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Resistance Thinking Culture
Culture is a term used to describe why humans act the way they do. The study of culture attempts to explain why certain behaviours have special significance for some humans, where as for others it is completely meaningless. Culture encompasses everything from watching television and surfing the web, to doing yoga and having pre-arranged marriages.
All of the human behaviours that make up a particular culture are founded on a certain set of ideas. For instance, Islamic women wear a hijab for modesty because of teahcings in the Hadith and many Christians wear a cross around their neck in rememberance of Christ. These are human behaviours that are founded on a very clear set of ideas. Ideas are expressed in human behaviours that make up a certain culture.
In this culture section you will find articles, news and reviews on an extrememly diverse range of topics that relate to culture: the media - TV, news, magazines, movies etc., other religions - Islam, Judaism, New Age, Buddhism, Hinduism etc., philosophy - postmodernism, existentialism, humanism, consumerism etc., popular culture, music, Christian culture - music, moviews etc., and a whole lot more!
Please browse through the articles below
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Thursday, 27 December 2007 21:49 |
The Pope laments the 'dead-end streets of consumerism' and warns adults against leading young adults down that path.
Youth led by adults to consumerism: Pope
Sydney Morning Herald, December 9, 2007
Pope Benedict XVI believes that boys and girls at ever younger ages are in danger of being deceived by adults hawking false models of happiness and leading them down "the dead-end streets of consumerism."
Benedict appealed to young people to be on guard about consumerism just as the Christmas holiday shopping season gears up.
December 8, which the Catholic Church celebrates as the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, is a national holiday in predominantly Roman Catholic Italy. |
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Read more... [Youth led by adults to consumerism: Pope]
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Monday, 24 March 2008 00:18 |
Janet Albrechtsen examines the Left's reaction to playwright, David Mamet's self-proclaimed conversion from liberal to conservative politics revealing the hypocrisy and vehement response reserved for those why 'betray' the emotionally based ideology.
Left slays its apostates
The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen, March 19, 2008
WHY the shock when a smart guy decides to think about issues and changes his politics? It is not just in Islam where apostasy is a capital offence. Judging from the reaction to David Mamet's self-proclaimed conversion from liberal to conservative politics, apostasy is also a mortal sin in the arts world. Declaring that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal", the famed American playwright performed the ultimate act of treason. After turning his back on a lifetime of progressive beliefs, Mamet was flayed for staining his artistic credentials.
Just one question: why does an artist - whether a playwright, a painter or a writer - have to subscribe to left-wing views to make good art?
First to the conversion. Writing in The Village Voice last week, Mamet looked to John Maynard Keynes who, when chastised for changing his mind, famously replied: "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
Mamet changed his opinion after he did some reading for his latest Broadway play. In November, he pits a corrupt, selfish, money-grabbing, realistic president against his left-wing, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
"I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele and a host of other conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than the idealistic vision I called liberalism."
It was quite a change for Mamet. He admits that, for years, he was such a "brain-dead liberal" that he listened to NPR - National Public Radio, which he dubbed National Palestinian Radio - with "wonder and rage contending for pride of place". A child of the 1960s who accepted the progressive orthodoxy that everything was wrong with the world, Mamet realised that "these cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them to my life."
His epiphany came from honestly reviewing his life. "A brief review revealed everything was not always wrong," he wrote.
In a series of acts that would shock the arts world, Mamet began to question his hatred of corporations, recognising his hunger for their goods and services, and dumped his "bad, bad military" views, instead realising these were men and women who risked their lives to protect the rest of us.
He found he was hard-pressed to find too many examples where government intervention "led to much beyond sorrow". And, drawing once again on his experience, he realised that the Marxist view that classes in the US were static, not mobile, was simply wrong.
Like a red rag to a bull, the Left attacked. "What worries me," Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, "is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position." The New Statesman lamented Mamet's embrace of "a more Hobbesian strain of conservatism". Back at The Guardian, Mike Marqusee saw the conversion as an unconditional "surrender ... to the dominant powers" of society.
David Lister, in The Independent, moaned that "so complex and gifted a playwright should now seek to reduce his own work and his own politics to simple concepts".
For the Left, Mamet's days as a provocative playwright are over.
As I parse the shrieks of horror over Mamet's move to the Right, I recall what a friend on the Labor side of politics said to me late last week. So many on the Left are obsessed with how they feel about something, he says.
Think about it. So many issues the Left is consumed by are about raw emotion, not intellectual analysis. They will ask you how you feel - not what you think - about some gripping issue. And that's why Mamet changed his views. He started thinking about issues, engaging his head. So many on the Left take the shortcut, letting their gut reaction dictate their response.
Continue reading at the australian |
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Friday, 21 December 2007 20:36 |
New study reveals dangers of introducing children to alcohol early, found in underage drinking patterns.
The dangers of offering children a 'Christmas sip'
Ninemsn, December 21 2007
Offering your child a sip of Christmas champagne can lead to underage drinking, suggests a new study. The popular holiday tradition of allowing kids a sip of bubbles with Christmas lunch may seem harmless to parents, but according to Deakin University research the smallest amount of alcohol can dramatically increase a child's chances of alcohol abuse.
After a study of more than 2000 students, researchers found that one third of students starting high school had already consumed alcohol, while almost half had done so by Year 8. |
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Read more... [The dangers of offering children a 'Christmas sip']
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Friday, 07 March 2008 22:27 |
In the Name of Education
Front Page Magazine, Jamie Glazov, January 21, 2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Jonas E. Alexis, a math teacher in Florida. He is the author of the new book, In the Name of Education: How Weird Ideologies Corrupt our Public Schools, Politics, the Media, Higher Institutions, and History.
FP: Jonas E. Alexis, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Alexis: Thank you so much, Dr. Glazov. It’s always an honor to have the opportunity to discuss what is happening in schools around the country and in the academia.
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Alexis: As an educator, I am really concerned about what’s happening in the schools, the media, and in higher institutions. In fact, a sequel to the book is tentatively scheduled to be released in June of next year. A third book will be released in 2009 to complete the trilogy. The last book will be entitled, Education’s Dangerous Idea. We are being bombarded by so many ideologies that it is almost impossible to keep up with them. Some of the underlying and unspoken goals of those ideologies are to attack the pillars of Western culture, namely Christianity. My task in those books is to expose them for what they are. I also want to give reasoned responses to them because they are irrational, unnecessary, and ultimately detrimental to Western societies.
FP: What do you think are the impulses of those leading the agendas against the pillars of Western culture? What utopian world do they envision?
Alexis: The impulses of those leading the agendas against the pillars of Western culture are many, too much to detail here. First of all, there are those in the academia and the media who simply hate what they themselves call a “white” civilization. In the 1980s, Jesse Jackson for example chanted, “Western culture has got to go.” Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a host of others simply hate “white curriculum.” They are very quick to blame racism for anything. John Michael of the University of Rochester complains: “Certainly the alienation of middle-class blacks and their intellectuals is intensified by the racism—some of it internalized—of the dominant white society…” As the black syndicated columnist Larry Elder has pointed out in his excellent book The Ten Things you Can’t Say in America: “Many American blacks falsely and unfairly accuse whites for black America’s “plight.” Bad schools? White racism. Crime? White racism.
Underperformance on standardized tests? Racist or “culturally biased” tests. Can’t get a loan for a home or a new business? Racist lending officers, who would rather reject profit than give a black man a loan. Disproportionately high arrest rates? Racial profiling by racist cops. To put it more bluntly, many blacks simply despise whites. They assume white bigotry and hostility toward blacks, and feel—against all evidence—that “white racism” remains an intense and formidable obstacle. So convinced that white racism stops black progress, many blacks not only ignore obvious signs of progress, but viciously attack anyone—especially someone black—who dares challenge the “they’re out-to-get-us” point of view.”
And because of that, many colleges and universities have become culturally sensitive. Other individuals in the academia simply want to indoctrinate young people. Perhaps the American philosopher Richard Rorty (who just recently passed away) was the best example. Rorty was professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University for years. Having followed the writings of atheist philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, John Dewey and so forth, Rorty, speaking for most of his intellectual entourages, unequivocally declared:
"It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy.
"The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.
"We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students.”
Rorty is far from alone. David Horowitz has written an excellent book (The Professors) listing many leftist professors in our colleges and universities. I also have documented this in my book In the Name of Education.
FP: Tell us some of your own experiences and what you have personally witnessed.
Alexis: One individual with whom I strongly disagree on other issues put it this way: “Most teachers are afraid of their principals, principals are afraid of their superintendents, superintendents are afraid of parents, parents are afraid of their children, and children aren’t afraid of anyone.” This has been some of my experiences when it comes to public schools. It appears that children are running the show.
Asian schools have made remarkable success because parents, teachers, and school administrations work hand and hand. Many parents nowadays are much more concerned about their kids getting an “A” in a class than real education. As long as their kids are doing “well,” then they don’t have to worry about anything else. Well, some liberal teachers will probably get into the game. I know that many of them do not want to deal with pressure, therefore they pass every student, even though some of those students want nothing to do with education.
This point has been clearly documented by reputable scholars. Thomas Sowell, for example, writes on this topic quite often in his columns. That is killing our schools. But there are also ideologies, and I clearly discuss many of them in my book.
Continue reading at front page magazine |
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Friday, 21 December 2007 20:16 |
Death of anti-solarium campaigner found to have increased teen awareness of the dangers of tanning and Victoria has now moved to regulate the solarium industry.
Solarium death not in vain
Daily Telegraph, Clare Masters, December 21, 2007
THE high profile death of skin cancer victim Clare Oliver coupled with a multi-million dollar graphic campaign has already had an impact on teenagers who are now recognising the dangers of tanning.
Victoria yesterday became the first state in Australia to regulate the solarium industry but a similar crackdown may not happen in NSW until at least May. |
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Read more... [Solarium death not in vain]
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Friday, 07 March 2008 22:17 |
When Tolerance Is Intolerant
Stand to Reason, Greg Koukl, 2007
There’s one word that can stop you in your track. That word is “tolerance.” Let’s take a look at the confusing and mistaken ways tolerance is used in our culture today. Using the modern definition of tolerance, you will see that no one is tolerant, or ever can be. It’s what my friend Frank Beckwith calls the “passive aggressive tolerance trick.”
Let’s start with a real life example. I had the privilege of speaking to seniors at a Christian high school in Des Moines. I wanted to alert them to this “tolerance trick,” but I also wanted to learn how much they had already been taken in by it. I began by writing two sentences on the board:
"All views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another" and
"Jesus is the Messiah and Judaism is wrong for rejecting that"
They all nodded in agreement as I wrote the first sentence. As soon as I finished writing the second, though, hands flew up. “You can’t say that,” a coed challenged, clearly annoyed. “That’s disrespectful. How would you like it if someone said you were wrong?” In fact, that happens to me all the time,” I pointed out, “including right now with you. But why should it bother me that someone thinks I’m wrong?”
It’s intolerant,” she said, noting that the second statement violated the first statement. What she didn’t see was that the first statement also violated itself. I pointed to the first statement and asked, “Is this a view, the idea that all views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another?” They agreed.
Then I pointed to the second statement—the “intolerant” one—and asked the same question: “Is this a view?” They studied the sentence for a moment. Slowly my point began to dawn on them. They’d been taken in by the tolerance trick.
If all views have equal merit, then the view that Christians have a better view on Jesus than Jews is just as true as the idea that Jews have a better view on Jesus than Christians. But this is hopelessly contradictory. If the first statement is what tolerance amounts to, then no one can be tolerant because “tolerance” turns out to be gibberish.
Would you like to know how to get out of this dilemma?” I asked. They nodded. “Return to the classic view of tolerance and reject this modern distortion.” Then I wrote these two principles on the board:
"Be egalitarian regarding persons
Be elitist regarding ideas.”
The first principle is true tolerance, what might be called “civility.” It can loosely be equated with the word “respect.” Tolerance applies to how we treat people we disagree with, not how we treat ideas we think false. Tolerance requires that every person is treated courteously, no matter what her view, not that all views have equal worth, merit, or truth. Don’t let this new notion of tolerance intimidate you.
Treat all people with respect, but be willing to show them where their ideas have gone wrong. The modern notion of tolerance actually turns this value on its head. It’s one of the first responses deployed when you take exception with what someone has said. “You’re intolerant.” To say I’m intolerant because I disagree with someone’s ideas is confused. The view that one person’s ideas are no better or truer than another’s is simply absurd and contradictory. To argue that some views are false, immoral, or just plain silly does not violate any meaningful definition or standard of tolerance. The irony is that according to the classical notion of tolerance, you can’t tolerate someone unless you disagree with him.
We don’t “tolerate” people who share our views. They’re on our side. There’s nothing to “put up” with. Tolerance is reserved for those who we think are wrong, yet we still choose to treat them decently and with respect. This essential element of classical tolerance—elitism regarding ideas—has been completely lost in the modern distortion of the concept. Nowadays if you think someone is wrong, you’re called intolerant no matter how you treat them.
Whenever you’re charged with intolerance, always ask for a definition, then point out the contradiction built in to this new view. Most of what passes for tolerance today is intellectual cowardice, a fear of intelligent engagement. Those who brandish the word “intolerant” are unwilling to be challenged by other views, to grapple with contrary opinions, or even to consider them. It’s easier to hurl an insult—“you intolerant bigot”—than to confront the idea and either refute it or be changed by it. In the modern era, “tolerance” has become intolerance. As ambassadors for Christ, however, we choose the more courageous path. In Paul’s words, “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5).
In a gracious and artful way, we accurately speak the truth, and then trust God to transform minds.
Article found at stand to reason |
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