Tom Holland wrote a response to Mehdi Hasan’s It’snotIslam piece.
He starts by pointing out that this drive to do away with the clutter of centuries of interpretation and clerical additions to go back to the Pure Unsullied Original is how Protestantism started.
The same impulse that prompted Luther to affirm the primacy of scripture over Catholic doctrine has also long been at work in Islam. [Read more…]
Mehdi Hasan wrote a very long piece for the New Statesman last week letting us know that Islamic State is not Islamic. The real, true, genuine, authentic, glorious Islam is a whole other thing altogether entirely.
The rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the Islamophobia industry. Here, after all, is a group that calls itself Islamic State; that claims the support of Islamic texts to justify its medieval punishments, from the stoning of adulterers to the amputation of the hands of thieves; and that has a leader with a PhD in Islamic studies who declares himself to be a “caliph”, or ruler over all Muslims, and has even renamed himself in honour of the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr. [Read more…]
Let’s visit the Bardo Museum, since the guys with guns are so keen to kill us for trying to do so.
We can go to The 101 Masterpieces, and there we can click on each one. Let’s check out Ulysses and the Sirens. Hover over the image to magnify any bit of it you want to look at.
We can take the virtual tour, which is amazing.
You can read the Museum’s Mission, so different from the mission of people who shoot museum-goers and staff. [Read more…]
In Tunis today – guys with guns killed 19 people at the Bardo Museum.
Italian, Spanish, Polish and German citizens were among those killed, as well as a Tunisian and a police officer, PM Habib Essid said.
Security forces killed two gunmen and were searching for accomplices, he added.
The attack happened at the Bardo Museum in central Tunis. [Read more…]
Fox Grom est un photographe russe né à Kirovsk. L’artiste détient deux magnifiques Husky qu’il s’amuse à photographier dans toutes sortes de situations. Dans cette série, l’homme s’est promené avec ses deux adorables bêtes sur un lac gelé. A découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.
Fox Grom is a Russian photographer born in Kirovsk. The artist has two magnificent Huskies and he likes to photograph them in all kinds of situations. In this series, the guy is strolling with his two adorable animals on a frozen lake. See the pictures in the article.
A couple of favorites.
Jay Michaelson at RNS reports on a Hasidic enclave in upstate New York.
Hasidism — literally, the way of the pious — began in 18th-century Europe as a movement of Jewish spiritual revival. Although shunned by the religious authorities of the time, it became enormously popular, sweeping throughout Eastern Europe. Centered on personal spiritual experience, devout prayer (think Pentecostals in Jewish garb) and charismatic leaders (known as rebbes), Hasidism revolutionized Jewish life, especially among less-educated, less-urban populations.
But it quickly changed its character. With the threats of emancipation and assimilation looming, Hasidism turned sharply conservative in the 19th century. Practices ossified, authority was centralized, innovations were prohibited, and any accommodation to modern life was rejected. Today, Hasidim dress like 18th-century Poles.
Unlike far-right Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists are often depicted as cuddly, harmless and quaint. “Fiddler on the Roof,” which in its original serialized novel form was a sharp satire of religious life, is a good example.
Raza Rumi writes about Bangladesh’s slide into theocratic misery.
The brutal, cowardly murder of freethinker Avijit Roy on the streets of Dhaka is a reflection of embedded intolerance in many Muslim societies. Bangladesh, despite its secular credentials, is no exception.
Rumi has experience of that kind of brutal cowardice.
This incident left me deeply disturbed. As someone who was also subjected to (missed) bullets in 2014, Roy’s murder brought back memories of my close brush with death, subsequent exile and the fear of returning to my own country, Pakistan. Like Roy and many others, Islamist extremists found my views unacceptable to the extent that physical elimination was the only answer. I miraculously escaped the assassination attempt, but my driver was killed and another companion was injured. [Read more…]
So of course we have to take a look at the Christian Domestic Discipline Network – Loving Wife Spanking in a Christian Marriage.
Hello & Welcome to the Christian Domestic Discipline Network!
This website is intended to be a haven for those practicing Consensual Christian Domestic Discipline, and for those who ernestly wish to learn about Christian Domestic Discipline.
What is Christian Domestic Discipline?
In order to describe to you what is Christian Domestic Discipline, I’d first like to start with what it is not.
Christian Domestic Discipline is not domestic violence. Neither is it abuse. It is an arrangement between two adults who share the belief that the husband is the head of the household and with that position comes the right to enforce his authority.
One bit of slightly less bad news – the Telegraph reports that most of the artifacts Daesh smashed up in Mosul were replicas.
[T]he head of the country’s national antiquities department confirmed they were plaster copies of priceless originals.
“None of the artefacts destroyed in the video is an original,” Fawzye al-Mahdi told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
Curators at the Baghdad Museum studied the video and found that many of the artefacts that appeared to have been destroyed were in fact safe inside their own museum. [Read more…]
Georgia Republicans are working on passing a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” aka RFRA that would be one of the worst in the country.
The bill, the “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” is one of a raft of similar bills (RFRAs, for short) wending their way through state legislatures across the country. The bills are part of the backlash against same-sex marriage, but they go much farther than that. Like the Hobby Lobby decision, which allows closely-held corporations to opt out of part of Obamacare, these laws carve out exemptions to all kinds of laws if a person (or corporation) offers a religious reason for not obeying them. [Read more…]