Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2023

An Islamic Court Finally Gets Something Right

Malaysia’s top court has ruled that non-Muslims can no longer use the word “Allah” when referring to God. This despite the long-standing trend of Christians and other groups using the same name to refer to God in scriptures, prayers, songs and normal conversation.

The word isn’t a local Malay one, but rather a borrowing from Arabic. However, some Malaysians have no other word in their current vocabulary to refer to the Supreme Being. But apparently the two-thirds of the Malaysian population that profess Islam are now going to have exclusive use. Authorities worry that failure to distinguish Allah as a unique understanding of Divinity could result in confusion and lead people to be converted away from their religion. So they’ve legislated away the confusion.

Sounds about right to me.

Friday, December 16, 2022

Too Hot to Handle: Different Ways to Die in the Dark

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Islamophobia is the hot topic of the day. Once again Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is breaking new legal ground. Motion-103, introduced by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, is allegedly intended to combat religious discrimination, often referred to in the media as Islamophobia.

Its detractors claim Motion-103 would make for bad law: too broad, too specifically focused on Islam rather than religious discrimination generally, too confused between racism and religious discrimination.

Tom: First of all, are we “phobic”, Immanuel Can?

Friday, August 05, 2022

Too Hot to Handle: Islam Fading

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

This is a curious little video:

Tom: As you know, IC, I tend to take such things with a dumpster-sized grain of salt. There’s enough disinformation circulating these days to keep the Christian perpetually on his or her toes. But the gist of this video is that Islam’s popularity and reach may not be all it is cracked up to be. Rather than growing prodigiously as we have assumed, the evidence may suggest the influence of Islam is actually shrinking.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Too Hot to Handle: Keeping It Controversial

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Matthew Block at the National Post says it’s a bad time to be religious in Canada.

Now of course he’s looking across the religious spectrum, not just at Christians, touching on everything from proposed government training and certification of imams on to the Quebec government’s plan to ban ostentatiously religious clothing through to the resistance to Trinity Western opening a law school.

Evidently it’s not just terrorism the Canadian government is concerned about, and it’s not just Canada where religious restrictions are either being considered or have already been rolled out.

Tom: I’m not a fan of the hyper-regulatory state, Immanuel Can. Do you see any silver lining here?

Friday, July 15, 2022

Too Hot to Handle: Collision Impending

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Germans in Stuttgart staged a protest rally last weekend over “family values”. At least 4,500 people took to the streets to protest new school curriculum that puts special emphasis on “sexual diversity and sexual minorities”.

What’s interesting about the German situation is that against the wishes of many Germans the Merkel government is importing unprecedented numbers of Muslims into its school system while simultaneously pushing an increasingly liberal social agenda, also against the wishes of a not-insignificant number of its citizens.

Tom: I bring this up, Immanuel Can, because our own Canadian government is on precisely the same trajectory and the U.S. is not far behind. It seems to me spectacularly ill-conceived social policy to pit one set of values against another. The cultural collision, when it comes, promises to be loud and destructive.

What are they thinking, IC?

Friday, October 22, 2021

Too Hot to Handle: Forgive Us, But …

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

In Islam, the word tawbah refers to the process of asking Allah for forgiveness. The ritual is comprised of three stages:

  • Recognizing your sins and mistakes;
  • Feeling ashamed to having violated Allah’s trust;
  • Making a promise to never repeat the mistake.

Western culture, on the other hand, has largely dispensed with the practice of seeking forgiveness, not least because a public confession of wrongdoing may create liability issues. So you get bafflegab like, “I regret if anyone was offended by ...” instead of a sincere apology.

Tom: Immanuel Can, can you recall the last time someone unsaved asked you to forgive them?

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Ten Commandments That Failed

It seems morbid, perhaps, to be raising the topic of 9/11 going on two decades later. It was a sad, bitter moment, one that we might all wish to forget.

But wisdom does not always come quickly, and events of this magnitude take a very long time to understand. There are some things which are best left unsaid in the heat of the moment, but are better brought slowly to the surface when due time has passed. Such is the case with what I am writing today.

Even now, the fall of the World Trade Towers is not an easy subject.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Unhobbling Don Quixote’s Horse

In a couple of earlier posts this week I looked at some of the differences between the premillennial and amillennial schools of thought about Bible prophecy. You can find them here and here if you’re interested.

All beliefs about prophecy have practical implications of one sort or another, but the one most likely to ruffle feathers in the here-and-now, I think, is postmillennialism. That makes it worth chewing over a little.

Thursday, November 01, 2018

An Islamic Court Finally Gets Something Right

 The most recent version of this post is available here.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Heretics and Coffee

What is a heretic, really, for practical purposes?

her·e·tic, noun, one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine

No, no. If we’re going to sling around religious terminology, we’d better consult the experts:

“Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same …”
— The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2089)

We use the word pretty casually in Christian circles when someone says something a little off the spiritually-beaten track, but mostly we mean it frivolously.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Three Kinds of Peace

Nick Lowe’s song (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? remains a staple in Elvis Costello’s live show more than forty years after Lowe penned it. Its simplicity and straightforwardness stand in sharp contrast to Costello’s ornate verbiage and characteristic cynicism, and yet the Lowe song often gets the strongest reaction of anything Costello performs. Why not? I mean, who could rightly disagree with the sentiment?

John Lennon famously urged us to Give Peace a Chance. If anyone suggested we Give War a Chance by way of response, it never got much radio airplay. There are times when men find compelling reasons to fight, but peace is usually preferable to bloodshed and death. Everyone agrees about that.

But peace means different things to different people.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Ten Commandments That Failed

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Too Hot to Handle: Rose-Colored Glasses

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The inimitable Conrad Black sums up a recent conversation with atheist and former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and reviews her latest book Heretic here.

Hirsi Ali has taken on the unenviable — and probably impossible — task of reforming Islam from the outside.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Too Hot to Handle: Different Ways to Die in the Dark

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Too Hot to Handle: Forgive Us, But …

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Too Hot to Handle: Keeping It Controversial

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, March 04, 2016

Too Hot to Handle: Collision Impending

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, September 04, 2015

Too Hot to Handle: Islam Fading

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Too Hot to Handle: Let’s Make Sure They Hate Us Enough

A more current version of this post is available here.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Too Hot to Handle: Reforming Islam

The most current version of this post is available here.

Friday, April 10, 2015

Too Hot to Handle: Forgive Us, But …

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

The Emptiness of the West

In a post entitled “ISIS and the Missing Christ”, Andrew Klavan points out that in the post-post-Christian western world, there’s no “there” here:
“As much as I believe in capitalism as a method of economic development, a capitalist life is empty without spiritual content. Indeed, as much as I believe in individual freedom as the only worthwhile goal of any political system, individual freedom too is empty without spiritual content.

It is in that emptiness that militant Islam grows like the cancer it is.”

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Room for Vengeance

There seems to be no end to the number of people who feel themselves personally responsible for the execution of justice.

There’s former rugby player Steve Waterfield who, waking to find a burglar in his apartment, was disinclined to simply let him make a run for it. He declared to himself, “Right son, you’re getting a whacking”, blocked the doorway, beat the trespasser bloody and left him reeling.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Three Kinds of Peace

The most current version of this post is available here.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

No Equivalency Here

After all his trash-talking of Christianity over the years, it’s unusual to see Bill Maher have a moment or two of unexpected lucidity on the Charlie Rose show:

*     *     *     *     *

Bill Maher: There are illiberal beliefs that are held by vast numbers of Muslim people.

Charlie Rose: A vast number of Christians too.

BM: No, no. That’s not true. Not true. Vast numbers of Christians do not believe that if you leave the Christian religion you should be killed for it. Vast numbers of Christians do not treat women as second-class citizens. Vast numbers of Christians do not believe that if you draw a picture of Jesus Christ, you should get killed for it.

Sunday, December 07, 2014

“It’s All Under Control …”

“Nothing happening here. You can move along any time now ...”
How many times have you heard that line?

If someone doesn’t come right out and say it (or something quite like it), a distraction is served up in the timeliest possible fashion. Remember Bill Clinton’s famous four-day bombing of Iraq just as the House of Representatives commenced his own impeachment hearing?

Or the problem may magically just go away, as in the disappearance from the news for the last month or so of anything whatsoever to do with the Ebola virus, when well over 1,000 Americans are now potentially infected.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Incoherence of the Left

I’ve seen this one coming for a while, though I’m far from the only observer of modern society to note the inevitability of internecine strife within progressivism.

The social liberal is, after all, a profoundly incoherent creature in hot denial of the reality that any genuine claim to the benefits he or she seeks to extract from society can exist only on the basis of Judeo-Christian principles he or she despises.

That is to say, when you reject the existence of a creator and therefore the value of individual men and women to him, you lose your rational basis for the ever-increasing list of “rights” to which members of oppressed or marginalized groups claim to be entitled.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Hats Off to the Imam

The Portage Daily Graphic has an interesting piece on Imam Bilal Philips, accused by the Philippines of “recruiting and inciting people to commit terrorism”.

Philips runs an online Islamic university he says has 180,000 students — out of Qatar, of all places — and has been banned at various times from the U.S., the U.K., Kenya, Germany and Australia. His YouTube videos explain the penalties for homosexuality under Islamic law. Needless to say, he has generated his share of controversy.

Oh, by the way, he’s back in Canada. From a citizenship standpoint at least, he’s one of ours. Which of course is neither my call, nor is it really any of my business.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Islam 100, Post-Christianity 0

We all know how deals with the devil usually wind up.

Lord Scott, a former UK Supreme Court judge, has a far-from-original way to combat ‘Islamophobia’: it’s called unilateral prostration. During a debate on how relationships between the Muslim community and other religious groups in the UK might be improved, he suggested the following:
“I do just wonder that if an improvement is needed between the faith groups, one way of promoting that might be to encourage interfaith marriages.”
If you find the concept of “interfaith marriages” with Islam as one of the parties less than entirely plausible, you’ve probably been paying attention. Here’s how it worked out in Lord Scott’s family:
“Of my two sons one has become a Muslim and of my two daughters one of those has become a Muslim, and I have 12 lovely grandchildren, seven of whom are little Muslims.”
Umm ... call me a nit-picker, but that’s not “interfaith marriage”. That’s wholesale capitulation. I believe the technical term is “conversion”.

And it’s all one way.

Tuesday, July 01, 2014

An Islamic Court Finally Gets Something Right

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Islam, Christianity and Secularism

Interesting things on TV these days.

If you missed it, which I certainly did, in this YouTube clip from last Friday’s show, Bill Maher — surprisingly, for such a notorious secularist — connects the actions of Boko Haram (the Nigerian schoolgirl abductors, for anyone not watching the news) to Islam “at large”, stating plainly that “It’s not just a few bad apples”, much to the consternation of fellow leftist Ariana Huffington, who begs to differ.

Matt Welch, Editor-in-Chief of Reason Magazine agrees with Maher (with a considerable number of qualifications): “Islam is providing a disproportionate share of radical nutbags killing people right now.”

Baratunde Thurston, CEO of Cultivated Wit and author of How To Be Black, dislikes Maher’s assessment and disagrees with Welch’s about the “disproportionate share”: “I don’t think Islam has any monopoly on darkness and nutbags and crazy rhetoric and violence.”

Maher replies: “It’s not a monopoly, but it’s the Titanic hitting the iceberg compared to Whitney Houston dying in her bathtub.”

Ouch.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Heretics and Coffee

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Saturday, March 01, 2014

The Deafening Silence of 9/11

The most current version of this post is available here.