Can I play too? Want to see Arianna Huffington’s garage? Want to see where bankers go camping?
Monthly Archive: January 2012
Jan 31 2012
An affront to principles of human rights
Al Jazeera reports on Baltasar Garzón defending his investigation of Franco-era crimes. “The amnesty law refers to crimes of a political nature, in no way can it be said that crimes against humanity of the kind that were alleged could have any political nature,” the 56-year-old judge said. “As such it was not even necessary …
Jan 31 2012
There’s an explanation
Tarek Fatah posted a photo on Facebook with the comment Inside Islam’s holiest place of worship, The Kaabah in Mecca. For some a romantic stroll in the park, without the fear of Maya Khan. Six comments in a guy said, in all seriousness – Have a close careful look! This man has only one leg, …
Jan 31 2012
“Unwise and untimely”
Frederick Sparks has an incisive post on Be Scofield on “new atheists” and racism. In referring to Dr King and the civil rights movement, Scofield also falls into the trap of “the Civil Rights Movement, Brought To You By Black Church”…a bit of historical revisionism that ignores, as professor Anthony Pinn points out, the secular philosophical influences, …
Jan 30 2012
Some women have a hell of a nerve
Just in case you missed this – Afghan woman is killed ‘for giving birth to a girl’: A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter. The murdered woman’s husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has …
Jan 30 2012
Too Westernized, secular and progressive to be authentic
This is an outstanding observation from Kenan Malik’s talk at Conway Hall: In recent decades, faith has, in other words, transformed itself into the religious wing of identity politics. Religion has, ironically, become secularised, driven less by a search for piety and holiness than for identity and belongingness. The rise of identity politics has transformed …
Jan 30 2012
Trots fight back
This just in, from LSE ASH at Facebook – a poster from the Socialist Workers Student Society advertising an event on Thursday. It reads: Religious discrimination is irrefutably on the rise at LSE. Both the Atheist Society’s efforts to publish inflammatory “satirical” cartoons in a deliberate attempt to offend Muslims, and the ‘Nazi themed’ drinking …
Jan 30 2012
The believer’s inner needs
Recognized. I’m reading Kenan Malik’s talk at the Conway Hall conference on blasphemy, and it corroborates what I was just saying about contemporary religion (that it’s contemporary religion that is seen as “fulfilling people’s needs” and that it’s reading backward to think religion has always been seen that way). This intensely personal, deeply emotional response …
Jan 30 2012
It wasn’t like that
A couple of ”Really? Is that actually true? Do you really know what you just asserted?” items from a review of three books on god, meaning, what to do without god, emotional needs, and the intersections between them all. In the aftermath of the French Revolution… The fundamental tension, however, remained unresolved: between, on the one hand, …
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