My God is better than your God

How is it that conversion only works one-way for certain religions ? After hearing about this case I wonder if the world would be better off if we all turned atheist......

Asia Times:

Losing faith in Afghanistan
Syed Saleem Shahzad KARACHI

Even as the Bush administration steps up pressure on Afghanistan over the plight of a Christian convert, thousands of youths are descending on Kabul to demand that he be hanged for renouncing Islam.

US President George W Bush and other Western leaders have latched onto the case of Abdul Rahman, 41, who was arrested last month and accused of apostasy for converting to Christianity in 1990, saying that the issue was one of "honoring the universal principle of freedom".

For many Afghans, though, it is just another rallying point to step up pressure for a broader alliance against the presence of foreign forces in the country, while for the Bush administration and its allies it is an opportunity to rethink their position on Afghanistan. The United States has more than 18,000 troops in the country, while the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force numbers about the same. Germany and Italy have already hinted they may reassess military support for Afghanistan. And German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble suggested that Afghanistan could lose aid or technical support for reconstruction because of the case.

The US begun reducing its troop strength in Afghanistan this year and has indicated that it will continue to do so. Bush said this week that US forces did not help liberate Afghanistan from Taliban rule so that conservative Islamic judges could issue death sentences against people because of their religious beliefs. He added that he was "deeply troubled" by the case, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai to call for a "favorable resolution to this case at the earliest possible moment". The masses in Afghanistan are not listening, though.

"Regardless of the court decision [whether or not he is hanged], there is unanimous agreement by all religious scholars from the north to the south, the east to the west of Afghanistan, that Abdul Rahman should be executed," Engineer Ahmad Shah Ahmad Zai told Asia Times Online on telephone from Kabul.

Ahmad Shah is a prominent mujahideen leader and head of the Hizb-i-Iqtadar-i-Islami Afghanistan. He was an acting prime minister in the government of Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani before the Taliban came to power in 1996.

"There is widespread dissent among the masses against the activities of Christian missionaries. These missions exploit the poverty of Afghan people and they pay them to convert. These activities will only translate into fierce reaction as Afghans do not tolerate anything against their religion," Ahmad Shah said.

"Since Abdul Rahman comes from the Panjshir Valley, people of the area are coming down to Kabul to show their dissent against him and demand that the court execute him," Ahmad Shah explained.

Rahman, a former medical aid worker, faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for becoming a Christian. His trial began last week, and now the Afghan government is desperately searching for a way to drop the case, with the latest move being to call for Rahman to undergo psychological examinations to see whether he is fit to stand trial. Senior clerics in Afghanistan, however, have already given their verdict: he should die.

"We will not allow God to be humiliated," Abdul Raoulf, a member of the Ulama Council, Afghanistan's main clerical organization, told Associated Press. "We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left."

Asia Times Online contacts in Afghanistan say that ministers in the cabinet are reluctant to take a stand on the issue because of fierce public reaction. There are clear indications that the minute the court gives any decision other than death penalty, Islamic parties will make it an issue with which to tackle the US-backed Karzai government and allied forces for intervening in the Islamic laws of Afghanistan. The Afghan constitution has contradictory provisions. Article 7 commits Afghanistan to observing the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of religion. But Article 3 says that no law can contradict Islam.

It is significant that the issue has come at a time that efforts are being made by Islamic parties in the north and south to forge an alliance inside and outside parliament. Unpublicized negotiations have taken place in southern Afghanistan between various tribal leaders so that they can present a united front against the foreign presence in the country.

In a separate development, the Taliban's spring offensive has begun, with the insurgency significantly increasing its activities. Rahman's case is the latest of several controversial issues that have served to strengthen the hands of clerics calling for a nationwide, broad-based opposition to foreign elements in the country. Last year, anger swept the country over reports that US interrogators had desecrated the Koran at the Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba, while cartoons published in Europe this year ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed further inflamed passions.

Religious aspects apart from the serious political implications, Rahman's case raises some thorny religious issues, with non-Muslims questioning how it can be acceptable for people of other faiths to convert to Islam, but not the other way round.

"It is more of an ontological debate than anything," said renowned Muslim intellectual Shahnawaz Farooqui. "If somebody tries to practice his religion or faith, Muslim society will not stop him or pressurize him to change his faith. Nobody is allowed to even motivate a non-Muslim to change his religion. However, discourse is allowed. After such discourse, if somebody feels they want to embrace Islam, it is allowed," Shahnawaz said.

However, for a Muslim to change his religion, "he will have to be executed because it is related to an ontological debate". "If somebody at one point affirms the truth [belief in God] and then rejects it or denies it, it would jeopardize the whole paradigm of truth. This is such a big offense that the penalty can only be death." Execution for apostasy has been accepted in Muslim society from the times of the Prophet Mohammed, and there is no difference among the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, be they Hanafi, Malaki, Shaafai, Hanbli or Jafari (Shi'ite). "At the very most, some scholars argue that the person should be given time to rethink, and if he embraces Islam again, he will be forgiven," said Shahnawaz. "I saw President Bush's statement in which he asked to honor the universal principle of freedom. This is not a question of social liberty or social rights or freedom, this is a question for the affirmation of truth and nobody will be allowed to distort the truth. No society can give people the right to distort the truth or play around with it".

Person of the week award goes to...

...Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette.

CanWest News Service:

Coming to the defense of Canada's seal hunt, a Liberal senator has lashed out at the United States' foreign policy, the Iraq war, the death penalty and the country's gun culture in an email to an American family considering cancelling a vacation because they are opposed to the "horrific" annual seal cull.

"What I find 'horrific' about your country is the daily killing of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of mainly black prisoners in U.S., the massive sale of guns to U.S. citizens every day, the destabilization of the whole world by the aggressive foreign policy of U.S. government, etc.," Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette wrote in an email response to the McLellan family of Minnesota.

The initial March 12 letter, from Ann, Pam, Nancy and Dale McLellan to all Canadian senators, urges an end to the "horrific mass slaughter of innocent harp seals" and warns of a boycott on travel and Canadian seafood because the annual cull is "going against what we like about Canada."

The McLellans wrote they have "great respect" for the country because their "ancestors" were Canadians and they live near the Canada-U.S. border, but they are loathe to spend $8,000 on a vacation while the hunt goes on.

Hervieux-Payette's response, coming two days later, defended the harp seal hunt as an exercise in controlling the population and ensuring the livelihood of local hunters and fishermen.

"They are not killed for sport reasons like our deer, moose by Canadian and U.S. hunters," the senator from Montreal wrote. "You may visit us and you will see that we are a safe and humane society, respecting the traditions of the aboriginal people, not trying to impose the 'white people' standards of living on them."

The regulated, two-month hunt of the 5-million-strong seal herd is intended to keep the fast-growing population in check and to maintain the fish stocks on which Inuit and Atlantic Canadian fishermen earn a living.

Senator George Baker, a Newfoundland Liberal, deemed his colleague's response inappropriate, but he said it may have been influenced by her time on the Senate legal affairs committee, where members were subject to a fierce protest when they were studying a recent animal cruelty bill.

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2006

Beowulf & Grendel

This releases tonight at the movies, and assuming I stay sober and/or no relatives drop by uninvited, I have a feeling I will go out and watch this tonight. :) Looks interesting, and I can finally visualize what my former English Literature teacher used to rave about on many a long lazy summer afternoon as I looked longingly outside the classroom window wishing I was somewhere else...

From The Guardian:

He is the original action hero, a fearless Norse warrior who slew a murderous troll and helped inspire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. And he is coming to a multiplex near you.The race to turn Beowulf, the hero of the first great written English poem, into a box-office star to rival the likes of Aragorn, Achilles and Alexander the Great, has begun.

Two films starring the fictional 6th-century sword-slinger are in production.Beowulf & Grendel, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, is a $12m co-production from Britain, Canada and Iceland, starring the Scots actor Gerard Butler. Filmed in Iceland, it is described by its producers as a "spiritual film".

Butler's Beowulf is a complex man who grows to understand and even sympathise with the troll Grendel.The second film, Beowulf, is a $70m Hollywood production financed by the American millionaire Steve Bing and Sony Pictures. Its director is Robert Zemeckis, whose crew will use the stop-motion technology recently employed in the children's film The Polar Express.

Beowulf is no children's film, however. The script, co-written by Roger Avary, Quentin Tarantino's collaborator on Pulp Fiction, has been described by its co-author Neil Gaiman as "... a sort of dark-ages Trainspotting [as in the film], filled with mead and blood and madness".Beowulf & Grendel is to be released this year; Zemeckis' film is in pre-production.

Adam Minns, the British film editor of Screen International magazine, said filming Beowulf was symptomatic of the industry's interest in "epic-scale, fantasy-type" material following the success of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings trilogy."Beowulf was one of the key inspirations for Lord of the Rings and I'm not at all surprised the success of that franchise has galvanised these two projects," he said.But adapting the poem to the big screen has proved difficult in the past. The 1999 Beowulf-inspired epic The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan, was an expensive flop. It was followed a year later by Beowulf, a lamentable science-fiction take on the poem starring Christopher Lambert. Both films failed to impress critics and audiences.Andrew Rai Berzins, the Canadian screenwriter for Beowulf & Grendel, cites the implausibility of parts of the story, which was written in Anglo-Saxon by an unknown author sometime between 700 and 1000.There was also a 50-year gap between the early events of the poem and Beowulf's climactic battle with a dragon, which proved a big hurdle in filming.His screenplay focuses on the battle between Beowulf and the troll, and fleshes out the story with "several significant characters".But he believes the script is true to "the bones of the story, the horror, the beauty and the doom".He said: "If the Beowulf poet rolls over in his grave, I'm trusting it'll just be to get a better view of the screen."A spokeswoman for Steve Bing's production company, Shangri-La Entertainment, declined to comment on its Beowulf script.

John Burrow, emeritus professor in the University of Bristol's English department, said Seamus Heaney's accessible 1999 translation of the "ripping yarn" had broadened interest, and that he would welcome the kind of mainstream interest the films might provoke.

Review: The Snow

The snow started falling on the sixth of September, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like a swarm of white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen - whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find the more evocative.....And at the beginning the people were happy.

But the snow doesn't stop. It falls and falls and falls. Until it lies three miles thick across the whole of the earth. Six billion people have died. Perhaps 150,000 survive.

'The Snow' is the latest offering from British sci-fi novelist Adam Roberts, and deals in part with themes of global apocalypse and human survival in in the face of catastrophic climatic change, and need to re-create social and political structures in the new era.

Curiously enough, Adams decides to choose as his main protagonist, Tira, a woman of south Asian Indian background (a profile also shared by Ursula Le Guin's main character in 'The Telling').

Adams succeeds in keeping the suspense going as to the origin of the snow and nature of what lies beneath the white frozen deserts. The book has shortcomings and is no classic, but is definitely an interesting book to read as those snowflakes settle gently outside on your window pane. :)

7.5/10.