Browsing: Religion

A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania.  The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations.  Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host.  Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …

A Brief History On August 27, 1982, far away from Anatolia, Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide killed Turkish diplomat Atilla Altıkat in Ottawa, Ontario, as vengeance for the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  Time and distance do not always stop those bent on revenge, and we list a few of those incidents. Digging Deeper In 1943, the US conducted Operation Vengeance, sending P-38 fighters 435 miles to shoot down and kill Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor raid. From 1972 to 1973, Israel’s Mossad conducted Operation Wrath of God, revenge for the murders of Israeli athletes…

A Brief History On August 25, 1967, US Navy World War II pilot, George Lincoln Rockwell, was shot and killed by a former member of his hateful group. Digging Deeper Born to European American parents that worked as comedians, little was funny about George.  His parents divorced when he was young, and he was later denied admission to Harvard.  He did attend Brown University but left in 1938 to join the Navy as a pilot. He served the US Navy well during World War II, although he did not engage in combat.  Recalled to active duty for the Korean War,…

A Brief History On August 21, 1791, a voodoo, or alternately “vodou,” ceremony at Bois Caïman, Haiti was the scene of the first major assembly of African slaves in Haiti, an event that led to the slave rebellion known as the Haitian Revolution. Digging Deeper White European colonial slave owners viewed the voodoo ceremonies as harmless exercise of the slave religion, making such rituals the only opportunity for large numbers of slaves to meet. Dutty Boukman, a voodoo priest and slave looked up to by other slaves, was named by a mysterious woman who appeared during the ceremony as the…

A Brief History On August 11, 1492, Rodrigo de Borgia was elected Pope of the Catholic Church, taking the name Alexander VI.  Serving until his death in 1503, Alexander’s reign was one of corruption and depravity, so much so that a Showtime cable TV show was produced about him and his family from 2011 to 2013, called The Borgias. Digging Deeper Although fictional, the show is based on many of the allegations against the Borgia family, including the Pope himself fathering several children via his many mistresses, reaping massive wealth while in office as a Cardinal and then as Pope,…