Briton wins Templeton Prize | csmonitor.com

Briton wins Templeton Prize | csmonitor.com: "Barrow says the two fields do not contradict as long as each is kept in its own sphere. '[The Bible] is not attempting to explain the [science] of the origin of the earth,' he says, 'any more than we would use a physics textbook to try to tell people how they should act. That was not the purpose of the Bible, or scriptures in other traditions, and there is a long history of disasters following this type of literal interpretation of the textual materials.'"

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times

Math Professor Wins a Coveted Religion Award - New York Times: "Dr. Barrow said that in contrast with the so-called culture wars in America, science and religion had long coexisted peaceably in England. 'The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God,' he said."

Court: Hallucinogenic tea OK

~ A major win here for religious civil liberties. And an 8-0 shutout too. I find this to be a "Liberal" ruling, as it is allowing something the Federal Government wanted to ban. Not bad for a "Conservative" court. ~~~ TP

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Court: Hallucinogenic tea OK: "WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday rejected government arguments against use of a hallucinogenic tea in religious services.

The 8-0 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts stemmed from a New Mexico case involving O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao Do Vegetal, a Spiritst Christian sect originating in the Amazon Rainforest. The court`s newest justice, Sam Alito, did not take part in the case."

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/

Alito Often Ruled for Religious Expression - N Y Times

Alito Often Ruled for Religious Expression - New York Times: "Nathan J. Diament, the public affairs director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, said Judge Alito's record demonstrated 'a deep understanding' of the Free Exercise Clause. Mr. Diament mentioned Judge Alito's concurrence in a ruling allowing a Jewish teacher at William Paterson College in New Jersey to go forward with a lawsuit accusing the school administration of trying to force her out by scheduling events on Friday evenings. 'He didn't just agree that the suit should go forward,' Mr. Diament said. 'He went out of his way to express his philosophy on the need to accommodate religious individuals.'"

When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation - New York Times

When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation - New York Times: "When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation"

ABC News: Should Drug Laws Limit Religious Activities?

~~ I am a complete Libertarian on drug laws.

I hope the court rules for my side , of course .

Go Team !!! ~~ TP
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ABC News: Should Drug Laws Limit Religious Activities?: "The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the group could continue to drink hoasca. Now the issue has reached the Supreme Court in a case that is seen as a test of religious freedom in America.

The court will decide in Gonzales v. Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 requires the government to allow the church to continue to import and drink the tea."

Congratulations, It's a Theocracy! By David Sarno

~~` Cute headline this morning at Slate.com .

~~ TP

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Congratulations, It's a Theocracy! By David Sarno: "today's papers A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers.

Congratulations, It's a Theocracy!
By David Sarno
Posted Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005, at 4:50 AM PT "

Where Was God? ; By WILLIAM SAFIRE

January 10, 2005

http://www.nytco.com/

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Where Was God?

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

ashington

In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering?

After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers.

Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith. The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?

The poet-priest who wrote this book began with a dialogue between God and the Satan, then a kind of prosecuting angel. When God pointed to "my servant Job" as most upright and devout, the Satan suggested Job worshipped God only because he had been given power and riches. On a bet that Job would stay faithful, God let the angel take the good man's possessions, kill his children and afflict him with loathsome boils.

The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. When Job's friends said that he must have done something awful to deserve such misery, the reader knows that is false. Job's suffering was a test of his faith: even as he grew angry with God for being unjust - wishing he could sue him in a court of law - he never abandoned his belief.

And did this righteous Gentile get furious: "Damn the day that I was born!" Forget the so-called "patience of Job"; that legend is blown away by the shockingly irreverent biblical narrative. Job's famous _expression of meek acceptance in the 1611 King James Version - "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" - was a blatant misreading by nervous translators. Modern scholarship offers a much different translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver."

The point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled a book on this "The First Dissident.") Indeed, Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: in a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to him in Scripture.

Frankly, God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement. Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal "I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it."

The powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" The poet-priest's point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own.

Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)

Job's lessons for today:

(1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.

(2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.

(3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's cynicism.

E-mail: safire@nytimes.com

"Impact of the Beatles was so strong that it started a religious cult

: "'Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov, who suggests in all seriousness that the impact of the Beatles was so strong that it started a religious cult and helped bring down the Iron Curtain'

THE Russian defence minister, bought all the Beatles' LPs in 1984. Speaking before Sir Paul's concert in Red Square last year, he said:

'The Beatles had started a whole, huge movement in the Soviet Union which involved not thousands,not even hundreds of thousands, but millions of young people who became, as Communist publicists have said, inner immigrants.

'They still lived in the Soviet Union with their bodies, but mentally and spiritually, they were somewhere else. There was no bloodshed, no civil war, no revolution, no nothing. The country was already ready for the disappearance of Communism.

'One of the main reasons for that was that the Beatles had prepared a huge part of the country's population for these new, free values.'

>>>

The real story of the Beatles

Jul 13 2004



by David Charters, Daily Post

http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=14420896&method=full&siteid=50061&headline=the-real-story-of-the-beatles-name_page.html"

The War on the Web Sites to see on the road to Baghdad.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2080407/
The War on the Web
Sites to see on the road to Baghdad.
By Avi Zenilman
Updated Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 3:05 PM PT

The Iraq invasion will be the first major war on the Web. When the bombs start dropping, millions of Americans will crowd the Internet to catch up on the latest news, see pictures, and send e-mail to loved ones in danger. After you've checked out Slate—your first stop, right?—here's where you should you go for updates, speculation, on-the-ground blogging, official statements, and even war comedy.

Mainstream Media
The special Iraq Web sites for the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN are all good sources for late-breaking news, streaming video, maps, and nifty interactive backgrounders.

If you find the American Iraq pages overwhelming, then jump across the Atlantic to England's Guardian newspaper's Special Report: Iraq. The page's efficient organization and solid reporting make it easier to use than the American news sites. Don't miss the Guardian's "Weblog," which is less a blog than a portal to the day's best journalism. Track the effects of the war on the global economy and on oil markets at Bloomberg's energy markets page.

Background Information
What exactly is a BLU-118 Thermobaric bomb? How about a GBU-16 Paveway II? Globalsecurity.org has an excellent encyclopedia of the weapons and vehicles the United States will use in the war. Its Target Iraq page is jam-packed with links and specific military information. The site also publishes U.N. documents and resolutions.

Defensetech.org is a blog that provides a boatload of information on new military technologies and national security. While not organized in any systematic way, it always has something new and interesting.

The Council on Foreign Relations runs a superb Iraq Resource Center with everything from a timeline to journal articles.

The Official Story
(Almost) daily State Department briefings can be found here. The White House posts free video of all presidential speeches and announcements (as well as Ari Fleischer's press briefings). Britain's official briefings are also available.

Also online is the Iraq News Agency, a mouthpiece for Saddam's positions and propaganda.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Iraq crisis section shows how the U.S. government is conveying the news to the people of the Middle East.

The United Nations' official Iraq page is hopelessly cluttered and often unresponsive (not unlike the organization itself), but if you can get it to work, it's a great clearinghouse.

Blogwar
Dear_raed is a must-read blog by a current Baghdad resident. Read his fascinating March 16 ramble about how he reluctantly supports the U.S. march to war and doubts the influence of fundamentalist Islamism in Iraq. It's not clear how the author manages to evade Saddamite censorship and scrutiny. We sent an e-mail asking how he does it. If he replies, we will tell you.

Www.kevinsites.net is a blog by Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent stationed in northern Iraq. Sites' reporting is unvarnished, direct, and full of the nitty-gritty details of war reporting A March 17 post, "Whispers of War," is a window on the professional rivalries that persist, even a war zone.

The Middle-East Reaction
Arab News is an English-language, semiofficial Saudi media outlet. Although its reporting may not always be reliable, it suggests how this war is playing in Riyadh. Lebanon's Daily Star is more trustworthy but much less entertaining. For a quick digest of how the Middle-East media portrays the war, the World Press Review's Middle-East section is excellent.

Al Jazeera video is available at www.favo.tv, an English-language Web site that streams from various TV and radio stations worldwide. It is often unreliable, so if you understand Arabic, the official Al Jazeera site may be a better source for the broadcasts.

Ha'aretz's special Iraq section will be a valuable source of news if Saddam decides to attack Israel. For a more offbeat Israeli view of the war, check out the Iraq-centric ribbityfrog.blogspot.com.

If Chatterbox's Kurd Sellout Watch isn't enough, visit KurdMedia, a news site/portal for all things Kurdish.

Curiosities
We can't find any real-time satellite photographs on the Web that would help track the war, but Terraserver posts satellite images of nearly every world city, including Baghdad. It's hard to make out what exactly is going on in the pictures, but it's very cool nonetheless.

Should United States troops worry about sandstorms? Check out this Iraq weather map.

Who's going to lead Iraq after the war? What are the odds of capturing Osama Bin Laden by October? What will the terror alert level be in June 2003? At Tradesports you can now bet on international politics, with nothing at stake but fake money and bragging rights.

Humor
If you need a brief respite from the grim news, take a breather at Iraq Humor Central. Be sure not to miss the parody slide show. Also, check out the Saddam games section, where you can do everything from playing the role of a crazed U.N. weapons inspector to creating a goofy press conference.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2080407