Ralph Schoenman - The Spread of Islamophobia is Part of America's Imperial Design

Essentially, US imperialism, which is the primary sponsor of the Israeli state, incorporated that notion of the necessity to demonize Islam and to create a rationale for permanent war in the region, and adopted it as the entire rationale for US capitalism and for imperialism itself in its military projects."

In another instance of promoting Islamophobia in the United States, the US military has been offering a course which teaches the trainees that their enemy is Islam in general.

The course, titled “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” was offered five times a year since 2004, with about 20 students having taken part in the course each time - meaning roughly 800 students have taken the course over the years - before it was removed in late April after protests.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, an author and commentator, from Berkeley, to further discuss the issue. The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: First of all, I’d like to get your opinion on the institutionalization of Islamophobic teaching techniques that are being employed all across the US.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30834

Brian Vastag - Mayan prophecy: The world won’t end, as a newfound calendar goes on and on and on

The ancient Mayans were masters of time, keepers of good calendars.

And now we have one of their timekeepers’ workrooms to prove it.

In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who’s counting), thereby predicting the end of the world.

The newly found calendars, which track the motion of the moon, Venus and Mars, provide an unprecedented glimpse into how these storied sky-gazers — who dominated Central America for nearly 1,000 years — kept such accurate track of months, seasons and years.

Read More:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/mayan-prophecy-the-world-wont-end-as-a-newfound-calendar-goes-on-and-on-and-on/2012/05/10/gIQA03s3FU_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Babies' brains benefit from music lessons, researchers find

After completing the first study of its kind, researchers at McMaster University have discovered that very early musical training benefits children even before they can walk or talk.

They found that one-year-old babies who participate in interactive music classes with their parents smile more, communicate better and show earlier and more sophisticated brain responses to music.

The findings were published recently in the scientific journals Developmental Science and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

"Many past studies of musical training have focused on older children," says Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. "Our results suggest that the infant brain might be particularly plastic with regard to musical exposure."

Trainor, together with David Gerry, a music educator and graduate student, received an award from the Grammy Foundation in 2008 to study the effects of musical training in infancy. In the recent study, groups of babies and their parents spent six months participating in one of two types of weekly music instruction.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/mu-bbb050912.php

Buddhists and Hindus Are On the Rise Nationally, Baylor University Professor Says

Hindu and Buddhist groups have grown steadily in the United States since changes in immigration laws in 1965 and 1992, with particularly high concentrations in Texas, California, the New York Metropolitan Area, Illinois and Georgia, according to a Baylor University professor who helped compile the newly released 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

"Both Buddhists and Hindus, though still relatively small compared to the large Christian groups, have grown to the point that they are beginning to exert significant influence on the key issues that most affect their lives," said J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, who was in charge of assembling the data on both groups.

The census, the most comprehensive statistical assessment of data from the 2,000-plus religious groups active in the United States, is made every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The complete summary may be viewed at this link: http://www.rcms2010.org/press_release/ACP%2020120501.pdf

Both Hindus and Buddhists have temples in most states, and "the groups now regularly voice their opinions on U.S. relations with predominantly Hindu and Buddhist countries," Melton said. "Like the Muslim congregations, Hindus and Buddhists are found in every part of the country, but they are concentrated in the big cities and still have not begun to appear in the smaller cities and rural areas."

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http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=115069

Valerie Tarico - How I Left My Evangelical Christian Faith

I am what you might call a slow learner. I managed to make it all the way through high school, despite an eating disorder I couldn’t pray away, and all the way through college, despite a suicidal depression triggered by the same eating disorder, and almost all the way through grad school before I finally gave up on my religion and god. 

By contrast, my friend Geoff figured things out in the second grade. One day a nun at his Catholic school tried to pour holy water on the one Black kid in the school to exorcise the devil because he kept getting in fights. But Geoff thought to himself: It’s not Satan, it’s because all the other kids pick on him. Today Geoff is a psychologist working for Seattle Children’s Hospital –which is, ironically, the same place that did in the last shreds of my Evangelical beliefs.

I can’t recall the name of the small person who severed the final strands of my faith. There's just a vague image of soft brown hair and trusting brown eyes. I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program, which required a year-long internship at the University of Washington. In one of my rotations, the one at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. He was two, and in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155155/how_i_left_my_evangelical_christian_faith

Mona Eltahawy - Why Do They Hate Us?

In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.

In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said. 

Read More:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us

James Bamford - The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Read More:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Adam Lee - How Religion's Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages

For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became settled and stratified, tribal chiefs and conquering warlords rose to become kings, pharaohs and emperors, all ruling with absolute power and passing on their thrones to their children. To justify this obvious inequality and explain why they should reign over everyone else, most of these ancient rulers claimed that the gods had chosen them, and priesthoods and holy books obligingly came on the scene to promote and defend the theory of divine right.

It's true that religion has often served to unite people against tyranny, as well as to justify it. But in many cases, when a religious rebellion overcame a tyrant, it was only to install a different tyrant whose beliefs matched those of the revolutionaries. Christians were at first ruthlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, but when they ascended to power, they in turn banned all the pagan religions that had previously persecuted them. Protestant reformers like John Calvin broke away from the decrees of the Pope, but Calvinists created their own theocratic city-states where their will would reign supreme.

Similarly, when King Henry VIII split England away from the Catholic church, it wasn't so he could create a utopia of religious liberty; it was so he could create a theocracy where his preferred beliefs, rather than the Vatican's, would be the law of the land. And in just the same way, when the Puritans fled England and migrated to the New World, it wasn't to uphold religious tolerance; it was to impose their beliefs, rather than the Church of England's.

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/154604/how_religion%27s_demand_for_obedience_keeps_us_in_the_dark_ages

Marieke Verhoeven - Sonic boon, Search for sound’s healing power

ODE MAGAZINE,  September 15, 2011,

I’m lying in a bed that’s as hard as nails with a series of strings along the sides and two gongs above my head. It’s known as a gong bath, and Gwen de Jong, a practitioner of sound healing at Spirit Connection in Amsterdam, assures me it can help clear my mind. “Just give in to it, and don’t try to analyze it,” she says before we begin. 

Then she asks, “What do you hope to achieve?” When I say I want to relax, De Jong puts a mask on my eyes and begins to play. While I enjoy the sounds at first, they soon become unpleasant. The increasingly intense vibrations feel like screeches; my head fills with dark thoughts. I’m this close to ending the session, but I struggle to give in to it. When the vibrations soften, I feel better. A few times, I even reach a mindless state—if only for a fraction of a second.

Afterward—my session lasted 20 minutes; they usually last an hour—Spirit Connection’s founder, Harry van Dalen, comes in and explains that the unpleasant sensation I felt is the internal battle between thoughts and the “I.” “Your ego is resisting. Some people can give themselves over right away; others take longer.” Internal battle or no, I feel remarkably relaxed afterward. Though I usually turn on my iPod after an interview, I decide this time to travel home in silence.

Most people are probably unaware that the body consists of vibrations. External sounds resonate with the sounds in our bodies; think of the sensation you feel near a speaker at a concert. It’s not so crazy, then, to imagine that external sounds might also have a therapeutic, healing effect. Anyone who listens to birds singing knows sound can relax us. But it can also heal, accomplishing everything from reducing stress to helping autistic children.

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Larry Gallagher - The compassion instinct

http://odewire.com/118151/the-compassion-instinct.html

ODE MAGAZINE, August 31, 2011

Research shows that a compassionate attitude towards others improves mental and physical health.

The Dalai Lama has been telling us for years that it would make us happy, but he never said it would make us healthy, too.

“If you want others to be happy,” reads the first part of his famous formula, “practice compassion.” Then comes the second part of the prescription: “If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Maybe the Dalai Lama knew all along or maybe he’s just finding out like the rest of us, but science is starting to catch up with a couple millennia of Buddhist thought. In recent years, the investigation of compassion has moved beyond theology and philosophy to embrace a wide range of scientific fields, including neurology, endocrinology and immunology. And while the benefits of being the recipient of compassion are obvious, new research shows that the practice of compassion has beneficial effects not only on mental health but on physical health, too.

Which is good news for everyone on the planet, as you can never have too much compassion. Job layoffs and home foreclosures, the cultural erasure of Tibet and the abscess that is Gaza, the sorrows of disease, natural disasters and death that are always with us: To create a short list makes one guilty of omission. Despite all the progress and advances we have made, there is still plenty about which to feel compassion.

Click to read more ...