MACLEANS.CA -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: For those unaware, Macleans is Canada's "Time Magazine."] ARTICLE: Not long ago, Dr. Leonard Sax was at a restaurant and overheard a father say to his daughter, "Honey, could you please do me a favour? Could you please just try one bite of your green peas?" To many this sounds like sophisticated parenting -- gentle coaxing formed as a question to get the child's co-operation without threatening her autonomy. To Sax the situation epitomized something much worse: the recent collapse of parenting. The scene is a prime example of parents relinquishing authority, losing confidence in themselves and defering to kids. A rule such as "No dessert until you eat your broccoli" has morphed into "How about three bites of broccoli, and then you can have dessert?" The command has become a question capped with a bribe. "When parents ...

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KIRKDURSTON.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1952: "Islam is a natural religion in which *God's miracles are the very law and order of nature*."] ARTICLE: To try and avoid Stephen Hawking's potential for God, atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss published "A Universe from Nothing." In it, he attempts to explain how the universe might have come out of "nothing". But Krauss' "nothing" is not absolutely nothing at all. His "nothing" is actually "something". Krauss' "nothing" still requires the existence of *laws of physics* ... It fails to provide a rational explanation how these came into existence in the first place. Cosmologist Don Page closes his review of Krauss' book by stating, "To me, as a fellow scientist, it appears Krauss has swung far wide of the goal, striking only the air with his philosophical speculations that do not address the truly deep questions of existence." As Page also points out ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- VIA SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah,1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science ..."] When I was young, physics seemed to offer answers to all of the mysteries of the universe. It felt authoritative and unequivocal in its explanations of nature and the origin of the universe. In that sense it was the perfect religion for my teenage self as I went through an atheist phase, probably provoked by popular physics books such as Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." Those books were always so dogmatic like the Catholic Sunday school I went to. Over the years my view of physics has evolved significantly. At the end of the day, the existence of multiverses and the anthropic principle are really religious viewpoints wrapped up in scientific jargon. This is not science, not testable, with no more legitimacy than believing that God created the universe. ...

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