Religion Dispatches
…world, Arabic numbers are called ‘Indian numbers,’ and why, in the West, ‘Indian numbers’ are called ‘Arabic numbers.’ In India they’re just known as numbers. No matter what they’re called, I think we can all agree they make life a lot easier. 2. Coffee Muslims invented coffee, and coffee is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies. At best it goes cold. In fact, one of the reasons coffee took off is because religious Muslims preferred the bever…
Read More…re. India: US Offers Asylum While Exporting Homophobia Speaking of aslyum, IndiaWest reported last week that an Indian gay couple who had been held for six months in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in El Paso, Texas, were granted asylum in December. Jagdish Kumar and Sukhwinder Sukhwinder left India in June 2012 and travelled by various means for a year through Dubai, Cyprus and several South and Central American countrie…
Read More…Shourie, journalist, occasional politician, and author of Missionaries in India, surveyed Indian Catholic missionary literature and concluded that it “sounds more like … the Pentagon, than like Jesus.” Moreover, just as critics of Muslims in America suggest that Islam is intolerant and therefore incompatible with American democracy, Indian authors such as these have criticized Christianity and its cousins for their claims that they alone possess…
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…at to call it. “Female feticide” is a little different. Almost everyone in India uses it to refer to sex-selective abortion. To a Western feminist, it sounds quite jarring, because it echoes the kind of language that the American anti-abortion movement uses. Since there isn’t much of an anti-abortion movement in India, there’s less sensitivity about such rhetoric. Still, some people there worry that the campaign against sex-selective abortion coul…
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…oversy embroiled him from the mid-’90s because he loved, and painted from, India. Politically-minded Hindu partisans objected to his portrayal of women. He painted not just women but Hindu goddesses, and he painted them as they have been painted for centuries: unclad. But secular Indian courts allowed advocates for the Hindu right to bring a case against Husain. He was accused of causing harm to the sensibilities of others. He faced not one case b…
Read More…stians and to stand firm against extremists from all quarters. This is why Egyptians and non-Egyptians alike are launching in the coming days a new initiative called ‘TahrirSquared.Net’, that aims to increase common civil society actions in Egypt and the region – wherever the Tahrir Square effect of joining hands against disunity and injustice has been multiplied. It was multiplied in the ‘Today, I am a Muslim too’ rally that took place in New Yor…
Read More…cause, despise Christians and attack them and their churches. But where do Egypt’s Christians go from here? What kind of country will Egyptians wake up to tomorrow? This is the pretext for military intervention. My preemptive proof? It’s more predictive. The military will use the resulting instability that emerges from its own violent crackdowns to belay democracy, arguing there can be no handover of power until Egypt is safe from its enemies, in…
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…ke away that free will, except for those who have the capacity to hack the code and reprogram the car. We normally think of robots as almost pure code, yet the scene last week when Graystone orders the Zoebot to rip off her arm raises some interesting stakes in this. It seems to me that people may be treating the Cylons differently depending on what mix of code and law they believe governs their behavior. And of course, those of you who study reli…
Read More…we find an investment advisor named Sean Hyman pushing “The Biblical Money Code,” which claims that advice “woven” into Scripture has helped him go from earning $15,000 to giving away up to $50,000 a year. Unlike Hovind, Hyman is giving away his system for free. All you have to do is sit through an hour-long video, during which Hyman explains how “to unlock vast amounts of wealth safely and ethically.” Fancy explanations are provided, but it’s act…
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…legation spoke for nearly an hour about the so-called crisis of 1948, when India and Pakistan had been partitioned. In fact he was confusing the subcontinent for mandatory Palestine, as India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947. He railed on and on about British imperialism, and the nefarious designs of the English monarchy upon South Asia—you can’t make this stuff up—and concluded by suggesting that India and Pakistan, which were apparently on…
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