Clergy: Jail gays, don’t hang them – Daily Monitor

Good grief. This is progress? What a bunch of hypocritical idiots. What would Jesus have thought of this?

George Gilder Lurks, I can Assure You

Meet Harun Yahya, the leading creationist in the Muslim world. – By Steve Paulson – Slate Magazine — This sort of thing never ends.

The great mystery is where Yahya’s Science Research Foundation gets its money. No one knows, though speculation runs from Saudi donors to wealthy Turks whose children have joined the secretive group. Whoever funds it, the organization seems to have the kind of wealth and influence that Christian creationists can only dream of. Yahya’s teachings aren’t confined to a religious subculture in Turkey. They’re part of the mainstream.

Creationist stories are now popping up in Turkish high-school science textbooks, and some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution. In Ankara, the government’s point man on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, told me, “All the holy texts say human beings are created by God. I think evolutionary theory is not scientific, but ideological.”

The Quran doesn’t have a detailed origins story like the six days of creation found in Genesis, but it does say Adam was created out of clay in a heavenly paradise and later banished to earth, along with Eve. Various polls show that many Muslim countries are predominantly creationist, but Turkey has recently emerged as a hub of global opposition to evolution.

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
[...]
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”. The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth.”
[...]
She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

[...]“There was already water,” she said.

“There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding.”

A lone cross built to honor the dead of World War I, bolted to a desert rock on public land, raises a host of complicated issues about which religious displays violate the Constitution’s ban on establishment of religion and who may challenge them. But the Supreme Court yesterday seemed disinclined to answer most of them.

Justices spent nearly half of the oral argument deciding what they were deciding about the 61/2-foot cross in the Mojave National Preserve in California and appeared to settle on a rather narrow question: whether Congress solved the problem by trying to transfer the land on which the cross sits to private ownership.
[...]
The case was the first major opportunity for the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to delve into the meaning of the First Amendment command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Previous court rulings on religious displays have been mostly narrow and case-specific, producing few rules on who may challenge government actions or what violates the Establishment Clause.

Justices seemed uninterested in reviewing the lower court’s decision, which found that a former park superintendent who objects to religious displays on public land is entitled to bring the lawsuit. Only Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to want to decide the more basic question of whether the cross was unconstitutional in the first place.

Lo and behold, the Bible has gotten too liberal, according to a group of conservatives. And it needs a little editing.

That’s the inspiration behind the Conservative Bible Project, which seeks to take the text back to its supposed right-wing roots.

So how can the Bible be conservatized? The group has proposed a Wikipedia-like group editing project. Some of the ideas would only bring the translation closer to the original. But others would fundamentally change the text.

Among the words to be eliminated: “government.” A conservative columnist at Beliefnet described the effort as “just crazy … like what you’d get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin’.”

Golly-gee, I remember the good old days when the Bible was considered the immutable word of God.

And I cannot imagine how much venom Ann Coulter would spew if the Left vowed to make the Bible more liberal.

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior. Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Found by Mark.

Tesco has been accused of religious discrimination after the company ordered the founder of a Jedi religion to remove his hood or leave a branch of the supermarket in north Wales.

Daniel Jones, founder of the religion inspired by the Star Wars films, says he was humiliated and victimised for his beliefs following the incident at a Tesco store in Bangor.

The 23-year-old, who founded the International Church of Jediism, which has 500,000 followers worldwide, was told the hood flouted store rules.

But the grocery empire struck back, claiming that the three best known Jedi Knights in the Star Wars movies – Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker – all appeared in public without their hoods. Jones, from Holyhead, who is known by the Jedi name Morda Hehol, said his religion dictated that he should wear the hood in public places and is considering legal action against the chain.

The quote of the day:

“If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”

May the Force and the Power of Cheese be with you!

While other religious and political leaders around the world are busy creating moral panics around violent video games, it appears that one Buddhist leader feels quite differently about them. The third ranking Buddhist, Ogyen Trinley Dorje (and, according to the article, the only Buddhist leader recognized by China, Tibet and India), apparently sees video games as therapeutic and a way to let out aggression:

Well, I view video games as something of an emotional therapy, a mundane level of emotional therapy for me. We all have emotions whether we’re Buddhist practitioners or not, all of us have emotions, happy emotions, sad emotions, displeased emotions and we need to figure out a way to deal with them when they arise.

So, for me sometimes it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games. If I’m having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards.

The aggression that comes out in the video game satiates whatever desire I might have to express that feeling. For me, that’s very skillful because when I do that I don’t have to go and hit anyone over the head.

In response, the interviewer asks “shouldn’t meditation take care of that?” to which he replies: “No, video games are just a skillful method.” So, kids, next time some politician says that violent video games are bad, why not point out that one of the most peaceful men in the world uses them to let out some aggression in ways that meditation cannot provide.

Brenda Voydatch has battled her ex-husband, Martin Kurowski, over the education of their daughter Amanda since she began home-schooling her in first grade. Last month, a Laconia (N.H.) family court judge adopted a marital master’s recommendation that it would be in the girl’s best interests to go to public school in the 2009-10 academic year.

“[T]he Court is guided … by the premise that a child requires academic, social, cultural, and physical interaction with a variety of experiences, people, concepts, and surroundings in order to grow into an adult who can make intelligent decisions about how to achieve a productive and satisfying life,” the master, Michael Garner, said in his order.

Kurowski had testified that “exposure to other points of view will decrease Amanda’s rigid adherence to her mother’s religious beliefs.”