Holy Weblog!

A Pittsburgh TV station reported a naked man was Tased in a local chapel.

Appearing to need help, officers took him to the Washington City Mission in Washington County and that’s where something unusual happened.

[23-year-old David] Briggs was tased and taken to a local hospital.

Read more here.

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“Yusuf” asks IslamOnline.net: “Is it permissible for a man to remove hair from the chest, back, and between the eyebrows?”

“There is no evidence from the Qur’an or the Sunnah that forbids cutting short the hair from the chest and back; but the removal of hair from these parts may be considered a form of imitating women, something forbidden according to the hadith: ‘May Allah’s curse be inflicted on women imitating men and vice versa.’ As for women, it is permissible for them to remove hair from these parts because it causes them harm.

As for removing the hair from between the eyebrows, it is lawful, because it is not part of the eyebrows. But as for plucking the eyebrows, it is forbidden and not permissible in Islam, according to the Hadith: ‘May Allah’s curse be inflicted upon women who pluck their eyebrows, and women hired to do this.’

Read more here. And for more information, check out advice for “Straightening the Eyebrows.”

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Photo by flickr user trappedinabay.

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The Vatican has finally forgiven John Lennon for that “we’re more popular than Jesus” thing during the Beatles’ heyday.

From Reuters:

“The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll,” Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said.

The article, marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ “The White Album,” went on to praise the pop band.

Read the whole thing here.

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The Sun’s headline: “The way you Mecca me feel.” Just can’t make this stuff up.

The skint superstar, 50, donned Islamic garb to pledge allegiance to the Koran in a ceremony at a pal’s mansion in Los Angeles, The Sun can reveal.

Jacko sat on the floor wearing a tiny hat after an Imam was summoned to officiate — days before the singer is due to appear at London’s High Court where he is being sued by an Arab sheik. …

Read the whole thing here.

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The Deseret News, among other places, is right on this story.

The New York Post and playbill.com, among other sources, reported Tuesday that South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are at work on a Broadway-bound show titled “Mormon Musical.”

“I play the main missionary, Elder something,” he said.

Read the rest here.

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A Florida woman has protested an Affliction-made T-shirt depicting the Virgin Mary as a “demonic”-looking skeleton holding the Baby Jesus. Her local Nordstrom listened, and pulled the shirt.

Judy [Carbo] was in disbelief when she saw the shirt for sale in Nordstrom.

Judy says, “If you were Jewish, you wouldn’t want to see a swastika on a shirt. If you were African-American, you wouldn’t want to see anything desecrating you.”

Read the rest of the WPTV-TV report here.

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(Link to the news video that was embedded here; the immediate-start feature of the video got annoying extremely quickly, especially with the commercial that showed up first. Apologies.)

A Kansas pastor — no, not that Kansas pastor — refuses to take down a message on his church’s sign that errantly declares President-elect Barack Obama is a Muslim.

KSN-TV reports:

“The main point of the marquee is to cause Christians to understand he’s not a Christian,” said Pastor Mark Holick of Spirit One. “They call and tell me he’s not a Muslim he’s a Christian. That’s not the point. The point is he’s not a Christian.”

What Pastor Holick says he’s trying to say is electing Obama was a sin because Obama isn’t an evangelical Christian. Obama supports abortion rights and tolerance of other religions. Holick is quick to recite Bible verses that say tolerance of the Jewish and Muslim faith is wrong.

Read the rest of the report (and get more video) here.

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I know, the proper term for non-kosher (or, in Islamic terminology, halal) in Islam is haram. The point is, there’s been a bit of buzz in some blogosphere corners about a ruling or two indicating that emoticons are decidedly non-Islamic. Blame the blog The Jawa Report — a site with an unfortunate and discomfiting level of Islamophobia about it — for this.

Much of the two Web pages noted in The Jawa Report made my head spin, largely because I’m not familiar with a lot of Islamic references and terminology. (And yes, I need to educate myself on this, I know.) But one of them concluded:

Emoticons are forbidden because of its imitation to Allah’s creatures whether it is original or mixture or even deformed one and since the picture is the face and the face is what makes the real picture then emoticons which represent faces that express emotions then all that add up to make them Haram.

The other cited page says regarding emoticons created from punctuation marks (as opposed to actual smiley faces created in, say, instant messaging platforms:

It seems – and Allaah knows best – that this face, whether it is smiling or sad, does not come under the same ruling as images that it is forbidden to make, draw, or use, for two reasons:

2 – The majority of fuqaha’ are of the view that if something is cut off from an image without which it could no longer live, then it is not a haraam image. …

Found a third Web site that addressed this:

Just as we write on computers today, in the same way we can express our emotions on a computer by the usage of emoticons, which are not pictures. Therefore, presumably, emoticons aren’t haram, according to this guy.

It all kind of makes canon law look like child’s play.

Further explanation or rumination by Muslim readers would be most welcome.

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