The Hazards of Belief

silverharp

oscarBravo wrote: »

Reporting a rape isn't exactly a bed of roses over here either, but sure: it's a lot worse there.

I still felt a lot safer walking along Sheikh Zayed Highway late at night than I ever have on O'Connell Street during the day.

woah there rocking your male privilege

oscarBravo

recedite wrote: »

Hmmm... so if you are straight and male, you have nothing to fear.

Ah, I see you're busy reading between the lines again. You've never met a negative preconception about Muslims you didn't like, have you?

recedite

Preconceptions? Its your anecdote, not my preconception.

oscarBravo

recedite wrote: »

Preconceptions? Its your anecdote, not my preconception.

...and the conclusions you jumped to were your own.

My sisters felt equally safe walking the streets of Dubai at night. The fact that you extrapolated anything different from what I posted is on you.

recedite

oscarBravo wrote: »

My sisters felt equally safe walking the streets of Dubai at night...

They are lucky they had a brother to chaperone them :pac:
Jesting aside, I don't wish to have a go at Dubai. My impression of the place is that it is a cross between Saudi Arabia and a US style shopping mall. A destination that Saudis residents go to when they want to lighten up and spend a few bob.
So although not really "my kind of place" at all, it would not be my example of choice if I wanted to complain about Islamic fundamentalism.

Hotblack Desiato

Charged with drinking alcohol... in a bar?!

smacl

oscarBravo wrote: »

...and the conclusions you jumped to were your own.

My sisters felt equally safe walking the streets of Dubai at night. The fact that you extrapolated anything different from what I posted is on you.

Worked over there myself for a bit. Certainly safe for European professionals of either sex. The native Emiratis make a small part of the population that you have to be quite unlucky to fall foul of them. You also see Emirati women in senior positions quite regularly, e.g. the head of planning for Dubai Municipality was an Emirati woman when I was last working there. Where I saw the discrimination and bad treatment of people was on the basis of wealth rather than gender or race. A lot of people from poorer countries (e.g. Pakistan and Sudan) doing menial work in terrible conditions, and from my understanding, without and access to socialised health care and other services. If you head down to Al Ain and on to Oman things become way more conservative and treatment of women is noticeably worse.

robindch

"Deliver Me", dubbed from the Italian "Liberami", is a new documentary which looks at the RCC's support for exorcism, and what this actually means in practice for people with mental health issues, or people who believe they do.

Looks like a 10/10 for "wtf?"

IT review here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3KK1wJceIY

recedite

I see the Dubai hip-pervert has returned to Scotland.
Happy, but £32,000 poorer, and 4 months older since his arrest.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/10/24/jamie-harron-arrives-back-home-after-being-released-from-jail-in-dubai-7025053/
(warning; in this link there is a picture of two men hugging)

smacl

recedite wrote: »

I see the Dubai hip-pervert has returned to Scotland.
Happy, but £32,000 poorer, and 4 months older since his arrest.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/10/24/jamie-harron-arrives-back-home-after-being-released-from-jail-in-dubai-7025053/
(warning; in this link there is a picture of two men hugging)

Not a country you want to get arrested in while drunk, particularly if there are claims of public indecency involved. Glad the lad got home, could have been quite a bit worse.

robindch

smacl wrote: »

Not a country you want to get arrested in while drunk [...]

Can't speak for Mr Harron, but from personal experience, an excess of beer never caused problems in Dubai.

smacl

robindch wrote: »

Can't speak for Mr Harron, but from personal experience, an excess of beer never caused problems in Dubai.

Depends very much how you behave with beer on board. If you tend to get loud or any way messy when jarred things can get unpleasant when you annoy the wrong people. Its been some time since I was there, but last time over there were a lot of decidedly dodgy pubs which bordered on being brothels, no doubt because at that time the bulk of the population in those bars and in Dubai in general were men working away from home. I reckon the Emiratis were entirely aware of this and turned a blind eye as they considered it a necessity to keep the place ticking over. At the same time, if you were to become a visible nuisance you'd get hauled off. A strange enough town in many respects, while liberal by Muslim standards my feeling was there was the law and a separate unspoken set of rules that those in the know stuck to, where if you broke the rules you faced the law. Easy to stay out of trouble if you're sensible but easy to get into trouble if you don't get the underlying set-up.

robindch

smacl wrote: »

[...] there were a lot of decidedly dodgy pubs which bordered on being brothels, no doubt because at that time the bulk of the population in those bars and in Dubai in general were men working away from home.

Somebody once described it as the world's largest bar conveniently situated next to the world's driest state - it's a good business model

robindch

As fark notes, er, "Medium well done".

How on earth could anybody have thought this was a wise thing to do?

http://news.sky.com/story/medium-steamed-to-death-as-wok-ritual-goes-wrong-11097952

Peregrinus

robindch wrote: »

As fark notes, er, "Medium well done".

How on earth could anybody have thought this was a wise thing to do?

I think the whole point is that it's not a wise thing to do.

(This is not an attitude confined to Malaysia, or indeed to religious believers; example.)

seamus

I guess it's basically just a pretty extreme sauna; albeit one which can cause first degree burns. It's pretty well established that people with heart conditions shouldn't go into very hot saunas, their heart has trouble dealing with it.

So this one was pretty inevitable; although he'd done it many times before, his family warned him that his heart couldn't take it. The things people do for ritual...

robindch

Peregrinus wrote: »

I think the whole point is that it's not a wise thing to do.

Yes, but one does have to question the basic wisdom of entering what's essentially a cooker.

robindch

Researchers have looked into possible correlations between religious festivals and outbreaks of transmissable diseases.

The conclusion is that god does not seem treat his believers all that well.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609309/religious-festivals-linked-to-major-flu-outbreaks/

mikhail

robindch wrote: »

Researchers have looked into possible correlations between religious festivals and outbreaks of transmissable diseases.

The conclusion is that god does not seem treat his believers all that well.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609309/religious-festivals-linked-to-major-flu-outbreaks/

Flu works in mysterious statistical ways.

robindch

Take up your tinfoil hats and enter the strange world of the Flat Earth International Conference, 2017, Q+A session. Do not drink your tea while watching this.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/11/13/this-is-what-the-qa-session-at-a-flat-earth-conference-looks-like/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTbFvM6HYMA

Zerbini Blewitt

robindch wrote: »

Take up your tinfoil hats and enter the strange world of the Flat Earth International Conference, 2017, Q+A session. Do not drink your tea while watching this.

I find this stuff really compelling & entertaining - in a David Brent way. I just skimmed a few minutes there. One historic point he made:

wrote:

This is the first time we’ve had a flat Earth conference, literally, in 500 years.

robindch

Islam has taken over one of Indonesia's last groups of indigenous people:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430

recedite

The officer, Budi Jayapura, took me aside to check my documents and said: "We need to watch over them.
"They don't understand the concept of stealing. They say the fruit grew by itself on the tree so it can be taken, but it was planted by someone. Maybe in their belief system it is OK, but not in our society."
The fact that they hunt and eat wild pigs also creates social tensions, he added.
"This is a Muslim community. If they see the pig's blood and the leftover bits, they are disturbed," the officer explained.
What is taboo, or haram, for the Orang Rimba directly contrasts with what Muslims eat, explains Mr Manurung.
"Orang Rimba will not eat domesticated animals such as chickens, cows or sheep. They think it's a form of betrayal. You feed the animal, and when it gets fat you eat it. The fair thing to do is to fight. Whoever wins can eat the loser."

Hmm... in terms of logic anyway, the Orang Rimba way seems to beat Islam.

silverharp

he doth protest too much

MrPudding

Just wow.

MrP

recedite

The water diviners should be subjected to regular testing....
by placing them in the ducking chair and dunking them in the local millpond.
If they don't drown, they really have the special powers.

robindch

Mike Hughes has built himself a steam-powered rocket, painted it red, and with it, he intends to briefly leave this cold, flat Earth.

"It’ll shut the door on this ball earth", explained the former chauffeur and holder of a 2002 Guinness World Record for the longest jump in a limousine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/21/this-man-is-about-to-launch-himself-in-his-homemade-rocket-to-prove-the-earth-is-flat/

silverharp

im sure he could book a flight on a U2 plane, at 70,000 ft you would see the curve

smacl

recedite wrote: »

The water diviners should be subjected to regular testing....
by placing them in the ducking chair and dunking them in the local millpond.
If they don't drown, they really have the special powers.

Ah here, did they run out of witches in your village? )

CabanSail

The God Bothers have taken a couple of hits here recently.

First their long resistance to Marriage Equality has finally been defeated. The nation wide "survey" had almost 80% participation and returned a 62% Yes vote. Only a handful of seats had majority No votes, those were places where there is large communities with strong religious influence.

Now the Victorian Government has voted to allow Euthanasia. It will be passed into law very soon. In New South Wales a similar bill was defeated by just one vote.

They keep trotting out the fear campaigns which have worked for so long. They are now having less effect and each time it reduces their influence.

seamus

robindch wrote: »

Mike Hughes has built himself a steam-powered rocket, painted it red, and with it, he intends to briefly leave this cold, flat Earth.

"It’ll shut the door on this ball earth", explained the former chauffeur and holder of a 2002 Guinness World Record for the longest jump in a limousine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/21/this-man-is-about-to-launch-himself-in-his-homemade-rocket-to-prove-the-earth-is-flat/

Funny article.

Have to give the guy kudos for his 4-second steam-propelled flight in 2014. That didn't happen by accident.

Don't fully get the logic of putting a person in it for test flights though unless it's all about being a daredevil.

Real salt-of-the-earth Trump man - "I need more money for the next phase of this rocket launch, and, uh....oh yeah, this flat earth thing is great! I've just recently become a believer. Any of you guys got some money to give me?"

robindch

Nibaru may or may not have whizzed past back in September or October (delete as appropriate), but it seems that not everybody is so sure.

A man in a ski-mask and a troublesome set of spectacles thinks that Elon Musk is in on the wheeze and last Thursday, may have indicated that we'd all be interstellar dust again by Sunday evening. The Daily Star has that story for you here.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/660844/Nibiru-planet-x-nasa-november-end-of-world

The Daily Star quotes a video from a youtube channel called 'Nibiru News', which resides here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiy7dQJOlFILitze1zwv0Zg

And, interestingly, the main trash-news site linked to from the Nibiru channel above is called http://www.someonesbones.com/ and - here's a fun surprise - approximately every second story is Russian-interest and while there's no clear indication who owns, runs or writes for the site, the site's about page contains a broken link to somebody called Vladimir Vladimirovich, which, by a most surprising coincidence, are the first two of Putin's three names.

http://www.someonesbones.com/

robindch

seamus wrote: »

Have to give the guy kudos for his 4-second steam-propelled flight in 2014. That didn't happen by accident.

The Bureau of Land Management has told Mr Hughes that he can't launch his steam-powered rocket from their property. That, and a mechanical breakdown on his driveway have prevented the launch from going ahead.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/25/flat-earther-postpones-steam-powered-rocket-flight-motorhomelaunchpad/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWapLcMh6kw

recedite

robindch wrote: »

and a mechanical breakdown on his driveway ..

Could be tricky claiming insurance money for the repairs.
Sir, have you made any material alterations to the vehicle, this ehh "motorhome slash rocket launcher" ?

robindch

Poland's hardline Law+Justice party has approved a law which, over the next three years, bans shopping on Sunday, thereby keeping its Catholic supporters happy.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/poland-s-conservative-government-approves-ban-on-sunday-shopping

Hotblack Desiato

Sad to see a country make the same sort of swap-one-oppressor-for-another mistakes we did all those decades ago.

Doesn't help that so many younger voters have emigrated.

recedite

Sunday trading is a complex social issue, as well as a religious one.
Neighbouring Germany has severe restrictions, as does France and the UK.
Poland and RoI are actually far more liberal than most in this regard, so it can't be just a "catholic" thing.

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

Sunday trading is a complex social issue, as well as a religious one.
Neighbouring Germany has severe restrictions, as does France and the UK.
Poland and RoI are actually far more liberal than most in this regard, so it can't be just a "catholic" thing.

The article that Robin links to notes that the measure is also supported by the trade union movement, and that's not terribly surprising, when you think about it.

recedite

The bill was actually proposed by their Solidarity trade union.

robindch

For anybody in Canada next month, make sure you visit St Xavier, or at least his severed forearm:

"Well, at first glance if you're far away it just looks like the skeleton of an arm because it's kind of sunken in and the skin is kind of dry. But when you can come closer you can see, oh my goodness there is meat on those bones, this is this is an arm."

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.4426549/november-30-2017-episode-transcript-1.4429596

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xma3v/theres-a-severed-arm-touring-canada-and-its-metal-as-hell

silverharp

Nice people but the State is a pox

Hotblack Desiato

robindch wrote: »

For anybody in Canada next month

It'd cost me an arm... and a leg

Hotblack Desiato

recedite wrote: »

The bill was actually proposed by their Solidarity trade union.

They're pretty catholic. Not like western trade unions. Think 100+ years ago when Irishness and devotional catholicism got conflated.

Peregrinus

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

They're pretty catholic. Not like western trade unions. Think 100+ years ago when Irishness and devotional catholicism got conflated.

Trade unions in Australia also oppose Sunday opening and, believe me, it has nothing to do with Catholicism. It has to do with overtime rates.

Seriously, its perfectly obvious why an organisation whose business it is to advance the interests of workers would have concerns about laws regulating the working week. You don't have to look to religious influences to explain this.

Hotblack Desiato

They should be looking to have overtime rates regulated then, rather than banning Sunday opening.

Ancient pseudo-Chinese proverb : where some see crisis (of faith) others see (financial) opportunity

Hotblack Desiato

As an aside, I'm pretty sure we had the only armed socialist proletarian revolution where the rosary was said multiple times per day

Peregrinus

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

They should be looking to have overtime rates regulated then, rather than banning Sunday opening.

The two are linked, Hotblack. If Sunday becomes normal trading hours, it's that bit more difficult to hold out for overtime rates for Sunday work. Whereas if there are limits on an employer's ability to compel workers to work on a Sunday, the employees 'bargaining position in regards to what employers have to offer him to get agreement to work on Sunday is much stronger.

When trade unions successfully bargain for shorter or limited working hours, the dominant outcome is usually not that workers work fewer hours. Some do, but mostly the outcome is that they work the same hours, but get paid more for it.

All together, now! Cue music! "Arise, ye workers of the world . . ."

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

All together, now! Cue music! "Arise, ye workers of the world . . ."

Don't know if you've watched Matewan P, well worth a punt if you haven't

Regarding Sunday work, it is also worth remembering that the small retail sector is currently being hammered by on-line vendors where a large part of their sales come at the weekend. I think putting many of them under more pressure will simply force them out of business, where the Aldi's and LIDL's of this world could suck it up without too much impact. As such, I'm of the opinion that restricting Sunday working hours doesn't benefit us.

silverharp

there is a bit of a class issue here, nobody expects to be able to ring up their insurance or bank on a Sunday but retail is expected to sweat their assets and trade as much as possible. Its facilitated by open labour markets at the low end and the consequences are things like higher rents which creates a vicious circle to trade more to pay the rents.

Actually Im amazed there even is a "high street" these days given how much is bought on line and in the long run leaves Sunday trading as a minor issue.

robindch

Religious organization which worships Jesus and consumes alcohol during religious services declares that a religious organization which worships Jesus and which consumes alcohol at their religious services is "a cult". This is confirmed by the splendidly-named Archbishop Sithole.

https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/gauteng/council-brands-boozing-church-as-cult-and-a-disgrace-to-christianity-12410602

IOL wrote:

Pretoria - Bishop Tsietsi Makiti of The Gabola Church said the South African Union Council of Independent Churches must consult with him first, before making “false allegations” against him and his congregation. This follows a media briefing of the council that branded the alcohol-drinking church as a cult and a disgrace to Christianity. The council said talking about God in taverns was disrespectful to the Christian faith.

The council intends to close the church but has no concrete plan as yet, and says it will remain in prayer until it is shut down. Within just four months of opening, Makiti said there were now branches in Bloemfontein, Klerksdorp, Sebokeng and Joburg and he had plans to expand to Lesotho, Tanzania, Zambia and eventually overseas.

“They need to consult with me, before making up all these stories. I help combat crime in the various communities and assist with burials and the needs of community members that the church can’t because they are too busy judging people,” said Makiti. He converted tavern owners to pastors and this improved the community drastically. The council wants to embark on an investigation to find who ordained him and qualified him as a bishop.

“In order to be a bishop you must first have been a pastor under another leader for two years and must have attended Bible school, following your calling and being trained under a senior leader of the church,” said Archbishop Lena Perumal, who is the deputy general secretary of the council. However, Makiti said he has been a deacon and pastor since 1993 and has long completed his theology studies. “My church is a way of making people forget their troubles and the worries of this world. This is what Jesus also did with his disciples; he turned water into wine,” he said.

Perumal and the other members of the council argued that the wine in the days of Jesus did not have a high volume of alcohol. “Jesus created that miracle to protect the family from embarrassment and it was not fermented and not high in alcohol, like the ones we get today.” The council said it was disturbed that “this apostle or whatever he calls himself” is making men feel better about spending money at taverns and making them feel guiltless, all in the name of the church.

According to the council, a church is a sacred place for the holy, chosen people and its congregants need to be different and not partake in all the sinister shenanigans people who are not part of the church partake in.

Archbishop Patrick Sithole, president of the council, said it was the mandate of the church to win back lost souls, who include people who drink and smoke. “You cannot drink beer while worshipping God. It is not acceptable to use the name of God while drinking,” said Sithole. Bishop Owen McGregory, executive of the council, shared the sentiments of Sithole and agreed with the statement that everyone should come to church “as they are” but they needed to change for the “better”. “Alcohol leaves you clouded and you cannot approach the throne of God in that state.”

The council concluded by saying that alcohol was destructive and one needed to be sober-minded when dealing with the things of God. We are not judging people, we are correcting and rebuking them, and that is what the Bible says we as the priesthood should do,” said McGregory.

According to the council, the Gabola Church was a clear sign or indication of the last days.