Fundamentalism

There are a lot of mistakes, either by ignorance or misinformation, in this article. The idea that India willingly submitted to British rule is just poppycock. The present mosque-temple controversy in Ayodhya is a legacy of British rule. About the middle of last century, the ruler of the local area, who was a Muslim, wanted to turn over the site to the Hindus. But the British would not allow it to keep up their divide-and-rule policy! For the past 40 years, a Ram idol had been installed inside the masjid area and continually worshiped by Hindus.

This year's drought has thrown California into a sudden tizzy, a crisis of snowpack measurements, fish-versus-people arguments and controversial cuts in water deliveries. But in reality, crisis is the permanent state of water affairs in the Golden State - by design, because our institutions keep it that way. California has 1,400 major dams, thousands of miles of aqueducts and pumps so powerful they lift water nearly 2,000 feet over the Tehachapis. The state uses enough water in an average year to support, in theory, 318 million Californians (and their lawns and dishwashers)

Tuncay Gunc, who sells carpets at the Grand Bazaar here, is a thoroughly modern Turk. He is a businessman who looks west, and he is a Muslim. "I pray," Gunc said the other day, "but only on Fridays--if I don't have a customer." Such religious pragmatism, more the rule than the exception in a Muslim nation that is also officially secular, is being challenged in Turkey today by small but growing numbers of Muslim fundamentalists, seemingly aided by Iran. The result is that in major cities throughout the rapidly modernizing country, new bouts are being fought in an old tug-of-war between a Middle Eastern heritage and official aspirations for a European future.

SAN DIEGO - No Duke here. No Ohio State anywhere. And no, giggle, not even a hint of New Mexico. At the late-night end of two NCAA tournament opening days filled with higher seeds laying giant eggs, UCLA finished Friday's madness with a simple, dominating march. The Bruins stomped through fears a talented fourth seed would overlook a pesky 13th-seed, trampled worries their new coach couldn't win a tournament opener, and even flattened a 20-year-old nightmare with a 76-59 victory over Tulsa.

There's nothing more cutting edge than fundamentalism. The women swathed in veils in Picadilly Circus, the "facts on the ground" settlers in Jerusalem, the values voters who never give an inch. They wrap themselves in tradition and rage at the godlessness of modernity, but ultimately they are products of the very modernity they hate. Not that long ago it was the secularists who thought they were ahead of the curve, in the vanguard of progress. They wrapped themselves in the illusion that modernity would eradicate religion.

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.

Any list of epochal dates in human history would be incomplete without Oct. 15, 1951, when chemist Carl Djerassi, working in Mexico City with his partner Luis Miramontes, created the oral synthetic hormone progesterone, which became the building block of oral contraceptives. For the first time, women could decide when sex would part company with procreation. For Djerassi the writer, that was another life ago. Although he keeps his hand in as a professor emeritus at Stanford University, his passions have moved on. He endowed the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I, too, am a non-Orthodox Jew who identifies strongly with the Jewish people and resents any particular Jewish denomination or other subgroup dictating the criteria for who is a Jew. It is particularly offensive when the dictation comes from one of the smallest grouping of the Jewish people--the religious fundamentalists. We in the Jewish community are well aware of the efforts of this small sect to dictate their terms to all Jews but the larger Southern California community is quite unaware of it. Your objective depiction of the issue is, however, more than a journalist's effort to bring attention to hitherto relatively unknown facets of our civilization.

Re "21st Century Tribes," Opinion, Dec. 12: The roles of sociology and psychology in human behavior are invaluable. Whether to explain tribalism, nationalism or fundamentalism, we cannot know enough about what motivates us. But we cannot persist in the belief that only foreign cultures are vulnerable to the propaganda and manipulation of ill-intentioned colloquial influence. The rise in Christian fundamentalism as a tool for political exploitation signals that it is time to talk about American gullibility.

Your editorial presents with great clarity, brevity and conviction the main evidence for placing the age of the Earth at more than 4 billion years. You must be aware that it will sway none whose mind-set is that of the creationists. Let us hope, though, that some who read it are teetering between absolute religious fundamentalism and common sense. Perhaps they can be brought back to reality. H.W. ANDERSON La Jolla

The public knows a great deal more now about a Los Angeles Police Department shooting than it did a few weeks ago. We know that officers fired more than 100 shots into and at a truck in Torrance on the morning of Feb. 7, 2013, only to discover that fleeing former LAPD Officer Christopher Dorner was not inside; instead, the truck was occupied by two women delivering morning newspapers. We know that one officer fired 28 rounds, and that officers were so poorly arrayed that they fired toward one another, adding to the confusion in the predawn darkness.

Forget the turbocharged six-cylinder engine, the three-stage neck-warming system, the color heads-up display. The most interesting feature of the 2014 BMW 435i convertible is the elaborate setup built into the caboose of this car. With the car's folding hardtop stowed in the trunk, it's hard to access the 7.8 cubic feet of luggage space below it. So BMW devised an automated system that raises the folded roof out of your way when the trunk is...

Appearances to the contrary, actress Cameron Diaz wasn't always the picture of health. A few months of kung fu training changed all that, and now she's written a guide for women to make smart decisions about their bodies. For Diaz, "The Body Book" is about dispelling confusion and letting people know how things work from the eyebrows on down. What motivated you to write "The Body Book"? Two years ago I was 39 and having conversations with other women my age, and they kept saying the same things about how they were confused about their bodies and how to get them to where they wanted to be. I thought it was crazy that someone could live their whole life in their own body and not know how it works.

If you're among the small number of directors or actors who isn't white, there is finally some cause to be excited about what's happening in Hollywood. For the first time in Academy Awards history, a black man - British filmmaker Steve McQueen - may win the directing Oscar for his heralded, harrowing film "12 Years a Slave. " Besides McQueen, critics and awards voters are celebrating the work of other people of color, singling out "Gravity's" Mexican-born filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón, the African American talk show host Oprah Winfrey from "Lee Daniels' The Butler," and a variety of black actors, including Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o ("12 Years a Slave")

The budget agreement reached by the House and Senate this week is a small step forward in restoring some sanity and order to the process. By putting in place a bipartisan plan for the next two years, the agreement represents a much-needed improvement over the uncertainty of governing by crisis that has dominated fiscal policy the last several years. But the fundamental fiscal challenges we identified in the 2010 report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and the need for reforms of entitlement programs and the tax code, go unaddressed.

Senators have long considered any change to filibuster rules to be "the nuclear option. " But the recent action by Democrats to limit the use of filibusters in blocking most presidential nominations didn't go nearly far enough. Now is the time to get rid of the Senate's archaic and abusive filibuster in all matters that come before it. And fortunately, Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are taking advantage of the momentum from the Senate vote to try to do just that.

Columnists and reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have shared their views with Times readers during the National League Championship Series. Reality-TV America might not have liked it much, but the St. Louis Cardinals sent Mickey Mouse, the Goofy in right field and the whole Disneyland gaggle of characters back to Southern California to begin their off-season grooming. Main Street America is headed back to the World Series. The Cardinals made surprisingly swift work of ace pitcher Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers in a 9-0 thumping in Game 6, putting an end to the National League Championship Series and the baseball culture war between the two franchises.

There are two ways to think about how far we've come in protecting against a repeat of the financial meltdown five years ago that plunged the world into recession. You can conclude that we've pretty much eradicated the risk of another such crisis. That's the bankers' viewpoint. Here's how Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman put it in an interview with Charlie Rose earlier this month: " The probability of it happening again in our lifetime is as close to zero as I could imagine.