Prosit. Well said.

He spoke his own personal view, and at no time did he ever suggest that should be brought to Malta.

He followed that interview up with a piece in Times of Malta where he says again that he does not want that here.

Do we need to quote the Bible to show you passages calling for violence and forced marriage? Will that make you happy?

Ted Cruz and other inept senators affect cutting-edge science directly. This is the same science that trickles down the publishing chain and eventually ends up in textbooks. So perhaps it’s more of an indirect effect.

I don’t know what your involvement in science is, but I suspect you haven’t been to a large European or international scientific conference. Great science is everywhere. Many European research centres and university departments are world-leading in their respective fields.

Finally, if you think that conservative religious nations cannot produce good science then you should Google Saudi Arabia’s university for science and technology (KAUST). It is truly impressive and unlike most European and US universities, extremely well funded.

While Ted Cruz will have an effect on government policy (most importantly he is a climate change denier) he is not the cause of the drive to change text books. He is however also driven by religion in part, as are the vast majority of equally stupid and inept Republican and Tea Party legislators. (Oil funding also plays a part, as does coal)

One of his predecessors is arguably worse. Paul Broun, previously on the Science & Technology committee, a medical doctor with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, is on record stating that evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory are lies straight from the pit of hell. He is quite typical.

So I wouldn’t be so sure about US university education and even less going forwards. Beyond a restricted elite of Ivy League colleges there is a morass of community colleges and private (as are nearly all colleges) institutions often funded by or controlled by conservative religious organisations or state/city/county councils.

If a whole generation is taught to ignore scientific fact because it contradicts religious sacred texts then it is a justified extrapolation that they are also abandoning the scientific method. When they leave high school with this mentality it is too late for colleges to fix.

I hope I am wrong. America leads and the rest of the western world follows, for better and for worse.

Saying that whole generations will be taught to dump the scientific method is an unjustified extrapolation.

Rolling back scientific education is not sustainable in the long term, and religious leaders know this well.

You may be right about lack of scientific literacy in many schools, but at least at university level this is certainly not the case.

The greatest threats to science and scientific literacy come not from religion but from electing shockingly inept candidates such as Ted Cruz to head scientific committees in congress.

Interesting how the response to statistics and requests to see the whole picture are classed as obsession and fanaticism. Maybe they are, but they are fuelled by the same spirit as the fight for democracy here and elsewhere.

But bald is not a hair colour, and not collecting stamps is not a hobby.

If redheads had persecuted and executed bald people as well as people with other hair colours for centuries, obstructed social, educational and scientific progress throughout history, and were still doing so now, bald people would be justified in being slightly annoyed. Somehow religion is expected to get a special pass and cannot be criticised. So the moderates are not that much different from the extremists after all.

One could argue that this is religion’s last hurrah by a vocal fringe, but I’m not so sure we should be complacent.

I am not hostile to belief but to belief driving policy, as so should we all be.

Throughout the Islamic world, in the US and now also in the UK and parts of the continent, religious people with funds are attempting to roll back scientific education with great success in the Islamic world, there not having been much to roll back in the first place, substantial progress in the US and some progress also in the UK. Religion has finally come to accept that more education means less religion and rather than look at itself as the problem in the equation it has decided to subvert scientific education instead.

This will have a huge impact on our economies when whole generations are taught to dump the scientific method. That is not a future to look forward to. Already many students in the UK and the USA are taught science subjects and told by their teachers that it is rubbish and that they should only study them in order to pass exams. The target is to drop all material contradicting literal interpretations of sacred texts.

In the US, while liberals occasionally score a victory, conservatives routinely ignore court judgements and limit the teaching of science they disapprove of. It is already bad enough that 60% think evolution is false and Noah’s Ark is a fact of history.

All this is further compounded by attacks on science text books and a recent development is the fact that publishers of science text books in Texas have succumbed to religious pressure in this respect. The sheer size of Texas’ education system means that other states simply adopt Texan text books without a murmur, and there you have it, a generation’s science education ruined.

I suppose the more I go on recounting the facts the more you will claim I am obsessed, always assuming that is a bad thing regardless of where it is directed. (Mintoff? Human rights?)

So I’ll just get back to the original topic. Reza Azlan is a habitual liar and a ‘clean face’ for an ugly subject.

What should we make of the fact that the Maltese iman declares that robbers should be amputated. Is he a good person following his religion (like Abraham willing to kill his son putting God before humanity), or because he one of those who are ‘not good people at all but fundamentally bad’?

Richard Dawkins is by all measures an obsessed atheist, but he does make some good arguments on the subject of penalties for apostasy in Islam. Christianity is rather benign in comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0tGbiFbF6w

And many of the comments below that video are just as polarized as we have seen everywhere.

We are lucky that most informed commentary about most current topics happens in English, including new publications.

In the Emirates, Sheik al-Nahayan recognised that this weakness was a strong, consequential and huge danger and decided – with the help of several partners but notably that of a major German publisher, to augment their libraries and book offer in Arabic to include several hundred new translations on an annual basis.

When it comes to translation, there is first a selection process and then a delay to take into consideration.

At a moment in time when millions of views/opinions are circulating at any one moment, the quality and timing of incoming information is going to make a huge difference.

Poor English is a handicap to ease of assimilation of content and concepts.

Translators do not possess the full metacognitive range that the authors do and therefore the quality of translations is rarely as good as/ as pertinent as the original. Only rarely, does a translator produce a better oeuvre than the original.

Sometimes the translators need to fall back to use of terminology that is a near match, but not an exact match. When a concept is kept in the original language, the detraction happens when it is still understood in the environmental context of a language that hasn’t yet identified it. Sometimes translators are the people responsible for creating the terminology, and this “born” with its own conditioned or subjective perspective.

We in Malta need a full focus on the English language that is fast being lost, if we are halfway serious about wanting a population that is able to keep abreast of concepts, especially current and emerging ones, and their wider contexts.