Dawkins and Free Speech
Richard Dawkins is dealing with a backlash. This time it isn’t from theists.
The prominent atheist faced a torrent of abuse from outraged fans after he announced that all further postings to the discussion forum on his website would be tightly moderated to ward off what he called “something rotten” in internet culture.
Context is key!
Thanks Jason!
Update: Iraqi Elections
Super good news re Iraqi March election: Sunni leader *will* participate. NY Times: http://nyti.ms/cC43bE
Could Francis make a Middle East comeback?
So many links! So little time! This is from December, 2009, but still relevant.
Where are the King’s? The Gandhi’s? The St. Francis’? St. Francis? Yes. I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my list, Paul Moses’ book, The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace. In his article on CNN, Paul Moses discusses how St. Francis “engaged Christendom’s enemy, Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil, by approaching him unarmed in the midst of the Fifth Crusade in 1219.” The encounter was interesting, to say the least, and a powerful witness to the tradition of compassion and respect in both religions.
[Francis'] goal was to convert Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity through peaceful persuasion. He didn’t succeed in that, but, amazingly, the two men found common ground and appear to have genuinely appreciated each other.
The sultan, who no doubt viewed Francis in light of an ancient Muslim tradition of reverence for holy Christian monks, permitted him to stay in his camp for several days, preaching the enemy’s faith in the midst of the Crusade.
The short article is well worth reading. I especially was intrigued by an new organization, Charter for Compassion. Moses explains the group’s purpose. He even bring Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize into the discussion and the criticism Obama has faced from some US evangelicals on his peaceful overtures to Muslim nations.
Neda, dictatorship and Iran
Today a student objected to my calling Iran a dictatorship. “It is a democracy,” he said. He did have a point. There are plenty of other places worse than Iran. Travel plans? Nope. I’ll stay right here in greatly flawed California, in the equally “challenged” US of A. There doesn’t seem to be any question that the government of Iran is repressive. Gmail has just been outlawed. The press is hampered. So much for freedom of assembly and free speech.
I do count your blessings and I do remember Neda Agha Soltan. PBS aired a documentary about her and the struggle of the opposition movement in Iran.
More religious strife in Iraq
It’s sad that there’s been an uptick in suicide bombings and the like in Iraq. This was from earlier this month from the BBC:
On Monday a female suicide bomber killed at least 41 and wounded more than 100 people in north-east Baghdad.
The pilgrims were making their way to the Imam Hussein shrine in the city where Shia Muslims are to mark Arbaeen, the end of 40 days of mourning for the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.
The bomb went off on one of the three routes into the city.
Earlier reports incorrectly stated the suicide bomber had been towing an explosive-laden cart on a motorcycle.
This and the general political mess makes me less comfortable about our plans to pull out of Iraq. On the other hand, it probably has strengthened calls for us to get out sooner. Hard to know what’s best for us and the government in Iraq.
Chesterton and Macdonald
I’m not sure I would have liked Chesterton, the person. But I sure do like his writing. I found this little piece he wrote about George Macdonald. Now George is someone I truly believe would be great to pal around with. At least I think so.
Carlyle could never have said anything so subtle and simple as MacDonald’s saying that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy. Carlyle was too obviously occupied with insisting that God was hard to satisfy; just as some optimists are doubtless too much occupied with insisting that He is easy to please. In other words, MacDonald had made for himself a sort of spiritual environment, a space and transparency of mystical light, which was quite exceptional in his national and denominational environment. He said things that were like the Cavalier mystics, like the Catholic saints, sometimes perhaps like the Platonists or the Swedenborgians, but not in the least like the Calvinists, even as Calvinism remained in a man like Carlyle. And when he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning-point in the history of Christendom, as representing the particular Christian nation of the Scots. As Protestants speak of the morning stars of the Reformation, we may be allowed to note such names here and there as morning stars of the Reunion.
Ash Wednesday Foot in Mouth
You may have read my essay about anti-intellectualism. Well, here is the flip side: religious ignorance. Or rather, ignorance about religious traditions. UK broadcasters pondering over that nasty looking smudge on Joe Biden’s head.
Hello! It’s called Ash Wednesday! Hello! Joe’s a Roman Catholic. Pretty good chance he’s gonna get some ashes.
But here’s where there may be some excuse: Since they were in the UK they may have been dealing with the time zone difference. Yes? Maybe? Or just clueless?
It gets “worse”. Fully story here.
Oy.
Roger Ebert on God
Just received a Tweet with this link. Really great to hear from non-theologians what they think about God.
How I believe in God by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times
When I was in first or second grade and had just been introduced by the nuns to the concept of a limitless God, I lay awake at night driving myself nuts by repeating over and over, But how could God have no beginning? And how could he have no end? …
Lyrics to Passage by Vienna Teng
I died in a car crash two days ago
Was unrecognizable
When they pulled me from the gears
No one’s fault, no one’s bottle
No one’s teenage pride or throttle
Our innocence is all the worse for fears
The other walked away alive
Arms wrapped now around his wife
My lover sits, the silent eye
In a hurricane of warmth and word
My mother trembles with the sobs
Whose absence seems absurd
My sister shouts to let her see
Through the cloud of crowd surrounding me
My colleagues call for silence in my name
I died in a car crash three months ago
They burned me until I glowed
And crumbled to a fine gray sand
Now I am nothing, everywhere
Several breaths of strangers’ air
And all thoughts ever written in my hand
They plant my tree out in the yard
It grows but takes the winter hard
My lover holds a knife to wrist
Says tomorrow comes, hold on a while
My mother tosses in the sheets
And dreams me holding my own child
My sister plays our homemade tapes
Laughs as tears run down her face
My office door now wears a different name
I died in a car crash four years ago
My tree drinks melted snow
Just eight feet tall a pale and fragile thing
Bee stings beaches bright vacations
Sunburnt high-school graduations
A sparrow healing from a broken wing
This year a glimpse of second chances
Tiny apples on my tree’s branches
My lover hears the open wind
And crawls blinking into the sun
My mother leafs through photographs
And thinks “yes she was a lovely one”
My sister can’t decide her truth
Asks aloud what I might do
In a conference hall my brief efforts engraved
I died in a car crash
A lifetime ago it seems
A decade or two or three
They’ve come out with a new design
Bars and bags front and behind
My fate now an impossibility
Safely packaged hurtling down
The highway hardly make a sound
My lover very much alive
Arms wrapped now around his wife
Lyrics: Passage, Vienna Teng