Murfreesboro — Smurfeezboro

knoxnews.com

Knoxville News Sentinel Editorial March 3 2011: regarding the article about the upcoming legislation regarding No Muslims allowed in Tennessee

A bill in the Tennessee Legislature that would basically outlaw Islam in Tennessee is obviously unconstitutional and an embarrassment to the entire state.
State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, the legislation’s sponsor, should withdraw the odious bill and issue an apology to all state residents, Muslims in particular.
The bill ostensibly addresses terrorism but in reality outlaws a religion. That’s unacceptable, unsupportable and unconscionable. It’s also unconstitutional on a variety of fronts.
Ketron’s bill would require the state attorney general to label any organization that advocates adherence to Shariah, the Muslim religious and legal proscriptions, as a terrorist group. The organization’s finances would be frozen immediately and members could face felony charges that could result in as many as 15 years in prison. Employees, presumably including school teachers and administrative assistants, are specifically targeted for possible prosecution.
A disclaimer that the law doesn’t apply to peaceful followers of Islam is laughable.
Based on the Quran, examples drawn from the life of Muhammad and a long history of scholarly thought, Shariah is more than a set of laws. It also instructs Muslims how to practice their faith.
All Muslims follow Shariah – which, like Christian and Jewish traditions, has conservative, moderate, liberal and fundamentalist interpretations – to some degree. Every Muslim organization can be construed as a Shariah organization, so the bill simply would outlaw Islam.
The bill also would set up the state attorney general as a grand inquisitor, giving the office sole authority to designate an outlaw organization using secret evidence out of the scrutiny of the public. Organizations wouldn’t be able to appeal the designation for two years.
Jailing Tennessee residents for practicing a religion is terrible to contemplate. The bill is repugnant and runs counter to America’s tolerance of all religious faiths. The Constitution forbids the enactment of a law that would interfere with the free exercise of religion, and Islam is one of the world’s oldest faiths.
The bill didn’t originate in Tennessee. According to the Associated Press, the Tennessee Eagle Forum gave the bill’s text to Ketron and House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma. Eagle Forum state President Bobbie Patray told the AP it was drafted by David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based attorney who runs the Society of Americans for National Existence, a nonprofit that claims following Shariahh is treasonous.
If the bill does become law, a court challenge is all but certain. Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was quoted in the Tennessean as saying at an interfaith protest rally in Nashville on Tuesday that his organization would file a lawsuit the instant the governor signs the bill.
Christians, Jews and followers of other religious faiths, plus those who follow no religion, should join in denouncing this bill. Legislators should condemn it, too. Gov. Bill Haslam should announce plans to veto the legislation should lawmakers pass it.
Religious liberty is at the core of American values. Ketron’s bill poses a threat to those values and must be defeated.
© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.

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… and that insane amount of funds was spent for?????????????

What exactly does this accomplish? … and for what cause was it done…? and really, what are they really thinking this will be used for???… and if they have no idea how it will effect the globe, i.e.: weather, water, quakes etc… or the ultimate fear some scientists have– what are they doing?? Just because ‘mankind’ CAN do something doesn’t mean ‘mankind’ should do it.

Landmark experiment to unlock secrets of Big Bang could cause end of the world, say scientists in court bid to halt it. It has cost 4.4billion+ and is designed to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang.
But rather than providing vital information about the beginning of life, the world’s biggest experiment could cause the end of the world, say scientists. They fear that the Large Hadron Collider – due to be switched on in nine days’ time – will create a black hole that could swallow the planet. By smashing sub-atomic particles together at close to the speed of light, the LHC aims to recreate the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the birth of the universe or Big Bang, shedding light on the building blocks of life.

But critics claim that the ‘time machine’, which has been built 300ft beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva, could instead spawn a shower of mini-black holes.  Within four years, one of these ‘celestial vacuums’ could have swollen to such a size that it is capable of sucking the Earth inside-out, said Otto Rossler, one of a group of scientists mounting a last-minute court challenge to the project.

They claim the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights. However, the case at the European Court of Human Rights is not expected to delay the switch on, scheduled for Wednesday of next week. Professor Rossler, a German chemist, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has admitted its project will create black holes but doesn’t consider them to be a risk.
He warned: ‘My own calculations have shown it is quite plausible that these little black holes survive and will grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside. I have been calling for CERN to hold a safety conference to prove my conclusions wrong but they have not been willing.’

Those involved in the project have dismissed the claims as ‘absurd’ and insist that extensive safety assessments have found the experiment, which is funded by 20 countries, including the UK, to be safe.  A report written earlier this year stated: ‘Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists.’  The lifespan of any mini-black holes would be ‘very short’, it added.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the arguments before the European Court of Human Rights had been answered in ‘extensive safety assessments’.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The Large Hadron Collider will not be producing anything that does not happen routinely in nature due to cosmic rays. If they were dangerous we would know about it already.’

Scientists have used large particle colliders to smash atoms and pieces of atoms together for 30 years, but this machine has attracted so much attention because it is the most powerful ever built.  In the LHC beams of protons will be propelled through an 18-mile-long circular tunnel. More than 5,000 magnets lining the tunnel will accelerate the hundreds of billions of tiny particles to almost the speed of light, allowing them to complete one circuit in one-11,000th of a second.

There will be two beams going in opposite directions, each packing as much energy as a car traveling at 100mph.  When they reach almost the speed of light, they will be smashed head on into each other, breaking them into their constituent parts, including, perhaps, the building blocks of the universe

Pastor Rick’s Test

The Candidates Submit, and a Principle Suffers

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister — no matter how beloved — is  supremely wrong.  It is also un-American. 

For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.  Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn’t a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town-hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court?  The candidates’ usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those who are most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those who are  most at ease with ambivalence. 

The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.  The loser was America.  In his enormously successful book “The Purpose-Driven Life,” Warren begins: “It’s not about you.” Agreed. Nor is this criticism aimed at Christians, evangelicals, other believers or nonbelievers — or at Warren, who is a good man with an exemplary record of selfless works. Few have walked the walk with as much determination or success. 

This is about higher principles that are compromised every time we pretend we’re not applying a religious test when we’re really applying a religious test.  It is true that no one was forced to participate in the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency and that both McCain and Obama are free agents. Warren has a right to invite whomever he wishes to his church and to ask them whatever they’re willing to answer.  His format and questions were interesting and the answers more revealing than what the usual debate menu provides. But does it not seem just a little bit odd to have McCain and Obama chatting individually with a preacher in a public forum about their positions on evil and their relationship with Jesus Christ? 

The past few decades of public confession and Oprah-style therapy have prepared us perfectly for a televangelist probing politicians about their moral failings. Warren’s Q&A wasn’t an inquisition exactly, but viewers would be justified in squirming.  What is the right answer, after all? What happens to the one who gets evil wrong? What’s a proper relationship with Jesus? What’s next? Interrogations by rabbis, priests and imams? What candidate would dare decline on the basis of mere principle?  Both Obama and McCain gave “good” answers, but that’s not the point. They shouldn’t have been asked.

Is the American electorate now better prepared to cast votes knowing that Obama believes that “Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him,” or that McCain feels that he is “saved and forgiven”?  What does that mean, anyway? What does it prove? Nothing except that these men are willing to say whatever they must — and what most Americans personally feel is no one’s business — to win the highest office. 

Warren tried to defuse criticism about staging the interviews in his church by saying that though “we” believe in the separation of church and state, “we” don’t believe in the separation of faith and politics. Faith, he said, “is just a worldview, and everybody has some kind of worldview. It’s important to know what they are.”  Presumably “we” refers to Warren’s church of fellow evangelicals. And while, yes, everybody has some kind of worldview, it shouldn’t be necessary in a pluralistic nation of secular laws to publicly define that view in Christian code.  For the moment, let’s set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:  “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.

Kathleen Parker is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kparker@kparker.com. 

 By today’s new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson — the great advocate for religious freedom in America — would have lost.