Thursday, October 23, 2008

"his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American."

Photo from New Yorker magazine
"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim - American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel particularly strong about this because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn't have a Christian cross.

It didn't have a Star of David.

It has a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.

And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan.

And he was an American.

He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life."


-- Colin Powell, Oct 19, 2008, on Meet The Press on the occasion of Powell's public endorsement of Barack Obama for President of the United States

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Sweet mystery of life...


File under: Irony and Karma

P.Z. Myers, who is a biologist and Asst. Professor at the University of Minnesota, and the blogger behind Pharyngula.org., was supposed to be viewing the local premier of "Expelled - No Intelligence allowed", a film supposedly describing, in an even-handed manner,the tension between evolution and "intelligent design."

Long before the film was near to being released, the film was being shot at by the very academics who were interviewed for it -- under claims that the project was misrepresented to them, and that the interview tapes were being cut and reedited in a manner to misrepresent what they had said. (see this piece in the New York Times from 2007 and the footnotes in the Wikipedia article )

As one of the people who were interviewed for the film, Myers was eager to see it (Likely with some trepidations about how cringe worthy it would be).

Well, he needed have worried -- at the premier he was not allowed to enter the theater. It seems he was persona non-grata and was told that he would have to leave the property. But his wife and daughter, with a guest, were allowed in to see the movie.

The irony is that their guest was Richard Dawkins. Someone who is even less enamored of the ID proponents than Myers is -- if thats possible.

And, being a blogger, Myers has, very happily, written about the barring him from the showing. One of the premises in the film is that opposing views are shouted down and barred from being considered. Which makes this so much more surreal (actually not -- it just points up more of the deceit and hypocrisy of the creationists who keep trying to deny that science is real)

Caveat for full disclosure. -- I'm a Christian. Been one all my life. I even teach in Sunday School. I also believe in a manner of "intelligent design." Where I believe that our Creator built and set in motion the universe where we all live and function.

But not the "intelligent design" that says that the Lord has created and enforced physical laws, yet, for some reason, has pettily violated those same physical laws so that radio-carbon dating, and examinations of geology somehow need to be disregarded if the result yields an age for anything that is more than 6000 years old. The sheer pettiness and self-aggrandizement of those conclusions is staggering

And those who espouse the "creationists" and "Intelligent design" dogmas are, at best, fools with monumental hubris without any real understanding of science or intellectual rigor, and at worst, hucksters preying on those who have real faith but need guidance.

The illustration is one that shows the adaptive matrix of Galapagos finches -- also known as "Darwin Finches" "Click" on the image for a larger view.

Update -- the non-admittance story has made the New York Times Science Section