Between the death of Copernicus and the birth of Galileo, Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 in Nola, Italy. Fifty-two years later, at the turn of the 17th century, he was gagged and burned at the stake in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. His books were to be “publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter,” and placed in the Index of Forbidden Books. Why? He reaffirmed the Copernican view that the Earth circles the sun. But he went much further. His heresy argued that the universe is infinite, composed of “innumerable worlds” similar to our own solar system, and that our sun is not the center of the universe. His true sin? Proposing a cosmology that removed human beings from the center of the universe.
Read MoreGod Himself and His patriarchal book of rules, otherwise known as the Bible, is the true glass ceiling, containing and suppressing the rise and equality of women. Feminists remain chained to an implicit Faustian bargain. They have traded mortality for patriarchy. Women have unwittingly sacrificed power and equality on Earth for immortality in the supposed afterlife. Women seldom challenge God’s gender. Only by deposing God, and His biblical male inventors, can women assume a fully equal role in day-to-day gender politics and the governance of the planet.
Read MoreAre mere beliefs sustenance enough? Are moral practices superfluous? Can we espouse love but practice prejudice without even noticing the incongruity? What prismed spectacles must be donned by extremists at the far edges of the politico-religious spectrum to blind themselves to such hypocrisy? Understanding prejudice seemed like a moral imperative after World War II. As a species, we could not let the Nazi slaughter of the Jews pass us by without understanding it, and preventing a recurrence. It was all too easy to blame the inhuman Germans, the Nazi enemy, and more recently, the Muslim jihadists, the despicable “other.” But is there something in the general human condition that ferments these atrocities? The key, perhaps, is to understand us-against-them, ingroup/outgroup thinking, and the danger of focusing on our differences, rather than our similarities to others, when the others also have nuclear toys.
Read MoreSo imagine that you are a scribe, sitting cross-legged in a large tent, in the shadow of the mighty Sphinx, in a desert landscape dotted with pyramids. You are one of the select few men invited to a private conference thirty-three centuries ago, addressing the problem of sacrifices to the gods. …
Read MoreAnthropocentrism can be viewed as an unspoken, hidden prejudice involving the valuing of humans over all other life forms.
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