Iraq Parliament not showing up
An article in the
New York Times says a majority of the 275 elected officials in Parliament often just don't show up for work.
Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, read a roll call of the 275 elected members with a goal of shaming the no-shows.
Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister? Absent, living in Amman and London. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian statesman? Also gone, in Abu Dhabi.
Others who failed to appear Monday included Saleh Mutlak, a senior Sunni legislator; several Shiites and Kurds; and Ayad al-Samaraei, chairman of the finance committee, whose absence led Mr. Mashhadani to ask: “When will he be back? After we approve the budget?”
It was a joke barbed with outrage. Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.
People killing each other every day is what we hear on the news. But when the government just doesn't show up, that does not bode well for the future of the country.
Thistlethwaite: "Christian Nation" A Label That Disrespects God
The Reverend Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, 11th President of Chicago Theological Seminary, writes in a
Washington Post piece
The United States is not a “Christian nation” because the Christians who wrote our Constitution believed that the freedom of each individual’s conscience honored God more than coercion. All coercion gives you is disrespect of an infinite God.
These claims that America is a “Christian Nation” only show a contempt for God. God doesn’t need the help of political pundits for there to be faith.
The nature of belief
About: Agnosticism/Atheism has an article asking if we can choose our beliefs.
According to Terence Penelhum, there are two general schools of thought when it comes to how beliefs originate: voluntarist and involuntarist. The voluntarists take say that belief is a matter of will: we have control over what we believe much in the way we have control over our actions. Theists often seem to be voluntarists and Christians in particular commonly argue the voluntarist position....
Involuntarists argue that we cannot really choose to just believe anything. According to involuntarism, a belief is not an action and, hence, cannot be attained by command — either by your own or by another's to you.
I never really consciously thought about this, but I'm definitely an involuntarist. Especially in a religious context, I can't imagine rationally choosing to believe something.
Compact Calendar
Check out this uniquely designed 2007
Compact Calendar. It's different from anything else I've seen.
A tip of the hat to Scott Wells from Boy in the Bands.
Labels: calendar
NYT: Shalikashvili supports gays and lesbians in military
John M. Shalikashvili, retired army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written an
editorial in the New York Times supporting open gays and lesbians in the military.
...Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.
This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.
I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job. ...
