Is ISIS Islamic?

I was pleased when Bush 43 said that the 911 terrorists did not represent Islam.

I was pleased when Obama and Cameron said similar things.

We don't want to be at war with Islam (or sometimes "1.6 billion Muslims").  It was appropriate for us to give a great religion the benefit of the doubt.

But I think that that has been said enough - by us.  If we keep saying it, then it relieves the folks in Tehran, Cairo, Saudi Arabia and such places from having to make that argument. It lets the leaders of Islam off the hook that their particular crazies have put them on.

I understand some muslim leaders in the US have issued a fatwa condemning the ISIS movement.  That is their job - to guide their flocks and tell the world that they are not all terrorists.

So I'm ready for Obama to quit saying things like:    ISIL (sic) is not "Islamic." 

(Which is a step beyond the previous statements above.)

How does he know that they are not Islamic?
They say they are Islamic.
How did Obama get to be the arbiter of who is and who is not Islamic?
If ISIS is not Islamic, why doesn't the much talked about "1.6 billion Muslims" step up and smash the 32,000 imposters who are ruining their good name?

Alaan Hirsi Ali

I am somewhat disabled right now and can only say google her and Brandeis University.

.Historical - Lincoln's Second Inaugural Addres

Some things are worth repeating and this is one of them.
It is also a useful reference for anyone who wants to do one of the following:
a) Refute the claim that the civil war was not about slavery.
b) Refute the claim that the American government has never had a place for religion in it.
c) Read good literature and/or history.

Lincoln'sSecond Inaugural Address

Tea Party and Science

Those who are open to evidence about the Tea Party might be interested in the following article

Tea Partiers Score High on Science Literacy

in the Cultural Cognition Project from Yale Law School.

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decision making by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policy making.

PC gone wild

This article, Britain's rape Jihad crises, should be read by those who are plagued by a fear of being accused of racism.
 

Steve Jobs 2

The question in Steve Jobs (here) seems similar to the problem:

What should an agnostic or atheist in a religious culture tell their children about god?

My, My

And we have the quote from actor Jamie Foxx at the 2012 Soul Train Awards show: "First of all, giving honor to God and our lord and savior Barack Obama." 

So many things come to mind.

Malala

 Angelina Jolie has written a moving article We All Are Malala about the 14 year old girl that the Pakistani Taliban almost murdered because she advocates education for girl children.

No, that is not a typo.  In the eyes of the Taliban her advocacy of education for girls is a capital crime and their rules call for her to be killed without trial.  Their first attempt failed, they have vowed to try again.

There is a bit of good news in this story.
The president of Pakistan has denounced their actions.
The people of Pakistan seem to be quite upset.
The Taliban has threatened the press because they are not getting the treatment in the press that they want.

However, my googling of "denouncing the Taliban over Malala" does not produce a list of Muslim religious leaders who are denouncing this act.

Why are there no religious leaders of the "1.5 billion peace loving Muslims" who are speaking out on this?
Isn't this an opportunity for them to finally lead the 1.5 billion against this sort of thing?
Or do they actually support the Taliban?
Or perhaps they are opposed but, for some unutterable reason, are just refusing to speak out?

What to do about Radical Islam?

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"Once I was ready to burn The Satanic Verses. Now I know that (Rushdie's) right to publish it was a more sacred thing than any religion."

That is the last sentence in a piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali called "Muslim Rage & The Last Gasp of Islamic Hate" in which she describes the cowardly abandonment of Freedom of Speech by the West in the face of the demand by some Muslims that their cultural imperative overrides ours.
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Democracy is not easy.

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I listened to all 5 of the "bobble head" shows from GPS to Foxnews Sunday and afterwards the distillation of what I think about the week's events is the title statement which was made by Henri Levy, the French political observer.

I was disappointed that Obama did not know that Egypt, to whom we send much money, is an ally.  (I took it as a conflation of the country and the new government.)  I do not see the current wildfire in the middle east as either a confirmation or denial of the success of Obama's foreign policy.  I should say that I am biased in favor of what I think is his policy, see Campaign 2012 Obama Foreign Policy .  (Which I understand to be:  We should move away from being the big dog and toward being the first among equals.)

Tom Friedman, on Face the Nation, noted that twenty thousand people, made in the image of God, have been killed in the last year in Syria.  He asked, "Has even one Syrian embassy been attacked or ransacked around the middle east."

How to deal with the wildfire.

This clash of cultures is a very difficult problem.  We cannot abandon freedom of speech (our cultural imperative) to meet their insistence that an insult to Islam and the Prophet be a capital offence (their cultural imperative).  Our leaders cannot endorse their cultural imperative.  However our leaders can, should, and in this case did try to explain that it was an individual and not an act of the US government. Their leaders cannot endorse freedom of speech, but perhaps they could argue to the people that they cannot enforce their cultural imperative in a foreign country and encourage their people to limit their response to peaceful demonstrations.

Some speakers wanted to cut off aid to Libya because an al Queda type organization killed our people.  Imagine the satisfaction that would bring to the terrorists in these fledgling democracies.  "All we have to do to split the US and our democratic government is kill a couple of Americans."  How would that would serve America's interest?  See some very touching signs that show what one hopes is the response of the great majority of Libyans.

In another venue one of the speakers noted that the real clash of cultures was within Islam: between the terrorists types and what I will call Greater Islam.  I believe that terrorist strain is the result of more than a century of Arab suppression since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.  But those of us with even a cursory knowledge of world history, (and mine is very cursory) know that there was a time when our European ancestors were living in mud huts and Greater Islam was the proud possessor of the highest and most tolerant culture in the world.

We should carefully gauge our responses to this wildfire and try to be on the side of that Greater Islam.

Historical - Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

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Some things are worth repeating and this is one of them.
It is also a useful reference for anyone who wants to do one of the following:
a) Refute the claim that the civil war was not about slavery.
b) Refute the claim that the American government has never had a place for religion in it.
c) Read good literature and/or history.

Lincoln'sSecond Inaugural Address
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Santorum and Kennedy

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I understand that Santorum has disagreed with John Kennedy's argument that the separation of church and state should be absolute. He then went on to say what he thought an "absolute separation of church and state" would mean. To him it means that no discussion of public policy could involve religion. All public policy debates would have to be secular in nature. It seems to me that in his mind that would mean that you could not even ask the question of whether the C Church should be required to buy insurance. You could only say "should an organization be required to buy insurance for employees". With that definition of separation of church and State I don't think I would go along either. But most of us don't use that as a definition of SOCAS. We use one that even Santorum might very well agree with.

So I would say he flubbed it by assuming that we all agreed about what SOCAS means when he should have talked about definitions. I think that most people would say that they agree with an absolute SOCAS, but they mean something much less dramatic that his version.

He shot himself in the foot with that one. That is why I think he will collapse. The only question is whether it will happen before or after the Rs have made their choice. I think it will be before.
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Birth control mandate

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I'm really having a hard time following the birth control mandate question.

A friend told me that she had read some of the comments on a blog and that it was depressing how simplistic the writers (on both sides I think) were about the topic and that none of them thought that it was complicated at all.

Well that's the way blogs are I thought, but then I listened to Senator Boxer and pro and con views on PBS last night and they took the same view.

"This is not a religious issue it is a health care issue," Boxer said.

Then on PBS:

"Of course it is a religious freedom issue since the government is forcing the Catholic Church to do something that is contrary to its fundamental beliefs."

The other side says, "I see it as a health care issue. I don't see it as a freedom of religion issue." Poof. (She was Methodist.) She showed no sign of ever having contemplated any religious aspect of it. She apparently believed that the freedom of religion argument was sufficiently dealt with by saying: I don't see it that way.

It reminds me a bit of the water boarding question. Some were horrified that the Government would water board a known terrorist for information. It was clearly a civil liberties issue they said. [later that day: I am told-not civil liberties rather international law. The point is the same] The other side took the view: I see it as a national security issue. I don't see it as a civil liberties issue. Poof.

Same song, second verse. Strange thing though there has (I think) been a bit of a role reversal. Those who worried over the water boarded terrorists are not the same group as the folks who are now decrying the coercion of the Catholic Church. In fact ...
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New England Patriots 45 - Denver Brocos 10

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Apparently God is no substitute for a powerful front four.
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Hitch

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"Religion is man made. All gods found so far are man made.

But that is not to say, at all, that there may not be a prime mover or higher intelligence.

But I say that no one has yet earned any claim to act in the name of that entity."

A comment presented on ABC's This Week.

Christopher Hitchens - April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011 - thinker, writer

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 2007. It was his 58th birthday and the 264th anniversary of Jefferson's birth.
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Islamic dress code

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On a trip to Texas we stopped in a Waffle House in Arkansas and saw what I assumed to be a Muslim family of father, mother and 3 children. The mother and teen daughter were carefully scarfed so that only their faces and hands were visible. Not even their hair showed.

Well sort of.
The scarves were very colorful almost form fitted so that one could see that underneath was a lot of flowing hair. The slacks that they were wearing were also form fitted and very colorful .

While they appeared to meet the requirements of "covering" I expect many of the mullahs in the more backward parts of the Islamic world would have been shocked at the sight.

Like all of the other threads that make up the fabric of America, Islam will change what we become.

But America will change Islam too.
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Rick Perry

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Rick Perry says that when he's elected he will end Obama's war on religion.

There you go.

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Belief in Science and Religion

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This is a prelude to a post on Climate Change and Capitalism.

Those who are familiar with the topic of belief will find nothing new here. This is a note for those who, like most of the reporters that I see on TV, could not pass the science part of Jeff Foxworthy's ten question test to decide if one is Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.

I come from the math-science side of Academia. I believe in science (thank you Aristotle, Roger Bacon, et al.) I believe scientists in general, even those whose work I know nothing about. That is because I know how they decide what they claim is true. That is, I believe in the scientific method and I think that those who have not practiced it may not understand that, inherent within science, are two of the most charming devices for the prevention and correction of errors.

The first is that your evidence must be reproducible. If you get results and someone else performs the same experiment and doesn’t get those results, then there is a problem and you basically start over. This is quite different from the way disagreements in religion have been handled. When Jesus and Mohammad have different visions then you had a very long religious war. Then of course there was the Pope and Martin Luther.

The second involves the difference between scientific and faith based belief. Faith based belief is often absolute – the expression that comes to mind is “written in stone”. Scientific belief is very tentative and can perhaps best be described as a belief that the position in question is the “best explanation available” at the present time. It may give way to a better or more complete theory at any time. The example that comes to mind is Newton’s mechanics which stood for 300 years before the arrival of Einstein's relativity. Those who are familiar with (or should I say committed to) faith based belief often imagine that the practitioners of science meekly accept its current beliefs as if they too were written on stone tablets. (I think I have seen this argument used by the intelligent design folks.) This is a more profound question because it speaks to the possibility that the whole enterprise may become biased in favor of its current beliefs. (The claim currently made about global warming.) In fact, it is true that errors have, in the past, been allowed to linger too long, the Piltdown Man comes to mind.

The corrective for that is, I think, one of the most profoundly delightful aspects of science. It is this: far from worshiping the pedestrian follower of the current perception, the scientific community reserves its highest accolades and greatest honors for those individuals who shake the very foundations of the current “best available explanation.” Carl Sagan is very well thought of as a presenter of science, but he will never compare to Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin in the pantheon of scientific stars.

Science saves its loudest applause for those who “look where all have looked and see what none have seen.”
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Voltaire on religion

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May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?
Voltaire, 1694-1778

burning the Quran

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I have conflicting thoughts on Preacher SFB burning the Quran.

Has he said what it is he is trying to accomplish? Seems past silly.
If a nonreligious person did it, it would be silly. But a religious person should be able to imagine how it would feel to insult his holy things.

Then on the other hand. If you get offended by somebody half way around the world and your response is to go and kill somebody who had nothing to do with it, then ... .

Religion, really does make some folks crazy doesn't it.

The Guardian took a poll. Here are the results:

44.7% Yes, it is a provocative blasphemy against others' beliefs

55.3% No, it should be considered a legitimate free speech act

You've got to love the wording and the fact that they don't seem to recognize that it could be (and is) "both of these."
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