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Religion - Vyoos

They want to build a mosque near Ground Zero

August 4th 2010 03:46

VYOOS EDITORIAL
They are going to build a mosque and Islamic community centre close to Ground Zero in New York. The final obstacle to the development has just been removed with a vote by New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission to reject landmark status for an existing building on the site. The rejection, which was unanimous, will allow for demolition of the existing building and construction of the mosque and community complex.

It is a massive project - the mosque will be 13 storeys tall - and it received considerable opposition. This is perhaps not surprising. To put it in the bluntest terms, Ground Zero exists because of an attack by Islamic fanatics on New York's World Trade centre which killed thousands. Now they want to build a mosque next door?

Opponents of the $100 million project, including 9/11 first-responders and family members of victims of the terror attacks, said the location would be "insensitive". Some went further, screaming "Shame on you!" at the nine commissioners who sit on the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission as they emerged from the meeting on Monday which cleared the final obstacle.

A different response came from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which praised the committee for ``standing up for the principles of religious freedom and tolerance''.

``We congratulate the Landmarks Preservation Commission for promoting our nation's core values and not letting bias get in the way of the rule of law,'' the organisation said.

Another group, called September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which advocates peace and opposes the war in Afghanistan, also commended the decision.

"We understand the grief suffered by all those who also lost loved ones," they said. "However, we cannot allow grief to give way to intolerance and bigotry. Murderers killed our loved ones on 9/11, not Muslims."

Well said. This is obviously a voice of reason, and they do well to resist commenting on the short-sightedness of those who opposed this plan on emotional grounds. So Vyoos will do it for them.

We say “shame” on opponents of this plan. You are the voice of unreason. Your views ultimately come from the same blinkered, self-serving intolerance which leads to acts of fanaticism.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: North America, US, Religion, Vyoos Editorial

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A story about a woman’s rights, lefts, hooks and upper cuts

May 18th 2010 03:54

Saudi Arabia’s religious police are not popular. Their job, fundamentally, is to ensure that Saudi women behave the way Saudi men think they should behave.

The thinking of Saudi men can be summed up by the fact that they have religious police in the first place.

Recently one woman, aged in her 20s, visited an amusement park with a young man. This is the sort of irresponsible behaviour which young people will get up to without adequate supervision. How, for example, are the religious police to know, just by looking at two young people strolling around an amusement park, if they are married? It is important to know this, of course, because in Saudi Arabia it is a crime for an unmarried couple to be alone together.

The religious police approached the two young people and initiated questioning about the legality of their activity.

In response, the young woman punched a policeman. Then she punched him again. In fact, she landed quite a number of blows, and as a consequence he was taken to hospital to be treated for fairly serious facial injuries.

Now the story worsens. Instead of decrying the violence as an outrageous and irresponsible denial of the customs and traditions of Saudi society, many women in the country are cheering.

One, a women's rights activist named Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, said, “To see resistance from a woman means a lot. People are fed up with these religious police, and now they pay for the humiliation they cause. There will be more resistance.''

Fighting words. Policemen beware.

The names of the young couple and date of the incident have not been made public. The woman faces a lengthy prison term and lashings – not for punching the policeman, but for refusing to confirm her relationship to the man.

Sources: News Corp, The Media Line news agency, Okaz newspaper, Jerusalem Post newspaper.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Religion, Sexism

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Questions about the afterlife

April 19th 2010 11:38

A remarkable story has unfolded today about the near-death experience of a three-year-old boy in Germany.

The story has three extraordinary levels. The first is that Paul Eicke, of Berlin, revived three hours and 18 minutes after drowning. The child fell into a pond at his grandfather's house and is thought to have been in it for at least several minutes before he was noticed and pulled from the water.

Efforts to resuscitate him failed. The boy's father gave him heart massage and mouth-to-mouth for 10 minutes until a medical helicopter arrived. The paramedics on board continued resuscitation procedures during a 10-minute flight to hospital, where doctors then took over and tried for "hours" to save the child. Just after they gave up, however, Paul Eicke's heart decided to start beating again.

The second remarkable fact is that it appears Paul will make a full recovery, suffering no brain damage because of the coldness of the water he fell into. His core temperature after being pulled from the pond was measured at 28 degrees, compared to a normal human body level of 37 degrees. It is known that cold temperatures slow the metabolism and allow the body to survive longer without oxygen, but Paul's case is still exceptional. "When children have been underwater for a few minutes they mostly don't make it," said Professor Lothar Schweigerer, director of the clinic to which Paul was taken. "This is a most extraordinary case." That view is supported by an American study which showed that, of children who survive drownings, 92 per cent are found within two minutes of submersion.

The third remarkable aspect of the story surfaced after Paul was well enough to speak — when he was able to tell those around his hospital bed what he had seen and done during the three hours and 18 minutes he was thought to be dead.

Remember, this is the story of a three-year-old, someone unlikely to have woken and recognised the reality TV and sensationalist magazine possibilities.

Paul Eicke told his family, friends and assembled staff that he had been to heaven. And there, he said, he had seen his dead grandmother. "There was a lot of light and I was floating," Paul said. "I came to a gate and saw Grandma Emmi on the other side. She said, 'You go back to your mummy. I'll wait for you here'.''

He added, "Heaven looked nice, but I am glad I am back with mummy and daddy now." Mummy and daddy, no doubt, agree.

Near-death experiences like that described by Paul Eicke are not new. Popular interest in what are commonly termed NDEs was sparked by the book Life After Life, written by Raymond Moody and published in 1975, but NDEs have been studied for many years by people in a variety of fields, including psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology and hospital medicine.

All this leads to an Agence France Presse news story of two weeks ago which said NDEs are reported by between 11 and 23 per cent of survivors of heart attacks. The report used that fact to introduce what could be the fourth extraordinary level of this story. Or, perhaps, it proves that there was nothing extraordinary about the Paul Eicke story, nor about any other NDE.

AFP reported the findings of a study in Slovenia, published in the respected Belgian peer-review journal Critical Care, which investigated 52 heart attack cases, 11 of which reported NDEs. The researchers found no common link in terms of age, gender, education, religion, fear of death, time of recovery or drugs used to resuscitate the patients.

They did find one common link however — high levels of carbon dioxide, and to a lesser degree potassium, in the blood.

Can these things create hallucinatory experiences? Medical science isn't sure. The researchers say further work is needed. But it could be the beginning of the end for notions of premature visits to the afterlife.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Europe, Happy Spot, Health, Psychology, Religion, Science

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The archbishop's take on social media

August 6th 2009 23:28

Internet social networking sites which promote themselves as communities are in fact undermining community life. So are texting and emails.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: UK, Human nature, Religion, Social media, Technology

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Would Christ have wept?

March 22nd 2009 20:48

The spectacled eider duck

Mary Colwell is a Catholic lay activist and environmentalist. About 15 years ago she went deep into the Arctic to film the spectacled eider duck, a rare species which lives all year round above the Arctic Circle. While other birds fly south for winter, it spends the dark months, as Colwell describes it, "sitting in the middle of the frozen Baring Sea".

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Animals, Environment, Religion

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