Notes taken March 7, 2007 on lecture by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author of What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America, and the Imam of a Sufi Mosque in lower Manhattan.
Born in Kuwait, educated in England and India, and received a masters from Columbia University.
Major theme from the book:
Sense of an Alien religion from Christianity and Judaism, but it is the last of the Abrahamic religions, underlied by a belief in one God and no belief in the divinity of the monarch. Also, was classless. Theme that God is one and the creator is one and all were created from one male and female, so at core we are all brothers and sisters and every human life is equal.
Fast forward
Late 18th century in America, the founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing the equality of humankind and endowed by the (singular) creator with certain inalienable rights; two Abrahamic ethics.
Sharia, all Islamic Law, has one over all objective: to serve the best interest of humankind in this life and in the next life (the permanent life).
5 major objectives of
Protection of Human Life/Dignity
Free Practice of Religion
Right to Family, Marriage and Sexual Relations
Right to Property
Right to Develop Intellectual Capacity
So... the US is a Sharia compliant state? According to Imam Rauf, yes.
Discuss.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Slavery in the 21st Century
Attended a lecture by Francis Bok on Feb. 22 at St. Edward's University. Mr. Bok was enslaved as a 7 year old boy and sold to a Muslim man in the northern part of the Sudan. He's from the tumultuous region of Darfur, and witnessed first hand the genocide executed upon the Christians who live there.
Though the lecture strongly appealed to my pathos -- Mr. Bok's stories made you want to weep for his stolen childhood and for the children still enslaved -- I didn't really find any proposed ways for us here in America to help until the final five minutes of his speech. In his conclusion, he praised the efforts of the Bush Administration and their work to help relieve the suffering of the Sudanese people, and he chastised the United Nations for sitting back and not taking action though they have known of these human rights violations on a mass scale since the early to mid-eighties.
Finally! Something I can respond to! Yes, I agree that the United Nations is more of a feel good sugar pill than any sort of remedy. They have a hard enough time throwing a birthday party, and unless everyone's mostly in some sort of agreement then nothing gets done. Then, even if representatives agree to lend their support, the UN's "strongly worded memos/suggestions" have all the efficacy of toilet paper to the dictators and despots they address.
Get with it United Nations! Stop electing random figureheads that look pretty and then use their influence for shame (*cough*Kofi*cough*) and start doing things. Start talking and acting on things that matter. Work for world peace. Make a beauty pageant speech, then get back to work. I like the idea of an multinational forum as much as the next idealist international relations major, but stop disappointing me. You've had sixty years to get your act together and I have only had 18. Get with it.
Though the lecture strongly appealed to my pathos -- Mr. Bok's stories made you want to weep for his stolen childhood and for the children still enslaved -- I didn't really find any proposed ways for us here in America to help until the final five minutes of his speech. In his conclusion, he praised the efforts of the Bush Administration and their work to help relieve the suffering of the Sudanese people, and he chastised the United Nations for sitting back and not taking action though they have known of these human rights violations on a mass scale since the early to mid-eighties.
Finally! Something I can respond to! Yes, I agree that the United Nations is more of a feel good sugar pill than any sort of remedy. They have a hard enough time throwing a birthday party, and unless everyone's mostly in some sort of agreement then nothing gets done. Then, even if representatives agree to lend their support, the UN's "strongly worded memos/suggestions" have all the efficacy of toilet paper to the dictators and despots they address.
Get with it United Nations! Stop electing random figureheads that look pretty and then use their influence for shame (*cough*Kofi*cough*) and start doing things. Start talking and acting on things that matter. Work for world peace. Make a beauty pageant speech, then get back to work. I like the idea of an multinational forum as much as the next idealist international relations major, but stop disappointing me. You've had sixty years to get your act together and I have only had 18. Get with it.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
50% rant, 50% philosophy, 50% listening to The Imperial March from Star Wars. 150% I kid you not!
The topic this week is to discuss the American Dream as an ideology.
My father really and truly believed in the American dream. My family was working class at the end of the second world war. My grandfather, Samuel, had dropped out of high school during the Great Depression to support his mom and siblings after his father's death with an apprenticeship to a machining shop. He enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor, earned a purple heart and a clover for wounds suffered campaigning in Europe, and returned home to his wife, Clementine, who he'd married merely months before the war started. He worked with his uncle in the machining shop until he left to start his own shop that also did roofing. My aunt and two uncles were all born during this time, and then ten years later, in 1960, my father was born. My family all agrees that it was the roofing business generated in the wake of 1965's Hurricane Betsy that allowed my family to rise to the middle class. My grandfather could then afford to send his son Kenneth (born in 1950, my youngest uncle) to college in 1968. When he graduated in 1973, he was the first genetically related member of my family on my father's side to have graduated from college. I say all that because my Aunt Veralyn, the eldest of my father's siblings, married a Tulane architecture grad. Anyway, my oldest uncle, Sammy (named after his father) took over the roofing business. When my dad graduated from college in 1983, he got a good job with Amoco petroleum, and my entire family had, within a generation, raised itself to the ranks of the middle class.
On the other hand, my mother had dropped out of high school to get married and have my older sister, Katie, with her first husband. They divorced a year later. She eventually got her GED, but she was working as a waitress at a bar named La Boucherie in the French Quarter when she met my dad, they fell in love, and got married. Five years later, VOILA! I appeared. Even after my parents divorced, my father incurred quite a bit of debt to make sure that he kept custody of me and maintained our middle class lifestyle. He has worked for ExxonMobil since I was three months old, and his pay bracket now places him at upper-middle class. As soon as our incurred debt is paid off in a few years, my family will, in short, be upper-middle class, from how his father started out as working class.
Because of this, my father truly believes in the American Dream. Anyone can make anything out of themselves if they try hard enough. I do not remember a time when I was not expected to go to college. My family saw college as the key to getting ahead in the world, and much of my education occurred in gifted/talented or honors courses in public school in a good suburb of Houston because of the high educational expectations placed upon me. College was not an option, and there has never been a time in my life where I haven't believed that I could not do something. If I wanted to run a multi-billion dollar international corporation, then I would somehow work my way up the corporate ladder, making the invaluable connections along the way that I needed. I wanted to be an ambassador, which involves knowing the right people in D.C. Yeah, I can do that. Never was I told I couldn't do anything, except be a princess or a queen because that takes a lot of elbowing and right marriage. Short of royalty, however, the world is my oyster.
So I've been raised to believe in the American Dream. I pin my hopes upon it. But I see my step siblings, Rebekah and Jimmy, and even my half sister, Katie, and for them somehow the dream has failed. Katie squandered her chance at a half-ride to a small satellite of A&M, and now she's 27 and putting her way through nursing school after having boomeranged into my mother's house. She used to be a role model, and now I look at her and she that she's wasted the majority of her twenties and is still not what she wanted to be. And Jimmy... he graduates from high school in a few months. He still has not taken the SATs. Will he get in anywhere? Will it be community college for him? He wants to join the Air Force, but he's considered overweight. He's a black belt in Karate... so I don't think so. And my youngest sister, who's sixteen, is barely passing her classes and wants to be a beautician. I look at my life and I wonder why I ended up being so classically successful and they didn't or might not be... and it was that I was always told there was nothing I couldn't achieve. My three siblings were constantly discouraged, and now their parents are frustrated that they aren't making the most out of their life like I am. Well... I think the American Dream is possible, but only if you parents tell you so. Only if it's part of your worldview. You need to believe in the American Dream and devote everything to it for it to become your American Reality.
Sorry for being long-winded and voicing some of my familial frustrations here. Hopefully you get where I'm coming from though....
~Secret Surfer
My father really and truly believed in the American dream. My family was working class at the end of the second world war. My grandfather, Samuel, had dropped out of high school during the Great Depression to support his mom and siblings after his father's death with an apprenticeship to a machining shop. He enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor, earned a purple heart and a clover for wounds suffered campaigning in Europe, and returned home to his wife, Clementine, who he'd married merely months before the war started. He worked with his uncle in the machining shop until he left to start his own shop that also did roofing. My aunt and two uncles were all born during this time, and then ten years later, in 1960, my father was born. My family all agrees that it was the roofing business generated in the wake of 1965's Hurricane Betsy that allowed my family to rise to the middle class. My grandfather could then afford to send his son Kenneth (born in 1950, my youngest uncle) to college in 1968. When he graduated in 1973, he was the first genetically related member of my family on my father's side to have graduated from college. I say all that because my Aunt Veralyn, the eldest of my father's siblings, married a Tulane architecture grad. Anyway, my oldest uncle, Sammy (named after his father) took over the roofing business. When my dad graduated from college in 1983, he got a good job with Amoco petroleum, and my entire family had, within a generation, raised itself to the ranks of the middle class.
On the other hand, my mother had dropped out of high school to get married and have my older sister, Katie, with her first husband. They divorced a year later. She eventually got her GED, but she was working as a waitress at a bar named La Boucherie in the French Quarter when she met my dad, they fell in love, and got married. Five years later, VOILA! I appeared. Even after my parents divorced, my father incurred quite a bit of debt to make sure that he kept custody of me and maintained our middle class lifestyle. He has worked for ExxonMobil since I was three months old, and his pay bracket now places him at upper-middle class. As soon as our incurred debt is paid off in a few years, my family will, in short, be upper-middle class, from how his father started out as working class.
Because of this, my father truly believes in the American Dream. Anyone can make anything out of themselves if they try hard enough. I do not remember a time when I was not expected to go to college. My family saw college as the key to getting ahead in the world, and much of my education occurred in gifted/talented or honors courses in public school in a good suburb of Houston because of the high educational expectations placed upon me. College was not an option, and there has never been a time in my life where I haven't believed that I could not do something. If I wanted to run a multi-billion dollar international corporation, then I would somehow work my way up the corporate ladder, making the invaluable connections along the way that I needed. I wanted to be an ambassador, which involves knowing the right people in D.C. Yeah, I can do that. Never was I told I couldn't do anything, except be a princess or a queen because that takes a lot of elbowing and right marriage. Short of royalty, however, the world is my oyster.
So I've been raised to believe in the American Dream. I pin my hopes upon it. But I see my step siblings, Rebekah and Jimmy, and even my half sister, Katie, and for them somehow the dream has failed. Katie squandered her chance at a half-ride to a small satellite of A&M, and now she's 27 and putting her way through nursing school after having boomeranged into my mother's house. She used to be a role model, and now I look at her and she that she's wasted the majority of her twenties and is still not what she wanted to be. And Jimmy... he graduates from high school in a few months. He still has not taken the SATs. Will he get in anywhere? Will it be community college for him? He wants to join the Air Force, but he's considered overweight. He's a black belt in Karate... so I don't think so. And my youngest sister, who's sixteen, is barely passing her classes and wants to be a beautician. I look at my life and I wonder why I ended up being so classically successful and they didn't or might not be... and it was that I was always told there was nothing I couldn't achieve. My three siblings were constantly discouraged, and now their parents are frustrated that they aren't making the most out of their life like I am. Well... I think the American Dream is possible, but only if you parents tell you so. Only if it's part of your worldview. You need to believe in the American Dream and devote everything to it for it to become your American Reality.
Sorry for being long-winded and voicing some of my familial frustrations here. Hopefully you get where I'm coming from though....
~Secret Surfer
Monday, January 29, 2007
Power Elite...
America is a democracy in the same way that McDonald's is gourmet cuisine. Hey, maybe once upon a time they actually cooked your burger exactly as you ordered it to be only a few minutes after you ordered it. Maybe it didn't even taste like cardboard. But after awhile, people grew lax and allowed mass production and microwaves to take over.
Okay, metaphor is too long. I no longer believe, as I did in the days of my third grade civics hour, that America is a democracy. Heck, I even voted for the first time less than three months ago. Did the guy I vote for win the election? No. Why do we even term it a "win"? Now, I don't believe that the power elite are all behind the scenes, stuffing ballot boxes and setting viruses in electronic voting machines or rigging the chad-punching system. Nah, they're too good for that. They're throwing hard and soft money at candidates and parties, using the American people on a subconscious level, convincing them that their Democracy is doing what they want. Not actually asking them what they want, but telling us what we want.
Okay, I'm too cynical. Basically the system is too fragmented for a true representation of the ideals of the American people to take hold. So we form the coalitions, who then tell us that if you want X and Y, well just go on ahead and vote for us... never mind that you don't want Z because if you promote our XYZ party, then all those folks that don't like X or Y but do like Z will be helping you out. Confused yet? Yes, power elite. Yes, things get done. Are they things I particularly like or care about? No. But things are getting done.
Okay, metaphor is too long. I no longer believe, as I did in the days of my third grade civics hour, that America is a democracy. Heck, I even voted for the first time less than three months ago. Did the guy I vote for win the election? No. Why do we even term it a "win"? Now, I don't believe that the power elite are all behind the scenes, stuffing ballot boxes and setting viruses in electronic voting machines or rigging the chad-punching system. Nah, they're too good for that. They're throwing hard and soft money at candidates and parties, using the American people on a subconscious level, convincing them that their Democracy is doing what they want. Not actually asking them what they want, but telling us what we want.
Okay, I'm too cynical. Basically the system is too fragmented for a true representation of the ideals of the American people to take hold. So we form the coalitions, who then tell us that if you want X and Y, well just go on ahead and vote for us... never mind that you don't want Z because if you promote our XYZ party, then all those folks that don't like X or Y but do like Z will be helping you out. Confused yet? Yes, power elite. Yes, things get done. Are they things I particularly like or care about? No. But things are getting done.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Coffee Kills
BBC NEWS | Americas | Hondurans die in coffee collapse
But don't expect me to stop drinking it any time soon.
So, as far as my topic goes, Todd seems to be of the opinion that I should focus on the minimum wage, so true to formula:
should we raise the minimum wage to
reduce the problem of ... ?
ut oh, I need to research this...
But don't expect me to stop drinking it any time soon.
So, as far as my topic goes, Todd seems to be of the opinion that I should focus on the minimum wage, so true to formula:
should we raise the minimum wage to
reduce the problem of ... ?
ut oh, I need to research this...
Monday, January 15, 2007
Ethanol... Brazil does it, why can't we?
Okay, so I was talking to El Presidente Duke and Joe "bubble" Meyer... and they reminded me that I needed to declare what my topic would be. Fine.
I will examine whether the United States should promote research and eventual switch to ethanol-based fuel for automobiles as an alternate to gasoline.
Too adventurous? Too boring? Too broad? Please let me know.
I will examine whether the United States should promote research and eventual switch to ethanol-based fuel for automobiles as an alternate to gasoline.
Too adventurous? Too boring? Too broad? Please let me know.
House votes to raise minimum wage from "top ramen" to "off-brand macaroni and cheese"
House votes to increase minimum wage by $2.10 - International Herald Tribune
I am currently considering examining the effects of a hike in minimum wage on the economy as my three-part, fifteen-page issue paper for my Issues in Social Justice class.
But in other news, let me babble a little about myself.
I'm from a vaguely defined suburb north of Houston. No, not that nice one with the mall and all the pretty master-planned communities, the one just south of that with the large Starbucks that all the teenagers hang out at when they're not getting paid the absolute minimum wage to babysit whiny preteens at the Splashtown across the freeway. I sympathize with Big Oil for this reason, because pretty much Houston would not exist if it weren't for our Gasoline Overlords. I know where the bread and butter comes from, and you don't bite the hand that feeds. I was raised as a conservative, but now I flip-flop (a la Kerry) between pessimistically apathetic and mostly libertarian. I think.
I'm a student at a private, nominally Catholic, university in Austin, TX, Live Music Capitol of The World (tm). I enjoy live music, sleep, and coffee. Mostly just coffee. Speaking of, why is there not a 24-hr coffee place in Austin? Anyone? Bueller?
Oh, so in the long run, I pretty much want to move to the Middle East. I'm an international relations major (but they're about to change the name of my major to Global Studies with a Perspective in Conflict Resolution... but I'll still say I'm in Int'l Rels) who has studied French for six years, and Arabic for six months. I plan on working for world peace, as opposed to wishing for it during a beauty pageant.
My parents are divorced, and I was raised by my father in aforementioned suburb. Every Saturday and Sunday during junior high and high school my dad and I would go to IHOP or Denny's and read the paper. A very clear memory is of my father looking straight into my eyes as I was fifteen minutes deep into the front page section of a Sunday paper and saying "I have never seen anyone get their $1.75 out of a paper the way you do." I avidly follow the news now that I'm in college, but I no longer read the daily paper. Rather, my favorite place to find out all the important, inane, and down-right weird goings-on in the world is a little site called Fark where many people contribute news stories with often hilarious re-titling (see title of entry, which was submitted as the tag for the linked article). Yes, it's not perfect, but at least I try to know what's happening in the world.
So, that's about all you get to know about me, the Secret Surfer.
I am currently considering examining the effects of a hike in minimum wage on the economy as my three-part, fifteen-page issue paper for my Issues in Social Justice class.
But in other news, let me babble a little about myself.
I'm from a vaguely defined suburb north of Houston. No, not that nice one with the mall and all the pretty master-planned communities, the one just south of that with the large Starbucks that all the teenagers hang out at when they're not getting paid the absolute minimum wage to babysit whiny preteens at the Splashtown across the freeway. I sympathize with Big Oil for this reason, because pretty much Houston would not exist if it weren't for our Gasoline Overlords. I know where the bread and butter comes from, and you don't bite the hand that feeds. I was raised as a conservative, but now I flip-flop (a la Kerry) between pessimistically apathetic and mostly libertarian. I think.
I'm a student at a private, nominally Catholic, university in Austin, TX, Live Music Capitol of The World (tm). I enjoy live music, sleep, and coffee. Mostly just coffee. Speaking of, why is there not a 24-hr coffee place in Austin? Anyone? Bueller?
Oh, so in the long run, I pretty much want to move to the Middle East. I'm an international relations major (but they're about to change the name of my major to Global Studies with a Perspective in Conflict Resolution... but I'll still say I'm in Int'l Rels) who has studied French for six years, and Arabic for six months. I plan on working for world peace, as opposed to wishing for it during a beauty pageant.
My parents are divorced, and I was raised by my father in aforementioned suburb. Every Saturday and Sunday during junior high and high school my dad and I would go to IHOP or Denny's and read the paper. A very clear memory is of my father looking straight into my eyes as I was fifteen minutes deep into the front page section of a Sunday paper and saying "I have never seen anyone get their $1.75 out of a paper the way you do." I avidly follow the news now that I'm in college, but I no longer read the daily paper. Rather, my favorite place to find out all the important, inane, and down-right weird goings-on in the world is a little site called Fark where many people contribute news stories with often hilarious re-titling (see title of entry, which was submitted as the tag for the linked article). Yes, it's not perfect, but at least I try to know what's happening in the world.
So, that's about all you get to know about me, the Secret Surfer.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
French marchers say 'non' to 2007
Hundreds of protesters in France have rung in the New Year by holding a light-hearted march against it. Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"
The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.
The protest was held in the rain and organisers joked that even the weather was against the New Year.
The tension mounted as the minutes ticked away towards midnight - but the arrival of 2007 did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.
The protesters began to chant: "No to 2008!"
They vowed to stage a similar protest on 31 December 2007 on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris.
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