The Papacy and Jon Stewart

This is probaly one of the funniest segments I've seen in a long time on the Daily Show.

"OH MY GOD The Pope's plane in invisible!"

"yeah, not like that last pope.. that guy was a dick!"

"wait, I thought the Jews controlled the media?"

and my favorite, "awesome speech". But that was President Bush's line, not Stewart's.

freedom of religion in Qatar

The very first church in Qatar is to open soon:

St Mary's Roman Catholic church was inaugurated in the capital, Doha.

Tens of thousands of Christians, most of them Catholic, live in the emirate, which has a mainly Sunni Muslim population.

Previously, Christians were not permitted to worship openly. Saudi Arabia is now the only country in the region to prohibit church building.
[...]
The church is expected to cater for the country's large community of foreign workers, mainly from the Philippines and other Asian countries.

The building is estimated to have cost $15m and seats 2,700 people.

Tomasito Veneracion, the priest of the new parish, expressed gratitude to the Qatari authorities for allowing the project to go ahead.

"The opening of the church is an important event for the entire community," he said.

There are plans for further churches in Qatar, which correspondents describe as part of a strategy of opening up to the West.

Saudi Arabia remains an outlier as usual. Recently, the top Wahhabi cleric there issued a death fatwa against two writers, for their "heresy" of arguing that believers in other religions might not be hell-bound. And let's not even bother mentioning the state of the Shi'a community there. However, in the rest of the middle east, the trend is indeed towards increasing religious freedom. There's a long way to go, but the trend is there, and opposite to the trend in Europe (Spain being just one example...).

Christians insist they worship same god as Muslims

Presented for your perusal without further comment.

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word "Allah" can only be used by Muslims.

In the Malay language "Allah" is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.
[...]
There has been no official government comment but parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said the decision to ban the word for non-Muslims on security grounds was "unlawful".

"The term 'Allah' was used to refer to God by Arabic-speaking Christians before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed," he said.

Well, one comment: obviously, the ban is wrong and any muslim supporting it is an idiot.

via pixelisation.

UPDATE: Malaysia reversed the ban. Seems we are all the same mono in monotheist after all. All praise due to Ali Eteraz, even though I beat him to blogging about it :)