atoms into suns

Bind ye the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the oppressor who flourisheth with the rod of the commandments of your Lord, the Ordainer, the All-Wise.

--Baha'u'llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, page 52

This is in a paragraph to the "Rulers of America and the Presidents of the Republics therein". The quote came up in a conversation about how in the world today there seems to be a lot of blurring between good and evil. The creation of the atomic bomb seems like pure evil, but at the time the scientists working on the Manhattan Project and the politicians and military establishment probably saw it as the lesser of evils: Let the war in the Pacific rage on, or kill thousands of innocent people to assure the war would end immediately.

Similarly, the war in Iraq could be seen as the liberation of an entire country under the thumb of an oppressive dictator, or it could be seen as the invasion of a small country by a larger one bent on recreating the dictator's horrors (eg Abu Ghraib, deaths of civilians). Of course, we have been hearing the arguments of both those sides since before the war began.

The horror, though, is that in our current world we cannot ever have true, pure justice. We always have to weigh the good and bad, and decide on what we think will be the 'lesser evil'. Isn't a lack of justice worse than hell?

Though Baha'is don't believe in the classic vision of hell, we do believe in a hell-like state created when we see the effects of all we've done.

The souls of the infidels, however, shall -- and to this I bear witness -- when breathing their last be made aware of the good things that have escaped them, and shall bemoan their plight, and shall humble themselves before God. They shall continue doing so even after the separation of their souls from their bodies.

--Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, LXXXVI

("Infidel" means a non-believer in God, not "non-Baha'i")

In other words, God doesn't put us in hell, but we grieve for the things we realize we should have done, the opportunities we missed, and so on. Even so, that existence is far better than the life we have in this world.

Last night I was making my rounds of blogs and got the fright of my life. I was at HijabMan's site and saw, in his sidebar, this little link to AtomsIntoSuns. Yikes! I figured people would eventually follow referrer logs and find me somehow, but I was in a sort of denial about anyone doing it this soon -- let alone linking to me. I guess this means I should actually start adding content or something. Thanks to HijabMan for adding the link!

Can someone please explain to me why the women's Olympic beach volleyball teams have to wear bikinis? Must women really be forced to wear skimpy clothes everywhere? Surely shorts and tanktops or t-shirts couldn't be too restrictive -- after all, that's what the men wear.

This is an extension of my general frustration with women's clothing, but that's a rant for another day.

You know, there's really nothing like the sound of a good raccoon fight in the neighbors' yard at 3:30am to get your blood pumping.

Since striking up a friendship with a series of Mormon missionaries over the past couple of years, I finally had the urge to start reading the Book of Mormon, just to see what it was all about. Yes, I find this somewhat amusing, since I've only ever read parts of the Bible and Qur'an, in addition to the Bah