While reading Richard Dawkins’ collection of essays in “The Devil’s Chaplain” I chanced on his essay about the potential for genes to determine homosexuality in humans and what implications that might have.
Since we had discussed this point before in The Challenge of Homosexuality, Dawkins take on things was rather surprising:
Imagine the following newspaper headline: ‘Scientists discover that homosexuality is caused.’ Obviously this is not news at all; it is trivial. Everything is caused. To say that homosexuality is caused by genes is more interesting, and it has the aesthetic merit of discomforting politically-inspired bores, but it doesn’t say more than my trivial headline does about the irrevocability of homosexuality.
Every Thursday at dusk, members of one of Iran’s most beleaguered religious minorities gather at Tehran’s railway station. With anxious, teary eyes, they are there to see off relatives and fellow Baha’is who have decided to pull up stakes forever and take the 8 p.m. train to a new life in Turkey and beyond.
Click on any picture to launch gallery view (then click right/left edge for next/previous):
One of the travelers says:
For the next five or six months I kept trying to talk her out of it, but in the end it was I who gave up, because I realized she was right in coming to this decision. But believe me, even now all my heart and soul belongs to Iran.
While I do not mean to diminish the sadness that is understandable for anyone who leaves their homeland, family and friends behind, I find such extreme sentiments a little bit surprising from a fellow Baha’i.
After all, didn’t Baha’u'llah say:
Let not a man glory in this, that he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his kind.
As Alison mentioned in her recent message about clusters, in the grand scheme of Baha’i multi-year plans, 2008 is the mid-point between 1996 and 2021. The future date being the centenary of the Formative Age of the Baha’i Faith.
To celebrate this and to “deliberate on its exigencies” the Universal House of Justice today called for 41 regional conferences to be held around the world. Check the map to see if your city is on the list. Each of the regional conferences will have 2 ITC counsellors as representatives of the UHJ. And Baha’is wonder why there is a revolving door between the two administrative bodies!
While reading Richard Dawkins’ collection of essays in “The Devil’s Chaplain” I chanced on his essay about the potential for genes to determine homosexuality in humans and what implications that might have.
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