[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evZO-70xqvI[/youtube]

Beautiful artistic works on deviantART

Browsing deviantART.

The above link is a search on the deviantART website for the term “Gaza.” So many results and mos are astonishingly awesome.

Bush on Blackwater.

Here is a good intro on Blackwater:

Listen to what Bush said about it a year and a half ago:

Word of God?

All religions claim that their scripture is the divine word of God. Hence, there is no point of investigating that, right? WRONG!

Here is a quite interesting but less-known piece of information. Do you know that the Quran is the only book that speaks in the first person of God? All other scripture only talk about God. If a book is the word of God, why wouldn’t it say “God created us,” and so on, instead of “We created you”?

Actually, there is one exception here, the Torah. A part of the Torah is written in the first person of God. But here is another interesting piece of info. The Quran says:

“Say (Muhammad): “Produce, then, [another] revelation from God which would offer better guidance than either of these two [The Torah and the Quran, and] I shall follow it, if you speak the truth!. And since they cannot respond to this thy challenge, know that they are following only their own likes and dislikes: and who could be more astray than he who follows [but] his own likes and dislikes without any guidance from God? Verily, God does not grace with His guidance peo­ple who are given to evildoing!” (28:49-50).

When the Quran challenged humanity to show another book from God, it didn’t say one other than the Quran; it said other than the Quran and the Torah, since they both are from the Creator, at least originally in the case of the Torah.

This is surely is not a sufficient evidence for a book to be the word of God, but it is a starter and an indication. It narrows down the options a great deal :)

Chaser’s War on Everything confronts the Australian Sheikh

Chaser’s War on Everything is a really funny Australian show, one of the few that I follow. They became famous lately after they slipped a Bin Laden-like guy into APEC:

Now, they decided to confront the Australian Sheikh Hilali. Hilarious:

“Postmodernism”

“There are no absolutes or certainty” is an absolute and certain!

Maybe you heard this one before. But here is a fresh articulation I just heard today: we cannot know anything because everything is filtered. And when you say: at least we know that there are filters and we can work on them, they go: oh, no. We have no idea what those filters are!

I am sick of this! This is failure, plain and simple, a paradigm that has one axiom: this paradigm does not work.

The field of religious studies started with naive atheist evolutionists who study “primitive” “irrational” cultures and go: people have religion and morals because they wanna kill their fathers and have sex with their moms, and it’s all gonna end soon because we now have science. And it ended with an outright admission of failure (commonly known as “postmodernism”).

Christianity didn’t work, “rationality” didn’t work, and this will apparently work! They are so subtle in criticizing the naively progressive paradigm of the Enlightenment and they think they progressed because they abandoned that. Beautiful, isn’t it?

I know that “postmodernism” is limited to a couple of fields in academia and that it is waning. I just had to release some pressure!

So much for the separation of church and state!

Listen how desperate McCain has gotten. Get the last part where he says he thinks “his religion is a better spiritual guidance.” So much for politics, McCain. You are over long time ago. Like the war in Iraq you support, it only gets worse by time.

What is unique about human beings?

Is it language? Is it reason? Is it math maybe? It is utility? Is it longer term planning? Is it the realization that one will die at some point? Is it religious and philosophical inquiry? Is it systematic thought?

It seems to be all of that. But can we abstract one value to account for all of these? Yes, we can. We can because it is Abstraction itself that is unique about all these abilities and that is unique about us, human beings.

Here is a thought. If we–in our religious or materialist-reductionist-scientific thinking–are so committed to the idea that nature is united, wouldn’t it be just abstraction to believe it has One source? It can’t have many distinctive sources and it can’t come out of no source, both of these alternatives would not be sufficient to explain the unity in the extreme diversity of all existing phenomena.

The belief in One Creator is simply the outcome of the practice of what is so fundamental about human beings. It is being human, in other words.

Let there be light!

When you talk with postmodernists, a group of people I am destined to have as my intellectual peers for the past year or so, you hear them appeal to all kind of theories to justify their, what I call, neo-relativism :) Few days ago, one of them appealed to the General Theory of Relativity (the word “relativity” must be music to their ears). So, they say that Relativity proved that all information you can get must be relative to your point of view, to your speed and location, hence, you cannot get an objective view on, pretty much, anything.

Even though the theory of relativity says precisely this, it doesn’t follow from it that an objective view or a measure is unattainable. Physicists would laugh at this if they heard it. Indeed, Relativity is quite the opposite to the later claim. Relativity, contrary to some Quantum theories, is deterministic and precise. From where you are, you will have a limited view, but then you can define precisely where everything, including yourself, is and what is your exact speed and be certain and objective in constructing an overall picture that describes all relationships within any defined limits. In a sense, it takes some more utilization of reason and perhaps cooperation from others would be desirable.

But the interesting thing is that postmodernists, desperately appealing to Relativity, never mention the unique phenomenon of light, an essential part of the theory. Light, in a way quite hard to comprehend and in contradiction to all other forms of matter, has a constant speed. No matter what your speed is, the speed of light, to you and to everything else, will be the same.

I find it interesting that the bible mentioned that the first thing was created by God was this constant, non-relative and unique phenomenon–light. When you look up “light” in the Quran, quite interestingly, it always mentions light as a singular and “darknesses” as plural.

The first instance you encounter it is in the chapter of Al-An’am (The Cattle) which tells you that Allah created the heavens and the earth and “brought into being” the darknesses and light (6:1). Other verses emphasize that all prophets were sent to take people from “darknesses” to “light” (2:257, 5:16, 7:157, 14:1, 14:5, 33:43, 35:20, 57:9, 65:1).

As early interpretations of the Quran emphasized, the reason for that is that Truth is one and falsehood is many, perhaps unlimited.

The physical seeing and spiritual seeing–as is the case with everything else in the Quran, the foundation of the Unity tradition, so essential for humanity–are not separate or unique to each other. The are prerequisites for one another. They cooperate for the wellbeing, or “the humanity,” of the individual. To illustrate this, I think I will have to write another post.

What liberalism, freedom and multiculturalism have in common?

I remember in a class where I was assisting in the teaching in a course on Contemporary Problems in Religion and Culture, we were trying to define the Canadian culture. After going here and there, it seemed that what is distinctive about Canada is that it is multicultural! That sounded a little odd since this answer implies that there is no distinctive Canadian culture. While I don’t totally agree that there is nothing more than multiculturalism to Canadian culture, nor that multiculturalism can be a part of culture, this reminded me with the notions of freedom and liberty the United States and many Western states like to describe as what fundamentally define them.

If you think about it, what does freedom and liberalism say? They say that everyone is free to believe and do what s/he wants! Is that really an ideology? Yes. But it’s rather a negative ideology, a disengagement agreement, a peace treaty if you will. They don’t suggest what is right and wrong or what is a good life and so on, they only set the stage.

I am not saying that freedom and liberty are bad ideologies and I am not arguing for dictatorship, if that got you concerned. I am saying that these are not characteristics of cultures. They are necessary. But they are only prerequisites, fundamental conditions for social function, the only value of which is to go ahead and use this freedom to actually choose something!, have some positive statement, some idea on what is good and bad.

My point is that just as multiculturalism would sound odd as a characteristic of culture, freedom and liberty are odd for a nation to identify with as its fundamental principles. It is as if you are saying: my principle is that I can choose a principle! You hear the word “We are a free nation,” or anything of the sort, and you feel like: isn’t free means free to do something?! If you haven’t used this freedom to actually choose, what value does freedom has?!

While I am a big admirer of multiculturalism, freedom and liberty, I am aware that the recent rise of relativism, represented in postmodernism and others, is a side effect of such a misunderstanding of what these notions were meant to do. If you take those principles as your main identification and think they are enough, or are reasons to be proud, this will ultimately lead to relativism and the loss of Truth, so fundamental to human function on all levels.

The human struggle is always one of balance. We are always trying to find the fine line between the two extremes of an equation, in this case between fundamentalism and relativism. And that line, with new information and communication, is constantly getting finer and finer. You can believe and be certain (if you have a justification) but still tolerate and cooperate for the common good.