Before killing seven CIA agents in a suicide attack in Pakistan in 2009, the terrorist Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi took a video of himself, in which – among other things – he expressed satisfaction with the fact of soon meeting his victims, when he is in paradise and they are suffering in hell.
The planned suicide [...]

How do you teach “History”? Israeli Ministry of Education apparently solved this puzzle. The solution: It’s not the contents, but rather the title, that matters.
I’ve been volunteering for several months, helping small children in the age of 10 years or so with their homework from school. Many of them attend what is known as the [...]

That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
— R.E.M.
Recently I’ve been confronted with an increasing number of people who are in the process of leaving their religion, but find it difficult.
They may say they’ve already found out the [...]

Are most people religious or secular?
In most Western countries with Christian orientation, the question itself is pretty obvious. ‘Belief in God’ for a typical American would usually be accompanied by some common Christian behaviors, and since many of these are optional, it could be translated into simple everyday habits. Nothing special that can be recognized [...]

The essence of any country, as I (and not necessarily others) see it, is not the ethnic composition of the population, but rather the country’s “culture”. I – and many others – very much want to preserve the “nature” of the current state of Israel in many cultural ways: Language is just one example, and [...]

“In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect”.” – Salman Rushdie
“Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” – Heinrich Heine
You may [...]