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{"id":2656,"date":"2011-10-27T22:09:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T22:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2011\/10\/the-nation-is-the-new-god.html"},"modified":"2011-10-27T22:09:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T22:09:00","slug":"the-nation-is-the-new-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2011\/10\/the-nation-is-the-new-god.html","title":{"rendered":"The Nation is the new God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/span>
Throughout my lectures on Nationalism, I am becoming increasingly aware, that if you were to substitute the word \u201cNationalism<\/em>\u201d for\u00a0\u201cReligion\u201d<\/em>, the context and the surrounding wording, wouldn\u2019t have to be modified, and we\u2019d still end up with a perfectly rational statement.
Like Nationalism, religion relies on the rather solipsistic idea that we as a species are somehow special and important. Nationalism narrows the field down, to those who exist on a specific land mass, sometimes using religion to attempt to strengthen its otherwise weak premise; but religion, whilst casting its net further afield, nevertheless clings to the same arrogant notion that we are indeed special. To illustrate this point, I would ask you to try and locate the August 2010 edition of Scientific America, in which Kate Wong (an evolutionary specialist) shows that around 195,000 years ago, Homosapien became as close to extinction as we\u2019ve ever came. Climate change, she argues, meant that our species had fallen to just 600 breeding couples.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"