Saturday, December 31, 2005

South Park Kids

South Park kids, as we know them:
South Park kids, if they'd been real people:

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who Saved the World in 1983

Somehow, "saving the world" is a very popular theme in Hollywood movies, story books, comics, etc... Which made me wonder: hey, what about the real world? Are there any heroes on the global scale as well? After googling for "saved the world", I found one candidate saviour: Stanislav Petrov. Here are two articles that talk about his (largely unsung) heroism:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1421370

http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Authorship Clues in the Quran

by Brandon Yusuf Toropov
Reproduced faithfully without permission from the free magazine Message International, October-November 2005's issue. Copyright owner can yell at me at haya_shiloh@yahoo.com (although I would prefer a thank you note instead, of course)

Who wrote the Qur'an? The non-Muslim's answer to this important question usually sounds like this:

"The Qur'an was authored by a human being; it is not a literal revelation from God. It is a book created by human intelligence, like any other book. It was, as a matter of historical fact, written by Muhammad, in the seventh century A.D."

If this is your view, rest assured that you have plenty of company!

You should also know, though, that this point of view is not without its difficulties. To believe it, you must also believe that Muhammad, peace be upon him:

- Knew that the Earth and heavenly bodies were once a single point, and were separated violently (21:30)

What's more...
- If you don't believe that he had access to special knowledge that made possible this prefiguring of the modern Big Bang theory - a theory entirely unknown to the Arabs of the seventh century - you must conclude that 21:30 of the Qur'an is merely an intriguing coincidence, a matter of getting something right by chance.

Perhaps this passage is simply an intriguing coincidence. If it is, however, it is not the only one.

This man, the supposed "author" of the Qur'an, would also have to have:

- Known about the relativity of time (22:47; 23:112 - 114; 70:4), a subject similarly unknown to Arab tribes of this period.

Either he possessed some extraordinary source of knowledge allowing discussion of this subject thirteen and a half centuries before Einstein, or we are looking at another intriguing coincidence.

Which is it?
- Most non-Muslims will instinctively answer along these lines: " Even if it means granting the text of the Qur'an a second striking coincidental feature, the likeliest explanation is that both passages are merely examples of happenstance."

And yet:
Consider that the same author would also have to have:

- Known that the universe is continuously expanding (51:47).

- Known that matter is created in pairs (36:36). (By the way, this discovery earned the scientist Paul Dirac the Nobel Prize in 1933.)

- Known what modern biological science knows about the foundation of life on Earth, namely that it is water-based (21:30).

- Known that iron is not native to the Earth, coming instead from an extraterrestrial source (57:25).

- Known that the planet Earth travels in an orbit (27:88; 21:33).

- Known that the sun, too, moves in an orbit (37:38), as indeed modern astronomy proves that it does.

- Known that the Earth's atmosphere acts like a protective shield for living creatures (21:32).

- Known that the stages of human development in the womb unfold in a specific, describable sequence (23:14) that has been confirmed by modern experts in human embryology.

- Known that the roots of mountains extend deep into the earth and serve the function of preventing shocks (21:31).

- Known details of how the Earth's rain cycle functions that were mysteries to scientists until the twentieth century (30:48).

- Known what modern oceanographers have now learned, namely that bordering seas meet but do not mingle with one another (55:19 - 20).

- Known that oceans have complex subsurface wave patterns (24:40).

- Known that, in communities of honeybees, only the females are workers (16:68 - 69). (The Arabic verb forms can connect only to female beings).

- Known, seven years ahead of time, that the humiliated Byzantine army of his day would rejuvenate itself and secure a major victory, which in fact it eventually did against the Persians (30:1 - 4).

- Known, two years before he did so, that he would enter Mecca in triumph (48:27).

- Known that the body of the Pharaoh who had opposed Moses would be preserved for future generations (10:91 - 92) - it is today on display in the Royal Mummies Chamber of the Egyptian Museum.

- Known to refer (12:54) to the Egyptian head of state of Joseph's, peace be upon him, era as king (Aziz-Malik) and not Pharaoh, the word that appears erroneously in the book of Genesis.

- Known that the fabled Arabian lost city of Iram (89:6 - 8) whose historical existence was confirmed by archaelogists only in 1990, was a historical reality.

- Known that the ancient flood that had beset the southern Arabian people of Saba from their dam system (34:15 - 17), similarly confirmed by modern archaeology, was a historical reality.

- Known the name of Haman (28:38), a historical figure close to the Pharaoh of the era of Moses, peace be upon him... despite the problems that a) the name Haman does not appear in the Torah's version of the story, and b) the ability to translate the hieroglyphic language system of the Egyptians had been utterly lost for centuries at the time of the revelation of the Qur'an, and indeed would remain lost until the year 1799. After the discovery in that year of the Rosetta Stone, scholars were able to unlock the mystery of the hieroglyphs and, eventually, to confirm that there was indeed a Haman, unmentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, who was close to this Pharaoh in this period, and who was involved in construction, just as the Qur'an says. If we believe that human authorship is the only possible explanation for the origin of the Qur'an, we must assume either that Muhammad, peace be upon him, somehow had access to this information, or we must believe that this passage is yet another in a remarkably long series of intriguing coincidences.

How many coincidences do we need to get the message?
The message is simple: no human intelligence could have produced this book in the seventh century.

Please know that there are many, many more such coincidences in the Qur'an. I have listed here only those that do not require advanced knowledge in such topics as Arabic, mathematics, Islamic history, or classical poetic forms. Even with the brief list I have provided, there comes, I think, a point at which one is obliged to evaluate the Qur'an's message carefully, closely, and respectfully. These supposed coincidences are, I believe, clear signs to humankind that the Qur'an's message is of a special quality, and must not be ignored.

Only the repeated exposure of the individual human heart to the Qur'an's message can settle such a momentous question, "Who wrote the Qur'an?"

If you are a person who believes that there is no such thing as a divinely inspired revelation, the question is: how many coincidences does it take for you to consider such a revelation to humanity may be possible?

If you are a person who believes that there is such a thing as a divinely inspired revelation, the question is, how many coincidences are you willing to ignore before considering the possibility that a particular text presents such revelation?

Please know that I am NOT interested in any debate about the possibility that any ONE of these verses I have cited is just a coincidence, or is for some other reason unpersuasive to you.

The truly remarkable thing is that ALL of these features should present themselves in a text supposedly composed by human intelligence - and the profound unlikelihood of that is the intriguing coincidence I wish to discuss.

Knowing what you now know about these supposed coincidences, do you honestly believe that the Qur'an is simply the product of human intelligence, a book like any other book? Or does it seem more likely to you that its message is of a special quality?

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

'You sure YOU have the worst problem?

You better not be laughing at this picture. Whatever the desperate boy is doing, whether drinking urine or eating faece, it's NOT funny.


An entry about Kevin Carter (the photographer of the picture above), taken from Wikipedia:

Kevin Carter (1961-1994) was a South African photojournalist and member of the Bang-Bang Club.

Carter spent much of his career covering the unstable situation in the last stages of the South African Apartheid regime. He is best known for winning the 1994 Pulitzer
Prize for Feature Photography
for a haunting photograph from the Sudan famine crisis of a small, starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing - and not helping - the girl:

The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene. [1]

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend in township violence may have contributed to Carter's suicide at the age of 33. His suicide note read:

I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen... The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist.

Vulture or not he was to that poor child, at least he helped spread awareness to the world about the famine issue... The photo should help spur people to do the right thing.

I congratulate you if you're still reading up to this point. Some people immediately turn away when they see the first sign of portrayals of misery. Seems like you're not one of them.

Well, the question now is, what next? shall you move on another random webpage and shove this unpleasant memory behind? Or mourn a bit, and then continue your life unaffectedly?

If you feel the urge to do something, then the least you can do is to donate online to relief efforts. Quick and easy. There are many you can choose from, and here are some suggestions: Red Cross, Red Crescent, UN's World Food Programme, UNICEF, UNHCR, Oxfam, Mercy Corps...

May each of our small acts help make the world better...

Friday, December 09, 2005

Little Johnny

The teacher asks everyone in the class to demonstrate something exciting. When Johnny's turn came, he walked to the blackboard and drew a small dot.

"What's that?", the teacher asked, puzzled.

"It's a period."

"Well, I see that, but what's exciting about a period?"

"Darned if I know, but this morning my sister said she missed one... Dad had a heart attack, mom fainted, and the guy next door shot himself."

(source: wikipedia)