Category Archives: Religion

Meat without murder?

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May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere.  The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by  Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:

Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques. 

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

Wicked!  It’s like Franken-food.  Oh come on.  You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too.  The Guardian has more:

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

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Women in Sikhism: A Promising Reform

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bibi jagir kaur.jpgSikhs like to talk a big game about gender equality, but most of the time it’s just talk. Patriarchal institutions like dowry are still quite widespread amongst the Sikh community in India, for one thing. And worse: Punjab, as many people will know, has the highest male/female birth ratio in all of India, due to rampant female foeticide. It’s hard to talk about gender equality when that is going on.

Well, this week there is one small but promising reform out of Amritsar, the granting of full inclusion of women in Sikh religious services, according to the IANS:

Sixty-five years after making a demand that they be allowed to take part in two rituals at the holiest of Sikh shrines – the Golden Temple at Amritsar – women will finally be able to enter an arena so far dominated by males. The religious promotion and affairs committee of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) – the governing body for Sikh shrines – decided Monday that Sikh women would be allowed to perform ‘kirtan’ (singing hymns) and ‘palki sewa’ (carrying the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib in a palanquin) on religious occasions. The decision came when the SGPC has a woman president – Jagir Kaur [pictured right] – at the helm of affairs. The first demand to allow women to do religious service at the Golden Temple was made in 1940 but the male-dominated SGPC never allowed it to happen. Jagir Kaur became SGPC president in 1999 but was unable to get the resolution allowing women to join rituals to be passed. The controversy over women performing voluntary religious service at the Golden Temple erupted in February 2003 when two Sikh women from Britain were prevented from doing religious service there. Till now, women were allowed to participate only in certain activities at the temple, like preparing food at the langar or community kitchen. (link)

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Separation of Burger and State

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Dave Sidhu at the great blog DNSI has a very illustrative example of what stinks in the ethnic ghettos of Europe in my opinion.  It turns out that Muslims that have the munchies can now satiate their cravings at their own Beurger King Muslim (BKM).  The BBC reports:

Parisian Muslims can now enjoy halal meals in an atmosphere that mimics US fast-food joints after BKM, or Beurger King Muslim, opened its doors.

BKM has set up in the northern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where many locals are first or second generation Muslims from former French colonies.

And half of the suburb’s population of 28,000 are aged under 25, the Agence France Presse news agency reported.

Beur is slang for a second generation North African living in France.

So let me understand this.  It mimics the atmosphere of the U.S. by essentially being a segregated establishment?  I’m torn.  I HATE this idea because all it does is serve to further segregate a community whose children sometimes seem to turn fanatical because they feel segregated against.  At the same time however it helps fight the poverty that leads to and maintains the segregation:

For most of BKM’s employees, the restaurant had “ended a long period of unemployment”, Mr Benhamid said.

One BKM worker called Hakim explained that “young people in these suburbs have trouble finding work and this restaurant will allow the hiring of young people who have no diplomas or are looking for apartments”. 

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Were the bombers BBCDs?

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Around half the British bombers of 7/7 and 7/21 were of Pakistani origin, the other half of African or Caribbean origin. The NYT now spins the Pakistani group as victims of cultural confusion:

“They don’t know whether they’re Muslim or British or both…” They are alienated from their parents’ rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward… they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has.

‘Give me mango lassi and aloo gobi in every grocery store, or give me death’ (which they actually have in the UK, bless Sainsbury’s little heart). The sale of desi exotica and Apu on The Simpsons irritate thin, sunlight-deprived snarkidesis into penning high-class rants on blogs, like the class nerd hitting the football star with a rubber band sneak attack and then running like a coward. But did Apu push the 7/7 murderers over the edge?

It’s pretty silly when you put it that way, of course. And the UK has one of the richest desi diasporic subcultures anywhere, so there’s no lack of musicians, movie stars and models for teens to identify with. Naturally, it’s not about cultural chiseling. IMO the Beeston milieu boils down to three factors: the reverse psychology of teen rebellion, the in-your-face racism of working-class Britain and standard-issue criminality. The perversity of rebelling by being more conservative than your parents is by far the strangest one.

The second gen is much more demanding of their rights as Britons than their immigrant parents who just want to keep their heads down and earn a paycheck:

The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain…Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years… Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. “When we came, we were like servants,” Mr. Hussain said…

The children of the immigrants have shed the servility, and passivity, of their parents, Mr. Hussain said. They want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. This inspires both pride and unease in him… Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. “They were very timid,” he said of the first wave.

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A brown athlete represents

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amir-khan-selogo.jpgThe comment threads on this blog are ablaze with flaming hot conversation (not to be confused with those uber-yummy flaming hot cheetos, please).

Everyone has an opinion regarding last week’s devastating attack on London, especially when it comes to the issue of how to react to terror. A few of you have exhorted moderate, if not all Muslims to speak up and out about their horror over what a few fundamentalists wrought.

Someone famous seems to be reading your minds; Olympic-Silver Medal-Boxer Amir Khan is the son of Pakistani immigrants, he is considered by some to be “Britain’s highest profile Asian-Muslim sportsman”. As a British Muslim, he feels especially called to react to the bombings. He made the following statements today, the day before his debut as a professional boxer:

“The worst thing about last week was that some people will tar all Muslims with the same brush,” the 18-year-old told the Daily Mirror newspaper.
“The Asian community has been appalled with what has happened. I hope that by stepping into the ring I can show all young kids in Britain that there are better things to do than getting into trouble and mixing with bad people.
“The world Islam means peace.”

Indeed. Rather than misdirecting hostility towards innocents, puree a punching bag. Hell, IMO any extra-curricular activity is preferable to growing glassy-eyed and hypnotized by a charismatic terrorist mastermind. Continue reading →

Meet Talibert

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Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (‘Freedom is slavery’) could hardly have done better than the neo-Taliban running Pakistan’s nuttiest province. Americans are familiar with daft states. We call them ‘Florida’:

A controversial new law critics say will seek Taleban-style moral policing has been presented in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province… The proposed law calls for the establishment of a new department to “discourage vice and encourage virtue.” … hardline religious parties have enough seats in the provincial house to pass the bill.

It will be headed by a cleric called “mohtasib” – one who holds others accountable – to be nominated by the government. The principal duty of the cleric will be to “ensure adherence to Islamic values in public places”… the mohtasib will be required to ensure people pay adequate respect to azan (call to prayers), pray on time and do not engage in commerce at the time of Friday prayers. The mohtasib will also stop unrelated men and women from appearing in public places together and discourage singing and dancing… [Link]

Having already banned alcohol and wedding feasts, they’re now trying to persuade people to like their fundamentalist sect better by beating them in public. It’s motivational genius!

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Muslim…Sikh…what’s the difference? (updated)

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Something depressingly predictable has gone down in the wake of last week’s terror attack on London (thanks, RC). The backlash we worried about has commenced:

Arsonists set a mosque in northwest England on fire on Saturday, police said, two days after a string of bomb attacks across London killed at least 50 people.

According to the Hindustan Times, authorities are searching for two white men in their early 20s, who were spotted near the mosque before it was vandalized. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only religious edifice that was harmed:

There were also reports in the Indian media Sunday that a Gurudwara — a Sikh temple — had been vandalised in an arson attack in Leeds.
According to the spokesman, two Sikh temples were attacked.

attacks.jpg An attack for an attack and the whole world going up in smoke. Those who are responsible almost seem to be saying, “Hurt us and we’ll hurt you, too” all the while forgetting that they are attacking their own, not to mention their suffering own. As people have pointed out on this very blog, the areas that were hit are quite Muslim, quite brown. We didn’t get a courtesy warning to stay home, we died and bled, too.

The attack on a mosque is awful enough, but going after a Gurudwara…that stings in a different way. You know, I had naively hoped that this wouldn’t happen across the pond. Contrary to America, where Sikhs are more scattered and less understood, I thought that in England, people were more knowledgeable about Sikhism, that they could tell the difference between al-Qaeda and an innocent group of people who had nothing to do with transportation treachery. Perhaps some, if not most of the English can…but much to my alarm, there are quite obviously a dangerous few who can’t. To them, a turban is a turban is a turban. Bend it like Beckham and bomb it like someone ignorant.

“Such attacks are an affront not only to the great Sikh religion but to entire humanity,” the spokesman said.
“The Sikh community in the United Kingdom has carved out a highly respected place for itself in the British society through its industriousness and commitment,” the spokesman said.

None of that matters. We are foreign and we wear turbans, just like that bastard Osama. Thanks to a coincidence of complexion, we are complicit and we will pay. Continue reading →

Next Weekend in SF: The Domestic Crusaders

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crusaders.jpg I know it seems like we only post cool things to do in NYC, L.A. or D.C. but yay urrea readers, take dil: this one’s for you. Next week, you should totally drag your friends and frenemies to Mutineer Manish’s old stomping grounds, for an evening at the theater.

You’ll be watching The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play which takes place on a single day in the life of a multi-generational Pakistani-American family–a day, by the way, that happens to be the “baby’s” 21st birthday:

With a background of 9-11 and the scapegoating of Muslim Americans, the tensions and sparks fly among the three generations, culminating in an intense family battle as each “crusader” struggles to assert and impose their respective voices and opinions, while still attempting to maintain and understand that unifying thread that makes them part of the same family.

How’s that for salient? If you’re worried about whether or not it will be good, here’s what the Contra-Costa Times had to say about it:

Wajahat Ali didn’t set out to write an earthshaking play. The Berkeley student was taking a short story course from Pulitzer Prize nominee Ishmael Reed. When his professor pulled him aside and told him he was a natural playwright, Ali couldn’t believe it. “I thought it was pure nonsense,” Ali says. Reed encouraged Ali to write a Muslim-American response to 9-11. “All I wanted to do was pass a class,” says Ali, who succeeded in doing much more than that.

Hey. All you readers who have totally reasonable gripes with the media, for not covering a broader, more accurate world– this blockquote’s for you:

“Domestic Crusaders” represents Muslim-American voices that have not been heard because we are living in a country whose media is censored…
“In the largely Pakistani-American audience at the premiere of the play, people were roaring and falling off their chairs,” says Blank. “It’s the kind of audience most original playwrights would kill to be able to contact,” Blank says, laughing.

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It’s not just the Catholic Church

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At the airport the other day a casually dressed man walked up to me in the security line and said, “you must be active duty or reserve.” Huh? “Excuse me” I politely replied. “Your haircut,” he pointed. Perhaps I had gotten it cut too short. I just love getting haircuts though. Having guessed wrong the man sheepishly walked off. Thirty seconds later he found a group of 3 young men and opened his suitcase to hand them something. Hare Krishna literature. The LA Times reported yesterday on an all to familiar story, but this one isn’t about the Catholic Church:

Leaders of the Hare Krishna faith last week began carrying out the terms of a $9.5-million settlement that closes the books on a long-running child abuse scandal.

Under the plan, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness organization has filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles while it determines how to compensate 535 former students who say they were abused in the 1970s and ’80s by adults at boarding schools run by the society.

The settlement covers abuses at Krishna temples and schools across the United States and India that resulted in a 2001 class-action lawsuit.

Some Hare Krishna devotees and gurus, including at least one in Los Angeles, were subsequently convicted of child abuse, and others were barred from visiting temples, said Anuttama Dasa, spokesman for the society.

Of course, this isn’t an indictment against all Hare Krishnas, just as the entire Catholic Church isn’t on trial for the actions of some of its clergy, but it’s something to be aware of. There is actually a Hare Krishna temple on my block in LA. Once last year I heard blaring rock music outside my window. When I tried to discern the words I realized it was actually Hare Krishna rock.

Schools, known as ashram gurukulas, sprouted across the country, including Los Angeles.

“I hardly ever saw my parents, but when I did, I would ask my mother every two seconds, ‘What time do I have to go back?’ ” said plaintiff Anya Pourchot, now 37. “I was so fearful that if I did not get back to the ashram in time, they would take away my privileges of seeing my mother.”

Pourchot, a Santa Monica beautician, said she was able to fend off sexual advances from gurus, teachers and other devotees in a Dallas boarding school, but she was frequently beaten. She said she saw other children put inside gunnysacks and barrels as punishment. Children were locked in closets and told that rats would attack them if they moved, she said.

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What makes me swear

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In North Carolina, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is requesting that Muslim court witnesses be allowed swear their veracity with a Koran instead of a Bible:

Ellis said there is concern allowing the Koran could create new challenges. He questioned what would happen if a person claimed to worship brick walls and wanted to swear the oath on a brick. [WebIndia123]

They’re right. What if some lone wacko claimed to worship a stone, such as the Qa’aba, a shivalinga, a laughing Buddha or an engraved copy of the Ten Commandments? Blasphemy! I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, since the scripture use is fairly ceremonial, you can already swear without your personal flavor of holy book, and people lie in court all the time, this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering issue. But it’s important to religious literalists who believe morality requires a warden-deity with night vision goggles.

So, taking the question at face value, it does in fact point to a larger issue of ownership. On one hand, it’s courteous to allow the majority religion its ceremonial religious invocations, which are woven throughout the Declaration of Independence, the currency, national holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance and the invocations of Congress and the Supreme Court. This religion and the work ethic it spawned built a great country over the years, and the American separation of church and state is reasonably good relative to most other nations. Those institutions are far more entangled on the subcontinent. Continue reading →