Battleground God

Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?

In this activity you?ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion. In each case, apart from Question 1, you need to answer True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you?ll need to answer in a way which is rationally consistent. What this means is you need to avoid choosing answers which contradict each other. If you answer in a way which is rationally consistent but which has strange or unpalatable implications, you?ll be forced to bite a bullet.

Battleground God

What if Fox News reported various famous moments in history. Mildy entertaining, and bi-partisan!

Fark vs. Fox News

Paul Berman writes for the New York Times Magazine on Sayyid Qutb.

This is an absolute must read.

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

] It is emblematic of an evolution in leftist values that has
] occurred so gradually over a period of decades that the
] profound nature of the shift is often not noticed. Today, the
] political counterculture and the antiwar movement in the
] West often seem to be one and the same.

Interesting way of putting it. And I can indeed name several people I know who seem to be anti-war not because they've thought through the issues, but simply because of a knee-jerk "if our government wants it, then it must be the wrong thing to do" kind of reaction.

To be fair, I have also spoken with anti-war advocates who *have* thought through the issues, and have clear, articulate opinions of why war is a bad idea, along with specific suggestions of alternative courses of action. I may still end up disagreeing with them, but I have far more respect for their opinion, and will spend much more time listening carefully to them, when it's clear that they've given thought to both sides of the issue and made a decision based on the facts of the matter, instead of just an emotional "anti-authority" response.

Salon.com | See no evil

] A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to
] Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across
] the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all
] shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth
] Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church
] of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to
] reality."

Anti-War human sheilds change their minds about the war upon meeting Iraqis