Castro, Nigella sativa is well known and easily available. You can even order it online here. But I didn't know it was an aphrodisiac. My very unmarried uncle chugs large quantities of Black seed oil mixed in honey (truly gross) every morning as some sort of cleansing ritual. He's also effectionately known as the perv, always staring at women's bosoms even as he harangues them about their lack of proper Islamic dress. I should tell him to quit taking a married man's medicine...

This a good demonstration of why, evolutionarily, the sex ratio is roughly 1:1. I've noticed that many academic immigrants from China have one child in their teens and another very young one.

The toothpaste commercial is not a real commercial. It's a skit, done by the same folks who do the "Letter to Black People" skit. There are a few others on their website whitestkids.com. I love the "Pregnancy Test" one.

Well, so long as you were not entirely nude...

Originally posted by Khayr: quote:Originally posted by Callypso: Khayr, As for which is worse, atheism or agnosticism, I would have to say atheism. Such flagrant denial of god At least the agnostic is hedging his/her bets! Village Member, Is this a 'submission' of confusion because you claim in previous writings that you are an 'Atheist' such a statement like this atheism. Such flagrant denial of god sounds like a contradiction in your 'disbeliefs' Main Entry: irony Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -nies Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler 1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony 2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance

If I got a penny every time I heard variations on this lament...well, I'd have about 8 or 9 pennies... Dear haldhaa, just tell her the man she thinks she loves has a wife and 7/8 kids, and that he abuses his wife and kids. It's your responsibility to warn her. It's her call whether she believes you or not. Even if she doesn't, what's the worse that can happen? He arrives, they marry, he knocks her about, she (hopefully) leaves him. From then on she'll know better than to trust strangers over her close friends.

Xiinfaniin, My friend, I don't want to keep re-iterating the same point, but it seems like you are not reading what I wrote. Originally posted by xiinfaniin: Calypso , Let’s not chase, good Calypso, our tale and confuse our selves. The Qur’an is not alterable by US. Have never been and never will. The version we have now has divined guarantees to stay that way. Well, when you put it like that... I referred to the gradual revelation of Qur’an to give you the benefit of the doubt lest you meant it that way. Actually, the gradual revelation is not so much the issue, as the modification/deletion of certain verses. It's a whole 'science' among the learned, apparently. Look up abrogation. Then come back and tell me that is not modification of a divine message. You'll argue that "well, the modificition is carried out by Allah, and not humans". But that's irrelevant to the argument, not to mention begging the question. Even if the changes are ordered by God, they are still changes. A single abrogation or deletion makes the Qur'an you have a version, which is another word for edition. The Point's original caveat regarding the scientific method was that science--unlike the much superior Divine Revelation--is self-correcting and mutable. My point is that Divine revelation is not immutable (I notice you keep ignoring Exhibit A, the Bible), even if you assume it really is revealed by God. That it is not mutable now is indeed the point! That is the distinction between science and the revealed knowledge! If you agree that it is not mutable now it deems your comparison rather fallacious. The problem, Xiin, is that putting a "now" after the Divine_Revelation_Is_Not_Mutable declaration kind of weakens the whole premise of your argument. If, over the space of a mere 20 years, the Qur'an had to be modified and corrected, how accurately can it guide us 1400+ years later? The analogy of proofing little green man in your refrigerator to that of proofing the existence of God is sheer simplicity, saaxiib. It is a meaningless proposition that reduces the subject of metaphysics to a worthless matter. Whoa! I didn't even know we were on metaphysics yet. And sheer simplicity is a good thing in my book. Simplicity is often the aim of those seeking the truth. I admire how you make loaded statements without giving your reasoning, by the way. Saaxiib, my analogy was in response to your comment that, what amazes me most is the notion that the burden of proof is on the believer in the existence of God, and not the denier who’s equally resolved in believing in God, not in His presence, but ironically in His absence. That is a patent absurdity indeed. My analogy was there to demonstrate that the burden of proof is always with the person who makes the positive claim. Whether this claim is about gods or cold green imps is the same. The default position is always skepticism. Otherwise you must spend a great chunk of your time disproving the existence of every single god that was ever worshipped by a society. When is the last time you have conclusively disproven the existence of Vishnu? Are you suggesting, good Calypso, that what’s not testable and provable is not to be reasonably believed? Yes. Exactly. If it is not testable or provable, if it goes contrary to reason, then I don't believe it. It's that simple. And how could you rationally effect a change in belief (in some thing that is not demonstrable) if you can’t definitively prove it false (its lack of existence)? A very good question. The answer is by looking at the "evidence" presented in support of its existence. If this evidence is weak, then I return to the default position of skepticism--but only for extraordinary claims, mind you. If you said that you had a sister, and as proof showed me a picture of you and a girl, then I would tend to believe you. The evidence is pretty weak, but the claim is not so startling that I require stronger proof of your claim. On the other hand, my claim of domesticating little green men in the fridge you should rightfully reject, because it's such an unlikely thing. If as evidence I gave you a bit of cheese with tiny holes, and told you that those are their bite-marks, I trust you still would find it hard to believe me. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's all. But what you consider evidence may not be the evidence I have. Absolutely. If you have extraordinary evidence for your belief in God, then good for you. My position is that the evidence I have is pretty weak. It's practically non-existant, in fact. Mostly hearsay and speculation. Not exactly unambigous stuff. So it's back to the default position of skepticism. It's not as if I'm challenging your right to believe in whatever gods you wish to believe in. I just have a problem with The_Point's depiction of scientists as amoebas wallowing in gooey poo because they don't accept his unverifiable claims as the absolute truth. But when a scientific thought that goes beyond what obtainable facts merit flies in the face of the revealed knowledge, in Xiin’s world the revealed truth takes precedent. Xiin, that's fine by me. In my world, there is no proven 'revealed knowledge', so the scientific method, which we have in common, is the only tool for ascertaining knowledge. I also reject any claims--scientific or otherwise--without verifiable evidence. As Ibnu Taymiyaa maintained, observable science does not contradict with sound Qur’an tradition. If that happen it would be due to lack of religious knowledge, and would not represent that of divined truth. That leaves a lot of wiggle room for the believer. How one would determine what the correct path is? I don’t really know. Strive and aim to find the truth, saaxiib, and with Allahs help you will(IA). You really don't know how you determined that the Qur'an is the correct word of God and the others are false? Really?

JB, Sagan influenced me in many ways: his unashamed love of science, his opposition to nuclear proliferation, his ability to write truly amazing prose (for a scientist, this is a real accomplishment believe you me). I read everything he wrote and was devastated when he died. Originally posted by J B: you go around almost naked Something that's a little disconcerting to many people, specially Somalis. But sometimes I wear a Hazmat suit. About your hometown, the website says: "The city of Uppsala is Sweden's fourth largest municipality... The city's resident population is 180.000." Good heavens, I've never seen a city give its population to three decimal places. 180 people, and it's the 4th largest city in Sweden. Do you know how to yodel? And do you know a girl named Heidi?

Caano Geel: You must tell me where the phrase comes from. Thanks for the recommendations. Right now, I'm reading Le Guin's classic The Left Hand of Darkness, which has the following observation about patriotism: "How does one hate a country, or love one? ... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills, and rivers, and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset falls in autumn on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the names ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing." I must read Things Fall Apart soon. Mainly because I meant to write the Great African Novel once, and it was going to be about the trials and tribulations of a small African village upon their first contact with Europeans. It was going to have pathos, and poetry, and funny African aphorisms. Above all, it was going to be a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Alas, what I've heard of Achebe's classic leads me to believe that I've been beaten to the punch.

Not knowing my exact birthday, I used to just read the horoscope and pick the one I liked best (all my mother could remember is that I was born during the 'gu' of 78). The truth is that it's all hogwash, but when you're young, it's natural to seek all avenues that promise to tell you about yourself. When I was a teen I tried numerology, palmistry (my fave), and the handwriting analysis thing too. Fun but it didn't take long to figure out the system. The best horoscopes by far are available at The Onion

For his part, Al-Azhar's fatwa committee chairman Abdullah Megawar argued that married couples could see each other naked but they should not look at each other's genitalia and suggested that they cover up with a blanket during sex. LOL. This has to be by far the funniest thing I've read in a while. Thank you, Castro. Dips on this as a sig!!!

I was carrying my friend's sleepy three-year old the other day. I approached the light switch and said "Nalka dami". No response. I repeat it, "Macaanto, nalka demi". She just yawned. I'm wondering what's going on, because she's usually a good kid, when I hear her mother laughing behind me. Mom calls out "Layrka bakhtii!" The little darling immediately flipped the light switch. With dialects, it's not always a case of "I say tomahtoe, you say tomaytoe". Sometimes you may say Solanum lycopersicum.

^JB, I read Cryptonomsomething. It was middling to good, but maybe I should try Neuromancer, since it's had such a life-altering effect on you Atlas, I would have to say The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. That book touched me on so many levels. I felt like crying when I finished it, because I knew I would never be the same again.

Originally posted by Khayr: Can I ask a question to the nomads, If you saw someone who wanted 10kids or who wanted 10kids, would you raise the issue of economics with them i.e. How can you AFFORD to maintain such a large family? Of course I would. Wouldn't you?

Abortion is a moral issue. That there are economic side benefits does not negate the fact that it may be immoral. In this day and age, a plethora of contraceptive options should make abortion a non-issue. Just on the off-chance that abortion is 'murder', no woman should take the risk of having unprotected sex. That's not to say that abortion shouldn't be legal, just extremely rare and frowned on.

Xiinfaniin, You're right about my muddled writing, but you hardly performed any better. Originally posted by xiinfaniin: The understanding that Qur’an has been subjected to alteration is simply erroneous. True that some verses have either been completely dropped or its legal effect voided but that was before the revelation was completed and sealed. Qur’an, once completely revealed, has been preserved. And forever so, I may add. To say that the Qur'an is never altered once it has been altered for the last time, sort of sounds like a handy truism. You can say that once science finds the truth, then science is never wrong about that truth again. The Qur'an was being changed, not just added to, in the twenty-odd years it was being "revealed". Some verses were deleted while others were merely abrogated. That makes the Qur'an mutable, at least for those twenty-odd years. That it is not mutable now is beside the point. {Actually, I thought the Qur'an we have is a copy of the Qur'an from on an eternal tablet in heaven, written before Allah even created mankind? So why was it being edited as if Allah was dictating it for the first time in the 7th century AD?} Conveniently, you ignored a key class of divine revelation that has been changed (which I mentioned already): the Bible. It is sufficient to contradict the claim that, as The_Point argued, divine revelation is superior to the scientific method because divine revelation is constant and unalterable. The Bible actually represent two instances in which Divine Revelation was altered by people. That's two instances too many. Originally posted by xiinfaniin: The multiplicity of divine revelations has never been a point of moot. Its authority and legitimacy has been and it still is. The question is, how do you determine the legitimacy of a particular example of divine revelation? Originally posted by xiinfaniin: As for the topic at hand, what amazes me most is the notion that the burden of proof is on the believer in the existence of God, and not the denier who’s equally resolved in believing in God, not in His presence, but ironically in His absence. That is a patent absurdity indeed. You think the burden of proof for a claim is on the skeptic? Well, there's a little green man living in my refrigerator. He eats all the moldy cheese and ocasionally turns my eggs into pots of gold. I hope you don't doubt a word of what I just wrote, because the onus is on you to prove me wrong. Originally posted by xiinfaniin: Big Bang could very well be a sound phenomenon that’s inline with how Allah invented and originated this universe. But it could never be used as a camouflage to deny the existence of the life Giver. I don't know anyone who uses the Big Bang theory to deny the existence of gods. There were atheists long before the theory became popular, and there will be atheists even if it turns out to be wrong. I know believers like to think so, but atheists don't go around saying "I don't believe in god(s) because of evolution/the Big Bang/superconductivity". For most atheists, their stance is--to quote the late great Carl Sagan--extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That an anthropomorphic, omniscient, omnipotent Creator took a bit of mud, shaped it, breathed on it, named it Adam, took one of it's ribs, shaped and breathed on it, and told the couple not to eat from an apple (or was it fig?) tree, is an extraordinary claim. Where's the extraordinary evidence?

MMA, He may be a beggar, but our president is sure the best-looking elected official in the world.

The Point, There's nothing more final than death to prevent one from practicing one's faith, surely? Islam itself excuses someone who claims to reject Islam out of fear for his life, and you want to put the Hijab before the sanctity of human life? For Turkey to ban the Hijab is a deplorable limitation on the fundamental human right to self-expression, but surely the level of vitriol aimed at Turkey is a bit hypocritical. I know Somali Muslims who placed their hand on the Qur'an and vowed to be truthful but told ridiculous lies so they could live in America or Canada. They were not exactly in terror for their lives either. So, how much contempt should we heap on these poor misguided souls?

The Point, You've made some excellent points there. However (there's always one of those in these fora...), I have a few objections, some of which I'll quickly mention. You wrote: ...a chorusof howls will echo from folks like Socod-Badane etc. that science is self-correcting etc. That IS precisely the point - something that is, in fact, self-correcting CANNOT tell us about the fundamental and immutable truths about our universe and human existence. How so? If slowly, piece by piece, science reveals the truth, occasionally going off on a red herring, but ultimately returning to the correct course, how would it fail? What fundamental and immutable truths will science overlook? This seems like special pleading to me: okay, rational inquiry cannot confirm my beliefs, so I'll just claim that my beliefs are beyond rational inquiry. So there! And anyway, who says Divine Revelation is not changeable? The Qur'an, I understand, was revealed as a "correction" to earlier Divine texts that were "corrupted" by mankind. Specifically the Torah and the Injil, in terms of actual texts, but keep in mind that God had to send numerous prophets to constantly bring people back to the fold, as they continuously changed his message. But even within the same tradition, Divine Revelation is hardly immutable. The same Holy Book is often modified even as it is being revealed: Verses in the Qur'an were corrected by other verses in the Qur'an, or even by Hadith. Divine Revelation can be mutable and usually is. Then of course, there are all the countless cases of Divine Revelation which you would not accept as such: The Mormon Bible, the Hindu holy texts, the Ancient Egytian Book of the Dead. Why reject some Divine Revelation and accept others? If we are to reject reason and rational inquiry (ie, the Scientific Method) to decipher truth, then on what basis should we decide what is true revelation from the Creator and what is manmade lies? Honestly, ignore everything else I wrote if you like and simply answer that question. Because science is locked into the straight-jacked of the Scientific Method it simply cannot grasp anything beyond this. That's because there is no beyond. The scientific method is a tool for ascertaining the truth. It is not the only tool, just the most reliable. Furthermore, even if the falsehood or racial superiority/inferiority issue existed for a short time before it was corrected - it still doesn't excuse those who did believe as scientific 'fact' - their flawed 'science' led to a lot of injustice etc. Now here's where I cannot understand you. First of all, your earlier romantic assessment of our noble grandfather is sentimental hogwash. He most certainly would not have said that all men were created equal. He would have told you that Somalis were superior to all others, and his tribe in particular was the most exalted of Somalis. To suggest otherwise demonstrates remarkably efficient rose-tinted glasses! In point of fact, every race considers itself to be superior to all others. The Somalis, the Whites, the Arabs, the Japanese, the Inuit. We all do it. It's self-affirming. To suggest otherwise is to deny human history and stick one's head in the sand. What's more, when Islam proclaimed that all Muslims are equal, it effectively drew new boundaries, making the Muslim superior to the non-Muslim. Since one's religion is mostly determined by one's parents' religion, in practical terms Islam did not remove equality, merely redistributed it. Case in point: most Arabs are Muslim, whereas most Whites are not. Ergo, a greater fraction of Arabs will go to heaven than Whites. As I said, merely a redistribution of inequality. To me, a theist who thinks he's better than another person simply because of his religious heritage is no less bigotted than someone who ascribes to theories of racial superiority. By the way, Whites who insisted that their race was superior to others would have referenced the Bible far more readily than they would point out scientific evidence of their claims. Black slaves were exhorted to read the Bible, which explains that they were enslaved as divine punishment for their forefathers' sins (the story of Ham). In fact, some creationists argued that Blacks were a different species and justified slavery on those terms, even as Darwin (the quintessential amoeba-scientist) wrote: Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children ... being torn from you and sold to the highest bidder! And those deeds are done ... by men who profess to love their neighbors as themselves ... and pray [God's] Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil. Indeed. But there's another important point. If you're suggesting that the scientific method is flawed because it was once used by evil men to justify racism, would you also use the same measuring stick for judging Divine Revelation? The Qur'an is used by many to advocate the murder of innocents who are born of other faiths. It's used to justify subjugation of women and it condones slavery, easily the most unjust institution ever created by humans. Would you reject the Qur'an as the ultimate arbiter of truth, since some have used it to wrong others? While science can be incorrect, it is, fortunately, a self-correcting process, incrementally revealing the truths of the universe, whatever they happen to be. Divine Revelation on the other, is neither comfortingly eternal and unambiguous, as multiple contradictory holy texts demonstrate, nor is it able to incorporate facts as they become evident. So this particular amoeba will give it a pass, thanks.

Khayr, An agnostic is someone who says that 1)They personally do not know whether gods exist, and/or 2)It is not possible to know whether gods exists. The two positions have nothing to do with belief per se, but with knowledge. The opposite of agnosticism is someone who is certain that a god does or does not exist, and bases such certainty on knowledge and not belief. Theism and atheism have to do with belief. The former states a belief in the existence of one or more gods, while the latter states disbelief in one or more gods. A person could be an agnostic atheist at the same time: I don't know whether a god exists or not, but I believe that he/she/it does not exist. As for which is worse, atheism or agnosticism, I would have to say atheism. Such flagrant denial of god At least the agnostic is hedging his/her bets!

I respect people's sentiments, and I say "Merry Christmas", "Eid Mubarak", etc. But I don't respect religious holidays themselves. Just that they are meaningful to other people. Jingle bells Santa smells Rudolf laid an egg!

Fathia, Why wish us an early new year. If I am correct the Hijrah New Year is 10 February 2005 . Maybe because you had to use the Gregorian calender to define the Islamic new year?

You're wrong, of course.

As a vertically-challenged individual, I nominate Liibaan. He has gone to great heights to assure all VCI's stand tall. If not Liibaan, then how about Khayr-Yonis-AlleUbaahne as a triple threat? They've provided many a laugh (and in the case of Khayr, some bemused smiles). Seriously, I nominate Castro. You rock, dude.

P or B As a Somali Is the same To me!