For the past two days I have been reflecting on an aspect of my character which I have never taken seriously before. There have been some incidents in my life during the past three years, like being stalked online or having my computer sabotaged, that have angered me to such a degree that I considered punishing the people behind them using physical force.

I don’t believe in violence as a solution to any problem. For the most part, I don’t believe much can be done to solve 99% of the problems I face. When I do think of a solution, it is often communication. This is why I am always surprised when I think of a solution to a problem along the lines of “I will send a group of guys to break this person’s face.”

What surprises me the most is that I think of myself as an intelligent person who does not adhere to the “tribal violence” mentality that I see prevalent in my society. If so, I ask myself, why do I even consider beating a person up as a means to teach them a lesson or perhaps get them off my case? For example, if my online stalker is put in the hospital after having his jaw broken at my command, would that really keep him from stalking me? I know it would make me feel better. Is that wrong?

I guess any such action would solve the problem to a degree, but not entirely. I have never resorted to violence to the extent I mentioned above, but I have considered it seriously as a solution to a number of problems. Does that make me a violent person or simply a person at loss for a solution?

What do you think?

An important milestone in Jordan’s medical history occurred yesterday. The father of a kid called Mutasem won a malpractice suit which he filed in 1999, after his son was put under the knife for hernia repair in a public hospital and emerged with a damaged-dead penis. The amount of the compensation was the biggest in Jordan’s medical history: 281,000 JD. The name of the doctor who operated on the kid was undisclosed.

I say good for Jordan. We can’t always boast about our medical expertise and about the quality of services we provide to Jordanians and Arabs alike, although most of this talk is valid only for private or military hospitals. We have to acknowledge our mistakes and when we do that, we will have credibility and we will be responsible for improving this important sector.

When my late aunt was rushed to a public hospital in Zarqa, she was still alive. Her good neighbor who was with her told me that she was still alive but the medics/nurses at the hospital were so slow in attending to her, and she eventually passed away. Thinking that she could have still been with us today had they reacted quicker is painful, to say the least.

An interesting bit in the article I linked to says that in Jordan we do NOT have a clear “medical responsibility” law, which means that the errors made since the dawn of medical practice in Jordan have gone mostly unaccounted for, the patients or their families have not been compensated, and no legal action was taken against the doctors or nurses.

وأوضح الحديدي أن قانون المسؤولية الطبية موجود على السطح ويحتاج للتوافق بين نقابة الأطباء ووزارة الصحة والمستشفيات الخاصة والجهات التي تمثل المريض ومنظمات المجتمع المدني لوضع قانون يضمن المساءلة الطبية للطبيب وضمان حقوق المريض بصورة عادلة وغير جائرة لأي طرف منهم.
وبين الحديدي أن غياب هذا القانون وعدم البت فيه منذ عام 2003 سيخلق فوضى في الاتجاهين أي اتجاه تزايد الأخطاء الطبية من جهة وتغول التعويضات في حال عدم إيجاد سقف وحد لها من جهة ثانيةن لتكون في حدود المنطق والمعقول وهذا سيحدث في حال غياب التشريع الواضح للأخطاء الطبية

Another interesting bit in the article is where it says that it is upon the patient to prove a medical error existed in their treatment. Very well, but in the case I cited above, it took the man NINE years to prove that a hernia surgery left his son basically incompetent. How is it possible that a case would take that long when the damage is so severe and so obvious? Also, there were many many cases where doctors left towels or scissors inside patients’ guts. How would the patient know unless they get sick and get opened up again?

Additionally, most patients who resort to public hospitals probably cannot afford to hire lawyers or to get legal assistance to prove that there have been medical complications beyond the scope of their treatment. I suppose that when they feel that they have been treated unjustly, some of them, or their families, resort to violence and beat up the doctors or nurses. Then we make a big fuss about it.

How do atheists get married in Jordan?

I ask because my information on the subject is minimal. Supposing two atheist people want to get married, how do they go about doing it in a country where your birth religion is inscribed in every document, identification material, and any other formal piece of paper you may acquire during your life?

Obviously, Jordanian law does not allow for the choice “Religion: none,” so if that is the case, does it stretch to allow for a form of legal binding between two people who have no religion?

Here’s a bit of interesting news:

LONDON (Reuters) - A British bus company has apologized to a girl who is led around on a leash by her boyfriend and describes herself as a human pet after one of its drivers threw her off a bus.

Tasha Maltby, 19, told British newspapers she was the “pet” of her 25-year-old fiance Dani Graves.

Pictures showed her dressed in black Gothic-style clothing with silver buckles on a silver chain — which the driver of a bus from the firm Arriva took exception to.

She told the Daily Mail newspaper Wednesday she was thrown off and told: “We don’t let freaks and dogs like you on.”

Now that in certain parts of the world there are laws protecting the rights of LGTB communities, and more are struggling to be added to the list (think zoophiles, perhaps even people who are into BDSM), where should the law draw the line?

Who gets to decide what is acceptable and what is not? Obviously, law-making has many variables; lobbying, sentiments of people at the time, etc. What was once taboo is now legal because of this, and viceversa. Perhaps by this logic we can say that right and wrong are also variables. They change.

So where do you think the law should draw the line? Should people on leashes be allowed on buses? Should people-animal lovers be allowed to dine in the same restaurants as the rest of the normal “us”? Gay people are already allowed most of the freedoms we enjoy, so why not these other communities?

What do you think?

In the past few years, Jordanians have increasingly resorted to bottled water for their drinking needs. After several scandals involving dirty drinking water causing numerous cases of posisoning/hospitalization, who can blame them? Also, and perhaps on a more elevated level, we have the renowned Jordanian love for conspicuous consumption which, trust me, makes many people carry bottles of water just to show off. I don’t get it either.

On this subject, I was just reading an article detailing the side-effects for the increasing dependability on bottled water. These range from environmental hazards, to consumerism, to ethics. Here they are in a nutshell:

1- First, the manufacturing of plastic bottles, which are often made from nonrecycled virgin material, requires vast quantities of petroleum, and only 12 percent of this material is recovered for recycling.

2- Next, the distribution of bottled water, often by container ship from the other side of the planet (Fiji, Evian, San Pellegrino), is fuel intensive and results in greenhouse gas and sulfur dioxide emissions.

3- When you add the cost of packaging and marketing to transportation, not to mention the water makers’ huge profits, you are paying two to five times more for a bottle of water than you do for the equivalent amount of gasoline.

4- Americans collectively spend five times more on bottled water each year than it would cost to eradicate the 1.8 million deaths of children due to waterborne illness each year.

If you want to read thess reasons in detail, click here to go to Pablo Päster’s article in Salon about bottled water.

Now I want to know what you think about this. Do you think people should depend on tap water and abandon bottled water completely to save the environment and poor thirsty people in Africa? What say you?

I’ll share my mind but first, what do you think?

There has always been so much debate going on about smoking and its “status” as Haram (religiously forbidden) or Halal (religiously allowed). We know now that the limited evolution of our laws has prohibited smoking in public places and in some corporate environments (minus the CEO’s office), but do we really know what religion thinks of smoking?

I have seen, as I am sure you have, many religious people smoke. I have also seen many non-religious people shun smoking  rather too religiously (i.e they hate its guts). We know we should not judge a religion by its believers, but what is right and what is wrong when a religious verdict is pronounced on a habit, a cancer, an artistic taste, and an annoyance like smoking?

I am very interested in your answers to this question: do you think smoking is Haram?

Do you believe that people seek to believe in a Higher Power (or powers) because this power really exists, or is it because people need to believe so they simply follow that instinctive need for The Divine that’s embedded in them?

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the issue of religion and spirituality, and have been very fond of science as well. Mix those elements together, do a little research on each, engage in discussions with people of different faiths and those without, and you will get soul-searching chaos Tololy-style.

I first heard about the theory behind the God gene from my sister, and that was years ago. Today, I finally decided to blog about it because I want to communicate it to people who may not have heard about it. Basically, as the question in the first passage of this post asks, the quest for a Deity (or more) just might have something to do with genetic predisposition. Read this article from TIME, dating back to October 2004, and titled Is God in Our Genes? , or you could read the following excerpts:

Which came first, God or the need for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above, or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather into the communities essential to keeping the species going?

. . .

Chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute, [Dean] Hamer not only claims that human spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer’s work, may be due to little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals governed by our DNA. “I’m a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of activity in the brain,” Hamer says.

. . .

Hamer also stresses that while he may have located a genetic root for spirituality, that is not the same as a genetic root for religion.

Spirituality is a feeling or a state of mind; religion is the way that state gets codified into law. Our genes don’t get directly involved in writing legislation. As Hamer puts it, perhaps understating a bit the emotional connection many have to their religions, “Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional.”

. . .

What do you think?