Shahid Rafi Ansari

Most Americans naively believe that presidential elections are largely decided in the presidential debate arena. The solemn fact, however, is that over the last 50 years or so the ‘Great Debates’ have rarely determined the winner. In The Control Room, Martin Plissner, retired executive director at CBS News, devotes an entire chapter to the widely […]

The case of Elizabeth Gilbert, a successful writer, and the author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, sums up what the God within belief system is all about. Unhappy with her marriage and career she dives into the “dark night of the soul”, spiritual odysseys, and comes […]

In its most fundamental form, “The God within” is heresy, pure and simple. It is a denial of God’s transcendence and a pantheistic blurring of the line between the Creator and His creation, a distinction that is central to all three monotheistic religions. The God within is the search for God (a supreme deity, spirit, […]

‘Pray and Grow Rich’ is the bastardisation of religion brought about by the “marriage of Faith and Mammon”. It is the witty label Ross Douthat puts in Bad Religion (2012) on the theology the Word-Faith movement has spawned. It combines the orthodox belief in the power of prayer and miracles with self-interest and selfish pursuit […]

Something strange bordering on the conspiratorial happened in the wake of the anomie unleashed by the sexual revolution in the US. Mainstream publications such as Time and Newsweek actively participated in driving the final nail into Christianity’s coffin. The magazines applauded rogue priests such as Episcopalian Bishop James Pike, who attempted to upend 2,000-year-old dogmas […]

According to Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion (2012), the mid-century US Christian revival ended rather abruptly in the late 1960s. The death-knell for institutionalised orthodox religion was sounded neither by an ill-conceived crusade against the Muslims nor by an anachronistic horde of Vikings. The requiem came from an apparently innocuous substance: a prophylactic — […]

There was a mid-20th century revival of the Christian faith in America delineated well by Ross Douthat in Bad Religion (2012). According to Mr Douthat, church membership grew twice as fast as the growth of population, seminaries filled up, and respect for religious leaders increased. American spending on constructing new citadels to their faith skyrocketed, […]

America is in decline — social, political and economic. This is a fact that can no longer be ignored, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. Various secular-political explanations have been advanced to explain the US’s predicament, however the most powerful theories, says Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion (2012), involve religion. The religious argument […]

The US-Israel alliance is harmful to the US strategic interest of maintaining access to the control of Middle Eastern oil, for which purpose the US secretly supports authoritarian Arab states on the one hand and on the other encourages democratic movements when the same states become bellicose and appear to threaten US and Israeli interests […]

Overwhelming pro-Israel sentiment within the US, the political influence of American Jews and the Israel lobby make it unlikely that any US administration, Republican or Democrat, will succeed in bringing peace between Israel and Palestine. Unconditional US support for Israel not only embitters its relationship with the Arab world, for whom the Israel-Palestinian issue is […]