timeimmortal

Hugh Folk writes in with his thoughts on the events described in this article.

Read everything you can on the Fordson High School page, and see if you can deduce from what’s there that Fordson is 95% Arab of Muslim (some of the Arabs are Christian and some of the Muslims are something else. I have read nothing that the Muslims are trying to turn Fordson into a madrassah (religious school). As I read the press, the minister was approaching the Muslim wrestling team members and trying to convert them. He also claimed he was trying to convert everybody. Muslims don’t proseletize and don’t permit their children to apostocize. I doubt if apostates are murdered in Dearborn, but in Pakistan for sure. The coach may or may not have enabled the minister to approach the kids. He may or may not have refused to meet the Muslim parent’s demands. You are right in calling for the coach to sue.

Even if the teachers have tenure and a union to protect them against managerial abuse, as a annual employee who is nontenurable the only hope he has is to exhaust his remedies at the school board and file within 90 days a complaints with the Michigan and antidiscrimination agency and the EEOC. If they don’y sue, they will give him a right-to-sue letter and he can bring suit under CRA64 Title VII and Sec1981. It sounds like a clear cut case of religious discrimination. The principal and school have no defense. I don’t think he has a suit against the complaining parents, unless they lied or exagerated his supposed offence, in which case he colde sue for slander. There should be an ACLU or some right wing Christian legal defence org. He had better hope that that it doesn’t reach the Supreme Court. They believe employers can legally do just about anything they want.

By the way, to infer that anyone with an Arab name is a bigot is bigotry itself. How about “Barack Hussein Obama?”

Selah.

For the record, O Reader, I did note that “I’m not the least bit surprised that a school principal with a name like Imad Fadlallah is an anti-Christian bigot.” Is this bigotry in turn? Some might say so — suffice to say that I intend no bigotry with the remark; it was instead a weary exclamation brought on by yet another example of what appears, both on the surface and after further analysis, to be a more or less clear-cut case of Islamic anti-Christian bigotry.

That’s not to say that anyone is trying to turn Fordson “into a madrassah,” and at no time did I make such a claim. But I agree with Hugh, and he apparently with me, that this was a case of anti-Christian discrimination on the part of, at least, the faculty of the high school, and possibly some of the parents. Yes, the assistant coach did proselytize, but that is hardly something for which the head coach can be punished, until and unless it can be proven that he actively encourage the evangelism.

As to the comment about Muslims not engaging in evangelism, personal experience suggests that the truth is other than what is stated above by Hugh, although he is more or less correct about the fact that apostasy is not permissible. As to whether anyone in Dearborn has been murdered for apostasy, I cannot say, and wouldn’t care to. Then too, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a case came to light.

As to Barrack Hussein Obama, well, that is his real name, is it not? Yes, I use it on the site, in the same way that I always use Hillary Rodham Clinton’s full name. The reason for this has to do with the function of the Wordpress tagging system, not out of any particular desire to highlight a particular aspect of a person’s name. I could simply call him Barrack Obama, as has become the norm, but I don’t want to add more redundant tags to the already massive number of tags I have designated on the site here.

I still hope the coach sues.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

The site just hit its 2,000th post, and then on a day which began with the site being suspended — again — by my ISP. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Time Immortal hasn’t grown beyond what a company I’ve been with for around four years now can reasonably sustain?

At any rate, tonight will be a night for data backups.

And so, as I mark the posting of my 2,000th article (and then only since my switch to Wordpress), I am looking for hosting package recommendations. Anyone got any favourites? Anyone care to recommend a company? Price is less of a concern; I am looking primarily for uptime and reliability.

I’ve been trying to maintain a more-or-less accurate count of visitors to the site since…well, for several years now. Of course, switching blogging software (twice!!) didn’t exactly make that easy for me to do, but where possible I’ve tried to carry forward the visitor counts from each successive software.

And while I realize that likely has introduced errors to the count along the way, according to Wordpress‘ built-in visitor counting utility, Time Immortal apparently logged its 500,000th visitor last weekend.

Which is pretty damn cool, actually. To be honest, I started the domain as kind of a personal clearing house for ideas and random thoughts, and somewhere along the line it kind of morphed into a lot of different things, and spun off into Aiera and my and Grace’s website as well.

And now it’s one of a number of conservative blogs at embroiled in the Mark Steyn/Maclean’s/Ezra Levant/Richard Warman/HRC brouhaha, fighting (in essence) to restore freedom of expression to Canada.

So let me just say a big “thank you” to everyone who has visited the site here and found something on it useful, controversial, inspiring, or distasteful. I don’t blog for anyone but me, but I find I am consistently amazed, and buoyed, by the myriad of people who seem to at least occasionally cast a glance this way.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Binks, you nutter…get your facts straight! I’m Irish/Ukrainian (mostly)!

Nicholas has some questions.

The title of your site comes up on my machine as

STOP ERROR 0xC5FA721B or MEDIA_JIHAD_STATUS_FAIL (Time Immortal)

Do you happen to know whether this a glitch in my settings, or what? (I use the hated IE7 - sorry!)

I think there’s also a glitch in the link to the Hoffmann article.

By the way, I look at your site occasionally because your photos are wonderful, and you write well about matters that interest me. Usually, I strongly disagree with you. But if I only read things I agree with, I might as well be dead.

Also by the way, I think the gospels have some historical basis, though deciding exactly what’s history, what’s legend, and what’s myth, is difficult. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but I thought that was what Hoffman was saying too.

Firstly, the site title is correctly displayed, O Reader, if in fact it reads as Nicholas is reporting that it reads. As far as I know, no Microsoft error code incorporates the term “jihad” into its error variable name. Moreover, as far as I know, 0xC5FA721B is not a valid hexadecimal error code in the Windows environment. Both the error code and the error variable name are of my own composition.

This is what nerd humour looks like. Periodically, I change the site title on a whim — this one is probably due for a change.

There was, however, a glitch in the link to the Hoffman article in my previous reply to Nicholas — Wordpress added a line-break after the URL, which I have now removed. The link should work now. Not that I particularly recommend the article, of course.

I am glad to hear that Nicholas enjoys the photos; quite a number of people tell me that, in fact. This is a bit of a tangent, of course, but I have offered in the past to make full-resolution (usually 3000 x 2000, except in the cases of panoramics) available to people who have written in concerning pictures I’ve taken.

It can’t hurt to make the same offer public, so please consider this notice of that offer. I don’t charge for pictures, so if anything strikes the Reader as compelling, simply provide me a link (either to the relevant Pic of the Day article or the gallery entry) and an email address to send the high-res version to, and I will get it sent out.

Moving on, while the opening parts of the Hoffman article could be looked upon as being an attempt to sort out history from fallacy in the Gospels, it quickly gets mired down in a discussion of contradcitions between the accounts and ends up more or less dismissing the historicity of Jesus entirely. The problem, of course, is that discussions of contradictions are entirely too subjective to provide a substantive basis for a rejection of the validity of the Gospel accounts. After all, any student of criminal trials knows that eyewitness testimonies often contradict each other to a certain extent (usually pertaining to side details). What is important in eyewitness testimony is that A, B, C, and D saw X do Y to Z. If A, B, C, and D can’t quite agree on the time of day, the number of bystanders, or whether X was wearing a sweater or a hoodie, that is okay, and in fact is to be expected.

If anything, I find that what few inconsistencies exist between the Gospel accounts add to the credibility of the accounts as a whole. Each approaches Jesus’ life from a different angle, and at the end of the day the exact count of women at the tomb is substantially less important than the fact that the tomb itself was empty.

Not directly, at least. Fortunately, Wordpress keeps an accurate list of inbound links. He has his own blog, and has decided to issue his response to my latest reply to him there. That’s just as well; he wasn’t doing all that well via the contact form.

He seems to be clinging to insisting that all Religions are basically the same (a common fallacy among atheists, I have learned). To which I can only say, again, what I said to him before: “While you see a distinction between various sports, as an non-sports fan I simply don’t see those as significant. Honestly, the difference in rules and methods between almost any two sports is virtually meaningless to me. I don’t see a massive difference, in many ways, between playing golf and playing football…”

(All I’m doing in the above quote, O Reader, is repeating a statement Joel made about religions, re-dressed to cover an alternative topic; the absurdity of Joel’s stance is pretty clear.)

Joel posits thusly:

Once you believe in an all-powerful supernatural entity that controls the universe and his divine son that was killed and then rose from the dead, any distinctions between particular interpretations of these beings and stories really does fall by the wayside**.

For example, lets suppose I’m schitzophrenic. And I believe that the dog is talking to me telepathically. Would you see any real difference between me and the other schitzophrenic that believes the dog is talking to him vocally?

Of course not.

Once again, Joel’s ignorance shows through: there could be any number of differences between two schizophrenics talking to the dog. The question of the magnitude of symptoms comes up — of what duration, and what severity, are each person’s episodes? The question of medication comes up — is either person medicated? What kind of medication, and in what strength, is each person on? Is it perhaps time to adjust each person’s medication? The question of response comes up — should we let each person continue talking to the dog? Should we inform someone? Should we call the police? We might even ask what kind of dog is being addressed. Are the two schizophrenics speaking to the same dog? Is the dog (or “are the dogs”) responding, in any way, to either schizophrenic?

The point is that there is more to the scene than just what the eye glimpses at first. There is not only room for, but a need for, greater inquiry, because we cannot understand the situation until we ask some follow-up questions. And I might also point out, since Joel seems of a mind that atheists should “do something” about the pervasiveness of religion in America (”the battle we fight,” he termed it), the only way to properly respond to any situation is to dig a little deeper in order to better compose your response in a manner that is specifically tailored to the person being dealt with.

In other words, the proper response to schizophrenic #1 might be wholly different than the proper response to schizophrenic #2 — if we treat them both the same, there is a risk of doing unnecessary damage to at least one of them, until and unless we allow our actions and responses to them to be informed by additional inquiry. Dismissing them as just another couple of schizos is simply unacceptable, in addition to being dishonest.

Not that Joel seems to care all that much: he flogs the death of a single child as an indictment against all religion, even though the parents of the child were members of a cult widely derided and disavowed by mainstream Christianity. Had Madeline Kara Neumann been born to Catholic parents, she’d probably still be alive — whither Joel’s big issue* then? Moreover, whither Joel’s point that all religions are the same — there are religions out there in which young Madeline would have easily survived, grown up in, and thrived in.

But Joel has no interest in digging any deeper than he has to, and cares not for the fact that even though he himself is not a member of anything he would recognize as a religion, the vast differences that exist between the different religions are not a side point in the debate; they are the debate. Because what is atheism, if not a rather odd — and somewhat counter-intuitive — form of religion (in that it is a philosophical conjecture, a belief in a universal negative)? Funnily, I’m pretty sure that Joel would be offended if I called him a racist, and would rush to disprove the charge. At least, I would hope he would.

But if one thinks about it, O Reader, how is what he has said any different from the sort of bigotry that necessarily informs Racism? His basic contention, at least as regards Madeline Kara Neumann, seems to be that if a religion has at any point caused the death of a person, all religions are to be held accountable. Applying similar logic, we could argue that we should jail all black people the next time a Jamaican gang banger guns someone down on Jane Street in Toronto.

Hmmn…and here I thought it was us theists who were supposed to be closed-minded and bigoted (not to mention uninquisitive).

Joel also asks:

Its sort of like trying to talk with someoine who believes magic runs every little bit of the world. How could you talk physics?

Numerous science fiction authours demonstrate a rather handy fusion of physics and magic in their works, O Reader. Not that I believe in magic, of course — I merely observe that several works of speculative fiction nicely bridge the two concepts. But then, realizing that would require a person to have an inquiring mind, wouldn’t it?

Amusingly, one of the people commenting on Joel’s article added this nugget of “wisdom”:

To the point where they can’t actually understand anyone who might find their beliefs to be, well, insane.

Their very identity and that religion are so intertwined as to be inseperable.
Therefor, no significant dissent is really allowable.
(oh, you might allow it, but you treat it as if it were spoken by children)

What moleboy doesn’t realize, of course, is that much the same can be said both about atheism and those who follow that particular philosophical conjecture, and about the way many Catholics — including, more than occasionally, myself — wind up having to speak to them because of it.

But then, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. There is no such thing as someone who does not believe, after all. The great question is not whether we shall believe, but what we shall believe, and atheism is just one more entrant in list of beliefs that can be found the world over. And everyone who believes — every human being, then — is rather strongly wedded to their beliefs. Joel and moleboy’s identities are strongly intertwined with their atheism, and I’ve already had to speak to Joel…well…if not like a child, than at least like an intellectual inferior. I don’t really enjoy doing so, preferring discussions to be between equals whenever possible. But that hasn’t been possible in this case.

* ten blog posts in the last month and change; easily one of his most talked-about subjects

** I’m sure Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Wiccans, and various other religions would have something to say about this, since they do not acknowledge one or both of a) God and b) Christ. But hey, what do I know, being a deluded theist? Fortunately, I have atheists nearby to correct my thinking.

Wordpress.com blogger Lorelle wonders why more people aren’t concerned about Brazil’s banning of the Wordpress.com domain on account of a single blogger there posting an embedded video in a blog post showing a couple having sex.

I think bloggers around the world have become apathetic. Lazy. Uninspired. Dumbed down. Honestly. When the term echo chamber was coined, it was a good label for all the regurgitation of content spread all over the web, drowning individual voices. Self-interest blogging is pervasive. What happened to altruism and using the blog publishing platform to support freedom of speech and bloggers around the world?

What happened to us? Why am I not seeing protests and opinions on this issue all over the web? Why isn’t the banning of three million WordPress.com blogs a big deal? Why aren’t we talking about this instead of the latest iPhone gizmo and useless SEO techniques? Why didn’t people get angry and protest loudly when WordPress.com blogs were banned in Turkey, China, and other countries? WordPress.com continues to be banned in places - why aren’t we talking about this?

Have we really become desensitized to the plight of other bloggers and the oppression of freedom of speech?

We need to find our indignant righteousness again, fellow bloggers. We need to make our voices matter. Three voices should not have to shout to be heard on behalf of millions of bloggers. I want my WordPress.com blog to be read by those in Brazil, Turkey, China, and everywhere in the world. Don’t you? Why should my blog be penalized because of the actions of one?

People are asking Automattic to take a stand. I’m asking bloggers around the world to take a stand and let their voices be heard when others can’t.

Let not millions of bloggers be blocked and banned for the sake of a couple of idiots. You don’t send an entire city’s population to jail because two people break the law. Maybe the world would be a better place if we did, but that’s another discussion.

I wholeheartedly agree. Oh, that’s not to say that I agree with a blogger who posts sexually explicit material on his website, of course; I find that sort of content unnecessary and immoral. But just as I will defend the right of someone to articulate racist views on a public website, I will defend the right of someone to post sexual material on a website…because the essence of freedom of expression is that we have to accept that people will use the right to express immoral and vile things. Chesterton noted that love means loving the unloveable, or it means nothing at all. Much the same can be said about defending freedom of speech — either we defend the rights of people who say the unsayable, or we may as well not defend the rights of people to say anything.

I disagree with the Brazilian government’s move in its entirety, as surely as I disagree with the actions of the CHRC and other human rights commissions in Canada. And I think bloggers not only should speak out about blatant acts of censorship such as these; I think they have a moral imperative to do so. To refrain from doing so is, in essence, to be a parasite, sucking at the flesh of the great, big internet while doing nothing to foster the fundamental freedoms that is offers, freedoms that are slowly being eroded.

Wordpress 2.5 has been released, so I’ll be updating the blog software shortly. I apologize now for any disruption in the site’s proper operation later today.

Update: The upgrade is done, and seems to have gone through without a hitch. I’ve still got a few features and functions to test, and a couple of things in the site backend need adjustment, but for the most part it seems to be up and working.

V is ticked off because some religious types (a group I appear to be a part of; I’ve never been able to coax this particular Wordpress installation to send out trackbacks, but evidently it decided to finally spit one out…) identified with something she wrote about marriage. Okay, she doesn’t believe in the sanctity of marriage and all that, and maybe she’s even just down on the general concept of marriage itself. Fine, that’s her right. Let her have every beef in the world with marriage, people who get married, God, and everything else for that matter.

She wrote something about marriage, childbearing, and the order in which these two events in life seem to be occurring for far too many people.

And as Disputations is fond of asking: “is it true?”

Well, yes…yes it is.

Does it impair us religious types from recognizing that, as wrong as she might be about things like God, and like the sanctity of marriage, she has a legitimate point? Does the fact that V doesn’t believe in the sanctity of marriage, or the fact that V doesn’t believe in God, mean that her point is not legitimate?

That’s right, O Reader: it does not. And despite all her other erroneous views about marriage and God, she still said something that was right, no matter how inadvertent the utterance itself might have been.

I believe that God calls each of us to live a moral life, and to understand that the world “just works” in certain ways. That’s kind of an oblique reference to natural law, in case the Reader is wondering. But I also believe that religious persons do not have exclusive license on living out the reality of that call, any more than we have exclusive license on perceiving it (which we also do not have). That’s not to say that those who are not religious necessarily understand a) where the call to be moral comes from, or b) that they are even heeding a call when they strive to be moral. What it is saying is that we all have opportunities to be wrong…or to be right.

In that sense, it’s irrelevant what V thinks about God, or about the sanctity of marriage — what’s relevant is the conclusion she came to in spite of all that baggage (exactly like how those obesity researchers figured out how to reactivate the human memory). Because at the end of the day she had a valid point that everybody with a brain, whether religious or not, should be able to recognize as valid. Having a child — creating a new life — really is a huge commitment (d’uh!), and if a person can’t make the commitment that forms the core of marriage then there is no way in any extant realm that said person is ready to have a kid. That society seems to have decided that the inverse of that statement is true is, at best, pitiable, and at worst a damn shame.

Should I be expected to disagree with that conclusion simply because I’m religious and the person making it is not? Should it be so confusing that I agree with that conclusion simply because I am religious and the person making it is not? Screw that. If someone says something that gets it right, then whether or not they believe in God is irrelevant. They still said something that gets it right, and that’s always worth remarking on.

Although, if V really needs to see a disagreement between her point of view and that of a religious type like myself, I will note one curious thing.

If I were to meet a pregnant, unwed Mother who told me that while she loved her partner and was committed to him completely, she would not be getting married because she didn’t think it was necessary to legalize her love, then I would applaud her wholeheartedly.

That’s interesting to hear coming from the same person who has, all along, been attempting to hammer home the point that if you can’t make a lifelong commitment to a person outside of having a child, you shouldn’t be having a child. I suppose that when one gets too caught up in an atheistic view, it’s easy to miss that marriage is a bit more than just a legal contract. No, I’m not going to argue, at present, for the sanctity of marriage. I’m simply going to remark that marriage, even secular marriage, is a formal statement of commitment.

In an certain way, I guess I’m saying that I don’t think V goes far enough. Believing one’s self to be committed is all well and good…but it’s also not enough to simply believe something to be the case; action is required. Personally, I hold that anyone who claims total commitment to another person but actively refuses to seek a marriage to that person is a coward.

Non-marital long-term commitment is a fiction, an excuse used by two people who “feel” very committed to each other at the time, perhaps even in a way that is, for the time being, genuine…but who are still looking to keep their options open, to have that “easy out” as a fallback plan. Absent any discussion of divinity, marriage is still not just a legal distinction; it’s a declaration, a statement made between two people that they are not only committed to each other, but that they have the courage to declare that commitment before the world.

That’s as true for secular folk as it is for religious folk.

Those old nursery rhymes were right, O Reader.

Blazing Cat Fur writes:

I do enjoy your blog and your subtle sense of sarcasm;)

That’s the sort of endorsement that makes a guy like me blush. And actually, I’d like to answer and endorsement with an endorsement; Blazing Cat Fur is a great blog to read, I find. Genuinely unapologetic conservatives are not the most common breed. And don’t miss the profile cartoon for the blog — man, I think my friend Paul used that as his MSN name for a month!

Some history:

Time Immortal went live on May 19th of 2004, and was built (at the time) with Macromedia Dreamweaver, using CuteNews for database-free content management.

By August of that year, I’d overhauled the look of the page to be free of frames, but I was still using CuteNews and Dreamweaver. The site languished for a while at that point, before being resurrected on Marth 13th of 2005, this time using the Mambo PHP/MySQL-driven content management system.

And then the site languished again. For a time, the blog was moved over to a subdomain, kennethk.timeimmortal.net. This subdomain actually went live in 2004 at some point (probably July or August), but once it was converted to Mambo (on November 11th of 2004), it became my primary blog.

That lasted until February 7th of 2006, at which point I moved blogging back to the main Time Immortal domain. I was still using Mambo at this point. In the time that had transpired between starting and ending the “kennethk” subdomain, I’d coined the term “backdoor sharia“, participated in the Omar Alghabra blogburst (mistakenly, as it turned out), and made Lost Budgie spew coffee all over his keyboard by remarking that, failing the success of trying to “follow the money”, one should “follow the genitalia” — that was in an article on Islamic suicide bombers wrapping their…uhm…”little jihadists” in aluminum foil prior to self-detonating.

Oh, Lost Budgie…where have you gone?

Anyhow, it wasn’t until January of 2007 that Time Immortal switched over to using the Wordpress content management system, and it will remain with that system for the time being. I keep getting tempted to return to the heady days of Mambo, but I just don’t like how the templates for that system cannot be edited online, in a compartmentalized fashion.

I don’t really know why I just went in to all that detail, but for whatever reason…there it is. I’ve been blogging, in some way or another, for almost four years now, and it’s amazing how much the world has changed even in that short span of time (not always for the better). Four years ago, I’d never even heard of Richard Dawkins — now, I lampoon the man regularly, and many of his contemporaries likewise. The Twin Towers had come down, but the Muhammad cartoons hadn’t yet been published. And I had no idea that human rights commissions were as much of a threat as they were. Oh, and I was still in university.

Still, if those were happier times, these are better times, and I’ve no complaints. The blog continues to grow, and is picking up traffic little by little, which I like. And in the meantime, if a few cool cats like BCF give it a read once in a while, I can say my day is made.

Or at least that my day would be made, except for the fact that my wife already makes my day just by virtue of being next to me when I wake up in the morning.

Time Immortal had its 400,000th visit over the weekend.

That’s not a total for the site for only as long as it’s had Wordpress installed, but a cumulative total that I’ve been carrying over to each successive blog iteration since I first began recording visit counts on the site here, back in the days when I was still using Mambo. These days, I’m lucky to hit fifty visits in a day, but in the past there were some truly heady times indeed.

That’s okay, though — one gets to like the peace and quiet after a while.