Well, at least these ones are. Either that or they all lost contact lenses.
No, they’re hypocrites.
P.S. If you don’t get it, read the second one.
A la Shakespeare’s Sister.
Archive for Religion
I Love Troll-Baiting
Check out this exchange between me (and some other enlightened folk) and a lonely troll.
The Catholic Church Has Jumped the Shark
Apparently Catholic clergy have fallen from denouncing Nazi war crimes, fighting totalitarianism in the USSR, and going to jail to protest the Vietnam war to fighting against our right to look at naked women on 1″ screens. Yes, that’s right, the Canadian cell phone service Telus has dropped their soft-core porn downloads for cellphones in response to a boycott led by Archbishop Raymond Roussin of Vancouver. So, it’ll only be available online, at adult stores and movie theatres, and on cable. And, oh yeah, on cellphones. Because 90% of Tellus’ customers use cellphones that can access the internet, and therefore, online porn.
A Huge Step Forward
Great news out of Egypt tonight. The Grand Mufti of Egypt (one of the most respected scholars of Islamic law) has issued a fatwa saying that premarital hymen reconstructive surgery is halal (religiously permissable), and that women don’t need to tell their future husbands about it. He even went so far as to say that a woman is under no obligation to tell her husband that she had premarital sex if she has repented. I can’t be sure, since I can’t find the actual fatwa, but the newspaper article made it seem like this applies even to adultery.
The best part? Another scholar (Shiekh Khaled El Gindy) has chimed in, saying that the reason for this fatwa is that “Islam never differentiates between men and women, so it is not rational for us to think that God has placed a sign to indicate the virginity of women without having a similar sign to indicate the virginity of men.” Apparently he also has a similar sense of humor as I do, since he added that “Any man who is concerned about his prospective wife’s hymen should first provide a proof that he himself is virgin.” (I want to meet this guy!)
So, next time someone tells you that Islam is inherently misogynistic, point them here. It’s happening slowly, but it’s making strides.
Apologia for Evolution
A departure from politics today. I’ve encountered a barrage of anti-evolution comments and websites recently, so I felt like I had to respond. The easiest way seems to be to debunk some of the worst and most common arguments against evolution. Just a note, I’m feeling snarky today, so edit out the snark if you’re actually arguing with a creationist.
Read the rest of this entry »
Beauty
I’m a little late posting this, but Ali Eteraz posted this absolutely beautiful piece on his blog. It’s an arrangement by the Symphony Orchestra of Bosnia-Herzegovina of the adhan and a Sufi chant.
http://www.eteraz.org/music/Bosnian_Symphony.wmaNext time someone calls Arabs “barbarians” or “backwards” I won’t know whether to hit them, laugh, or play this.
This Is So [expletive deleted] Wrong
In the category of “Wrong Response,” the winner is… a school district in New Jersey. When a teacher at Kearny High School made several, shall we say, unjustified comments to his class (we’ll get to what she said in a moment), a junior there decided enough was enough and he would go to the school board. However, since he was only a student, he thought they wouldn’t believe him, so he decided to record the class on audio tape.
What did he record? The teacher telling his class that the big bang and evolution were unscientific, that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and that if you did not accept Jesus Christ as your savior (hallelujah!) , you would burn in Hell for all eternity. So, what do you think the school board did when they heard the tape? Well, first they reprimanded (not fired) the teacher. Then, they banned taping classes without permission from the teacher.
Well, it turns out that the teacher has not learned his lesson. Apparently the same student that taped him in September now says that he compared the people who believe in global warming (aka scientists) to Hitler. What, exactly, does it take to fire a teacher?
**Correction**
The teacher in question is male, not female, as I stated before. (I’m not entirely sure how I missed that.)
Why I’m Not Religious
Among other things, here’s a quote from Roger Hill in the Guardian
[A]ll animals suffer a huge range of diseases; most female animals lose most of their offspring; and most species live under stress at the limit their environment can sustain. Designing a world like that is just plain evil. So if there is one intelligent designer, it is evil.
Here We Go…
I was hoping I could ignore the brouhaha over Keith Ellison taking his oath of office on the Quran rather than the bible, but Dennis Prager has written a column that is at once very scary and strangely amusing. A couple excerpts:
What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.
Damn straight. There’s this little thing called the First Amendment, Dennis. You might have heard of it. No? I suspected as much.
Ellison’s doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal — the Islamicization of America.
Yes, what the Islamic extremists want most of all is to see a moderate Muslim serving the United States after having vowed to fight terrorism. Sheesh.
[S]ecular officials did not demand to take their oaths of office on, say, the collected works of Voltaire or on a volume of New York Times editorials, writings far more significant to some liberal members of Congress than the Bible. Nor has one Mormon official demanded to put his hand on the Book of Mormon.
Let’s see:
1) I can’t think of a single atheist (why he insists on calling atheists “secular” is beyond me) who has been elected to a major position yet.
2) Mormons believe the Old and New Testaments to be holy as well.
3) The whole point of swearing on a Bible is to be sure that you don’t break your oath. This is why ancient Greeks made sacrifices to the gods while making important oaths, and Romans grasped their testicles. (I swear I’m not making this up. Testes is the root for “testify.”) If you want a Muslim, who doesn’t believe in the authenticity of the Christian Bible, to keep his oath, why in God’s name would you have him swear on a Bible?
Neanderthal… Nephilim?
Apparently, we interbred with Neanderthals at some point in the distant past, giving us a gene for a better brain. Two interesting points not mentioned in any article I’ve seen so far. First, this means (from what I know of biology) that Neanderthals had the scientific name Homo sapiens neanderthalensis not Homo neanderthalensis since it’s impossible to reproduce with an individual outside of your own species.
Second, and more interesting, this lends some credence to the old theory that the Neanderthals were the inspiration for the Biblical Nephilim. (Sorry about the link to the religious nutjob site, but it illustrates the theory pretty well.) The Bible (Genesis 6:1) says that some angels (the Grigori or Watchers) interbred with the “daughters of man,” giving birth to a race of giants. The Neanderthals were more robust than H. Sapiens, and so would have been their offspring. Also, since this news appears to imply that Neanderthals were more intelligent, it explains why they would be thought of as angels.
The Soggy Liberal 