Define “Muslim” (UPDATED)

UPDATE: See the comments section, particularly Liadnan’s comment and my reply to it. Maybe the news report was even less competent than I thought! Richard Dawkins has been taken to task at times for his assertion that raising a child in one or another religious tradition is a form of child abuse, as it constitutes an abuse of the trust given one with a child. My friend Marvin and I have been discussing the intricacies of this issue over at his LJ (in the comments, but do read the post!) but I ran across an article online that demonstrates how …

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You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Fight For Your Right To…

Readers at LJ: click here to check out this post which has been gobbled up by the horrible Moloch that lives somewhere in Livejournal’s API. Yeah, I gotta say, after having been around some Tibetans in Northern India, and hearing their stories first hand… I am so not into the Tibetan Buddhist theocracy, and think they probably were living off the slave-like labour of the Tibetan people, just like China’s official party line claims. But colonial occupation and genocide isn’t really much in the way of help for the Tibetan people, regardless of what the Chinese official party line claims. …

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The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens

I rarely inhale books, but today was one of those days. I whipped through this book, disillusioned — who’d have thought I could be more disillusioned than I had been? — yet not really surprised. Doubtless, some interpreted this text as an attack on Mother Teresa, but if you read it carefully, it’s much more an attack on the media — conservative and liberal alike — that, during the woman’s life, glossed over major issues in her work and beliefs, issues that the majority of human beings would probably take issue with if presented directly, and beatified Mother Teresa in …

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Stuff From This Week

UPDATE: This post has finally been reconstructed. Enjoy! UPDATE: Somewhere from a third to half of this post disappeared. I’ll rewrite that soon. But not today, as I’m (dramatic flourish) feeling ill! It’s been a busy lazy week. Since there’s nothing new in Gordland, I thought I’d just dump some links. I don’t do this often, but since I’ve just been catching up and surfing around (aside from a rewrite I’m working on) I have lots of stuff to share. I’ll subdivide it all by headings. One more thing: for the LJ readers out there, there are some Youtube videos …

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New President

Not the one I was rooting for. Nor the one the vast majority of my students claimed to be rooting for. I’m curious to hear how the ongoing “independent investigation” of various charges of manipulation of the price of shares will go. Especially since he’ll be immune to prosecution while he’s President. He’s, ahem, promised to step down if there’s proof. How can proof be ascertained if he can’t be prosecuted? Hmm? That’s all I’m going to say for the moment. Oh, and is family name is really 이, which sounds like “E”, not Lee. We all know which e-word …

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