Mea Culpa…February 17th Winning Council Posts

 
I am sooo bad. This post is two weeks overdue. The Watcher will be calling out the dogs soon, so I’d better hop to.

A little irony here: Gates was the winner with A Dialogue. I enjoyed that conversation with eteraz, but haven’t had time to get over to his site of late. Please visit him here, since he was the other half of that dialogue. He gives me hope that Muslims and Christians can eventually enter into some kind of dialogue.

Dr. Sanity placed second for Shame, Guilt, the Muslim Psyche, and the Danish Cartoons.

She’s usually in the top three somewhere, mainly because she writes like the extroverted, direct, take-no-prisoners kind of blogger that she is. Being a psychiatrist gives her a leg up in explaining the craziness we live in, but it’s her inimitable style that keeps people coming back for more. In this post, she explains the dynamic of a shame-based culture. Her ideas are intriguing and thoughtful:

One of the ways that those who fear shame protect their fragile self is to subjugate those who he perceives as weaker. By doing so, he can rationalize that he is superior to the subjugated individual. In fact, this is the only way he can maximize his honor. In Arab/Islamic culture, women are one of the primary instruments of achieving honor. Hence the bizarre and distorted attitude that the culture has toward women and the exaggerated means by which "honor" must be maintained. So strong is the cultural pressure, even women buy into the delusion.

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In the non-council posts, the first place post was The 10 Commandments by Big Pharaoh. He used a tried-and-true format: the ten commandments of …and insert your beliefs here. But he did it up in grand style, conflating Moses’ experience with the burning bush with his trip up the mountain to get the stone tablets.

In BP’s version, it’s his PC which is on fire. He wakes in the middle of the night to hear Allah telling him what to say to his “beloved Muslims.” Allah, by the way, doesn’t seem to have any more confidence in his people’s ability to hear him than Yahweh had in his hard-headed desert wanderers. So here’s Allah’s first two commandment as translated by Big Pharaoh, just to whet your appetite:

1.Thou shall not have westophobia. The west is not plotting against Islam, they don’t give a hoot about your religion nor the religion of this old Hindu man walking in downtown Calcutta, India. The West is busy with far more important things.

2.Thou shall remember that millions of Muslims in Europe have far more rights than non-Muslims in Arab/Muslim lands (for more info, contact the Christian villagers of el-Udaysaat) So quit playing the victim here. I simply don’t buy it.

Go read the rest. You’ll like Allah’s style.

The second place winner was All Things Beautiful for America's Useful Idiots. I am so glad someone resurrected Lenin’s term for the disposable people he could use to further his cause. It certainly is a handy phrase to have in one’s quiver. She uses a powerful painting by Giuseppe Cesari (his “Betrayal of Christ”) to illustrate her argument that the Bush administration is not exaggerating al Qaeda's threat to the United States for purely partisan gain. Hats off to her for being willing to explain, one more time, what the real threat is…hint: it’s not the chimp in the White House, so you can quit sending bananas.

As usual, The Watcher did the dirty jobs — like sending me the reminder I am behind yet again in putting up my council posts… Go see the rest of the entries for February 17th. God willing and the Creek don’t rise, I’ll be featuring some of them in the near future.