Author: Tom Miller
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16. The Spiritual Legacy of the Messiah Wars
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Overcoming the myth of redemptive violence The history of the Messiah Wars illustrates how institutionalized religion and religiously held political ideologies have worked to coopt spiritual forces and accumulate wealth and power. Nations fight over such things as access to natural resources, trade routes and tariffs, immigration policies, intellectual property, and national pride. They also…
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15. Tale of Two Sons, Two Destinies
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Isaac, Ishmael and the Saga of the Middle East Islam takes up the story of Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice on Mt. Moriah found in Genesis 22. The event is known in Judaism as the Akeda, meaning “binding,” referring to the story of God’s command to Abraham to offer his son Isaac…
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14. The Jihad Spirit of Islam
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How Islam divides the world Jihad in Arabic means to ““make exertion” or “struggle” in the path of Allah, and has been called the Sixth Pillar of Islam.[1] Muslims differentiate between Lesser and Greater Jihad. Greater Jihad is the inner struggle against one’s ego, selfishness, greed, and temptation toward evil. This highlights a noble stream…
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13. Abraham’s Strong-Willed Children
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What differentiates Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? Abraham’s life was shaped by his faith in God. He trusted God and followed wherever God led him until he arrived in the land God promised him, which later came to be known as Israel. Genesis 15:6 says “Abraham believed in the Lord and the Lord counted it to…
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12. Tunnels in the Desert
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Smoke signals from the Gaza Strip The historical Messiah Wars described in the preceding briefing papers came to a head in our time when a perfect storm in Gaza that no one seemed to anticipate rose up on October 7, 2023. It was typified by the tunnels hidden from view beneath the coastal Mediterranean enclave…
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11. Hyper Economics
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Rethinking economics to better sustain prosperity and peace Economic instability has been a fundamental source of social trauma and conflict throughout human history, as previous chapters have highlighted. Cultural Golden Ages—whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Asian, African, feudal, democratic, colonial, capitalist or Marxist/socialist—have all at some point left a trail of faltering or failed economies. Clearly,…
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10. Digital Domains Rising
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Forging global empires of the heart and mind Where emperors once levied taxes to fund territorial conquests, today’s imperial visionaries engineer virtual networks built on commercial revenues fueled by secular dreams of new ways of being human. Today, the world’s largest digital empires manage revenues larger than the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most…
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9. Unholy Alliance
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The Mufti meets Hitler and accelerates Jihad The saga of Yasser Arafat illustrates what happens when modern liberation ideology mixes with ancient jihadi religious beliefs. Here I want to add a sidebar that shows how deep and nefarious this blending really goes. The story begins with engagement between Jews and Germans that predates World War…
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8. Revolution as Religion
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Reconfiguring the world through ideology and victimhood The 1960s are known to scholars as the Decade of Revolution. National wars of liberation broke out in many countries during that decade when Cold War tensions mounted between the Soviet Union and the U.S. As the two powers vied for global dominance, nations everywhere became oddly bi-polar,…
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7. The Russian Caldron
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The brooding empire that propelled global revolutions The ancient quest for Russian identity birthed a violent empire and a rich literary tradition preoccupied with deep brooding about the “Russian Soul.” The writer Dostoevsky characterized it this way in A Writer’s Diary: The most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need…