Category Archives: Transhuman News

The whole day today my mind had this long question-and-answer session concerning the Muslim Friday prayers and what should change in the way the congregation is spoken to. I had these random questions in need of perspectives, in light of the rising tension emanating from the Allah controversy:

1. Why should Friday sermons put people to sleep and be used to sow the seeds of hatred and ignorance, rather than promote intercultural and inter-racial and international understanding? Have we not have been having enough of violence on the streets as a consequence of these urgings to divide and destroy? Should people boycott religious hatemongers parading themselves as pious people using house of worships as cells to promote hatred?

2. Friday khutbahs will remain hypocritical if they do not talk about the hypocrisy of the ruling class in the way they spend money, consume conspicuously, breed hatred, fight endlessly over power and its insanity, the production of high-brow pornography, etc.

I imagine the jemaah/congregation will finally wake up if these are addressed, since they are the most meaningful topics relating to the reality of things and ones that place religion as a meaningful human invention to alleviate human problems based on scientific, moral and ethical solutions, grounded in radical-ecumenical tradition and not merely a showcase of human obedience .

3. Imams delivering engaging khutbahs should also be postmodernists and transculturalists instead of merely becoming parrots to the dictates of the state.

They should be able to craft their own speech texts true to the ability of their intelligence to share new ideas, promote multiculturalism, bring people of all faiths together, think like a cosmopolitan, well-read in comparative religion, able to extract, extrapolate, and espouse universal values of all religions, be in tune with the pressing matters of the day, speak up against gluttony especially of the rich and the 1 percent of society, and above all do not speak ill of any religion, any race, anyone professing any kind of truth meaningful to them.

How can we create such imams and replace those out to damage society with them?

4. Why should the jemaah/congregation pray for the continued longevity of morally questionable rulers of empires of despots, dictators, demagogues?

Why not pray that those who hath oppressed the people for generations will arrive at a moksha, a boddhisatva, a catharsis, a stage of spiritual peak performance, a personal enlightenment, an illumination, a deep and poignant realisation that they ought to resign from their ill-constructed positions and worldly matters and devote their lives to ceasing all further attempts to create wealth and sustain power for themselves and their families dynastically, so that the poor will be spared of being further used and abused under a system of tyranny sanctioned by religion that continues to blind people, maim and mutilate, and debilitate the mind, body, and soul of the very purpose of existence to connect and to liberate and to break away from all forms of demagoguery.

Why cant we be made to see this picture clearly?

Excerpt from:
On the khutbah / Friday sermons

Last week Fox renewed Bones for a 10th season, guaranteeing the quirky procedural starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz would live to see its 200th episode and with no mention of No. 10 being its final go-round.

Its an unlikely milestone for a show that has endured multiple moves around the schedule and speculation for the past few seasons about its probable end date.

They always say every year that they expect it to be the last and then they look around and realize the Bones audience is actually growing, executive producer Stephen Nathan tells The Post. We dont quite understand it either. A decade seems like an awfully long time. We will be prepared for a series-ender but we will plan on a season-ender.

On the air since 2005, Bones is Foxs third most-watched drama, averaging 9.1 million viewers behind newer entries The Following (11.2 million viewers) and Sleepy Hollow, (11 million viewers).

And its hardly the only graying drama refusing to quietly retire. For all the buzz that younger, sexier series like Scandal and The Blacklist (rightly) generate, an older class of drama veterans is quietly drawing an equal audience after a decade on the air.

CBS long-running NCIS is the poster child for a drama only growing stronger with age the Mark Harmon headliner still draws an average of 21.8 million viewers a week in its 11th season and is prepping a possible New Orleans-set spinoff (it already has NCIS: LA).

Criminal Minds, which will air its 200th episode on Feb. 5, is averaging an impressive 13 million viewers in its ninth season while the networks oldest series, CSI (14 seasons), still draws 12 million viewers a week.

Greys Anatomy stars Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey recently signed new two-year deals, increasing the likelihood that the ABC medical drama will reach a 12th season. And with good reason though its no longer the networks most-watched drama, at an average of 12.7 million viewers its just behind Scandal (13 million viewers) and Castle (12.9 million viewers its getting up there itself at six seasons).

If theres a secret to keeping a show alive for so many seasons, it seems to be create a family of characters that viewers want to have in their living room year after year, say producers.

People have really connected with those characters, says Criminal Minds showrunner/executive producer Erica Messer. And then on top of that, I think that fans tune in every week because of the battle between good and evil its almost that simple. Out of 200 episodes, about 195 of them weve stopped the bad guy and theres been a satisfying end to that weeks journey.

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Producers share the secret to a TV shows longevity