King – Bachmann – Gohmert – 3 Stupidiest American Tourists Lost In Cairo International Airport (in Egypt)

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/editorials/223213241.html

.

Rand Paul’s Shadow (Tea Party) Government Shapes J Street Foreign Policy on Egypt

Rand Paul with Bibi Netanyahu in Israel Earlier in January

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rebeccaberg/rand-paul-will-propose-banning-f-16-sales-to-egypt

WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul told an off-the-record meeting of conservative donors and powerbrokers Monday that he plans to file a bill that would ban sending F-16 fighter jets to Egypt.

"The crowed loved it," a source told BuzzFeed.

Last year, Lockheed Martin delivered 20 F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of $1.3 billion in military aid from the U.S. government, The New York Times reported.

Paul has expressed concern for the practice in the past — but his remarks via Skype to the so-called "Monday Meeting" in New York City showed even firmer support by the Kentucky senator for policies that might cater to Jewish voters, as well as Evangelical groups that are staunchly pro-Israel.

.

Muslims Outdo the Crazy Religion Thing on This One!

Religion in Egypt gets crazier by the minute!

It perhaps loses something in the translation thing?????

http://rt.com/news/egypt-sex-dead-wife-054/

Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament is set to introduce a law allowing husbands to have sex with their dead wives up to six hours after death. Critics fear it highlights a trend of increasingly anti-female legislation since the Arab Spring.

The “farewell Intercourse” bill was inspired by a Fatwa issued by a Moroccan cleric last year. Zamzami Abdul Bar said that since the two would meet in Heaven again anyway, death shouldn’t get in the way of one last post-mortem marital romp. 

Critics have slammed the law as “catastrophic.” Prominent journalist and TV host Jaber al-Qarmouty used his program on Tuesday to lash out at the proposed law.

“This is unbelievable. It is a catastrophe to give the husband such a right! Has the Islamic trend reached that far? Is there really a draft law in this regard? Are there people thinking in this manner,” he lamented on air.

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) also called on Parliament not to adopt this and other measures which they believe increasingly seek to roll back women’s rights.

The NTC further charges that "marginalizing and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country's human development.”

Along with the rather grim “farewell Intercourse” draft law, parliament is also set to approve legislation that would allow girls as young as 14 to get married.

Lawmakers are also seeking to eliminate a reform implemented over a decade ago that allows women to end unhappy or abusive marriages without interference from their spouses.

.

Religious Fright! - Fear of Religion

Rather than move the world forward in a positive manner, many aspects of religion no matter how “peaceful” your one true religion is, many aspects of religion are a redundancy decades or centurties after secular institutions began to function in the place of ancient religious insitutions such as courts, hospitals, universities and civil government.

Indeed, I think that religion here in the west is just hanging around after it has been become obsolete on the secular civil level. As such what good is it except to clutter those secular institutions with superstition and useless remembrances of the past.

The past is the past. The Modern World is now. A Post-Modern world is tomorrow. There seems to be a lot dead weight regarding religion trying to drag us away from modernity.

That dragging people into a mindless past with Sharia Laws, Islamic or Christian, is anarchy – trying to destroy the secular real, functioning, world around us.

In the news I see sad things in that seven people were mowed down in gun fire at a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass celebration in Egypt. Fully 10% of Egypt’s 80 old million souls are Coptic Christian which these days comes close to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in their beliefs.

There are also fire bombings at Christian churches in Malaysia, an Islamic Country, where a court ruling said that it was legal for Christians, a minority, to use the word Allah as the word for their G-d in Christendom. Semantics. Bloodshed. Misunderstanding.

I am looking briefly at the concept of post modern Christianity with various mainstream and evangelical fundamentalist branches of the Christ tree trying to rethink and retool not to a modern world – but a post modern world – whatever that means. The here and now is modern enough for me.

I will say that dialogue if it exists at the high CEO level of church entities doesn’t talk to the little people on the ground on how to rethink and retool- sounds like I am talking automobiles in Detroit – more so than churches – Religion is like General Motors – only the empty factories give evidence of a once great human enterprise. Empty churches – empties factories – Obsolete thinking! Gross mismanagement of purpose.

The RC church, the so-called power house of Christian entities that should be setting the pace on post modernism, if there is such a thing, is still wallowing in the 32 years of Vatican mismanagement. Still languishing in the disaster reign of Pius IX in the nineteenth century who started the war on modernism (like a similar war on terror – it will never end).

In fact, Vatican II and all its negative fallout to this day forty odd years later is partially a result of trying to undo 32 years of RC/Christian gross mismanagement of humanity and its spirituality. The Vatican likes electricity and flush toilets (very modern things) but everything else that is not medieval is Verboten.

Indeed, Benedict’s attack on Islam, a new holy war, his infamously incompetent and tactless reference to Islam in the 14th century in his Regensburg Lecture in September 2006 is something mainstream Christianity will have to deal with in terms of collateral damages for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Perhaps bloodshed in the news today in Egypt and Malaysia has its direct roots in that very same speech.

While one part of Christianity wants to address interfaith issues and improve the perception of Jesus’ message to the ages, bumbling hack Vatican bureaucrats are still debating the bloody Crusades!

There is a point in time long ago where the secular world took over most institutions in the West. Rather than give the devil his due, I would say that most of Christianity lives in the delusion of the past before street lights, electricity, running water, penicillin, birth control and all those other truly evil things of a modern world.

Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism Etc. must look at reality first in the present and assess where they have been or where they are going. Otherwise, the coming rapture happens to them all - as they get whisked away into obscurity and history. Good riddance.

The Coptic Christian killings above is indicative of the dysfunctionalism of Islam in Egypt. Before Obama’s visit to Cairo earlier this year, the hack cronies of the Government decided that the pigs being raised by Christians in Cairo would cause a national swine flu epidemic even though there was little or no scientific data to support such a slap in the face of the Coptic minority population which eats pork.

The pigs were confiscated and destroyed. Compensation from the Government did not materialize. What would you expect – Justice?

The Moral of the story of Egyptian Muslims harassing Coptic Christians in Cairo - The pigs used to eat the garbage in the streets. The pigs are gone. Now all of Cairo smells of rotting garbage. If you want to be post-modern and or even modern world, start a secular garbage collection bureaucracy before you impose your stinking religious prejudices on the entire world. Think first – cause and effect.

The west and the Christians can learn from the lack of tolerance to others in the smug present world moving into a future world. That world will likely see the decline and disappearance of all religion because the guy in the back end of the Donkey costume does not know how to signal or cooperate with the other guy in front end of the suit. Or vice versa.

We are all interdependent in this world -“joined at the hip”- if it takes a hundred years to start up an interfaith dialogue, guess what, the secular will survive while your religious world crumbles and disappears.

Religions will come and go in the post-modern secular world. Whether there will be any religions left in that post-modern world? Well - one third of the passengers of the Titanic did after all make it all the way to New York.

In the meantime, garbage will continue to be picked up in a timely secular fashion.

Reality is real. Religion frightens me.

Mosque of Miriam Paris?

America used to be called the dumping ground of Europe. Europe, now with so many immigrants, will be twenty percent Muslim by 2050 by stats I have seen lately. Nothing outwardly wrong with that unless you fear Islam. (And the GOP vehemently complains about the many Catholics coming north from Meso-America.)

Is it possible to envision the sale of an unused obsolete house of worship like Notre Dame in Paris around 2075 with the plaza outside to accommodate daily Muslim prayers? Anything is possible. Whatever.

Anti-science campaigns by fundamentalists in this country have brought forth a kind of false science with the resurrection of dinosaurs to stand along side Jesus in popular local belief and myth as creationism.

Creationism, by default, would seem to be slipping into Islamic common beliefs or lack of them. It is not that I am campaigning for or against Charles Darwin, patron saint of modern science, but only three or so of twenty-two Muslim majority population countries even touch upon the topic of evolution in their education systems.

Creationism would seem to happen by default by either believing in the literal myth of creation in Genesis or by the lack of any Genesis like text in Islam.

As such, educated scientific minds of all persuasions, Muslim or not, gathered in Cairo this week to discuss the western, European concept of evolution.

Egypt’s Darwin debates

She (Dr. Eugenie Scott) objected to science being viewed through a religious filter and said the two should not be confused. "A biologist who studies enzymes that cause cell division does not bring the Qur'an or Bible into it. It does a great violence to science to run your explanation through a religious filter for this understanding to be accepted."

Lots of uncharted grounds here in the merging of cultures, religions, sciences, myths and human nature.

Islam as a culture carried on basic science while Europe wallowed in the ignorance of the Dark Ages. It would appear that there is at present no real dividing line, concepts set in stone by words, by culture, or in thought about the idea of science or evolution or even the strictest sense of creationism across the Islamic world.

Creationism Gains Ground in Europe

Prof Reiss will tell the gathering that many European nations are yielding to pressure exerted from both East and West in the growth of creationist beliefs, with Muslim immigrants on one side and the importation of Christian fundamentalism on the other…

“What the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries,” he told The Guardian newspaper yesterday. “These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries.

In London ... there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing advanced-level biology who do not accept evolution. That’s either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds.”…

But Prof Reiss said although Islam does not suggest that the world was very young – a tenet of Christian creationism – its texts say different organisms had separate origins.

The world continues to merge in thoughts and deeds. The future global society is one of a mix of many things both of scientific and religious myth.

The future is full of possibilities real, imagined and unimagined. The tidal wave of humanity and mixed ideas are already washing over the landscape in the growing Global Culture. Many perspectives are too close to focus on at present. I do not care whether Darwin or Jesus’ pet dinosaur wins in the end. I will not likely be alive in any case to see that future cultural landscape.

Food for thought.