Discussion (11)¬

1. JohnnieCanuck says:

   July 3, 2007 at 7:48 pm

   I just read that the Twelver Shia believe that the 12th Imam ‘became occulted’ in 939 or 874 or 868. That’s less than 1200 years ago. Still a long time to be flitting around, corporal or not. Strange how they have so many dates. Looks like yet another source of schism and violence.

   The article also mentioned some of the other sects, like the Seveners. Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable curiousity any further than that.

2. Necessary Evil says:

   July 4, 2007 at 8:18 am

   A man is taking a walk in Central park in New York. Suddenly he sees a little girl being attacked by a pit bull dog. He runs over and starts fighting with the dog. He succeeds in killing the dog and saving the girl’s life. A policeman who was watching the scene walks over and says: “You are a hero,” tomorrow you can read it in all the newspapers: “Brave New Yorker saves the life of little girl.” The man says: “But I am not a New Yorker!” “Oh, then it will say in newspapers in the morning: Brave American saves life of little girl” – the policeman answers. “But I am not an American!” – says the man. “Oh, what are you then?” The man says: “I am a Saudi!” Then next day the newspapers say: “Islamic extremist kills innocent American dog.”

   Taken from http://www.ezsoftech.com/stories/mis5.asp. There are some islamic joke sites around, but I haven’t found any that match the level of humor here.

3. Brian says:

   July 5, 2007 at 6:05 am

   Clearly, Mo (PBUH) in bed with Jesus playing his hippy guitar is being portrayed as an insane Islamic extremist.

4. Danu says:

   July 6, 2007 at 12:28 am

   Johnnie, the most accepted date is 874, which is when the ‘Ghaibat as-Sughra’ [the Lesser Occultation] began. The Imam was said to have been 5 years old at the time. During this time, he was concealed from the general public but often met with pious Shi’as. To communicate with the general public, he had a ‘safeer’ and there were four safeers in the Lesser Occultation. After about 70 years (equivalent to a man’s lifetime) – after the fourth safeer had died – the Imam went into Ghaibat al-Kubra, the Greater Occultation which has stretched on to date. In the Greater Occultation, he doesn’t meet with anyone except the most trusted Shi’as [I don’t think they even exist anymore!]. He is seen as a savior figure, about to set things right and avenging his forefathers of the injustice shown to them by the various [and according to Shi’as, illegitimately installed] caliphs of the Islamic state. He is supposed to pave the way for the coming of Jesus.

   If you want, I’ll tell you a bit about Seveners too…

5. Hamidreza says:

   July 15, 2007 at 12:37 am

   Its gotta be pure idiocy to believe in these crap stories about Imam’s occultation, etc, and meeting with trusted (meaning self-installed) Shia leaders, etc.

   I wonder how the human species can close his mind and believe in the unproven and the unprovable to the point that he wants to rule and enslave others through this belief (with the help of the AK47 and the RPG, of course).

6. peterNW1 says:

   April 4, 2008 at 3:50 am

   Is Mo’s guitar a Cat Stevens reference?

7. Topi says:

   January 3, 2015 at 10:59 am

   @Hamidreza: How does one rule & enslave with the Role Playing Game? Be careful with your TLAs.

8. Bones'sDog says:

   April 30, 2017 at 4:34 pm

   Danu, so, essentially he’s King Arthur?
   I have a fridge magnet with the legend, “Out to lunch, back in five years”. Those guys are a little less precise.

9. Walter says:

   March 25, 2018 at 3:06 pm

   Hey, Jesus’ father told him he’d be back in a couple of days. You see Jesus is traveling to Heaven at light speed so he experiences no time passing.
   A couple of days in Heaven for R&R and he’ll be right back. He’ll be surprise that the Earth has been wiped out by the Sun going red giant.

   That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

10. Walter says:

    November 11, 2018 at 5:23 pm

    On the island of Tanna in Vanuatu there is a cargo cult centered on John Frumm, who will bring his followers all sorts of modern goodies. When the Christian missonaries try to call this silly they respond that “You’ve been waiting for your Jesus for almost 2 thousand years and we’ve only been waiting less than a century. Besides our whole society is based on John Frumm and we can’t change it.

    They are obviously less insane than Christians.

11. Tinkling Think says:

    May 29, 2019 at 8:00 pm

    When I was a child, the JW’s used to wander about with leaflets proclaiming that “millions alive today need never die”. With the rapid advances in cryogenics, anti-ageing research, anti-cancer treatments, cybernetics to store minds and other wonders, I could well have believed that they might have been right … for all of the wrong reasons, of course.

    Now, many, many decades later, when all the bright promises of SF and “New Scientist” have fallen by the roadside, one wonders how we ever had such hopes, such naivety, such confidence. None of the promises have been realised, not even the much ridiculed “power too cheap to meter”.

    Science, it seems, has become as much smoke and mirrors, man-behind-the-curtain and vapour-ware as al of the previous schemes of thought. It has given us iPads and spyware but little other improvements since antibiotics and those were eighty years ago.

    I want my Starships and Moon-bases. As you promised. Them and robots to do the laundry, mind-machine linkages and bionic eyeballs.

    I’ll forego the meal-in-a-pill and everyone wearing silver suits things, thanks.

    I’ll even accept that flying personal carriages are idiotic as they would no doubt lead to a flurry of drunken louts doing to politicians what pigeons do to statues, which may be why they have been quietly discouraged though they are technically easy to master but the future ain’t what it should have been.

    We’re missing much of the fun stuff. And still dying.