Oliver's /dev/null replacement

So Fidel Castro, someone who is both, a living legend to some and a dictator to others, has resigned. Fine. Whatever people think about his person, listening to George W. Bush’s comment on Castro’s resignation gives the whole situation a comical spin – once more.

He tells us that he expects free and fair elections now that Castro resigned. I wonder what this so-called election in 2000 was in the USA. Free? Fair? C’mon, this must be a joke, right? Right?

// Oliver

Muslims ask for illustrations of Muhammad to be taken down from Wikipedia. Quote from the petition text follows:

In Islam picture of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other Humans are not allowed. But Wikipedia editors are showing illustrations with face illustrated and face is veiled or white washed. But still they are offensive to Muslims. I request all brothers and sisters to sign this petitions so we can tell Wikipedia to respect the religion and remove the illustrations.

What the heck? It’s all nice if Muslims or any other religious groups have sensibilities due to their faith, but why oh why do these sensibilities always have to affect other people which do not share this faith? This time it’s not about the caricatures of Muhammad, but about illustrations from the fifteenth century, by the way. So it’s not per-se something offending from a Muslim point of view. In fact the Shi’a and the Sunna are not of the same opinion concerning this question either.

By the way, while we’re at it. In the stricted sense there has been a clear prohibition of images of god (not of the prophets, though) in the Christian and Jewish world. This particular prohibition can even be interpreted as being valid for anything that has a face (which includes many animals, of course). Now what would we say if Christian fundamentalists told us to stop broadcast TV? Well, not that I really mind – I do not even have a TV set – but occasionally I watch reports on the internet.

// Oliver

PS: When will religious zealots start to respect my sensibilities as an atheist?

Lately there has been a huge discussion in Germany about privacy issues connected with those social network websites of the web 2.0. In Germany there is one called StudiVZ which is more or less modeled after FaceBook, as I am told (I don’t use either, btw).

In the center of the dicussion was the fact that young people enter their private data voluntarily and freely available for others on those websites. One of the things that was mentioned was the question whether those people will have a chance in their future to get a job. Some “human resource” ¹ manager mentioned that photographs of parties might be nice for a future event manager, but could be damaging for someone applying for a job at a bank. He also mentioned that he makes extensive use of web search in order to find details about applicants. He also mentioned that comments in forums and elsewhere would be considered in the course of such a web search as well.
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1. In my opinion one of the ugly terms that really reveals what our society is about! [↩]

Follow this link!

I don’t share all thoughts, but some are certainly interesting and seem to have a foundation. And since this is in English, I thought why not share it with the readers of my blog 😉

// Oliver

A colleague sent me this link today, after a short discussion during lunch. It shows again how ridiculous the self-proclaimed universal church is. Never mind the criticism of Harry Potter or having it called “satanism” or so. I just don’t care whether someone is Christian or Satanist or both

What really freaked me out, though, was the following:

The exorcist, with his decades of experience in directly combating evil, explained that J.K. Rowling’s books contain innumerable positive references to magic, “the satanic art”. He noted that the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction “does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil.” (above link)

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