Rumi Nations

It's a complex issue but one that needs to be confronted head on. All religions are old belief systems and naturally reflect their age. All religions need to change to keep up with changing times and advances in human civilization. There's no way that one can cling on to ways of life propounded in texts written thousands of years ago — no matter how suited those ways of life might have been to the times and climes they were written in. Let's face it: religions came into being as humans tried to make sense of a perplexing universe. There was no science then. So, religions provided simplistic explanations for natural phenomena. Pretty much all religions have concepts of heaven and hell. They talk about living a pious or righteous life here on Earth so that one gets to go to heaven in the afterlife instead of getting punishment in hell for eternity. This is certainly as silly as it sounds. I don't know how people can believe in childish stuff such as this. Beyond this, dif...

President Obama was in Cairo recently and addressed students of Cairo University. Egypt is of course one of the oldest civilaztions on the planet with the pyramids having been built some 5,000 years ago — the human mind with a human lifespan of 60/70 years is certainly incapable of making sense of a timeframe that long. A city like Cairo must have seen so much through the thousands of years of its history. Today, it stands at the crossroads of the 'Clash of Civilizations' debate between Western and Islamic civilizations. President Obama sought to 're-connect' with the 'alienated' Muslim world by this speech. He addressed some central issues: Iran's march towards acquiring nuclear weapons, Israel's right to exist, the right of the Palestininian people to a homeland, the threat of Al Qaida and Taliban in Pakistan/Afghanistan, the plight of women ... or, the 'right' of women to live the way they want to ... whether they want to get educated and purs...