Mark Biskeborn is a writer.
His most recent novel: Mojave Winds
To learn more: www.markbiskeborn.com
Who’s to say which religion is better than the next? Most often a person ends up following a particular religion by location or by birth.
What are the chances that someone growing up in Afghanistan would attend a synagogue rather than a mosque? Would someone raised in Peru wager his chips for eternal life with anything but the Catholic Church?
In America it’s often considered shameful to criticize religion. We’re supposed to accept religions without question. Who would dare publicly highlight the flaws in Judaism? Many cringe at the dreadful risk of being called anti-Semitic even when discussing the role of AIPAC.
Who dares to criticize Evangelicals or Catholics? Mormons? What about those faithful to the Book of Mormon which Angel Moroni handed down to Joseph Smith as a revelation in 1830?
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics
Fear drives people to dogma, dogma drives people to stop thinking, both deliver people to leaders who promise to protect and to do good but will most likely do neither.
“Abortion is the most important issue on the table.” Fred explains to his group. He is a Bible study class leader at a local Catholic church.
“But, Fred,” I interject, “you know this war in Iraq is killing thousands of people, innocent civilians and U.S. soldiers.”
“We must stomp out abortion and our President Bush â well, he’s pro-life.” Fred goes on. “And John McCain, he’s picking up the torch. He’s carrying the only light in these dark days. God’s only beacon.”
“But Fred,” I repeat, “all those people in the war, they’re losing their lives. And abortion’s been around since before King Tut. The Bible doesn’t say a word about it, talks about the value of life. And, Jesus, wasn’t he the Prince of Peace?”
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics
In a crazy time people need reassurance, people need support, and America often falls into crazy times.
“You’re reading the Bible. That’s a great book,” I say as I sit down to work in a cafe.
I smile and go about my business, nose plunged in my papers.
“Yes, we should all read it, especially now,” a man says with a serious look. “You know the day is coming, the day of the Rapture when God will begin the End of Times and make His judgments.”
Experience tells me, I risk getting buckled into a long discussion on the Beast with seven heads and ten horns (Rev. 17:2), the Whore of Babylon, and the whole bucket of Christian eschatology.
As a big word, eschatology is not one you’d use at the supermarket while buying beer and pretzels. In Christian theology, eschatology is the study of the destiny of mankind according to the purposes of God.
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics
While Franklin Roosevelt provided a plan for the United States’ long-term energy needs, George Bush has instituted a blood tax to provide for a short-term solution to guarantee the nation’s oil supply.
Riding on the USS Murphy, a tall, black-bearded Arab king anticipated his important meeting. His bodyguards, fierce-looking men armed with daggers on their belts, assisted him because battle wounds had long ago weakened his legs. The destroyer carrying these men met the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake where three admirals and F.D. Roosevelt waited to greet the Bedouin monarch. After boarding the U.S. Navy cruiser, the Arab monarch grasped the U.S. leader’s hand in a firm grip. The handshake sealed the destiny of two countries–Saudi Arabia and the USA–and shaped the course of events in the Middle East for decades to come.
F.D.R. and King Saud met on February 14, 1945. Roosevelt’s actions that day demonstrated how far and how rapidly American strategic thinking about the Gulf region had evolved during the war. Before 1942, the U.S. government had no official interest in Saudi Arabia, even though Standard Oil Company of California had struck oil there in 1938 and had created a village of American geologists, drillers and engineers to deliver the oil to global markets.
But the war had consumed huge amounts of petroleum, thus awakening F.D.R. to the dwindling U.S. domestic oil reserves. He saw the long-term value of the Saudi fields, the only ones in the Middle East where an American company held exclusive production rights. At the same time the U.S. Armed Forces, fighting a global war, wanted an airbase someplace in the Middle East that was not under British or French control.
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics
“What are you writing?” he asks inevitably. “You’re here every morning early.”
Running on caffeinated fuel, all synaptic pistons firing, I’m writing away, polishing up my next novel, The Sufi’s Ghost, and what happens? The stranger sits nearby. I keep my head to my laptop screen, taking cover. The stranger always comes in, white guy with the curly afro gray hair and suit, no tie.
“Just work,” I say. Impromptu conversations at Starbucks always carry the opportunity costs a waste of perfectly tuned caffeinated inspiration humming along. It’s never smart to admit to any creative endeavor, not here in Orange County, California where every man, woman and child engages in nose-bleed unbridled enterprise.
Many a corporate professional speeds down the wide boulevards here, chasing after that promotion through the office political maze. Corporate automatons abound, wearing their pay checks in fine German cars. Engines of our economic strength, they live in the fast lane with hardly a smile, only a denial that they’re part of the middle class. Delusional nouveaux riches, they vote right-wing just to feel like they’re part of that class of real wealth.
“You’re here early too,” I say. “What is it you do?”
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics
In horribly oppressive theocratic countries, these five remarkable women bust out to find a freedom that many of us in America fear and hide under the veils of self-imposed constraints. Awake up call to the American fundamentalists who demand more religious based laws and education. Theocracies exist and they often grow into ugly regimes. We don’t have to go to Afghanistan. Go to Utah.
The autobiography, entitled Infidel by Ayaan Kirsi Ali, drags gruesome truths out from the shadows of Muslim society that otherwise remain in the darkness of closed circles and communications controlled by Islamic authorities. Ayaan exposes the hidden workings of a backward society gripped tightly in religious fervor.
Ayaan shows us how the social threads in many Muslim countries weave tightly together to form a tough fabric that binds, conceals, and controls every aspect of a person’s life. The social fabric consumes all individual freedoms that we in the West take for granted.
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Tags: News · World news
George Bush uses the Christian faith and its symbols to work miracles for winning political battles. Let’s hope the American voters become savvy about these tricks.
Sometimes, when seeking inspiration, I hang out on the lower side of San Pedro, LA’s harbor area, where I talk to the homeless people and those who inhabit another dimension. Other times I just walk down the street to a Catholic Church and hang out with the parishioners. After talking with acquaintances there, I realized many people had actually voted for G.W. Bush simply because he talked about God. In this regard, Bush has mastered modern politics, so let’s give him credit for manipulation at least.
Then, alas, the questions came to me. Does the local church reflect the nation’s way of thinking? Is a man who talks of God necessarily a follower of Christ’s teachings? Does God-talk make a man more moral? Then I recalled how my good friend Machiavelli once told me how he set down one of the most explicit doctrines for modern politics while advising a sixteenth-century prince, counseling him to do whatever was practical for the sake of power, and that it was highly effective to use moral principles and especially religion to achieve success.
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Tags: Editorials · Local Politics · World news
Are suicide bombers similar to others who commit suicide? Do they derive their motivations from the same sources?
There were more than four suicide bombings just last Monday to mark Cheney’s visit to Iraq. A woman entered a mosque in Karbala, killing dozens and wounding another hundred. What drove her to this?
When Mahmoud Marmash, a young bachelor, blew himself up near Tel Aviv, in 2001, he took several Jews with him, perhaps to the same afterworld, or maybe not. “I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians.” From a poor community– he grew up where many people despair in poverty and hopelessness– Mahmoud’s act is difficult for many of us to understand. We wonder what would push a person to such extremes?
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Tags: Editorials · World news
Stop Loss is a film required viewing for anyone with a heart-beat. Its emotional drive keeps your pulse racing. You could go watch a flick about a bank robbery or a border crossing…but, hey, that’s been done before.
Though highly entertaining, the story carries us far beyond mere cinematic amusement, its characters deal with high stakes of country and duty, life and death, family and identity, love and self. Its narrative handles the complexity of how red-blooded Americans are coping with the war in Iraq. The otherwise uninvolved civilian audience, we step quickly inside the lives of patriotic soldiers who care about their country and learn the hard way that good intentions and innocence hardly suffice as a compass through the big world. It helps us all to take a look at who we are as Americans regardless if we’re in or out of small-town USA, liberal or conservative.
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Tags: Film · Reviews
