Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

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Radicals vs. moderates: British Muslims at crossroads

Friday, January 19th, 2007

DUBLIN, Ireland (CNN) — At a recent debate over the battle for Islamic ideals in England, a British-born Muslim stood before the crowd and said Prophet Mohammed’s message to nonbelievers is: “I come to slaughter all of you.”

“We are the Muslims,” said Omar Brooks, an extremist also known as Abu Izzadeen. “We drink the blood of the enemy, and we can face them anywhere. That is Islam and that is jihad.”

Anjem Choudary, the public face of Islamist extremism in Britain, added that Muslims have no choice but to take the fight to the West.

“What are Muslims supposed to do when they are being killed in the streets in Afghanistan and Baghdad and Palestine? Do they not have the same rights to defend themselves? In war, people die. People don’t make love; they kill each other,” he said. (Audio slide show: Preying on Britain’s young Muslims)

But in the same debate, held on the prestigious grounds of Dublin’s Trinity College in October, many people in the crowd objected.

“These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven,” said one young Muslim who waved his finger at the radicals.

More… ➡

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Fury at Australia cleric comments

Friday, January 19th, 2007

– Two stories out recently about radial statements being made by Muslim clerics point up a growing and critical problem. As we continue to fill the world, our cultures and religions are pressing against each other with ever more pressure. This is a volatile situation that grows ever more dangerous. Our cultures and religions need to be ever more tolerant of each other if we are to avoid disaster as we try to muddle our way through the coming historical bottlenecks.

– Stories, like the following, are clear calls for moderate Muslims to control the statements of their more radical brethren. Indeed, be it Muslim, Christian or any religion, I would advocate the same.

– To get the drift of why a story like this might incense Australians so badly, consider that they are 20 million and they are just south of Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim country in the world – and a very poor one, besides. Consider a statement like the following: “Muslim Australians had more rights to the country than white Australians whose ancestors arrived as convicts. ”

– Below, is the first of the two stories. The next can be found in the next post here.

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The Australian government has condemned a Muslim cleric for making offensive comments in videotaped lectures.

Sheikh Feiz Mohammed, head of the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Sydney, urged children to become martyrs for Islam and mocked Jewish people as pigs.

Police are said to be investigating the tapes, which were exposed in a British TV documentary earlier this week.

Top Australian Islamic cleric Sheikh Hilali also sparked controversy, with remarks on women and white Australians.

Sheikh Feiz Mohammed, who has spent the past year living in Lebanon, talks on the controversial videotapes of his desire for children to be offered “as soldiers defending Islam”.

“Teach them this,” he says, “that there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a Muhajid.

“Put in their soft, tender heart the zeal of jihad and the love of martyrdom.”

He also ridicules Jewish people as pigs and makes snorting noises, saying they will go to hell.

His comments were shown on a British television documentary called Undercover Mosque, which says it found children selling Islamic tapes in a car park behind a UK mosque.

More… :arrow:

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SCIENTISTS AND EVANGELICALS UNITE TO SAVE THE PLANET

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

This morning, scientific and evangelical leaders announced a collaborative effort to protect our environment from anthropogenic threats.

“We dare to imagine a world in which science and religion cooperate, minimizing our differences about how Creation got started to work together to reverse its degradation,” Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, said at the announcement in Washington, D.C.

The coalition released a statement signed by 28 prominent evangelicals and scientists—including biologist Edward O. Wilson and climatologist James Hansen—that calls for a “fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late.” The coalition sent the statement, titled an “Urgent Call to Action,” to George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, congressional leaders, and national evangelical and scientific organizations.

More… ➡

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Grand Theft Christianity

Friday, December 15th, 2006

– I’ve written on this story before here and here. It is amazing to me that certain threads within Christianity have gotten so far off the road and into the bushes.

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A loose coalition of progressive social-advocacy and Christian groups are lobbying major retailers, most-notably Wal-Mart, to stop carrying a high-end video game that they say urges born-again Christians to convert or kill others who don’t adhere to their extreme ideology – including Muslims, Jews, and Catholics.

The game is Left Behind: Eternal Forces, based on the popular Left Behind series of Christian-themed novels, which are based on the theology found primarily in the book of Revelation, according to the publisher’s Web site.

The action of the novels takes place after the Rapture, when Christian believers have been shuttled to heaven and the nonbelievers have been left behind to face the return of the Antichrist.

The Campaign to Defend the Constitution, Crosswalk America, Talk2Action and the Christian Alliance for Progress are among some of the groups that have joined forces to boycott the game and to lobby Wal-Mart to remove the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game from its shelves.

Said Clark Stevens, co-director of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, to the San Francisco Chronicle this week:

It’s an incredibly violent video game. Sure, there is no blood. (The dead just fade off the screen). But you are mowing down your enemy with a gun. It pushes a message of religious intolerance. You can either play for the good side by trying to convert nonbelievers to your side or join the Antichrist.

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The Synthesizer

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

“Let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of heaven.'” E.O. Wilson is quoting from the biblical account of the fifth day of creation. “Isn’t that lovely?” he asks, his voice lilting with pleasure. “Whether you believe that there is a god who touched the universe with a magic wand or not, it’s a command—[one] I think scientists could respond to as well as religious folk.”

Wilson sits in his office on the fourth floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, across the hall from the university’s world-famous ant collection. His hands move in animated gestures, his shoulders falling forward into a natural hunch—the “lifetime posture” he developed by his late teens from stooping low to the ground to inspect small creatures.

The reference to biodiversity in the seminal text of Judeo-Christian culture resonates deeply with Wilson. Raised a Baptist and “born again” as a teenager, he has championed biodiversity as an academic and a writer for more than 50 years. His new book, The Creation, is an appeal to the religious right to “consider forming an alliance to do something that science and religion, the most powerful social forces in the world, are uniquely prepared to do: save the creation.”

more… ➡

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A parable by Emo Phillips

Saturday, October 28th, 2006

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!”

He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well…are you religious or atheist?”

He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too!

Are you christian or buddhist?” He said, “Christian.”

I said, “Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?”

He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too!

Are you episcopalian or baptist?” He said, “Baptist!” I said,”Wow! Me too!

Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?”

He said, “Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too!

Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?”

He said,”Reformed Baptist church of god!” I said, “Me too!

Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?”

He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!”

I said, “Die, heretic scum”, and pushed him off.

———-

research thx to PHK

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Iran bans fast internet to cut west’s influence

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

– To my thinking, ideas should stand or fall on their own merit. Therefore, when governments control information to direct the thoughts and perceptions of their populations, they are revealing that they don’t beleive that the ideas they are promoting could stand on their own merit.

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· Service providers told to restrict online speeds
· Opponents say move will hamper country’s progress

Iran’s Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture – by banning high-speed internet links.

In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net.

The order follows a purge on illegal satellite dishes, which millions of Iranians use to clandestinely watch western television. Police have seized thousands of dishes in recent months.

The latest step has drawn condemnation from MPs, internet service companies and academics, who say it will hamper Iran’s progress. “Every country in the world is moving towards modernisation and a major element of this is high-speed internet access,” said Ramazan-ali Sedeghzadeh, chairman of the parliamentary telecommunications committee. “The country needs it for development and access to contemporary science.”

More… ➡

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Waging War on Evolution

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

By Paul A. Hanle of the Biotechnology Institute via the Wasington Post
Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page B04

I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: “How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don’t even accept evolution?”

I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of “intelligent design” in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education. And an independent education foundation has concluded that science-teaching standards in 10 states fail to address evolution in a scientifically sound way. Through changes in standards and curriculum, these efforts urge students to doubt evolution — the cornerstone principle of biology, one on which there is no serious scientific debate.

This war could decimate the development of U.S. scientific talent and erode whatever competitive advantage the United States enjoys in the technology-based global economy. Already, U.S. high school students lag near the bottom in math skills compared with students in other developed nations, and high school seniors are performing worse in science than they were 10 years ago.

More… ➡

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Bible Publisher Tyndale House Faces Boycott Over Anti-Christian Game

Monday, August 21st, 2006

It is unprecedented for conservative and progressive Christians alike to close ranks in condemning a Bible publisher. It is unheard of for Christians to call for a boycott of a Bible publisher for licensing a real-time strategy videogame that caricaturizes Christianity as a crusade, puts modern military weapons in the hands of children, sends them on a mission to convert or kill infidels, and even lets children role play commanding the armies of the AntiChrist, unleashing demons that feast on Christians.

“Does it sound like fun, or does it sound like the way homicidal Muslims think?” asks Marvin Olasky, editor of the conservative Christian World Magazine in a blog post dated August 21, 2006, and titled Convert Them Or Kill Them? That’s Not Christianity. His piece links to a recent Washington Post article, “Fire and Brimstone, Guns and Ammo.” But the Post and World Magazine have barely touched the hem of the garment, in terms of understanding and exposing the game for what is truly is. Yet word is getting out, and a boycott is picking up steam.

It is unprecedented, and to date unheralded by the mainstream media. But it is happening. It is sparking, sputtering, glowing and growing like a prairie fire. There is a growing movement among conservative and progressive Christians alike to boycott Tyndale House, the Christian publishing house that publishes the Living Bible and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels and also licenses the controversial videogame Left Behind: Eternal Forces, along with any chain stores or megachurches that plan to distribute the game.

More… ➡

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Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

That our country is slipping towards becoming a backwards nation can’t be denied when one reads the following.
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In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond true, false or not sure to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”   The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001.The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science.

Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement.

More from this article… ➡

Here’s a chart of how the 32 countries ranked: ➡

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