Sunday, November 16, 2008

18 Marḥeshwan 5769: International Day for Tolerance/Button Day

Greetings.

Worthy cause of the day: “SAVE THE WOLVES OF THE ROCKIES FROM SLAUGHTER”.

Relevant to Divine Misconceptions:
  1. I am annoyed over one of the groups promoted in one the ads which Google Ads produced recently for my blog, and so I would like to promote that group’s archenemy, Jews for Judaism.

  2. “Priest: Obama Voters Must Do Penance”: Thus is it written:
    A priest at a South Carolina Roman Catholic church says his parishioners shouldn't take Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because of the Democrat's stance on abortion.
    Fair enough. The Catholic Church is entitled to decide what is offensive to Catholicism and requiring serious penance. But this is the paragraph which is truly problematic:
    But, reports CBS affiliate WSPA, [Father] Newman said his congregants shouldn't take communion until they do penance for supporting the man he called the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president.
    Note the term “pro-abortion”. I have previously attacked the term on August 13, 2008 and February 12, 2008, noting that, unless I am very wrong, no politician has ever come out being actually for abortions, only for government noninterference in women obtaining abortions. I find it very disturbing that people keep making this major mistake in terminology which reflects paranoia and not anyone’s actual views.

  3. “Tomboy protests a security threat?”: Thus is it written:
    Malaysia's police, who have recently cracked down on dissident bloggers and broken up anti-government demonstrations, say that protests over an edict against Muslim women wearing trousers are a security threat.
    Mainly Muslim Malaysia's National Fatwa Council recently issued a religious ruling that wearing trousers was un-Islamic.
    It said that, by wearing trousers, young girls risked becoming "tomboys" who became sexually active.
    That move triggered small protests later from two non-Muslim non-government organizations -- Katagender and Food-not-Bombs.
    I will leave it to Islamic scholars to determine if it is un-Islamic for women to wear pants. A protest being a security threat is frankly rather strange; unless the protest is unusually violent and threatens to spread and completely destabilize the country, this is hard to imagine. “Security threat” smells of an inappropriate government response. The idea that girls wearing pants leads to them becoming sexually active is probably the most far-fetched notion in the article; if there were actual empirical evidence of it, people in the West would probably be pushing for girls not to wear pants so as to avoid teen pregnancy. Anyone who knows of a study showing such a thing (or the opposite, for that matter), please let me know.

  4. I have contributed two crummy church signs towards the latest issue of Crummy Church Signs. Come and bask in the utter crumminess of bad church advertising!
Today’s news and commentary:Today’s weird thing, submitted by Barry, is “12 Oddly Specific Museums Preserving Our History ”. Enjoy and share the weirdness.

Aaron

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