of paradise and houris there has been some talk of how the quran is being (mis)interpreted by certain scholars who remain anonymous because of the obvious dangers such professions impose upon the individual. here's my two cents, the quran can uniquely claim to be virtually unmodified from the time it was revealed, at least that is the belief held by the world's muslim population, the bible has no such distinction, in fact, as tacitus says,
[...] It was a pity indeed to find that, alas, Moses didn't write all five of his books; or that Genesis was cobbled together over several centuries; or that Solomon didn't write Ecclesiastes and his Song. But faith is, well, faith, and Christianity survived and adapted. The collision of rational inquiry and religion destroyed neither, and the West marched on. [...]
Indeed, the West and Christianity did march on but with only a vestige what the actual religion preached, with modifications and changes a consistent element throughout, thus, Christianity has evolved into a widely disparate group of congregations, there is one for each subset of beliefs. A case in point is the recent controversy of gay priests being ordained. From what little I know of Christianity, homosexuality is explicitly disallowed, rather it is a fairly big sin in the eyes of God. Tacitus and fellow proponents will probably explain this away as adaptation, my question is what good is adaptation if the very character of faith is forever changed? Again in Tacitus' words, Islam is now facing the same music as Christianity did in the 19th century, which is true, however, Islam has, till now atleast proven to be rather reluctant to adapt, it is not facing the music very well in western eyes. One fact most muslims pride themselves on is the solid belief that the quran is as today as the day it was revealed. The recent controversy is about interpretation, which to me as a muslim is entirely irrelevant. I've been given a book with certain text, I can choose to believe one interpretation or another, for neither set of scholars can claim with absolute certainity that their interpretation is perfect. Luxenberg claims the quran has been through one level of translation, aramaic to arabic, and that one translation brought about such drastic changes in its meaning, what then must have happened to the text of the bible which has gone through a far greater number of translations before it came to be widely distributed in english? A muslim will simply tell you that the Quran is the word of God and it is He who will keep it consistent through time, ravages of translations and human interpretation notwithstanding.
Going off on a tangent here, a question for those muslim readers with better knowledge and understanding, why is it that what is illegal in this life is offered as reward in the hereafter? i'm alluding, of course to the promise of houris or virgins in paradise. Also, why should the men be promised such rewards and women nothing comparable? answers anyone?
ah... choice! three reasons i'm using firebird to browse the web, i) type ahead find, lets u jump through hyperlinks without using the mouse, highlighting the link text as you type it, u gotta use it to believe how fantastic this feature is ii) tabbed browsing, instead of ten different windows you can have everything tabbed in one window iii) it is fast and offers everything that IE does plus more
i'm not sure if u've noticed but tacitus seems to have gotten less objective and more invective. first there was the attack on islamic and/or iraqi culture citing the case of a little girl who'd been raped and then subjected to physical abuse from her own sick family members, latest is his diatribe about how islam is one of the "few movements, peoples, or ideologies that have in the course of history sought to destroy Western Civilization as such". it's funny how newspapers twist the truth, the headlines convey something and the actual article says something entirely different. two cases in point, the first was an article in the san jose mercury news last week that spoke about a tape that had surfaced in baghdad, with saddam hussein allegedly urging a "holy war". the actual article did not mention anything about a holy war as such, saddam hussein urged the iraqis to "wage a jihad against the americans". "jihad" in this context was not related to religion at all, rather it was an exhortation for the iraqis to fight the people who'd toppled hussein. the second article that caught my attention was in the wall street journal, the headline said something akin to "iraqi scientists talk about attempt to create biological weapons", the article was actually about a failed attempt to use ricin, back in 1991 and the methods used even then were so crude the whole thing was scrapped before it even got off the ground. my point is, why do respected newspapers sensationalize the headline at the cost of credibility? posted by ubaid - Sunday, July 20, 2003 at 1:57 PM -
0 comments -
post anonymously
in the beginning the following is an excerpt from a remarkable commentary entitled, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, an essay by sf writer Neal Stephenson on the evolution of operating systems, the companies that make them and associated paranoia. But this excerpt is not about software at all, it is an interesting view of how things are and why they are that way,
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds.
Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely--and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you've got some tools.
In this country, the people who run things--who populate major law firms and corporate boards--understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.
And not only do these people feel some responsibility to their own children, but to the country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile and cynical, of course, but many spend at least part of their time fretting about what direction the country is going in, and what responsibilities they have. And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando.
[.....]
The entire essay is rather long but definitely worth your time, especially if you have more that a cursory association with computing and software.
getting ripped off in san jose this was a revelation to me, bananas at albertsons - 79c/lb, bananas, same quality and brand at an indian grocery store, same city - 19c/lb. what kind of a business model is that? the highway robbery kind?
why does usps allow fedex to have its dropboxes right outside the usps post offices and on their own property? anyone's gotten an explanation? posted by ubaid - Sunday, July 13, 2003 at 11:13 AM -
0 comments -
post anonymously
switching cities from india to the us and then from los angeles to san jose, from graduated and unemployed to graduated and interning, from family to friends to no one. it has been one rocking week for me. in the space of five days i'd set foot in three different countries and four different cities, phew! i'm tired.
san jose has a sucky transit system, that is my first impression atleast. the worst thing is there is nothing like the trip planner at the LA met transit authority's mta.net. u can call up and find routes it seems but the wait on the phone is a little above my tolerance level. you'd think with all the tech muscle this area has someone would put a trip planner online here, hmm, i can smell an opportunity.....
in other news, i spent one hour at the light rail station the other day, the first train i couldn't get into coz i'd been waiting to see if trains were still runnig at that hour before i splurged on a ticket (when u r earning peanuts u need to watch every dime ;)), the second one i left coz in my telephonic conversations i mixed up which direction i was supposed to go, it was the third train that i finally hopped onto. posted by ubaid - Saturday, July 12, 2003 at 2:41 PM -
0 comments -
post anonymously
quote the definition of beauty is easy; it is what leads to desperation --valery posted by ubaid - Sunday, July 06, 2003 at 4:54 PM -
0 comments -
post anonymously
i'm back in los angeles that is. read this. gotta run, but, as arnie said, i'll be back. very soon. posted by ubaid - Tuesday, July 01, 2003 at 10:55 PM -
0 comments -
post anonymously
