Lahore's only Hindu temple razed

[KrazyHorse]

So, to recap:

First football game: McGill
Inventor of basketball: McGill alumnus
First organised indoor hockey game and first codification of the rules: McGill

[KrazyHorse]

The modern campus is remarkable unchanged in that section. All the buildings you see in the background are, IIRC, still standing.

You are looking north from just above the Roddick Gate on Sherbrooke street, with Mount Royal rising in the background. The statue of James McGill should be somewhere to the left of the photographer.

[Drake Tungsten]

No one with an avatar like mine can disprove of McGill.

[KrazyHorse]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_University

There are hundreds of clubs and student organizations at the university. Many of them are centred around McGill's student union building—the University Centre—known unofficially as the Shatner Building. In 1992, students held a referendum and named the building after actor and McGill alumnus William Shatner, although the university administration refuses to accept the name. Traditionally, the administration names buildings in honour of deceased members of the university community or for major benefactors (of which Shatner is neither).

[Drake Tungsten]

Ah. That's probably why Shatner didn't show up for the renaming ceremony.

edit: Shatner claims to have attended. Have I been misinformed?

I had a great time at McGill. I did go to a ceremony at the student union building and my feeling about McGill is that it's a great university and it produced many great students. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/05/1444246&mode=nocomment

[Mr. Harley]

The Islam of the early caliphates was a totally different beast than today's Islam. It's like castigating the modern Christian Churches over witch burnings - today's Christianity has utterly changed from the one that did that. Okay - maybe not utterly, but largely. Islam has had a similiar kind of transition, but in the opposite direction.

The critical change in Islam was the codification of Sharia, and the victory of those who did so over the mystic and other forces vying for control of the religion. This is very similiar to the codification of the Bible in Christianity, and occured on a smiliar timeline, i.e. two-three centuries after it's founding. This is the time of the Council of Nicea, where the road to the purging of Gnostics from Christianity starts. Once the Law (Sharia) became Supreme, and most of the other voices vying for a say in the development of Islam were marginalized, or eliminated, the golden age of Islam was over, and the stage was being set for the stagnation of Islam, and it's intolerance.

There were some isolated exceptions, like the Moghuls. Note that they came out of central Asia, which was one of the bastions of the Sufi's, who follow the mystic tradition of Islam. This actually makes my point for me, and as Arabic/Sharia based Islam has spread into the bastions of Sufiesm, as predicted those areas have become less tolerant. The viciousness of the Chechen insurgeny can be directly traced to the funding of marginalized Sufi insurgents by Wahabi based groups. Those marginalized broups were marginalized in part by their communities due to their extremeism

The spread of Wahabi beliefs from Saudi Arabia is essentially an ultra-orthodoxy, or Uber-Sharia. It reflects a similiar movements in both the Jewish and Christian faiths. The ulta-legalist versions of those two faiths have not had the Saudi oil money behind them, and as the US Supreme Court rightly obseverd, in today's world money equals speech.

BTW, LOTM - you've made my point for me, one that I've tried to make multiple times in the past. Destroying and seizing individual Palestinian property in retributon for what other government's have done is in violation of all the various UN accords - and a macabre piece of hippocracy, given how variations of that justification (perceived or actual actions by Jews justified to take actions against individual property holders) has been used to seize Jewish property. It is doubly so in the case of what has been done on the West Bank, i.e. where the Government of Israel is an occupying authority. This does not justify various actions by Hamas, the PLO, nor the Israeli government. It is germane to the high moral ground claimed by the Israeli government, and reeks of hippocracy. Please don't get me started on recent actions by the US Government, let's just say you know that I am consistant in that regard.

[Cort Haus]

Canuck threadjackers.

C'mon lads, lets have a hockey row.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Sikander


They weren't all crap, but let's just say that the case for Arab genius is vastly overstated.

Who said anything about geniuses? I'm the only genius here.

[Cort Haus]

From what I've read about Taoism (not much, the Tao of Pooh) it seems highly unlikely to force itself upon people. After all, it's not exactly 'go-with-the-flow' is it?

Aneeshm said somewhere, I think, that Hinduism never really bothered to translate it texts for export.

I'm not surprised if most religions have gone through a 'kill the heretic' phase - because IMV religion is used as a tool for the elite to subsidize their own authority.

However, surely this is different from the strident evangelism of Christianity and Islam. For Christians, non-believers to go to hell. Islam, I gather, splits the world into the lands of peace (Muslim lands) and the lands of war (yet-to-be Muslim lands). This may just be a feature of the Sharia intolerance, rather than the original Islamic values, in the same way that the original Gnosticism of Christianity was lost to the the Roman Empire's adaptation of the religion for its own ends.

The point is, are we to judge a religion by what it once was in its spiritual and ideological prime, or by how it treats us today?

[Colon™]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


What are you talking about? There are some good signs that the Hindus got the positional notation from the Chinese. For example, the abacus.

Originally posted by aneeshm

Proof , please ?

Ooh, please do answer UR. We haven't had a über-nationalist Chinese vs über-nationalist Indian fight on poly yet.

[Elok]

Oh, for...why do people treat the Gnostics as some sort of enlightened Original Christianity? They were a wacked-out doomsday cult, who rivalled the Puritans for hatred of the flesh and the worst Calvinists for sophistry and elitism.

[Lorizael]

Because people like tragic stories.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Mr. Harley
The Islam BTW, LOTM - you've made my point for me, one that I've tried to make multiple times in the past. Destroying and seizing individual Palestinian property in retributon for what other government's have done is in violation of all the various UN accords - and a macabre piece of hippocracy, given how variations of that justification (perceived or actual actions by Jews justified to take actions against individual property holders) has been used to seize Jewish property. It is doubly so in the case of what has been done on the West Bank, i.e. where the Government of Israel is an occupying authority. This does not justify various actions by Hamas, the PLO, nor the Israeli government. It is germane to the high moral ground claimed by the Israeli government, and reeks of hippocracy. Please don't get me started on recent actions by the US Government, let's just say you know that I am consistant in that regard.

Im not sure how i made your point - no one is saying Pakistan violated international law, but their own rules wrt this trust. The cases are really not comparable, AFAIK.

Alll Jewish property in Arab lands was seized in 1948. I dont think there is a comparable act in India during partition.

Is it like medieval govt taking Jewish property for acts of some Jews? No. The Israeli govt in 1948 did NOT take all arab property, by any means. Property belonging to arabs who STAYED in 1948 was untouched. All that was taken was property left behind by arabs who left. at a time when Israel had hundreds of thousands of refugees FROM Arab lands who needed homes. The property of Muslim Waqfs - religious endowments that owned mosques, etc - was also untouched.

Should arabs who left receive some compensation for their property - yes, and that is an item to be discussed as part of a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians (and other arabs).

As for the West Bank, the Israeli took no individual property there.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
So, to recap:

First football game: McGill
Inventor of basketball: McGill alumnus
First organised indoor hockey game and first codification of the rules: McGill

No. Sounds more like McGill taught Harvard to play Rugby, a game invented in England. It didnt become something different from the English game till the forward pass was introduced. Did McGill do that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Camp

Walter Camp (April 7, 1859 – March 14, 1925) was a football coach known as the "Father of American Football". He is generally regarded as the inventor of the game and the most significant person in the history of American football.

Camp was born in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Leverett L. and Ellen Cornwell Camp. He attended Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, entered Yale University in 1876 and was graduated in 1880.

By the age of thirty-three, a scant twelve years after graduating from Yale, Walter Camp had already become known as the "Father of American Football". In a column in the popular magazine Harper's Weekly, sports columnist Caspar Whitney had applied the nickname; the sobriquet was appropriate because, by 1892,Camp had almost single-handedly fashioned the game of American football. Its rising popularity was almost solely his doing, for he had taken the game of rugby and changed it into, in his way of thinking, an American game.

For almost 50 years, Camp served on the various collegiate football rules committees that developed the game of football during that time. His opinions, especially in his early years, dominated the sessions. Camp's contributions to early football included the introduction of the scrimmage in place of the rugby scrum, the reduction of the number of players to eleven, the forward pass, and the introduction of the now standard offensive arrangement of players (a seven-man offensive line and a four-man backfield consisting of a quarterback, two halfbacks, and a fullback). But Camp knew that developing the game was not enough; in order for it to catch on, the word had to spread.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by notyoueither


No, baseball is Canadian.

Where did gridiron start?

Baseball evolved from Town ball, a game played in New England since colonial times. Probably orginated in games played in East Anglia, from which most New Englanders came.