Torture's blowback

The Koran from the British Museum: (c)Lord Harris
Some Rights Reserved

Use of the Qur'an as an instrument of torture is a backfiring Guantánamo mistake, says Michael Peppard in the Dec. 5 issue of the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Peppard argues that:

Religious torture generates determined resistance and long-lasting resentments. What has been a mere footnote for us may be the main story for the Muslim world. The U.S. military knows that desecration of the Qur'an leads to hunger strikes and suicide attempts, that playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" over the call to prayer is demoralizing. But they seem not to have considered the long-term effects of such tactics.

Long-term effects include a self-sustaining stream of enemy combatants, as a former Special Operations interrogator explains in Sunday's Washington Post. President-elect Obama plans to dry up that stream by outlawing torture and closing Guantanamo.

Sweet the Turkey Beard was

Turkey Beard sans gobble, this one bloomed, sweet-smelling, almost three decades ago in a burned-over Cumberland County, N.C., glade near Methodist College.

The late Claude W. Rankin of Cumberland County made the image:

Breaking slender threads to the SBC

“This church really is historically tied to the Southern Baptist Convention, but lately it’s only been tied by the slenderest of threads,” the Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell of First Baptist Church Decatur, Ga., told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

It was her first Sunday in the pulpit following the Georgia Baptist Convention's approval of a policy allowing it to refuse donations from churches which do not adhere to Southern Baptist Convention's statement of faith.

At the outset, her appointment as pastor in Decatur attracted comment from Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who defended the SBC position that only men may pastor churches.

Southern Baptist Convention leadership (dominated by men) may be divided from the women in Baptist pews and homes.

Breaking those threads would lead the SBC where?

From machine souls the AI legal rights?

Ray Kurzweil was asked in a silicon.com interview, will machines ever have souls?

He dismissed the soul as mere "consciousness," thus finessing the issue of ensoulment.

Even if you accept that theological illogic, there is more to consider.