BBC

23 November 2010 Last updated at 02:43 GMT Share this pageFacebookTwitter ShareEmail Print British Columbia court to rule on anti-polygamy law A Canadian court has begun hearings on whether Canada's anti-polygamy law violates rights to freedom of religion guaranteed by the constitution.

The case focuses on a break-away Mormon sect alleged to practice "plural marriage" in British Columbia.

Authorities have asked the court to affirm the ban is constitutional in order to prosecute alleged polygamists.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has 10,000 members in the US and Canada.

The provincial government in British Columbia is deciding whether and how to crack down on alleged polygamy in a church community in the south-eastern corner of the province.

Craig Jones, a lawyer for the provincial government, warned a British Columbia Supreme Court judge on Monday that if the law was overturned, Canada would become the only Western country to allow polygamy.

'Rights protected'

Authorities had previously declined to prosecute alleged polygamists, fearing the 19th-Century law would be declared unconstitutional.

But on Monday, lawyers for the province of British Columbia told the Vancouver court they had changed their minds.

"Today we have a much fuller appreciation of the social harm of polygamy," Mr Jones said.

Thirty-six witnesses, including some women in polygamous relationships, are expected to testify before the court in Vancouver.

The church and its supporters say the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms allows it to practice its religion, including plural marriage.

"Consenting adults have the right - the Charter-protected right - to form the families that they want to form," British Columbia Civil Liberties Association lawyer Monique Pongracic-Speier told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

"In some polygamous families, as in some monogamous families, there are abuses and there are difficulties, and it's those abuses or those difficulties that ought to be the target of legal intervention, not the form of relationship itself," she said.

But critics say the relationships subjugate women, who are at times forced into marriages with much older men.

The case is expected to continue until January.

Assalamo Alikum.


These are not my words,,,


-------------------------

Bible has some shocking 'family values'

CNN

Salam


Wael

Sri Lanka- a Buddhist country has 10% of Muslims. The muslims in Sri Lanka are celebrating Eidul Alha, festival today. Kahatowita is a tiny village in Western Prvince in Sri Lanka. The muslims in this tiny village celebrated Haj festival at Kahatowita Al Badriya school ground according to the way of Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi wasallam...

visit: http://kahatowita-kahatowita.blogspot.co...-alha.html

Assalamo Alikum,
With some excecuses, the Catholic Church has admitted the fact that Islam is the world's largest religion in the world today Alhamdulelah.
FoxNews
PrintShareThisVATICAN CITY —  Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.
"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook.
He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population -- a stable percentage -- while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.
"It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer," the monsignor said.
Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.
When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.
Spokesmen for the Vatican and the United Nations did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Sunday.
Salam
Wael

Migration and the Changing Face of Education

Globalisation means that we now all live, work or communicate with people who are different. In this global village, religious faith plays a central role in the way that people understand or from their culture and identity. Human being is a product of his culture, language and faith. There is a positive co-relation between language and culture. Parents have the right to raise their children in faith based schools. Those who object to this right display their contempt for parental rights and sadly intolerance for the religious convictions of others. It is not only Muslims but other communities have been trying to set up their own schools for their children. I set up the first Muslim school in 1981 and now there are 166 Muslim schools and only 11 schools are state funded. There are four Sikh state funded schools. Hindu state funded school was set up in Harrow last year and next year a Hindu state funded school would emerge in Leicester. Even Black community is thinking of setting up its own schools for black children with black teachers.

A study by Bristol University reveals that a high level of racial segregation in Oldham schools and tension between communities resulted in recent riots in 2001. A report by the Institute for Community Cohesion found that native parents were deserting some schools after finding their children outnumbered by pupils from ethnic minorities. The native parents do not want their children to be educated along with migrant children. Schools in parts of England are becoming increasingly segregated. Many of the schools and colleges are segregated and this was generally worsening over recent years. This is RACISM. The solution is that those schools where Muslim children are in majority may be opted out as Muslim Academies. State schools with non-Muslim monolingual teachers are not in a position to satisfy the social, emotional needs and demands of the bilingual Muslim children. Majority of them leave schools with low grades. They find themselves cut off from their cultural, linguistic and spiritual identities. Muslim children in state schools feel isolated and confused about who they are. This can cause dissatisfaction and lead them into criminality.

Immigration is an unstoppable face of modern society, and immigrants will need help integrating, but the host society needs to show zero tolerance to non-EU and EU citizens who clearly don't like being here. The second generation of Muslim migrants is facing a huge challenge because they did not think even for a second before that someone would say, 'You are not welcome. Native Brits feel that their culture and language is superior and every Tom and Harry must learn English and forget their own languages, cultures, literatures and poetry. It is the native Brits who need to learn and respect those who are different. Immigrants are also human beings with social, emotional and spiritual needs and demands. They are not just economics for the economic prosperity.

British children in Spain come with this mentality, wanting to keep themselves to themselves and feel no obligation to integrate into Spanish way of life. The Brits are the most problematic minority group in Spanish schools. They are worst at learning the host language and integrating into school life than any other nationality in Spain's state schools. They have negative attitudes towards integration. They carry a strong sense of English linguistic superiority. They were embarrassed to speak Spanish because the other students laughed at them. Brit children had very little or no concept of Spanish culture or social life. They watched UK TVs and English language radios. Their parents do not speak Spanish nor have Spanish friends. In English ghettos, Spaniards fear to tread. They have no interest in being part of Spanish society.

Iftikhar Ahmad

http://www.londonschoolofislmaics.org.uk

CNN

February 19, 2009|By Elizabeth Landau CNN


It may seem obvious that men perceive women in sexy bathing suits as objects, but now there's science to back it up.


New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.


The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses," she told CNN.


Although consistent with conventional wisdom, the way that men may depersonalize sexual images of women is not entirely something they control. In fact, it's a byproduct of human evolution, experts say. The first male humans had an incentive to seek fertile women as the means of spreading their genes.


"They're not fully conscious responses, and so people don't know the extent to which they're being influenced," Fiske said. "It's important to recognize the effects."


The participants, 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton, took questionnaires to determine whether they harbor "benevolent" sexism, which includes the belief that a woman's place is in the home, or hostile sexism, a more adversarial viewpoint which includes the belief that women attempt to dominate men.


In the men who scored highest on hostile sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions was inactive while viewing scantily clad women, Fiske said. Visit CNNHealth.com, your connection for better living


Men also remember these women's bodies better than those of fully-clothed women, Fiske said. Each image was shown for only a fraction of a second.


This study looked specifically at men, and did not test women's responses to similar images.


A supplementary study on both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I "push," "handle" and "grab" instead of the third-person forms such as she "pushes," "handles" and "grabs." They associated fully clothed women, on the other hand, with the third-person forms, indicating these women were perceived as in control of their own actions. The females who took the test did not show this effect, Fiske said.


That goes along with the idea that the man looking at a woman in a bikini sees her as the object of action, Fiske said.


The findings are consistent with previous work in the field, and resonate, for example, with the abundance of female strip clubs in comparison to male strip clubs, said Dr. Charles Raison, psychiatrist and director of the Mind/Body Institute at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Raison was not involved in the study.


Previous research found that people tend to similarly dehumanize those who are homeless or drug addicts, although the phenomenon in this case is somewhat different, Fiske said. People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.


The broader purpose of the research was to explore circumstances under which people treat one another as the means to an end, Fiske said.


Past studies have also shown that when men view images of highly sexualized women, and then interact with a woman in a separate setting, they are more likely to have sexual words on their minds, she said. They are also more likely to remember the woman's physical appearance, and sit closer to her -- for instance, at a job interview.


Taken together, the research suggests that viewing certain images is not appropriate in the workplace, Fiske said.


"I'm not advocating censorship, but I do think people need to know what settings should discourage the display and possession of these kinds of things," she said.


Both women and men have something to learn from this line of research, Raison said. Women should be aware of how they are perceived when wearing provocative clothing, and men shouldn't let feelings of impersonal sexual longing interfere with their more personal relationships with other women, including female friends. "Many men make foolish choices because of sexual attraction," he said.


"The suggestion might be that there's some hard-wiring there that can interfere with the average man's ability to interact on deeper levels with really hot looking stranger women in bikinis," he said.


Women may also depersonalize men in certain situations, but published research on the subject has not been done, experts say. Evolutionary psychology would theorize that men view women as objects in terms of their youth and apparent fertility, while women might view men as instrumental in terms of their status and resources, Fiske said.


Another avenue to explore would be showing images of men's wives and girlfriends in bikinis, Raison said. He predicts the objectifying effect would not happen in this context.

Found this video on youtube and posted it here for feedback. I'd like to know if this cleric's understanding of the teaching of wife punishment is correct




eNSGqnAREAs

Visit My Website


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Submitted by legalizeliberty on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 20:52


in Current Events





<div><iframe width="459" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q9QtZkT8OBQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe></div>

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has once again accused the United States of playing God. But this time it's Haiti's disastrous earthquake that he thinks the U.S. was behind. Spanish newspaper ABC quotes Chavez as saying that the U.S. navy launched a weapon capable of inducing a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti. He adds that this time it was only a drill and the final target is...destroying and taking over Iran.