Sadly, it seems that protests against the anti-Church sentiments of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy has most likely led to the abandonment of the filming of the trilogy. Calls to boycott the first film, The Golden Compass, led to di

It is wonderful to now have the irrepressible Eteraz contribute to the HuffPo.

I have been watching the HuffPo since it started and posted the following on my blog a while back—the second half of the post is more relevant and I reproduce it below

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the March 15 episode of The Colbert Report:

Hirsi Ali
Many Muslims have refused to question the doctrine itself, the submission within Islam as opposed to the majority of Christian who’ve been questioning it for ages, and who have now developed a Christianity that is defined only as love – love thy neighbor, where they’ve abolished hell, whereas most Muslims believe not only in a hereafter, but in Hell, and your not allowed to ask – put question marks on what is in the Quran.

Colbert:
I don’t know what Christianity you’ve been studying, but, uh, Hell’s still fairly prominent in some of the churches I’ve been to.

I just don’t get it. Why is this woman taken seriously?

Thus sayeth a person to my wife today about an American convert she knows who talks about Islam. When she told me this, I immediately knew it applied to me as well since that man and I have in common our whiteness and maleness. You see, people expect a brown immigrant who speaks with an accent when they hear someone representing Islam. Even better if they are exotic with a turban or Azharite red Fez. When they don't get it, thier pre-programmed wiring tells them that the representative must not be authentic. This is despite the equally feasible conclusion that thier expectation itself was flawed, but Hummer-driving Americans who never deserved to have US Marines die for them never look within themselves for the error.

For those of us unhappy with the job that CNN and BBC do of covering world news, there's now another alternative; Al-Jazeera English. Assuming, of course, that you're lucky enough to receive it; as the New York Times reported in their cheekily-titled story "Not coming soon to a channel near you":

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld once famously denounced the Arab-language Al Jazeera as “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable,” which may be one reason that major cable and satellite providers in the United States declined to offer the English version. Yesterday, most Americans could watch it only on the Internet