reincarnation means you were probably a different shade of skin in past lives and you probably will be in your next one (assuming you don’t ‘fall’)

jimi hedrix sang ‘there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke’, don’t make this mistake, make the most of this precious oppourtunity

love, share with and help each another, tolerance, forbearance

His “history lesson” with Islam… funny how it mirrors that of Christianity. Somehow he believes nobody would be upset if he wrote that kind of thing about Christianity… I believe he’s wrong.

About the only thing I agree with him on is that our society whines too much about perceived slights. Freedom of speech is dying in many ways, and the PC (not the computer) revolution is helping. It’s sad that one cannot speak his or her own mind without being attacked for those thoughts.
The only problem is… his writing is a poor example of this. It’s slanderous, one-sided, and full of holes.
A better example would be the reaction to the Muslims responding to Blake’s tripe. Some received threats of violence (and worse), and they were certainly not deserved. (I will say, some people that were 100% against Blake’s column went too far, and showed the same kind of ignorance, but threats of violence are never appropriate responses)

I recant nothing. Eight months after the “shitstorm” (to use my editor’s crude but accurate term) I provoked with my column The Islamic Double Standard, I am more convinced than ever that what I wrote was true and needed to be said.

The main thesis of my piece was confirmed by the response to my column. Had I written a piece attacking Christianity, there would have been nothing significant in the reaction. I know this, because another Barometer columnist, Jim Smith, wrote viciously about Christianity regularly during his time at OSU. There were no agonized debates over whether those should have been published, no protests, no new student groups formed, etc…

Broader proof comes on a regular basis, seen most recently in the vile response to Pope Benedict XVI’s comments. Consider the response of the Pope’s critics in the West. They have generally said that he shouldn’t have made the comments he did, because they were insensitive and provocative. Implicit in this is acceptance that it could reasonably be predicted that the Pope quoting a centuries-old condemnation of Islam would lead to things like a nun being shot in the back and killed.

The examples are endless. Rushdie had a bounty placed on his head; Dan Brown merely reaped a bounty from his blasphemy. Since there is no compulsion in religion, I’m sure Muslims the world over rose up in protest against the forced conversions of two kidnapped journalists; the media of the imperialistic Zionist crusaders here in the West just must not have covered those protests.

Everything I said was true. Mohammed did have a child bride when he was in his fifties. Islam did spread through wars of conquest, which began in Mohammed’s lifetime and were led by him. Islam doesn’t make any distinction between civil and religious authority – in much of the Muslim world, apostasy from Islam is a capital crime.

In the hubbub over my column, it was clear that my offense was to speak an unpleasant truth that those in progressive environments like Corvallis would rather forget. Their’s is a childish attitude, unbecoming of the search for truth that is supposed to mark a university. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” is a fool’s advice, because sometimes reality isn’t nice. To avoid any statements that might offend is to commit intellectual suicide, because it prevents real discussion and investigation. I care less whether my column was hurtful that I care about it being true.

I can only wonder at the provincialism of people who demand that nothing ever be written that may disturb their emotional equanimity by questioning, and yes, even attacking, their beliefs.