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Jewcy Book Club

This week:
Spanked: Red Cheeked Erotica
and
Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp
Spanked: Red Cheeked EroticaMoose: A Memoir of Fat Camp
Welcome Authors
Rachel Kramer Bussel
 &
Stephanie Klein
who are posting all week.
Coming up:
  • 01/12:
    Bob Morris
  • 01/12:
    Lily Koppel
  • 01/19:
    Peter Manseau
  • 02/09:
    Tania Grossinger

DAILY SHVITZ

Burmese Days
Michael Weiss

by Michael Weiss, September 26, 2007

2 comments
TAGS:

Welcome to the age of post-post-colonialism. One almost feels a vicarious thrill for apologists of religion like Madeleine Bunting of Comment is Free, or Our Maddy of the Sorrows, as Norm Geras calls her. She's taken the spectacle of tens of thousands of marching Buddhist monks to taunt atheists: "Will Richard Dawkins accuse these monks of child abuse for encouraging young boys to join their monasteries?"

Well, he'd be a cad to do that at a time like this, wouldn't he? Though would it be too much to ask Bunting to acknowledge the tens of thousands of secular and lay Burmese also risking life and limb to defy a miserable junta?



Michael Weiss

Michael is a contributing editor of Jewcy. His work has appeared in Slate, Gawker, New York, Democratiya, Reason, The New Criterion and The Weekly Standard. His blog is Snarksmith.

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2 comments | leave a comment

Anonymous

09/26/07 7:49 pm
If the US government is

If the US government is truly interested in promoting freedom through humanitarian intervention, it has to invade Burma, depose the dictator, and establish its own chaos. How else can we be consistent?


zbird

zbird

09/26/07 8:22 pm
Comments: 285
Friends: 4
I'm not atheist but I agree with you, Mike.

Any religious person who argues in favor of religion because of all the worldly benefits it might bring is missing the point, as is any atheist who argues that religion is wrong because it has bad social implications. 

Even if religion is the worst thing ever happened to civilization, there could still be a god, and vice versa. 

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."  Matthew 10:34 

--Z