Sunday, April 26, 2009

Commercial having technical difficulties

The commercial for The Independent Magazine can be viewed on Gary or Sabrina's blog
http://gethestudent.blogspot.com/2009/04/read-independent-magazine.html or http://theyellowcanary.blogspot.com/2009/04/civil-liberties.html

The Independent Magazine Commercial

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

America The Beautiful!






Reading the essay, America the Beautiful, I was very enlightened to the history of the world and how religion has impacted government, society, and lifestyles of people. Even the morals of nations. The idea of freedom giving an individual the choice to have morals or to just to conform to morals that are forced. When it comes to defending your morals, the ones in your heart are of greater value than the ones that your community forces on you.
D'Souza writes about the lack of moral self confidence that America has, and then goes onto give examples when America has absolute moral self confidence such as the passengers on Flight 93, the firefighters and police personnel in New York who rushed into a burning building to save lives, thinking nothing of their own. When we need to have moral self confidence in America it is there, in a diversity of religious and moral backgrounds and belief. But in the absence of tragedy we seem to be hyper sensitive to individual moral self confidence.
The Muslim history in this text gives perspective to the forced morality which is imposed on people of the Islamic world has perhaps squelched their creativity, as very few inventions or advances come from the middle east in recent years. They do offer the world oil, but there was a time when the Arab world offered many more contributions such as number system which replaced Roman numerals and lended itself to arithmetic much better, also coffee, cotton calico and other things were invented in the early years of Muslim history. One other distintion this article makes is the true context of the Muslim concept of jihad, which is now the cutting edge that they are known for.
The American way of life thrives on individual freedom, and ability to create and improve one's own life. This is the basis of American values. The United States does have religious pockets of predominant religions, however they do not take political or government leadership and impose the religion upon others, rather they all have to operate within the laws of this great nation. In America, the beauty is that we have freedom of religion, and religious leaders often exist harmoniously side by side and occasionally take up a common cause to make a better place for everyone.