Ahmadinejad’s Opening Statement…YIKES!

The Iranian President spoke at Cambridge University the other day. Many of the transcripts are available online where you can get an idea for this man’s views and the American reaction. In opening the first part of the transcript, you will read the following:

the president recites verses from the holy Koran in Arabic. “Oh, God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those to attest to his rightfulness.”

This is how Ahmadinejad opened his speech…no big deal right? Well, it immediately worried me. You see, the return of Imam al-Mahdi can only come with destruction never seen before on this planet (he comes in, resolves everything and creates ‘peace’…of course, if you don’t submit to Islam, you are beheaded).  I should note that this is similar to the Christian ministries who can’t wait for Jesus’ return (which is said to be after massive world-wide destruction).

There are a great deal of Muslims who believe in Imam al-Mahdi’s eventual return. The problem is, Ahmadinejad can effectively “hasten the arrival” of the Imam by creating carnage himself…through nuclear war perhaps?

No Message Reaches Religious Lunatics

by Susan Jacoby

I assume that the definition of “religious extremist” is someone willing to kill anyone seen as an opponent of the extremist’s faith or political goals. The idea that there is any point in sending a “message” to fanatics is a fantasy beloved by many good, naive people of all faiths or no faith. What is one to say to Osama bin Laden, whose idea for world peace is that everyone else convert to Islam?

Analyzing Jesus: Was he really the Jewish Messiah?

Analyzing Jesus
Part Two: Was he really the Jewish Messiah?

In Part One of this series, we analyzed Jesus as a historical figure in history. The second part of this series is to address if Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but in order to do that, we need to understand what Messianic Prophecies are. Scholars (Jewish and Christian) believe that the Bible (Old Testament) contains over 300 predictions about the Jewish Messiah. These predictions do not come from one source, but are from multiple authors in a variety of books ranging about 1,000 years. In other words, what we have here is an enormous “library” of statements made about the Jewish Messiah (what he will be like, what he will do, and so on).

Analyzing Jesus: The Historical Figure

Analyzing Jesus
Part One: The Historical Figure 

It’s about that time again. Time for me to start up a new series regarding religion/faith/Christianity. I can already tell that this series will be a long one, so get ready for the long haul. I will address Jesus on a variety of different fronts, trying my best to be objective (like a lawyer). Granted, I cannot completely rid myself of my preconceived biases, but I hope that you can, at the very least, respect my investigative reasoning.

17 Christians Convicted in Indonesia For Beheading Muslims

Well this is a sad story indeed. Apparently some people feel that revenge is a value of Christianity. I am saddened to see such barbaric behavior. Click the ‘read more’ link for the full article.

“[They] beheaded two Muslims to avenge the government executions of three Christians in Indonesia.” “The revenge killings were the bloodiest incident in several days of protests…” read more

How to Practice Faith at Work Without Offending Others

 I ran across this little article and thought it was interesting. Here’s how some employers integrate religion into the workplace without offending others (and of course, facing some outrageous lawsuit). I was not aware of these initiatives, but I suppose I may see them a bit more as I enter into the corporate world upon leaving graduate school.

What do you out there think of religion in the work place?

CLICK HERE TO READ STORY

War with Iran Coming?

MANAMA (Reuters) – A U.S. aircraft carrier is heading to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet area of operations, which includes the Gulf, but the Pentagon said on Tuesday there had been no decision to increase naval power in the region.

U.S. defence officials said the deployment of the USS Enterprise was a routine measure to replace one of two U.S. Navy carriers now in the Fifth Fleet area.

Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet said the Enterprise was expected to arrive within weeks in its area of operations, where the U.S. has been flexing its muscles in a standoff with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme that has stoked regional tensions.

“There is a scheduled swap of carriers that is part of the routine deployment of the Enterprise,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters in Washington.

“Has the department made a decision for three carriers in the Gulf? No,” he added.

The U.S. Navy declined to comment on the future movements of the USS Stennis and the USS Nimitz, the two carriers currently deployed in the Fifth Fleet area.

The area includes the Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean.

A Pentagon official said there was a possibility the Navy could go down to one carrier in the region.

The United States sent a second carrier to the Gulf at the start of this year. U.S. officials said that move was designed to reassure U.S. allies concerned about Iran’s increasing influence in the region.

In May, a flotilla of U.S. warships sailed through the Gulf to hold exercises off Iran’s coast in a major show of force that unnerved oil markets.

The U.S. Navy said in a statement that the Enterprise would provide “navy power to counter the assertive, disruptive and coercive behaviour of some countries,” and take part in anti-submarine, anti-surface, anti-mine, air and missile defence and air strike operations.

“These operations are not specifically aimed at Iran… We consider this time unprecedented in terms of the amount of insecurity and instability in the region,” Navy spokeswoman Denise Garcia said, citing tensions in Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West suspects Iran of secretly seeking to build a nuclear bomb and wants Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment activities. Tehran insists its atomic ambitions are peaceful.

Earlier this month, commercial satellite imagery showed Iran was building a tunnel facility inside a mountain near a key nuclear complex — a move nuclear analysts said could be an attempt to protect nuclear activity from aerial attack.

Tension over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions has raised regional fears of a military confrontation. Iran has dismissed previous U.S. drills off its coast as morale-boosting exercises, and has said it had missiles that could sink big war ships in the Gulf.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Gray in Washington)

Militant Atheism Exposed

Our newspapers and news stations are littered with acts from militant religious leaders. It seems like everywhere you look you see these militants abusing the innocent using a distortion of their religion for justification. However, not only do these religious militants exist in the Middle East, but also on our very own soil. Granted, the militants in the United States don’t go about killing people (at least not on the same scale as what we see in the Middle East), but they still distort religion to suit their own agendas which negatively impacts other individuals. Extreme fundamentalist movements such as the “God hates fags” campaign come to mind.

I believe that most people recognize that the religiously devout can (and sometimes do) negatively impact a harmonious society. But what about atheists? Are atheists above the “militant” label? No. In fact, some take pride in it (just google “militant atheists” and you’ll come up with a variety of t-shirt stores).

While it is certainly true that atheists have been described as militant unfairly in the past, it does not take away from the fact that there are, indeed, militant atheists. This concept is hard for some atheists to swallow because it would mean that *gasp* religion isn’t the only thing to blame for every problem!

However, not all militants (religious and atheist) incorporate violence, but many (especially in the U.S.) do so in much more indirect ways. I’ll show you what I mean…

In my view, a militant religious fanatic is one that imposes on another through irrational thinking. Using this criteria, let’s consider atheist Michael Newdow. Newdow states:

“…keeping ‘one nation under God’ would do irreparable harm to my 6-year-old daughter if she was forced to utter such repugnant language. Even if she remained silent while the rest of the class recited the Pledge, the mere mention of “God” in a classroom would scar the girl for life.”

Is Newdow imposing on others through irrational thinking?  Yeah.

Now I am not here to discuss whether or not ”under God” should be in the Pledge, such an argument will just go in circles and be a waste of time. The message is that “militant-ism” does not lie solely with the religious, but also with the irreligious. Looking at this from a bigger perspective clearly shows that the problem lies not with institutions, but with humanity.  The sooner we can recognize this, the sooner the we can begin to address the issues.

The Flood: was it really Global?

I came across this very well done post by Nick Norelli from Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth.  In it, he discusses the Flood from the Old Testament, and why Fundamentalists/non-believers have had trouble with his perspective.  I really enjoyed this post, I hope you do as well.

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Last night while speaking with a skeptic I was asked if I believed in the flood as recorded in the book of Genesis — of course I said yes — but I qualified the statement by saying that I am open to the possibility that it could have been either local or global. Well this statement drew a funny reaction from the skeptic — in fact his reaction was the same as the fundamentalists in the room. He began to argue for a global flood because then and only then upon getting me to accept a global flood could he argue for the absurdity of the account and accuse the Bible is being fiction (at least in that part).

You see he wasn’t prepared for me to be open to different interpretations or for me to say that I genuinely don’t know — he (being a fundamentalist himself [of the skeptic persuasion]) had a cookie cutter argument that he wanted to use but couldn’t because I didn’t immediately jump on board with a global flood interpretation. He actually had to argue in favor of a position that he really wanted to refute! Such is the irrationality of radical skepticism.

Likewise, the fundamentalist Christians in the room had cookie cutter arguments of basically the same variety that the skeptic was using. But my reluctance to accept them on their face drew charges of heresy and not being a Bible believer, etc. It was even enough to draw a series of emails from a group that shall remain nameless but seem to love talking about me. Here is an example:

the flood could have been global,or it could have not….thank you,oh thank you,mr prophet for that incredible superfluity….i could not in my mind have ever reasoned a conclusion as such…i am glad such prophets exist to open the doors of truth to us….looking at the context of the dialogue,it shows once again the error of latching on to one word,and running with the words meaning to prove a point….so,roofer,in this dialogue,”world” doesn’t mean world,it means…uhhh..local?…

I don’t know what the reference to ‘roofer’ means and all the ad hominem aside – yes… the flood could have been local. This is a distinct possibility. I’m not sure exactly what word this individual feels I ‘latched onto’ or what meaning I have ignored, but I can say this — hyperbole is very common in Ancient Near Eastern literature (to include the Bible) and I can see no reason that would exclude the possibility of it being used here. There are plenty of examples in both the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures of ‘world/earth’ having reference to local regions and not the entire planet (e.g. Gen. 41:56-57; 1Ki. 10:24). But again — I don’t know if the flood was local or global. I’m open to either possibility — I’ll go where the evidence leads.

Another email in response to this one said:

There is evidence of a global flood everywhere you go. I sit in Capetown South Africa and there is a big mountain twenty minutes from here. On the top of the mountain …and it is way up there….you can see what looks like a beautiful beach….the mountain looks strange…..how did all that white sand get on that mountain way up there and it is covered in twenty to thirty feet deep of brilliant white sand.

I mean white sand on a mountain top in South Africa must mean that the flood was global, right? There are no other explanations for how such a thing could possible be, right? It seems to me that fundamentalists have their answers before they ask their questions and this is something that led me away from fundamentalism — it dishonors God in not seeking the truth — I genuinely question whether these men (or women) have wrestled with the alternatives to their theories — I seriously doubt that they have.

In any event, you’ll have to forgive me for not placing the flood as a doctrinal priority and for admittedly not knowing whether it was local or global. You’ll have to forgive me for not accepting cookie cutter arguments that only make sense to young earth creationists (such as sand on mountains or claimed ‘literal’ readings) — but I stand here as a man whose theology is shaped by his Trinitarianism first and foremost — and my Trinitarianism doesn’t demand a global or a local flood. It can go either way.

B”H

Bush and the “Muslim Problem”

This is quite an intiative by President Bush.  Frankly, I can’t help but cringe when I read things like this. Our country’s leaders have no idea how to approach Islam in the slightest bit.  <Sigh> Maybe one day we’ll figure it out, but not anytime in the near future that is for sure. I think that a good place for them to start would be the free report posted on this blog.  To some it may seem like common sense, but that is what our leaders are lacking at the moment.

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The US president has said he will send an envoy to the largest grouping of Islamic nations and called on Muslims to speak out against “extremists” he says are Islam’s “true enemy”.

George Bush said appointing an envoy would demonstrate to Muslim communities “our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship”.

But several American Muslims told Al Jazeera that Bush’s walk did not match his talk.

They said Muslims had been discriminated against especially since the September 11, 2001 attacks and that the country’s military action was not congruent with its rhetoric that Islam is a peaceful religion.

Bush did not say who would be made the first US envoy to the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, in his latest bid to counter the tide of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.

But Al Jazeera’s Viviana Hurtado said he would have to be a respected American Muslim who can articulate US foreign policy, withstand criticism at home and scepticism from people in the Middle East who may see him as Bush’s puppet.

‘True enemy’

In his speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Islamic Centre of Washington, Bush said that while the principles of religious freedom have been expanding elsewhere in the world, in the Middle East there had been a rise of “extremists”.

“This enemy falsely claims that America is at war with Muslims and the Muslim faith, when in fact it is these radicals who are Islam’s true enemy,” he said.

“We must encourage more Muslim leaders to add their voices, to speak out against radical extremists who infiltrate mosques, to denounce organisations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund acts of violence.”

Asked about the simplistic way of viewing the Middle East as having only either moderates or extremists, Karen Hughes, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, told Al Jazeera that the distinction was to draw a clear line between those who advocate using violence and those who do not.

Anti-American sentiment has increased since the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and Bush’s past use of terms such as “crusade” and “Islamo-fascists” in referring to the “war on terror” and Iraq has angered many Muslims worldwide.

(Source: Al Jazeera and agencies)