America becoming less Christian, survey finds

From CNN.COM:

(CNN) -- America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

Three out of four Americans call themselves Christian, according to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1990, the figure was closer to nine out of 10 -- 86 percent.

At the same time there has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious affiliation.

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The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of Trinity College.

(full article)

Well, it's not much ... yet ... but it's progress. Someday perhaps a majority of Americans can remove the blinders and look at the world as it actually is instead of through the filter of fairy tales.

Young Jordanians rebel, embracing conservative Islam - Be careful what you wish for

From the International Hearald Tribune:

AMMAN, Jordan: Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.

As a high school student, Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a "wasta," or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.

So Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan's largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.

(Full Article)

To our young friends in the region: be careful what you wish for, and be sure to study what has happened to those who've gone before you in places like Iran. By all means stand up, rebel, shake up the status quo, change the government, but make positive changes. When religion becomes the government and the government becomes religion, corruption doesn't abate. If anything, it tends to become even more entrenched.

Secular government may seem anathema to Islam, but when a religious establishment must coexist with a secular government, each helps to keep the other from being hijacked by a corrupt few. When the two become one, there is no such balance. Each benefits from the existence of the other.

Under the George W. Bush presidency, the US (and the world) got a taste of what can happen when religion and government start to become entangled in a context where this is explicitly prohibited. The global reverberations will likely continue for a generation.

Also worth considering is the utter vacuum of evidentiary support for the foundational beliefs underlying religion. As university students, you are young and intelligent, and curious. Never let anything suppress your mind or misdirect your thinking.

Think about it ... think about it...

From International Herald Tribune:

JIBLA, Yemen: One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband's house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.

That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.

Within days, Arwa - a tiny, delicate-featured girl - had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.

(please read the full article)

Dr. Wafa Sultan

"The al-Jazeera network deeply apologizes for the fact that one of its programs' participants degraded Islam and the monotheistic faiths on her own initiative. The channel extends its apology to all its viewers for the offensive remarks and has canceled both reruns of the program"

And with this unfortunate apology, Al Jazeera demonstrates for all to see, the corrupt and repressive environment in which it has to operate. Whether means to make an earnest effort toward unbiased journalism or whether the mission of the news station is purely propaganda may be academic - they evidently have no choice but to pander to Muslim extremist pressure.




Transcript of the full debate courtesy of Aqoul.

Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy
Physics Today Online

"Internal causes led to the decline of Islam's scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong."

(article)

Islam, Muslims & the World - a brief, paradigmatic analysis

An atheist ex-muslim speaks out. Very well written and well worth reading.

What Hath Religion Wrought

Bernard Lewis is a Brilliant scholar of middle-eastern history, politics, and culture. Recently, on the occasion of his having been granted the Irving Kristol Award by the American Enterprise Institute, Professor Lewis gave a Lecture on historical change, the present conditions concerning the Islamic world and the predominantly Christian west. The World Jewish Digest published an article entitled The Third Islamic Wave, an excerpt from this Lecture.

While it contains few if any surprises, Lewis ties together historical events, of which many of us are largely ignorant, leading to a better understanding of the present-day picture. Through this and other of his considerable writings, can be seen more clearly, some of the machinations of the religious mindset.

For further reading, his book From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East delves in depth into the region's religious, cultural, and political history.