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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (217482)	2/10/2007 11:15:56 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I do not think my views are universal. If they were, we would not be in Iraq right now. As for church bells: "The Catholic Church institutionalized their rituals into the offices of the day, each accompanied by its distinctive peal of the bells: Prime, Terce, Matins, Lauds, Evensong and Compline to divide the day and night into six parts. Or more. Or less. It depends on your source. It also depends on the historic period under discussion." I assume some churches still use church bells as they were originally intended- as a call to prayer. That's why I mentioned them. Bellringers can also play lovely music, to be sure, but the original purpose of the bells was the same as it is for the Mosque caller. (And btw, if you've ever accidentally booked a hotel room near a bell tower, you will find that bells can be quite obnoxious indeed, especially if you have any interest in sleeping.) I'm not sure why people wearing their own clothing is "imposing" something on American culture. One of the nice things about America (for some of us anyway) is that you can wear pretty much anything you want (or nothing, if you want to wear nothing, in an American nudist colony). And another nice thing about American culture (and indeed, most cultures) is that they aren't static. They all change. There is no static thing such as "American Culture". There is the moving target of American popular culture, which constantly shifts, and then there is the idealized nostalgic image many people have of the time of their youth, which they mistakenly think of as "American Culture"- even though in many cases the nostalgic image is only relevant to their memories- and any given time in America that one person looks back on with nostalgia, could have been pretty bad for some other group of Americans (the 50's are a good example of this. Many whites look back on that time with great affection and nostalgia, even though many blacks were then laboring under a burden of segregation and racism). I think Muslims would only be imposing if they insisted WE wear their clothes, right? Our constitution gives us a great deal of latitude in terms of the freedom we have to express our religious preferences wrt our clothing, or our behavior. It's not imposing to exercise these rights. I'm sorry you didn't like the firearms data. I don't really care about that issue. Here's another mortality list- maybe you'll like it better: benbest.com The point wasn't about fire arms, but rather about the unlikely ways of dying that people choose to worry about instead of worrying about the logical ones. We agree that terrorists are intolerable. I just don't see how you get from there to your statement about Sharia law in American courts. I want to fight terrorism. I even think we should be devoting more resources to it than we are, and I think Iraq has provided a terrible distraction to the actual work we ought to be doing on fighting terrorism.