Tag Archives: religion

In Part One, we touched briefly on my personal experience with American-born Evangelical Christian religions, their racist past and anti-tolerance messaging. We touched on how religion is historically used to erase and homogenise a culture for compliant assimilation into an empire and the impact it has on our multi-cultural nation …

If my laptop had not died, I would have written this piece much earlier, not long after Akilah Holder’s 14 February article. Small ting; Jessica Joseph’s masterful response, using the same points I wanted to raise, was both an excellent rebuttal and an education resource. Those whose minds are not …

I was raised in a Christian sect that was founded in the late 19th Century in the USA. It managed to find its way to the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago in the 1920’s. Though I was raised in what the great humanitarian, Bishop Desmond Tutu, enthusiastically called a “Rainbow …

I must apologize, I forgot to share the etymology of the word “sodomite.” Etymology is getting the backstory on how a word came to be what it currently is and to mean what it now does. A local example is when we trace the history of the word “doubles” back …

There is nothing in the Torah, Old Testament, Talmud or New Testament that says the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the men were all homosexual. Remember the medical definition of homosexuality we are sticking to is extra-biblical, 19th Century, medical terminology for sexual orientation. It would …

Pop culture anthropologist Jessica Joseph attempts to show that the modern Bible is misinterpreted in relation to the LGBTQI movement in Part Two of her response to a Letter to the Editor from Akilah Holder: Let us then move on to 1 Corinthians 6:9 which reads: “Know ye not that …

Akilah Holder’s impassioned column—in which she took umbrage at a gay man sharing his feelings of self-acceptance and his spiritual certainty about being loved and accepted by God—generated a lot of buzz, most of it negative and condemnatory. While I agree with those who pointed out the poor reasoning skills—the …

On 8 October, 2013, Newsday published a letter to the editor, headlined “Say no to gay marriages” and signed by Valentine Young, with which I fully agreed. Young’s position was that the legalisation of same-sex marriages had brought God’s wrath upon the United States of America (certain states anyway) because …

“Is that a new standard that the society is being asked to now adopt? Are our colonial hang-ups and archaic societal constructs so rigid and prejudiced that we cannot see beyond a person’s sexual orientation to determine if (s)he is competent to perform a task for the benefit of the nation? …

This week’s column is prompted by two reports last week that made global news. Although reproduced in local media, they would hardly have been expected to create waves within non-academic communities. One of these reports welcomed a new frontier of knowledge of human evolution: the CNN headline, “Modern fossil find …

Carnival, the Greatest Show on Earth, was one of my favourite times of the year. Apart from the extra holidays we all received, it was a time when the church would go out to camp somewhere in the countryside to get away from the noise and the confusion and the …

“We used to call it the People’s Negro Movement and sometimes the People’s N—r Movement because we saw nothing national about it. We saw the PNM as the enemy and [Dr Eric] Williams as the chief enemy. And Williams made it quite clear he saw us Indians as the enemy …