For a religion without a god (not even a benevolent one, never mind one filled with malice), and certainly without a devil, Buddhism has an unseemly preoccupation with torture. Buddhist hells—and there are many of them—are filled with pain, and Buddhist writings...
Three issues of physics are in play in the Netherworld. Firstly, the fires of hell need no fuel and do not consume what they burn—that would rather defeat the purpose, for it would have ended sinners’ torment too soon, which would not do. So hell’s designers...
Did Pope Francis earlier this year (before the tsunami of negativity about priestly abuses) really scoff at the notion of hell? Did he really muse to an (atheist) Italian journalist that there was no theological justification for the eternal torment of...
Was Satan always a Fiend? Well, no. Was he always evil? Nope. The scholar Elaine Pagels points out that in the early lore of the Hebrews (whence came Satan, after all) Satan was not a being but an attitude – “satan” being the Hebrew word for adversary. Later, “the”...
It would seem so. Even parts of the Bible think so. Like the Book of Job, for example, where Satan is far from (or at least not yet) the scaly-tailed horned Fiend of later centuries. Quite the contrary – he was just one of the guys, almost family. One day (this...
The word “hip” seems to have lost favor as a descriptive of cool, which I can’t help feeling is just as well. For me, at least, the word has taken on a darker connotation, or at least evokes a darker memory. Hip can also mean pain and near death, surgical incompetence...
This is a brief talk I gave at a symposium sponsored by The Walrus magazine late in 2015, on the topic of Innovation. I chose the not very glamorous subject of sewage; it refers to a theme introduced in my book, Back to the Well: Rethinking the future of water. I had...
Who owns culture? Who owns language, science, art, the accumulated genius of technology? Who owns history? Who owns the collective intellectual heritage of the human species – culture, broadly defined? Who owns, in short, the human library? Who owns it, and who has...
If you’re trying to make sense of the privatization of water (itself a slippery term – privatization of what, exactly? The water? Or its delivery systems?) where are the facts to be found? From Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, who tells us that “untold...
Recent Comments