"...I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me..." [Deuteronomy 5:8-10]
"I could cope, I could cope with all the stupidity, the cruelty, the ugly things that happen - it it wasn't for the fact that once in a while you'll do something that's so beautiful that it gives me hope for us all, for a moment..."
Anonymous street poem, found in the West End of Glasgow.
Is this new at Nice'n'Sleazy or had I just missed it?
The tale of King Robert comes from a poem by H.W.Longfellow (1807-1882). He was an arrogant king who was deposed by an angel, stripped of his robes, and forced to asume the role of a jester, with only a monkey for a friend.
Glasgow is a post-industrial city. Its murder, unemployment and heart-disease rates are amongst the highest in the Western World. It is not in Kentucky.
If you'd like to know more, check out its comedians. Try Sandy Nelson and Limmy.
I recently moved back after ten years away. It's nice to be back.
I took these pictures with a Nokia N95 during August 2008.
Grantura are mates from my London days. Here's their latest single, as played by Terry Wogan yesterday morning. Hooray! For all you colonials and foreigners out there, this is a "big thing" :)
Back in the old days, before Denyse O'Leary started persecuting me for my lack of beliefs (and presumably marked me as beyond redemption), I used to get concerned Christians writing to me regularly, trying to save my soul.
Invariably they'd put me on to C.S. Lewis. I guess they thought that if one old smart guy was able to convince himself to believe in fairy tales, then I should too. I'm sure it was meant as flattery.
Sadly, they'd then try to convince me that all of modern science was a conspiracy against Jebus, and we'd quickly fall out. Such is the way of things.
This was all brought back to mind when Gmail threw a Lewis quote at me quite by accident yesterday:-
"We are what we believe we are."
I don't think that's quite true. But it's interesting to think about what Christianity says we are...
It says we're all flawed. That I've no problem with. But for many Christians, it says we're all bad. Fallen. In need of saving. Intrinsically, well, evil.
But if Christianity does say that, then what does that say about its God, who made us in his image?
If you take the Bible as gospel, God-given truth, then there's no doubting that its deity does appear to have some very human, very fallible properties. All evil is his doing, just as much as all good. He's jealous. He's moody. He plays favorites. He's open to flattery. He's insecure. And, golly gosh, he changes his mind.
If God does exist, and He really is an all-encompassing, universe expanding being, then does it really make sense for him to be like that? I don't think so. Who was it who said that all theology is basically an attempt to explain away the problem of evil. Now that is a smart man I'd want to be like.
Anyway.
My parents grew up as Christians, and they definitely grew up believing that people are intrinsically fallen (even if, as I think with most believers, they didn't actually think people were bad).
I grew up in a different environment... It was idealistic. People, I believed, were intrinsically good.
I was wrong. I confused the capacity for good with goodness in nature, just as I think much of Christianity confuses the capacity for "badness" with "badness" in nature.
What I've come to realize is that people just are.
It's what they do which defines them, not what they believe.
It's interesting, I think, that much of Christian theology is based around arguing specifically that this is not the case... That all that matters is what we believe - not what we do.
Hey ho.
And with that, here's another accidental discovery, Nice work, Dale - but I don't agree...
Thanks again to Notes From Off Centre for being the sanest, sensiblist, and salubriousest Christian Blog on the Net... and for bringing Rexella into my life. Make sure you stick around for Jack's breakdown at 3:42.
And Rexella, if you're reading this... I'm always there for you if things don't work out with Jack. No pressure. As a friend.
I lived in central London for almost six years. I mean central. I could roll out of bed and stagger across the road for cocktails in Soho or shopping in Covent Garden. I walked twenty minutes across the Thames to work each day. My corporate life was pretty good too. I didn't have to wear a suit. I hung out with z-list celebrities and could choose to answer or delegate whacked-out complaints from the public as I liked. I was circling near the top of my career path, and my exposure to assholery was surprisingly limited.
But after a while, I was surprised to find that I wasn't happy. Most of my energy - and all my creative energy - was going into other people's work. Worse, it was work I didn't care for. I tried to make things better. I did change some things. But all in all, the corporation was happy with the gunk it was producing, and terrified it'd lose money if anything changed.
I looked for other jobs, doing similar things, making stuff I thought I might be proud of... But everywhere the corporate "thing" seemed to loom larger. If I was going to advance, it was going to be in a suit-and-tie, with increased seriousity, less levity, and a damn site less free reign.
It was time for a change.
And so, I packed up my stuff and moved back to Glasgow, where I'd spent most of my life before. Sure, I'll probably end up back on the corporate trail... But it was time to try some other things first, and to see what would stick.
But what to do first? I needed a break. I needed to get fit, to clear my head, to break bad habits, to get back the soul that London had squeezed out of - that I had let it suck away...
And so, gentle reader, I found myself heading to a Buddhist Retreat, to the Holy Island, off Arran on the West Coast of Scotland, for a week long program of meditation and yoga, booked pretty much at random and very much at the last minute.
I knew people who had been there before, as well as to Samye Ling and to Plum Village. But the Holy Island sounded quieter, smaller, more isolated and relaxed. It was a good choice.
There were around thirty of us on the course. I expected lycra-clad, po-faced new agers, all slender muscle tone and hostile to humour. Instead, they were lovely, a great mix of people and abilities. The teachers were superb. We learned various yoga styles and techniques throughout the week, and by the end I felt fit, fabulous and healthy. It cost bugger all. The food was stunning. There was no booze, no fags, no TV, no internet, and not a bad word said all week.
After my staggeringly unhealthy London lifestyle, it was a joy to get up at seven each day, to breath the morning air, to hear the seagulls and smell the sea. Everything was optional, but I tried to make the most of it. Most mornings I joined the island volunteers (some Buddhist, some not) for prayers and meditation. After breakfast, there were usually two yoga classes before the high point of everyone's day. Lunch. Did I mention the food? It was all vegetarian of course, and truly legendary. Then we'd have one or two more classes in the afternoon, and usually a talk in the evening, before soup, a walk, and an early night.
The main theme of the week was mindfulness, a central teaching in Buddhism, but now getting a lot of press as a stress-free, drug-less alternative to pretty much all of the ills, travails and horrors of modern life.
A small few of the talks were a bit new-agey for my tastes, but hey, there's wisdom everywhere if you're open to it, and I was certainly in the mode for learning lots.
A true high-point was the visit of two High Lamas to the Island. Even the long-term-island volunteers were impressed. Taking questions from all-comers, they answered in Tibetan.
"Is there truth in all religions" asked a friend.
"There is only one path" came the answer through the translator.
"So Buddhism is the only true religion?"
"Attachment to the path is not the path".
Put that on a t-shirt.
One lovely girl asked about anger she felt when reading news stories about places such as Zimbabwe and Burma.
"Anger hurts only yourself... When you are in a position to change something, you should do what you can to change it... Anger only leads to more anger..."
Another question asked whether the monks felt that there was a growing understanding of the need for peace and love worldwide. Were things getting better? The answer was just brilliant...
"In my experience, I find where loving kindness and compassion is practiced, we find more loving kindness and compassion. Where it is not, we do not".
Wowser.
And so, I returned to the real world, refreshed, healthier, and with a million more stories to tell :)
Notes from Off Centre has a hilarious parody of Jack Van Impe, a whack-job Americanian TV preacher with a kind of Bible-verse-Tourettes. Here he is, getting all hot and bothered about The Da Vinci Code...
I know how he feels. It was a terrible book. (And that Rexella chick is hawt).
Sometimes the words just flow out. Sometimes I write things I wouldn't normally say. Dagnabit, sometimes I've been a bit rude. Juvenile, even.
And so it's been with Canadian grandmother Denyse O'Leary. I've been rude towards her. And you know what? There's no excuse for that. Other than, I guess, that I'm human and I make mistakes.
Why did I get upset at Denyse? Well, it's a long story. If you know Denyse through her writing, you'll have you own opinion about her. She positions herself at the sharp end of the debate, so supposedly she expects a bit of flack. But juvenilia? Rudeness? Well.
Although O'Leary calls herself a "blogger", she doesn't allow open comments about what she writes. And so, it seems to me, she never has to address facts she doesn't like. She writes the same thing over and over again, making the same mistakes, ignoring the same problems.
You might think Denyse is just jam-packed full of wisdom. To me, her championing of "Intelligent Design" is based on a jumble of logical fallacies, factual inaccuracies and wishful thinking. To each his or her own, I guess.
What's that you say? Get to the point? That I can do.
Denyse O'Leary didn't ignore me entirely. She called my blog "the low end" of the debate. She said I portray myself as "incapable of a civilized argument". And, apparently, she spread the word. Over at the very laudable Free Mark Steyn blog, I came across this:
"...look at the kind of juvenalia Denyse has to put up with for defending her ideas. Look at the url, for example..."
Juvenalia? O noes!!!!!11eleventyone!!1!!!!
Well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me...
It's OK, apparently, for Denyse to portray atheists as Darwin-worshipping amoral nihilists.
It's OK, apparently, for Denyse to pretend scientific differences of opinion are evidence against Darwinian Evolution when practically all of the scientists she mentions still accept Darwinian Evolution.
It's OK, apparently, for Denyse to dismiss the faith of Christians who accept Darwinian evolution.
It's OK, apparently, for Denyse to ignore the Conservative Christians who say "Intelligent Design" is bad science and bad theology.
It's OK for Denyse to plead persecution and then beg for more.
In short, it's OK for Denyse O'Leary to defame, misrepresent and damn everyone who disagrees with her... Yup, Denyse can do all of these things to "defend her ideas".
But me being juvenile... That's just too much to bear.
Well, Denyse, I apologise for being rude to you. We all make mistakes. I can't fix yours. I can only fix mine. I'll try harder in future to be civil.
As for Free Mark Steyn, I guess they didn't really mean to imply that it's OK for Mr Steyn to disrespect Islamic Fundamentalism, as long as he isn't "juvenile" about it...
I don't want to blog about Denyse O'Leary, I really don't.
I could be writing about my niece's first day of pre-school, or the Brits' success in the Olympics, or how impressed I was with the Apple Store in Glasgow's swapping out my Macbook screen in only an hour. I could be enthusing about Debunking Christianity or Cute Overload...
But Denyse keeps writing, and I keep reading.
Today, she tells us "Darwinian evolution" is about to collapse. Again. Her reasons this time:-
(a) Scientific understanding keeps advancing in the light of new evidence
and
(b) Lots of people prefer to believe in young earth creationism
Wow.
Does she give us any evidence whatsoever in favour of Intelligent Design? Does she "fudge".
She does give us one pearl of wisdom:-
"...one should not write about big topics without basic research..."
A while back I posted ReligionIsACrutch's great parody video of the movie Expelled. Electro-whiz Al Watt of MaxPlanck sent on this funky remix for your listening pleasure. Enjoy :)
For all their pops at "Darwinism", Intelligent Design Creationists see the world as a cruel and vicious place. Dissenters from the "given wisdom" are cast off, thrown to the wolves, expelled from all good society. Some, especially respected and respectful, will be allowed a voice for a time... But in the end, all opposition is silenced, airbrushed from history, with only ghostly echoes remaining to show that they had ever existed.
And, since IDers think that's the way the world treats them, that's the way they treat the world. Most ID websites refuse any opposing commentary. Those that do - like Uncommon Descent - ban visitors so fast it'd make your head spin. They threw me out almost instantly.
So, like many before and after, I created a sock-puppet - a character with a plausible back story who could throw in occasional comments at Uncommon Descent, to prod discussions, prompt debate, and perhaps poke gentle fun at the more inane posters and commentators. What else is a man to do in the face of censorship? Give up? Go away? Stop being Jewish? (Not that I am Jewish, but you get the point...)
Watching from the peanut gallery was all very well - but I wanted to be close to the action. I wanted to smell the greasepaint. I wanted being With The Banned to mean something...
At the start it was easy. Beginning my first UD comment with "DaveScot as always you are absolutely right" got me out of moderation and into straight-posting before I could say "Jack Robinson". For a while, I took things fairly easy. Sure, my comments were dumb, some immensely so, but Intelligent Design Creationism is a big tent, and at the start no-one seemed to notice just one more slightly unhinged visitor to UD. Eventually though, as so often in life, I got just too smart for my own good. No-one, surely, could be that enthusiastic about Denyse O'Leary's senseless wittering. As with all good things, my sock-puppetry came to an end. After six months of occasional posting, DaveScot's genius-level IQ spluttered into action. With a firm thump to the side, his nixplanatory filter managed a rare true-positive. Credit where credit is due, Dave played his cards with good humour:-
Dear bililiad,
I installed a WordPress upgrade that included a beta test version of something called Troll Filter v1.0. Upon activation all your comments disappeared. Sorry about that. We’re working with wordpress to determine the root cause of the problem.
And so, gentle readers, Bililiad's comments passed on into oblivion, and sadly his wit and wisdom (and/or lack thereof) is lost to the world almost, but not quite, entirely...
For, like the legendary pagan Celsus, known only through the words of the early Christian apologist (but teacher of reincarnation) Origen, Bililiad does live on, somewhat, in answers to the questions he'd posed. Search Uncommon Descent for bililiad, and his voice can still be heard, a phantom, from beyond the ban-osphere...
Take his penultimate post, from yet-another-thread where Denyse O'Leary took a whack-the-piñata strike at "Darwinism", predicting its imminent demise without offering anything pro-ID in its place... Bililiad wrote:
“What the materialists can’t get their head around is that if “Darwinism” loses, ID wins by default..."
DaveScot may have smelled a rat... But commentator CannuckianYankee took the bait, answering:-
"Yes, because the materialists have clung to the only scenario that could be true under materialist assumptions: Neo-Darwinism.
It means that methodological naturalism as the driving method behind doing science also loses.
Going wherever the evidence leads transcends all assumptions, materialist and non-materialist. Flew got it right."
And there, my friends, is the problem with ID laid bare, naked for all to see.
Can ID supporters offer any advance in science or technology whatsoever in the entire history of the world that was not based on materialistic assumptions? Do they use non-materialist assumptions in their engineering, or mathematics, or when they are putting up shelves or driving their cars? Would they trust the health of their children to non-materialistic medicine? And if they would, would you?
I'm not a regular blogger. I have little bursts here and there, but following the supposed "culture wars" as I do from time to time exposes me to so much stupid that after only a little while I feel like I'm going to assplode. I get all hot and botherered, angry and grumpy. Like a ginger in the sun, I can only take so much.
Case in point, Uncommon Descent, the home blog of Intelligent Design Creationism. Today we have Denyse O'Leary continuing her series on why "Intelligent Design Is Winning", explaining that science is too hard, and that means people can't understand it, and some things might not be explainable and that means God Did It.
Then Granville Sewell weighs in, with a post explaining that anyone who does not see the validity of ID must by have lost their minds. Immune to irony, logic and even apparently self-awareness, he opines:
"However strong may be the philosophical, psychological and religious reasons why many of our greatest minds reject ID, the argument for ID is still crystal clear to the unindoctrinated mind."
In short: Thinking is too hard. Therefore God Did It.
Must... Not... Read... Uncommon... Descent...
Elsewhere in Fundy Fantasy Land, my new favourite nutter-blog is the fabulously named The Moral Collapse Of America. It has just the right mix of whacko bizareness, breathtaking bigotry and unintentional(?) insights to make it indispensable reading.
While I'm in a blog-rolling mood, props to En Tequila Es Verdad for being without question the best blog in the world today, Letters From Exile for making depression-blogging more fun than you'd think, and Jenny Soep for art, music, tea and soup :)
For all the huff and puff of the culture wars, most real-life religious believers are more reasonable and inclusive than the idiotic, we're-right-and-everyone-else-is-fucked dogma their various churches, mosques and temples would have us believe.
Consider, for example, the recent Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life finding that 57 percent of "evangelical" Christians in the United States believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life".
That statistic may give your average foaming fundamentalist a clutcher, but it fills this particular atheist with something of a warm glow, even if these believers tend to still think that their understandings and petty rituals are still miraculously closer to "God" than everyone elses'...
In that spirit of equanimity and brotherly love, is also fair to say that unlike some non-believers, I can see plenty of benefits of at least some type of religion and religious belief. Hey, we all like a good party, and though I've never been to a humanist "union", it's a dead cert that your typical Hindu or Muslim wedding is going to have way better food.
In fact, I'm so certain of my own wisdom on this point that I'm going to state categorically, here and now and without fear of contradiction, that not all religions are as wrong as each other too.
Let's take, for example, Buddhism. Strip away unprovable reincarnation and the ancestor-worship-esque guru veneration, and you are left with a simple set of rules which are eminently sensible. You should be nice to other people no matter who they are and what they do to you... Life is a struggle between understandable human desires, and the pain we face in gaining and losing these things we desire... We should live in the now - not in the past or in the future... And so on.
And with that as a background, it's time for me to blog at last about my recent stay at the Buddhist Retreat on the windswept and very beautiful Holy Island, off the Isle of Arran in Scotland.
Having decided at last that the corporate world could live without me for a little while at least, I was looking for an excuse to get into some good habits - to lay off my usual atheistic-hobbies of murder, whoring and crack-dealing (well, smoking cigarettes anyway...) and to get fit.
And so, I ended up at a week-long "meditation and yoga" course, booked last minute and pretty much at random. It was great. There was no meat, no booze, no fags, no television, no internet, and jeez louise, no DaveScot or Denyse O'Leary to distract me from the pure joy of wishing loving kindness and compassion to all living beings...
To the rest of the world, "intelligent design" (ID) is deader than disco. For years, its supporters pretended "evolutionism" was on the verge of collapse, and that ID was about to overturn "Darwinism" and revolutionize science. Now, even Michael Medved, long term scourge of liberalism and newly minted Discovery Institute fellow, admits:-
"the important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they [its supporters] need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It’s a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else."
Indeed. Despite over a decade of hype, ID has produced no research, no discoveries and no science...
For Denyse however, like the Black Knight in Python's Holy Grail, victory is ever-near.
First, she complains that the unknown processes which created life from non-life over a period of billions of years under circumstances we don't yet understand aren't repeated daily in front of her. Stupid? Yeah - but as she proves time and time again, O'Leary is no scientist. In fact, she seems to have severe problems with her reading comprehension.
Having taken a pop at New Scientist, O'Leary then goes after - would you believe it - me. Yup, PTET, fresh from the blagospheric wilderness... O'Leary blathers:-
"I put New Scientist at the high end. For the low end, try this stuff. These people sesem, for the most part, incapable of a civilized argument - or at least that is how they choose to represent themselves. That can’t be good news for their cause."
Huh? Has Denyse actually read this blog? I very much doubt it. I myself was banned from Uncommon Descent long ago - like anyone else who dares ask questions which embarrass O'Leary and her idiot colleagues.
Sure, I've been rude to Denyse. I've even apologized for that. But, for the life of me, I can't see why my occasional posts or my irrelevant blog (2,638,306th in the blogosphere!) would be evidence of anything... Other than, perhaps, O'Leary's delusional mental state.
Maybe she wants Uncommon Descent's readers to see how it's own "blogczar" DaveScot called her a "Canadian Cross Dresser" and a "Morhpodyke". Who knows?
For the rest of you... Hello and welcome. You can comment here freely. Please take a look around :)
Yesterday I took a long walk, passing through Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. No-one was claiming to be Jesus this time - but one guy caught my eye. Here he is, animated and apparently quite funny. Does anyone speak Arabic? What is he saying?
I'm guessing it's something about peace, love and understanding. We could all do with some of that, right?
FarkTV is normally an epic fail by default... But this is class.
I've zapped WOW from my mac three times in the last six months. The urge to re-install is still there. I'm not sure I even enjoy playing. Help me - I am being held prisoner against my will...
It would allow my children to express their religious beliefs in class without fear of recrimination or failing grades.
Well done for thinking your bill through so thoroughly.
I hope you are very proud of yourself for standing up for your beliefs in the face of all the "logic" and "reason" that will no doubt be thrown in your face by the intelligent and educated section of the community.
So Shall You Reap is a short & funny documentary about the astounding amounts of money made at the KICC Evangelical Church in North London. See believers queue up time and time again to hand their money over to charlatans and carpet-baggers, like Eddie Long and Cindy Trimm.
Apparently Christians "give more" than non-believers... But how much of that money goes on luxuries for pastors and their families? Is anyone keeping count?
I've been blogging on and off for a long time, and there is a familiar pattern. I write a lot in bursts about things that interest me. Sometimes there's a general theme to my posts, other times they are more random. But for whatever reasons I find myself enthused about writing and blogging for a while. And then I stop. Something else comes up in life. New girlfriend. A new job. Other distractions. And then after a while I get bitten by the bug again and I feel the need to post. That's what happened in January when I came back to blogging after a long break. But then, in February, I found the blogging well had dried up and I moved to other things.
It's amusing to look back at what got me blogging - or indeed as writing as PTET in the first place. Like a zillion naive skeptics, I wanted to explore and challenge my beliefs, to learn new things, and to try and work out just how so many people could be so inexplicably stupid as to not believe what I believe. If only I explained it to them slowly and patiently, I thought, I'd be able to convince them of the error of their ways. I'd make them think. And hey, I never thought I would stop anyone being a Christian or believing in God. But I did think that if only people could be made to see just how ridiculous creationism was, how it was illogical, how it was based on lie after lie, that people might think enough about their beliefs to question them. Sheesh, I thought, people can be Christians and Bible-believers all they want - but surely I can help people realize that much of what is said in the name of Fundamentalist Christianity is just patently untrue.
How wrong I was. For months and even years, I posted the same arguments again and again in blog entries and in correspondence with erstwhile Christians who wrote either to argue with what I'd said or to convert me. The same arguments again and again, endlessly repeated.
The Bible was historical. It contained remarkable prophesies which spoke to it's "truth". Jesus was the most attested-to historical figure of all time. Science backed it. Genesis in particular was incredibly and overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific understanding. All that crap.
Nothing I said in response to these arguments seemed to have the slightest effect. My correspondents would dodge and weave and avoid reading or checking anything I wrote in response.
Evolution was an atheistic construct dreamed up by amoral degenerates who wished to avoid moral accountability. If I mentioned that most Christian scientists accepted standard evolutionary theory, I was told that these people were not real Christians. If I asked whether my respondents would go out and murder and steal and rape if they stopped believing in god, the responses would comically range from outright evasion of the question to statements of such breathtaking stupidity that all chance of further dialogue ground to a halt.
So why do I write? Why should I blog? I don't want to write into the ether. I don't want to preach to the skeptical choir. There's nothing to be gained from me worrying about the very large number of eminently sensible and rational Christians and other believers who are entirely comfortable with the limits of their faith and who accept evolution and don't have to rely on the "truth" of the Bible to support their beliefs.
It is maddening to see just how immune True believers are to any arguments or evidence which contradicts them.
But hey, they see me the same way. To a fundamentalist or evangelical, it is the non-believer who is intransigent, illogical, evasive, dishonest, stupid... All these things. Skeptics come up with the same arguments which have been "refuted" time and time again on Apologetics websites, or in Christian books, etc., etc...
So what then? I've tried until I am blue in the face to show that Fundamentalism and Intelligent Design Creationism are patently wrong... I point at every turn the Christians who do accept evolution; to the origins and basis of morality outside of religion, all that.
But it gets me nowhere.
Maybe they are right. Maybe the entire world of science is an atheistic conspiracy to suppress the obvious existence of God. Maybe evolution is impossible, and the only reasonable explanation is an all-powerful, loving God. Maybe that God can only be explained by their religious beliefs. Their religious beliefs and no-one else's, of course. Maybe homosexuality and abortion are always wrong. Maybe there is no morality without God? Maybe we know all these things because God and/or the Bible say so. Or is none of that relevant? Is it really all about the science?
"...when the interpretation of scientific data contradicts the true history of the world as revealed in the Bible, then it’s the interpretation of the data that is at fault. It’s important to remember that we have limited data, and new discoveries have often overturned previous ‘hard facts’..."
"At the same time that research in the Bible Code has taken off, research in a seemingly unrelated field has taken off as well, namely, biological design. These two fields are in fact closely related. Indeed, the same highly improbable, independently given patterns that appear as the equidistant letter sequences in the Bible Code appear in biology as functionally integrated ("irreducibly complex") biological systems, of the sort Michael Behe discussed in Darwin’s Black Box"
The short film Fitna was released on Friday. You can watch it on youtube.
[b]Update:[/b] LiveLeak now have the film for you to watch. They'd temporarily removed it after receiving death threats...
The Film itself is not very incendiary. It does say that Islamification of western culture is dangerous. Is that controversial? Most muslims in the west - and the ones I know of course - want nothing to do with the Fundamentalists.
'Course, there is one major section of society in the West who want to ban the teaching of evolution; stop abortion, homosexuality and fornication; and return women to a subservient role in society. Guess who...
My mate got mugged. She made this wee film about it.
I was assaulted randomly in the street about 12 years ago. It was a real shock. Like my friend, it was teenage boys who got me. My attackers got away too.
All this time later, as a godless liberal, if these now-grown-up boys were in front of me, and I had the chance to hurt them, would I? What would you do?
"I could cope,
Is this new at Nice'n'Sleazy or had I just missed it?
Aaaah, the Glasgae banter...
King Robert of Sicily
Glasgow is a post-industrial city. Its murder, unemployment and heart-disease rates are amongst the highest in the Western World. It is not in Kentucky.
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