Religion

George Walford: Ideology in the Reviews (58)

Authoritarian religion and the state appeared together as paired expressions of domination, and the novelty of the original Christian movement was soon brought into line. In Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Professor Averil Cameron suggests that the Christians in the Roman Empire took care that both what they said and their way of saying… read more »

Diana Keller: Ideology in Israeli Education

In January 1992 Diana Keller submitted to the Senate of the Hebrew University of Education a Ph.D. thesis entitled: State Education and State Religious Education: Two Ideological Frameworks.  It used some of the concepts and approaches of systematic ideology. The submission was successful and with Dr. Keller’s permission we present a shortened version of the… read more »

George Walford: Notes and Quotes (58)

FREEDOM of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. If you doubt that, try getting a piece on systematic ideology into the Socialist Standard. DEATH with his scythe leading the victim away, they pass Santa Claus: ‘I bet you didn’t believe in him, either.’ NATIONALISATION of telegrams in 1870 and telephones in… read more »

George Walford: Anarchism

STATE ANARCHISM “Until this year, young people could only learn about anarchism outside of school. Now, anarchism is included in the syllabus for ‘A’ level politics by the London Examinations Board. We learn this from students who have been coming into the Freedom Press Bookshop seeking information.” (DR in Freedom 30 November) Ever since anarchism… read more »

George Walford: The Birth of the Gods

Studies in systematic ideology tend to centre around politics. There have been forays into wider fields, and Beyond Politics [1] justifies its title by an attempt at tracing the influence of ideology in society at large, but broad areas remain unexplored. Here we take up one feature of the ideology of religion, a subject hardly… read more »

George Walford: Surveying the Surveyors

When discussing the relative sizes of the major ideological groups, one commonly encounters the suggestion that an opinion survey would settle the question once for all. Why undertake all this argument? Why not simply count them? The Chair of a MENSA meeting addressed by an s.i. speaker once put this forward. The people who have… read more »

George Walford: Editorial Notes (53)

CHRISTMAS cards, Birthday cards, Get Well cards, Mother’s Day cards… IC introduces the GO AWAY! card. Carry a supply, hand them out to bores, pests, and botherers. EDMUND Burke: “the British House of Commons… is… filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval… read more »

George Walford: Scientific Religion

IC 36 included (on page 12) a note on Sir Isaac Newton and his religion. It remarked that systematic ideology goes against the tendency, common among the more extreme left, to posit a necessary connection between sound science and atheism, finding the search for precision to be constant rather with the types of religion, known… read more »

George Walford: Systematic Ideology

As the years and the decades go by, and now the centuries begin to pass, it becomes increasingly evident that neither socialism, communism nor anarchism embodies the first restless movements of an oppressed majority about to grasp its freedom. Although each of them claims to work for the great body of the people each of… read more »

George Walford: From Kinship to Kingship

Readers will be almost as grateful as we are ourselves for a respite from Marxism. In At the Dawn of Tyranny, the Origin of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), Eli Sagen presents the most substantial attempt we have yet encountered at a psychoanalytical interpretation of the development of… read more »

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