Jon Rivers

The Necessary Evils of Being Judgmental

I’ve always been a terrible snob, but almost everyone is, in one way or another. We all judge negatively from time to time, and when we judge negatively we look down, and when we look down on anything we are being snobs.

If I replay the judgments I made just this morning within three blocks while walking to the library, it’s a rather shameful catalog of intolerance. As I made my way down the hill to Santa Monica Boulevard, I was forced to leave the sidewalk and walk on the street. I was about to tweet, “Obese couple + Dogs on long leashes = Blocked sidewalk.” I thought better of actually posting it because I correctly judged it too nasty for public comment; a more balanced, tolerant judgment overrode a grumpier, bitchier one. Did I really need to broadcast my transient wrath over such a silly thing?

Happy Birthday, Mr. Prophet

KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | THE INDIA FILES

by @James_Killough

I cannot imagine what it must be like for twenty-three-year-old Hamza Kashgari right now.  It’s one thing to be Salman Rushdie, already a Booker Prize-winning novelist when the fatwa was issued against him by the ayatollahs in Iran after he willfully went against everyone’s advice and published The Satanic Verses, but quite another to tweet a series of messages addressed to Mohammed on his birthday that the Prophet himself might have approved of.

One man's devil is another man's god.

There is no existing iconography of Mohammed—or there shouldn’t be— because he explicitly forbade it.  He didn’t want to be worshipped and deplored any form of idolatry.  As we in the West often imagine what Christ would think if he came back and saw the sorry state of what his teachings have wrought over two thousand years, the same would apply to Mohammed.