider that Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great never existed and that historians such as Plutarch are false. Readers are of course encouraged to make their own reasoned and informed judgments, as indeed... Read More
lg-robespierre-1
I’ve heard that, as part of new amendments to the Russian Constitution, President Putin proposes to include the Russian people’s “faith in God,” and a definition of marriage as a “union of a man and a woman.” I’m a bit skeptical about the news, but if true, I think it’s a great idea. If voted... Read More
As mentioned in a 2017 review of The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews (2010) by Boston College’s Robert Aleksander Maryks, I am especially fascinated by aspects of Jewish group behavior that involve crypsis, a phenomenon that is often facilitated by a combination of deception and self-deception on the part of Jews. To date,... Read More
fred-random-2
Washington at Yuletide
Just got back to Guadalajara and environs after two weeks of Christmas in Washington. Good times were had, old friends seen, but it was not altogether a delight. Going back to America every nine months or a year is like watching something decay in time-lapse photography. It can be a shock. Arriving in the Virginia... Read More
welby-mirvis
If it can be said that Europeans are today largely blind to Jewish aggressions, then Christians are among those fumbling around in deepest darkness. Historian Jonas Alexis once remarked that, contrary to older Christian anger at depictions of Jesus and Christianity in the Talmud, no such reactions are evident in relation to modern the Jewish... Read More
betaorourkevdare
It’s not surprising that Robert “Beto” O’Rourke wanted to apply an ideological test on churches, it’s just surprising he felt so comfortable saying so. Even liberal journalists admit stripping tax-exempt status from churches that oppose homosexual marriage is unconstitutional. However, there has been a concerted effort in the Main Stream Media from The New York... Read More
the-ark-of-the-church
I recall a saying of the twentieth century that neither religion nor politics are to be discussed in polite company. Cat
Shaman in Vinh Chau, 2019
After three weeks in Saigon for Tet, I’m back in Ea Kly. It’s 5:33AM as I begin this, and I’ll type until 6:45, to begin my work day at the plastic recycling plant. As usual, I sit at Mrs. Ha’s cafe. I’m her first customer. Unlike Saigon, it’s chilly here. Appearing suddenly from the shadow... Read More
shutterstock_624828302
Introduction by the Saker: I have always had a passion for theology in general and the studies of religions in general. Several years ago I discovered, quite by chance, a book written by Michael A. Hoffman II entitled Judaism's Strange Gods which I found most interesting and thought provoking. Reading that book, I felt that... Read More
evolution-2
Atheists are genetic mutants who, for the most part, would never have been born if we hadn’t managed to break free of pre-industrial conditions of Darwinian selection. This was the conclusion of a paper published just before Christmas in the leading journal Evolutionary Psychological Science[The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: The... Read More
Like many Americans during the past three weeks, I've been bombarded by news about the destructive power of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. The stories are of misery, death and destruction. The misery, death and destruction are acutely difficult to accept because they have been visited upon innocents. I say that... Read More
shutterstock_626073953
Two recent controversies about the religious freedom of public and political officials have provoked similar outrage among my fellow social conservatives. I’d like to respectfully suggest that there’s a difference, and that conservatives are mistaken to equate the two. The outrage about one of the stories is absolutely justified. The hounding of British Liberal Democratic... Read More
A View from Without
In today’s irreligious and indeed anti-religious climate the fashion is to dismiss Christianity as crude superstition, and to babble wisely about the separation of church and state. This is unfortunate, and stupid, since Christianity was the heart and soul of as yet the greatest civilization the world has seen. Those who know nothing of it... Read More
Philly Jesus and Black Israelites, 2016
Philly is blessed with a generous allotment of public space at its very center. On any day of the week, weather permitting, there are throngs of people at LovePark, DillworthPark and near the Clothespin. Around this 45-foot-tall sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, I’ve seen an assortment of petty hustlers selling everything from loosies to oddball T-shirts,... Read More
antichrist-864x400_c
Dear friends, Christ is Risen! I have enjoyed a much needed break, but I could not fully forget about the blog and a few current events. Many of you have asked me for my reaction to the meeting between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis but at the time I decided not to comment about it.... Read More
Grace Fellowship Assembly of God, Bloomington, Indiana – Fellowship is what primarily draws people to religion. Credit: Vmenkov/Wikimedia Commons
Religiosity is moderately heritable—25 to 45% according to twin studies (Bouchard, 2004; Lewis and Bates, 2013). These figures are of course underestimates, since any noise in the data gets classified as ‘non-genetic’ variability. So the estimates would be higher if we could measure religiosity better. But what does it mean to be religious? Does it... Read More
It's that time again. There's been another horrific high-profile mass shooting. And as usual, all the nonsense that typically circulates when that happens is circulating again. "We need more gun control!" "The problem is mental illness!" Or "it's not mental illness!" "It's racism!" Chris Harper Mercer added another layer to the matter – the fact... Read More
shutterstock_160328408
Euclid Cannot Explain a Hamburger
On the Unz Review I find a piece by Razib Khan, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist? His answer, yes, is inarguable since, as he points out, many good scientists are religious (Newton, a Christian, by most accounts did pretty fair work.) But why should it be necessary to ask such a luminously... Read More
With the recent spate of mass shootings, (at least four high-profile incidents occurring in the U.S. and Canada in the last two weeks), the issues of guns and violence inevitably come up. Naturally, the politically correct wisdom, which is founded on the blank slate (or at least, a bare slate), wants to blame these events... Read More
Ponderous Ruminations, Maybe Tedious
The world is too much with us, late and son. Before long, it can begin to seem reasonable. I have my doubts. The usual always seems reasonable. For example, existence seems reasonable. We wake up every morning and there it is. Actually it isn’t reasonable. It’s just customary. We avoid thinking about this so as... Read More
Colin Woodard's book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, is currently generating a lot of buzz. This is, in good part, thanks to an article that appeared in Tufts Magazine in which Woodard describes his work. Like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America before... Read More
Introduction: The opening long decade of the 21st century (2000-2012) has been a period of repeated and profound economic and social crises, of serial and prolonged wars and declining living standards for the vast majority of Americans. How have people responded to this crisis? No large scale, long term, socio-political movements have emerged to challenge... Read More
Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing, by Peter Kreeft
Seeing that the first sentence in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Peter Kreeft's book Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing is a quote from C.S. Lewis, my suspicions were aroused right away. Kreeft hastened to confirm them, quoting Lewis again four pages further on, and again eleven pages after that, then four pages... Read More
Is groupthink genetically determined? Twin studies suggest that people are prewired to identify and comply with social rules. Where to from here? Will evolutionary psychology ossify and disappear? Or will it redefine itself and move on? In a sense it doesn’t matter. A name is just a name, and the field of evolution and human... Read More
Churchgoing for functional atheists
It's been over six years since I last attended a church service. I maintain a proper humility towards large questions about the universe and the place therein of human (or any other kind of, if there is any other kind of) self-awareness, but I am a functional atheist. It seems highly improbable to me that... Read More
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, by Eric Kaufmann
Did you know that Osama bin Laden has twenty-five children? And that his Dad had fifty-four? (Osama seems to be number 17.) Bin Laden Sr. was careful never to have more than four wives at a time, though, divorcing older wives in order to marry younger ones, thus staying within the proper Koranic bounds. Like... Read More
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, by Nicholas Wade
With this new book, New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade positions himself as a serious challenger to Steven Pinker for the title Best Living Popularizer of the Human Sciences. Wade's 2006 book Before the Dawn was a masterly survey of current knowledge about our deep ancestry, informed by recent discoveries in genetics and archeology.... Read More