Articles from April 2011
2011-04-28: So somebody is going to get married tomorrow.
Why would I care? It’s not someone I know. It is not someone of any extraordinary accomplishment. The only thing that makes this person special (beyond the fact that everyone is special, of course, in their own way), or let’s say different from the not-so-different rest of us, is his ancestry. His ancestors were people who, in times long gone, conspired with the church to form a kind of clerical-noble complex to keep poor people poor and miserable and enrich themselves by telling them that nobility comes from God, and God wants everybody to be miserable during their worldly lives so they can be happy after death. (Guess what, the joke’s on the poor people, as all you’ll ever going to be after your death is dead.)
Or maybe not so long gone, come to think of it.
And German public television totally upends their programming schedule because of this? Incredible. All with my user fees.
2011-04-22: Dancing among the Taliban
Imagine a country where, out of respect for a religion that little more than half of the population follow (many in a perfunctory way), public dancing was banned during some of the most sacred holidays of said religion.
Think you are in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan? No! Welcome to present-day Germany, where public dancing is banned on Good Friday. Like typically in the US, the exact regulations vary by state, but even in Berlin, the most liberal state when it comes to banning public dancing, it’s banned from 4am until 9pm.
If your religious feelings bar you from going out to dance on Good Friday, then don’t, that’s fine with me. But why, oh why, do we allow religious extremism to curtail our freedom to dance on any day at any hour of our choosing?
