My Zen Arcade

Wow, I didn’t realize how horribly dangerous we were.

Now, while I think that Rob Sherman (if he’s who I think he is) is using his child, I agree with his cause.

I also think that anyone who finds their faith threatened by someone believing something else, or by someone rejecting that faith, then they really don’t have a very strong faith at all.

Interesting…Islam likes to say pretty much the same thing about people who don’t believe in Allah, or worse, those who leave Islam.  Leaving Islam, apparently, damages all muslims.

What is it about ‘people of faith’ that scares them so about people who don’t buy what they bought?

Oh, right…fantasies are pretty damn hard to maintain when someone keeps saying that its all make-believe.

This is actually unfortunate. Forget the fact that a number of people might just go nuts (I’m thinking thats a small number…they probably already went nuts when he married a catholic in the first place). Now this man’s opinions on Islamic extremism will carry zero weight with, well, Muslims.
Imagine the reverse. Like, maybe that Archbishop converting to Islam…

lgf: Pope Baptizes Muslim, Seething Expected

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book “Long Live Israel.”

Let’s see, first its Hagee who thinks that we should be working to bring about the apocalypse so Jesus will come back, and who thinks the holocaust and other attempts to wipe out the jews are due to the jews themselves, and says equally disgusting things about gays and Catholics.
Now, John-boy has picked up Rod Parsley.
Parsley believes that the US was founded to destroy islam, AND that people should be prosecuted for committing adultery, as well as other crazy stuff.
John, truly, any maverick-ness you might have had has gone the way of Britney’s image, into the toilet.
You sell your soul, and the irony is not lost.

McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam

And today’s installment of ‘Pot, meet kettle’:

Cleric attacks hardliners over wedding dance | Oddly Enough | Reuters
       A prominent Saudi Arabian cleric has issued a rare public attack on
religious hardliners angry over a video showing           him dancing at a
wedding in the conservative Islamic state, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
       …
      Obaikan, an adviser to the cleric-run Ministry of Justice, defended himself in remarks published in Asharq al-Awsat,           saying the society needed to “get over restrictions imposed by ignorant people.”

Honestly.  When the government executes you for being gay, isn’t that almost the definition of systematic oppression?
‘Discrete’…the same way light skinned black people could pass if they were discrete.  The same way apostates can get along fine if they are ‘discrete’.
The UK and most, if not all, of Europe is suffering from a deep and profound fear of Islam.
The Archbishop of Canterbury went so far as to suggest that Muslims be allowed to have their own set of laws.  England would have two legal systems.  At what point do you just give up the illusion of being one country?  The brilliance of the modern legal and governmental system is that there is only one set of laws, that they apply to everyone equally (in theory, if not in practice).  It doesn’t matter if the second system is sharia, or rabbinical, or just some new set of laws dreamed up in a poli-sci class.  When your country does not treat all people under the same laws, death comes in robes of righteousness.

Gay teenager is facing gallows as his asylum bid is rejected - Times Online

The ruling will put the Home Office under renewed pressure to reassess his case — or face the possibility of sending a young man to his death. The department’s own guidance concedes that Iran executes homosexuals but rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians.
..
“The Home Office’s position is that gay people can return to Iran safely
providing they are ‘discreet’. Heaven knows what that means,” he said.