Just When You Thought Reading Was Safe
From the Washington Post:

Aside from Lord Voldemort, the Forbidden Forest and the Dementors, young fans of the wildly popular Harry Potter books apparently have one more thing to worry about: "Hogwarts Headaches."

Howard J. Bennett, a pediatrician in Northwest Washington, was alerted to the peril when three patients, ages 8 to 10, complained in June that they had been suffering from headaches for two or three days.

"The presumed diagnosis for each child was a tension headache brought on by the effort required to plow through an 870-page book. The obvious cure for this malady -- that is, taking a break from reading -- was rejected by two of the patients, who preferred acetaminophen instead," Bennett wrote, referring to the painkiller sold as Tylenol and other brand names.

October 30 in History
This from Working for Change

1270: Eighth and last crusade is launched.

1922: Benito Mussolini becomes prime minister, Italy. Invented the term "fascism" to describe an authoritarian government controlled by corporations. Hmm.

1938: Martian UFOs land at Grover's Mill, New Jersey, as reported by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre in a network radio adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel, causing a national panic.

1986: Attorney General Ed Meese urges employers to begin spying on workers in "locker rooms, parking lots, shipping and mail room areas and even the nearby taverns" to try to catch them using drugs. By and large, they've complied.

Whose God is Bigger? Does it Matter in Foreign Policy?
The history dates were actually part of the tag of a very good article analyzing what the author sees as the real issues behind the recent statements about Muslims by General Boykin.

The first is whether the "my god is bigger" contempt of Boykin for a Muslim enemy is leading Boykin, as head of intelligence and a key military planner for current efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq, to underestimate the resistance being put up against American forces. This week has been the bloodiest yet in Iraq; in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are quietly making a resurgence, two American ex-CIA officers were killed in a firefight yesterday.

But if public officials are going to go around sneering at Islam, what about the Americans who are also Muslim? Their voices have been notably absent.

Those Americans, in case you're wondering, number somewhere around six million -- now making Islam by far the United States' second-largest religion. ... Islam -- which has more adherents in America than Judaism, and as with Judaism has shared historical roots with Christianity -- is widely seen as a foreign, "other" religion. This was true well before 9/11, but the sense that America has enemies and this is their religion today permeates many Americans' views of Islam.

This is, of course, both unfair and preposterous. The majority of America's past wars have come against Christians -- Germans, Spaniards and Mexicans, Brits, our own civil war. We don't take it out today on Lutherans or Catholics as a result, any more than we do on followers of Buddhism or Shintoism for our experiences with Vietnam and Japan.

If anything, instead of marking our differences, Boykin's "my God is bigger than yours" line sounds remarkably similar to something bin Laden himself would say.

Regardless, both the views of Boykin and other evangelicals and of many of his critics seem to ignore the fact that Muslims make up a significant and fast-growing part of our own culture. It's one thing to disparage the religious beliefs of an enemy. It's another to disparage the faith of six million fellow Americans -- and that, above all, is what makes comments like those of Lt. Gen. Boykin both offensive and dangerous.

Very good insights. We can easily lose our perspective on the conflicts around us. We can demonize a group because of their religion (or other issues) and hence turn what we do into an unofficial "holy war." That is dangerous for a country that presumes religious freedom and to be beacon of light for the world as we often claim to be (and have been at many times.) The issues of which religion(s) are right and which are wrong is not a public policy discussion. Such things cannot and should not be legislated by ballot, congress, or the point of a gun. They are in the hearts and souls of people and it is in our witness as members of a particular religion that the truth of the religion is seen by those outside. We live what we truly believe.

Which is why Islam has received such "bad press" and is working hard in America to maintain a better image. bin Laden et. al., have muddied its name (just as Christian terrorists in other countries, the Crusades, etc. muddy the name of Christianity.) They are rightly afraid that what bin Laden and others have done will be projected on to them. That would be grossly unfair and would do more to tarnish our American image than anything.

Let me close this post by quoting again from the Dalai Lama as Alan Brill posted at The Right Christians. It is an excellent understanding that we need to at least pay attention to:

I am Buddhist. Therefore, Buddhism is the only truth for me, the only religion. To my Christian friend, Christianity is the only truth, the only religion. To my Muslim friend, Mohammedanism is the only truth, the only religion. In the meantime, I respect and admire my Christian friend and my Muslim friend. If by unifying you mean mixing, that is impossible, useless.