Fatwa Against Body Scans
Fiqh Council of North America issues fatwa against airport body scans:
“It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women. Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of faith. The Quran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.”
via Portland Humanist Examiner, via USA Today, via Free Press
Teaching Speciesism: The McDonald’s Talking Fish schools Consumers on Complicit Complacency
The McDonald’s “Talking Filet-O-Fish” commercial opens with a wide shot of a garage. A heavy, bearded man sits with a McDonald’s bag and drink on the table in front of him. He seems comfortable, content, and average as he holds a sandwich in his hand. When he takes a bite of the sandwich the shot cuts to a close up of a taxidermy fish mounted on a wooden plaque on the wall. The fish bends in half, making an hyperbolic mechanical sound, and looks right at the camera as it begins to sing:
“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme that fish!”
As the fish continues, the camera cuts to back to the man who is shown bobbing his head with the tune and chewing on the sandwich. He is sitting on a weight lifting bench next to a motorcycle. The fish continues singing:
“Gimme back that Filet-O-Fish.
Gimme me that fish!”
Another man walks into the garage carrying a drill – perhaps returning it to his friend. He stops and looks with astonishment at the fish and then at his friend sitting on the bench eating the sandwich. The fish continues to sing:
“What if it were you hanging up on this wall?
If it were you in that sandwich,
you wouldn’t be laughing at all!”
Just as the fish sings, “If it were you in that sandwich,” the camera cuts to the man chewing.
continue reading "Teaching Speciesism: The McDonald’s Talking Fish schools Consumers on Complicit Complacency"
superhuman powers
Via Discerning Brute, Erin Pavlina tells her story of running the vegan spirituality software:
I grew up on burgers, fries and milkshakes. I ate the Standard American Diet my entire life.
Around the time I started college, I told the spirits that I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save the planet. And I told them if they would just see fit to grant me superhuman powers that I would use them for good. I also told them I wanted to be a healer and asked for the power to heal people with touch.
They laughed and told me I wasn’t ready for such a thing. So I asked them what I had to do to get ready.
They told me to go vegetarian. They told me that in order to heal people and to have ”superhuman” powers and abilities that I would need to raise my vibration, my energy, and that one powerful way of doing that was to stop eating meat. They explained to me that an animal carries its torture and death with it when it is slaughtered, and that when we humans eat that energy, it lowers ours. That made a lot of sense, so I immediately told the spirits to go take a flying leap. There wasn’t any way I was going to go vegetarian! Give up my Big Macs? Pfft. Wasn’t there some other way? I asked them hopefully.
Nope, they said. You gotta stop making your body a graveyard for suffering, torture, and cruelty. I ignored their advice for years. But it always niggled in the back of my mind. How could I expect to live with compassion when I was allowing other people to murder an animal and feed it to me. Oh, the hypocrisy.
When I met Steve, he was a vegetarian. I remember being annoyed that he couldn’t eat at certain restaurants and was always trying to get me to go vegetarian too. I was always getting food poisoning and very ill when I ate animal products, so one day I decided to try going vegetarian for 30 days. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it. And it was easy! Much much easier than I thought it would be.
I went back to the spirits and said, “Now can I have super powers?” They said, “You’re headed in the right direction, but eating eggs and milk and cheese is just as cruel as eating the animal’s flesh. Look into it and you’ll see.” I promptly ignored them again. I figured I had done quite enough! They thought differently. But I did notice that my
psychic abilities increased as a vegetarian and it did make me curious.One day Steve told me he wanted to go vegan and raise our future children as vegans. It nearly broke us apart because I had NO intention of doing anything SO drastic! But once again, I decided to give it a try for 30 days and see for myself if it was something I wanted to do or not. Oh my goodness! The difference was amazing. I lost tons of weight, I felt great, 95% of my chronic health problems just magically vanished, and my psychic abilities increased massively. How could I possibly go back to eating ice cream and cheese? That would be like putting poison back into my body.
I starting reading and learning more about how food animals are treated and I could no longer be a part of their suffering. When I realized that I could live quite easily and happily without harming animals I made the firm decision to continue to be vegan. Not only did this increase my compassion, it increased my connection to the spirits. I was able to hear them more easily, and I started having more precognitive dreams. I started being able to “read” people and know what was going to happen to them. I guess you could say I became vastly more psychic. And they started giving me tasks and assignments to carry out. I felt like a first level hero.
So, that’s how I went from eating fast food to plant food. Even though the spirits were right all along, I just wasn’t ready to listen. And they understood that too. Free will and all.
From this experience, I learned that having superhuman powers doesn’t mean flying around and using x-ray vision. It means moving towards a higher vibration and moving closer to Source. And it’s that kind of “superhuman” power that will save our planet. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from trying to fly occasionally, and I do still have that cape tucked away somewhere … just in case.
Spiritual Rights
It’s time to develop a reasoned argument for the rights of spirituality.
This is free-writing in this post, a list of ideas:
* Spirituality is a right.
* In the mode of historical pursuits of social justice struggle a new cafeteria-style liberation theology must be written.
* All states of consciousness, even those which do not directly obviously produce capital, must be allowed, protected and encouraged.
