FaithWorld
Religion, faith and ethics
Senior al-Azhar Sheikh Emad Effat shot dead during Cairo protests
Emad Effat, a senior official of Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta department of al-Azhar that issues Islamic fatwas (religious edicts), died on Friday of a gunshot wound when Egyptian soldiers clashed with demonstrators protesting against the country’s military leaders in downtown Cairo. The clashes, which continued into Sunday, have killed 10 people and wounded hundreds, marring the first free election most voters can remember.
His wife, Nashwa Abdel-Fattah, told Reuters the bullet “hit him under his shoulder in a diagonal way from right to left,” adding she did not know who fired the shot. “The firing wasn’t just from above, there were people on the ground,” she said.
At his funeral on Saturday, hundreds of mourners chanted “Down with military rule.”
Nashwa Abdel-Tawab, Effat’s widow and Ahram Weekly journalist, said in [a] video that her husband had been participating in popular demonstrations since Egypt’s January uprising. “During sit-ins at Tahrir Square, he would go to work in the morning and spend the night in the square,” Abdel-Tawab recalled of her husband. “He wasn’t able to join the Cabinet sit-in, but when he saw [the violence], he couldn’t just stand and watch people dying, so he went down to the protest.”
“He didn’t advocate violence,” she added. “He was there to show solidarity with the protesters.” Effat, senior clerk at Al-Azhar’s influential Dar Al-Ifta religious authority, died on Friday of a gunshot wound sustained when military police attempted to violently dispersed the sit-in.
Effat’s funeral was held on Saturday in the presence of thousands of mourners, including Al-Azhar officials, political activists and Coptic Christian figures, including prominent Coptic priest Felopateer Gamil and members of the “Maspero Youth” Coptic activist group.
The Muslim Brotherhood website Ikhwanweb wrote:
The late Sheikh Effat, 52 years old, also made an extensive argument against SCAF[military authorities] after the Maspero incident where scores of Christians were killed in clashes with the military police. He called the Egyptians to unite and pressure for handing over of power from the military to civilians, and warned all Egyptians – especially Islamists – from falling into the trap of sectarianism and igniting a confrontation between Muslims and Christians in the way that extends the rule of the military.
Study says Dutch Catholic Church sexually abused thousands, bishops apologise
Tens of thousands of children have been victims of sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands since 1945, an independent commission said on Friday, criticizing what it called the church’s cover-up and culture of silence. Church leaders said the findings filled them with shame and sorrow and offered a “heartfelt apology,” saying not only the perpetrators were to blame, but church authorities too.
The commission estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 minors were sexually abused in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools and seminaries between 1945 and 1981, with offences ranging from very mild to serious, including rape. Education changes meant few Catholic homes for minors remained after 1981, but abuses involving the church continued.
“Several tens of thousands of minors were subjected to mild, serious, and very serious forms of inappropriate sexual behavior in the Roman Catholic Church,” from the end of World War Two until 2010, the commission said.
Most cases were of mild to moderate abuse, such as touching, but it estimated “several thousand” instances of rape.
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Voices from al-Azhar on Egypt, Islam and elections
Following are lightly edited excerpts from my conversations in Cairo with two senior officials of Al-Azhar, the prestigious Cairo mosque and university that has been the centre of Sunni Islamic learning for over 1,000 years. I quoted both of them yesterday in my story Egypt’s al-Azhar to preach Islamic message on satellite TV. Ibrahim Negm is senior adviser to Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s second-highest religious authority who is responsible for the Dar Al-Ifta office that issues fatwas. Mahmoud Azab is the adviser on dialogue to Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar and top Islamic authority for many of the world’s Sunni Muslims.
Ibrahim Negm, December 12, 2011
Q. Where does Al-Azhar stand amid all the changes in Egypt?
A. Al-Azhar is in a historic situation to upgrade itself and not just be content with speaking through the media. The people voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis because they know them. We need to break the thick layers of barriers that have been built over the past three decades between the religious establishment and the people. We have to upgrade our Islamic discourse by talking about the simple concerns of the people. The issues that they have been battling with, the issues that the other camp has succeeded in addressing. Those are issues relating to behaviours, dress, rituals, day-to-day dealings. For example, they have managed to tell the people that to be a good Muslim, you have to wear a beard. That restricts the meaning of Islam to formal looks.
The religious establishment has not explained to people what Islam really means, that Islam goes beyond the outer looks, that Islam is all about values we need to inculcate. It doesn’t matter so much to wear a beard or full veil while you have problems with your neighbour. They have managed to get the people preoccupied with these kinds of issues. The result is that people basically have a crooked understanding of what it means to be religious nowadays.
Q. What was Al-Azhar doing these past three decades?
A. Al-Azhar has been doing its job. But when satellite television was invented, when the Internet was introduced in Egypt, al-Azhar did not cope adequately with the modern means of communications. These voices have managed to talk to people in the privacy of their own homes. So far, al-Azhar does not have a single satellite television, not even one. The Salafis have eight, from all over the region. Al-Azhar has just a couple of websites while the other ones have hundreds of websites. Also, in terms of literature, we don’t put out much literature while you have thousands and thousands of pieces of literature from the other camp. They’ve been very active running popular religious programs in the suburbs and in the countryside that have been raising awareness. They have managed to go to these places and preach to them.
Many U.S. surgeons don’t discuss patients’ wishes in end-of-life care: study
Many U.S. surgeons fail to discuss their patients’ wishes in case a risky operation goes awry, and even more would not operate if patients limited what could be done to keep them alive, a survey found.
Such medical wishes and plans for end-of-life care, called “advance directives,” outline what can and cannot be done if patients are unable to decide for themselves. The most famous examples are so-called living wills. But the restrictions are debated among doctors, said the survey, published in the Annals of Surgery.
“(Surgeons) feel the advance directive basically ties their hands behind their back, and they’re not given the tools to get them through the surgery,” said Margaret Schwarze, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, who was one of the survey’s authors.
She and her colleagues asked 912 surgeons who regularly perform risky operations 14 questions on how they discuss a patient’s advance directives and whether the directives influence their decision to operate.
More than four out of every five surgeons discussed which forms of life support the patients would like to limit. But only about half asked specifically about the patient’s advance directive, which can include restricting the use of feeding tubes and ventilators to keep a person alive.
Read the full story by Andrew Seaman here. . Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld
Polemical atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens dead at 62
British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Thursday at the age of 62. He died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.
“Christopher Hitchens – the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant – died today at the age of 62,” Vanity Fair said.
A heavy smoker and drinker, Hitchens cut short a book tour for his memoir “Hitch 22″ last year to undergo chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer.
As a journalist, war correspondent and literary critic, Hitchens carved out a reputation for barbed repartee, scathing critiques of public figures and a fierce intelligence.
In his 2007 book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Hitchens took on major religions with his trenchant atheism. He argued that religion was the source of all tyranny and that many of the world’s evils have been done in the name of religion.
Read the full story by Anthony Boadle here. . Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld
Funny, Hitchens’ beloved Marxism is responsible for 100 million deaths so far, vastly more than any religious faith. And yes, he did pull for the other team during the Cold War, as his brother Peter has confirmed. Gee I wonder how that would have turned out.
And the killing continues.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/15/world/asia /north-korean-labor-camps-in-siberia/in dex.html
The real answer is not a banishment of religion as Hitchens advocated, which involves widespread death everywhere it was tried, but religious freedom and tolerance of differing views. Ironically, the societies Hitchens spent most of his time criticizing were the world’s most free and tolerant societies.
Egypt’s al-Azhar to preach Islamic message on satellite TV
Al-Azhar, Egypt’s 1,000-year-old seat of Islamic learning, will soon be preaching its doctrines on satellite television, a space it has previously left to Islamist parties now leading the country’s first free polls.
Al-Azhar, Egypt’s highest religious authority, also plans to spruce up its websites, improve religious education and mobilise its imams to offer an alternative to the unexpectedly popular puritan message some Islamist politicians deliver.
Alongside its traditional work training most of Egypt’s imams and providing thousands of religious rulings (fatwas) daily, it has also been hosting discussions among religious, political and cultural leaders to ponder Egypt’s future.
“The revolution has helped us to reform,” said Mahmoud Azab, adviser to Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand Imam of al-Azhar and top Islamic authority for many of the world’s Sunni Muslims.
Ibrahim Negm, senior adviser to Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s second-highest religious authority after Tayeb, said: “We have not adaquately coped with the changing modern means of communication and information technology.”
The advisers told Reuters al-Azhar was not taking sides in the political rivalries marking Egypt’s staggered elections.
Rather, it was making up for time lost during Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade dictatorship when it kept close to the authorities, while banned Islamists eagerly embraced the new media and grassroots contacts to spread their stricter views.
Radical Jewish settlers spark soul – searching in Israel, govt announces crackdown
Young Jewish settlers behind attacks on Palestinian mosques have shaken Israel by turning violent against its most revered institution, the conscript military. The zealots’ escalation from anti-Arab vandalism and arson to a rampage at an Israeli garrison in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday triggered concern for the future of an ideologically driven society that sees its armed forces as a bulwark of unity.
“The red lines have been crossed,” was Mari tabloid’s main headline on Wednesday. An officer slightly hurt by rocks was quoted as saying his assailants had called him a Nazi, trashing a taboo in their fury at Israel’s occasional crackdowns on settlements built without government authorisation.
A top military commander told Reuters that hostility to state authority was “unfortunately not an aberration” among settlers. “We have to deal with this with all means now, because these people are part of us, the Jewish people, and we’d best find a way to remain a democracy,” he said on condition of anonymity. Read more in Radical settlers trigger soul-searching in Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday approved steps to crack down on the violent ultra-nationalist settlers. Among the measures were administrative detention of suspects, trials of some suspects in military rather than civil courts, and ejection from the West Bank of settlers suspected of inciting violence. Read more in Israel approves steps to rein in settler violence.
Dutch set to block ritual slaughter ban after Jewish, Muslim protest
The Dutch Senate is set to reject next week a proposed law banning ritual slaughter of animals, which has drawn fierce opposition from Muslim and Jewish groups. During a debate, party factions representing a majority in the Senate said they would vote against the bill proposed by the small Dutch Animal Rights Party.
The bill stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to the Muslim halal and Jewish kosher laws that require animals to be fully conscious.
The lower house of parliament passed the bill in June but without Senate approval it will fail.
The Labour Party, which backed the ban in the lower house, declared it would reject the bill in next week’s vote as it hurts freedom of religion.
“This is too much of an ad hoc solution and a symbolic law, and our faction unanimously cannot support the proposed law,” Labour Senate member Nico Schrijver said.
Read the full story by Gilbert Kreijger here. . Follow all posts on Twitter @ RTRFaithWorld
The Higgs boson: What has God got to do with it?
“We don’t call it the ‘God particle’, it’s just the media that do that,” a senior U.S. scientist politely told an interviewer on a major European radio station on Tuesday.
“Well, I am the from the media and I’m going to continue calling it that,” said the journalist – and continued to do so.
The exchange, as physicists at the CERN research centre near Geneva were preparing to announce the latest news from their long and frustrating search for the Higgs boson, illustrated sharply how science and the popular media are not always a good mix.
“I hate that ‘God particle’ term,” said Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN’s ATLAS team of so-called “Higgs hunters” – an epithet they do not reject.
“The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that,” she told Reuters at a news conference after her colleagues revealed growing evidence, albeit not yet proof, of the particle’s existence.
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The findings were, The Higgs exist, or it doesn’t.
What the standard model in reality predicts is, that mass does not exist.
What if mass in reality does not exist at all?
Professor emeritus of physics at the University of Toronto John Moffat, was in direct communication with Einstein in his late life. John Moffat describes in his book “Reinventing Gravity”, how Einstein in the fifties attempted to construct a theory that unified gravity and Maxwells equations of electromagnetism.
If mass does not exist, or in some way is related to electromagnetism then gravity doesn’t exist either.
It really is spooky, but it seems like electromagnetism is the only existing property in the physical universe. The strong and the weak force has some very peculiar similarities to electromagnetism. The standard model shows that.
Einstein never found the relation. If he did he would have made headlines again.
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CERN scientists find signs of the missing “God particle”
International scientists said on Tuesday they had found signs of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle dubbed the “God particle” that is believed to have played a vital role in the creation of the universe after the Big Bang. Scientists at the CERN physics research centre near Geneva said, however, they had found no conclusive proof of the existence of the particle which, according to prevailing theories of physics, gives everything in the universe its mass.
“If the Higgs observation is confirmed…this really will be one of the discoveries of the century,” said Themis Bowcock, a professor of particle physics at Britain’s Liverpool University. “Physicists will have uncovered a keystone in the makeup of the Universe…whose influence we see and feel every day of our lives.”
Physicists think this subatomic speck of matter, if it is ever found, could explain the mysterious code at the origin of the physical world. To know this would be to “know the mind of God,” as Einstein wanted to do. The physicist who launched the hunt for this elusive particle doesn’t like its nickname. “It embarrasses me,” Peter Higgs has said. “Although I am not a believer myself, it’s a misuse of terminology that might offend some people.”
The leaders of two experiments, ALTAS and CMS, revealed their findings to a packed seminar at CERN, where they have tried to find traces of the elusive boson by smashing particles together in the Large Hadron Collider at high speed. “Both experiments have the signals pointing in essentially the same direction,” said Oliver Buchmueller, senior physicist on CMS. “It seems that both Atlas and us have found the signals are at the same mass level. That is obviously very important.”
Fabiola Gianotti, the scientist in charge of the ATLAS experiment, said ATLAS had narrowed the search to a signal centered at around 126 GeV (Giga electron volts), which would be compatible with the expected strength of a Standard Model Higgs. “It is too early” for final conclusions, she said. “More studies and more data are needed. The next few months will be very exciting…I don’t know what the conclusions will be.”
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