France has made headlines recently when multiple beach towns implemented a ban on “burkinis.” Burkinis are a fully covered swimsuit…
Category Islam
Yesterday, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore created a new campaign to fight back against “The Donald.” Donald Trump (and pretty much…
The current battle in America’s Culture War is over the Syrian refugees. Many on the political Right are opposed to…
In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, many are asking how we should fight terrorism. I think…
In the early 80s when I was in elementary school, my friend built a computer for the science fair. She…
One of the most disturbing things about the Chapel Hill shooting is that the shooter, Craig Hicks, is an active atheist online. His Facebook page looks a lot like my Facebook page… minus the photo of the weight of his gun. We even have 77 Facebook friends in common.
In the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, I think it is a good time to discuss the relationship between religion and jokes. Purely from an observational standpoint, it very much appears to me that the more religious someone is, the less of a sense of humor they tend to have.
Fundamentalist religious believers went on a shooting rampage in Paris apparently over a cartoon poking fun at the Muslim prophet Mohammad — intolerance be upon him. While reading up on this breaking story, I saw a 2012 quote from Charlie Hebdo journalist Laurent Leger. The quote reads, “You don’t throw bombs, you discuss, you debate. But you don’t act violently. We have to stand and resist pressure from extremism.”
In a recent interview on CNN, Muslim apologist Reza Aslan made it clear that barbaric practices like female genital mutilation and the treatment of women in a few Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran has no place in the 21st century. However, he doesn’t think this has anything to do with Islam. The fact that so many countries ruled by Muslim theocracies also just so happen to treat women as horribly must be a coincidence.
A few years ago, I got into a religious conversation with my ultra-Jewish cousin. This was a long awaiting exchange of ideas. My cousin is very smart and so I was expecting a pretty interesting debate-style conversation. What I got was the same typical arguments I have gotten from newly minted born-again Christians.