Kevin's Watch

Priests brawl at Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus

Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

Woman Escorted Off Bus For Reading Bible Aloud

FORT WORTH (CBS 11 News) ― A passenger on a Fort Worth bus says the T. Bus Service discriminated against her religion.

Christine Lutz says she was reading her Bible to her children when the bus driver asked her to stop or get off the bus.

Lutz, a Seventh Day Adventist, and her children were on their way to church.

"She then said, 'Well I don't think this is the place or the time to do so.' And I said, 'Oh, but it's the perfect time and the perfect place since it is our Sabbath and it is the time with the Lord and therefore I'm going to continue.' And I continued," she explained.

Then, a TRE supervisor came on board. Lutz also told him that she would not stop reading. She and her family were escorted off the bus.

"This was definitely a clear cut case of persecution," she said.

Or was it a clear cut case of policy?

"Anyone who is loud will be asked to be quiet," said representative Joan Hunter. "That is a standard policy across country in the transit industry."

It doesn't matter what is said, the T has a policy of no loud or abusive behavior.

"It's only if the other passengers will complain, or it's obviously so loud it's distracting the operator, that we will ask them to stop," Hunter explained.

Inestimable Privilege?

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite Eleanor Katherine's tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."

Emotional Leper wrote:You obviously don't know any idiots in the proper age range

Esmer wrote:

I have the best hat too, don't I?

danlo wrote:Well, she's now in round the clock mental lockdown so she should be crying out for god about now...

An End to Female Genital Cutting?

These are busy times for Pakhshan Zangana. Head of the women's caucus in the Iraqi Kurdish parliament in Arbil, she is on the verge of pushing through a piece of legislation that is the first of its kind in the Middle East — a law criminalizing female genital mutilation (FGM). "Sixty-eight out of 120 deputies signed our bill, so we could have got it passed by ministerial decree," Zangana says. "But law-making is the job of parliament, and we want everybody to debate this issue openly." The bill received its first reading on Dec. 3 and is likely to be passed by February.

Affecting up to 90% of women in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia, FGM is widely seen as an African phenomenon. But it also happens to a lesser extent throughout the Middle East, particularly in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq.

If the Iraqi Kurds are leading the way today, it is partially thanks to a handful of local women's organizations that have struggled for greater awareness of the issue since the early 1990s. But the real breakthrough came in 2005 when WADI, a German non-governmental organization, published the results of its survey of 39 villages in the Germian region, east of Kirkuk.

Of 1,554 women and girls aged older than 10 interviewed by WADI's local medical team, over 60% said they had undergone the operation. Larger surveys completed since show the practice is prevalent among local Arabs and Turkmen, as well as Kurds. The surveys provide the first solid statistics on a tradition which — while practiced relatively openly in parts of Africa — is so veiled in secrecy here that brothers are often unaware their own sisters are affected.

A farmer's wife in Zurkan, a remote village close to the Iranian border in northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan, Amina Khidir began performing the operation when her mother became too old to carry on. Her first patient was her own daughter. "I didn't feel nervous, because I had spent years watching how the cut was done," Khidir remembers. "And my daughter was a baby at the time, too small to understand what was happening. That's the best age to do it." Matter-of-factly, Khidir describes dealing with the aftermath of her work. She applies oak charcoal to reduce pain, cold water and antiseptic solution to reduce the risk of infection. Asked about the specifics of the procedure, she covers her face with her loosely worn headscarf. "I cut about a quarter off," she says. It's a reference to the so-called 'Sunna' circumcision, the removal of prepuce and sometimes clitoris that some Muslims attribute to a tradition taught by the Prophet Mohammed.

"According to the Shafi'i school [of Islamic law] to which we Kurds belong, circumcision is obligatory for both men and women," explains Mohamed Ahmed Gaznei, chief cleric in the city of Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan's second city. "The Hanbali [school] says it is obligatory only for men." Personally opposed to female circumcision, Gaznei in 2002 issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for imitation of Hanbali practice. He has since appeared on a short film about FGM shot by a Kurdish filmmaker that WADI medical teams now take with them when visiting villages.

"Look, they even got Osama bin Laden to talk," quips Gula Hama Amin, one of 30 women watching the film in Nura, a village 100 miles north of Sulaimaniyah, referring to Gaznei's luxuriant beard. The others tell her to quiet down. All have been circumcised for reasons hovering somewhere between religious belief and tradition: locals say the food an uncircumcised woman cooks is unclean, or that the operation makes a girl more affectionate to her family.

So great was the taboo surrounding FGM until recently that even the Iraqi Kurdish authorities, largely supportive of campaigns against it, have sometimes been tentative in their resolve to take action. Since 14,000 people signed an April 2007 petition for a law against FGM, though, the mood has changed radically. Both the region's main parties have given their blessing to the law, and FGM is now openly discussed by the local media. Back in parliament, Pakhshan Zangana knows the law represents only the end of the beginning of this struggle. Her aim now, she says, is to end FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan within five years. "A law on its own can't do that," Zangana says. "What can is full cooperation between government departments, and people like me, in parliament, making sure the law is enforced."

full article posted

The case of the general talk of “progress” is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, “progress” is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress — that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible — at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word “progress” than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one, men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche; — these are the things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this “progressive” age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most “progressive” people in it. The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress, might be trusted perhaps to progress. The particular individuals who talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven when the pistol-shot started the race. I do not, therefore, say that the word “progress” is unmeaning; I say it is unmeaning without the previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common. Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith. GK Chesterton, heretics, ch 2