Reza Aslan on Why Islam is Not a Violent Religion

This clip is relatively old (in internet age, at least). Last September, Reza Aslan, a religious scholar and teacher at the University of California, appeared on CNN to talk about whether Islam promotes violence (it does not) and whether people are wrong in their attempts to categorize all 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide as adhering to the same cultural beliefs (they are, and because they do not, respectively).

Aslan makes a point that the majority of people who believe (incorrectly) that Islam promotes violence. In the clip, when posed with the question, Aslan says,

Islam doesn't promote violence, or peace. Islam is just a religion — and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Christianity, your Judaism, your Hinduism, is going to be violent. There are Buddhist...monks in Myanmar slaughtering women and children. Does Buddhism promote violence? Of course not. People are violent or peaceful, and that depends on their politics, their social world, the way that they see their communities, the way they see themselves. 

Remember, Anders Behring Breivik, the man who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, did so to 'save Norway from Islam' (not a direct quote).

Aslan then proceeds to ether both hosts for repeatedly saying "Muslim countries" are primitive or repressive after giving repeated evidence to the contrary. He further states, to great effect, I believe,

This is the problem is that these types of conversations that we're having aren't really being had in any kind of legitimate way. We're not talking about women in the Muslim world, we're using two or three examples to justify a generalization — that's actually the definition of bigotry. 

In an interview around the same time with The Washington Post (Aslan was promoting his latest book),  he further explained the relationship between religion and personhood.

It’s not [that] I think Islam is correct and Christianity is incorrect. It’s that all religions are nothing more than a language made up of symbols and metaphors to help an individual explain faith. 

Check out Aslan on The Daily Show this past May, and follow the man on Twitter.

Time Magazine and Photojournalist Emanuele Satolli Take You Inside a Russian 'Krokodil' Cook House

If you haven't heard yet, A) pay more attention to the news B) krokodil is a fringe drug making headlines around the world for its ability to turn the injection site of those unfortunate enough to use it into a decaying waste land. Seriously. It's somewhere around a 1/10th the price of heroin, but gives you a similar high. According to Time,

But addicts pay dearly for krokodil’s cheap high. Wherever on the body a user injects the drug, blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks. That side effect has earned krokodil its other nickname: the zombie drug. The typical life span of an addict is just two or three years.

This is because krokodil, names such because of the reptilian marks it leaves on those who use it, is a mixture of items you'd never want to ingest. Also according to Time,

[A]n addict can cook up krokodil using ingredients and tools bought from the local pharmacy and hardware store. The active ingredient, codeine, is a mild opiate sold over the counter in many countries. Users mix codeine with a brew of poisons such as paint thinner, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorus scraped from the strike pads on matchboxes.

In October, CNN published a report suggesting the drug had finally made its way stateside after proliferating under the radar in Russia in the mid 2000s, although DEA officials would need to catch someone in the act of making a batch of krokodil before they would be able to confirm that the drug is in fact in the US.

To see the effects of krokodil in action, head over to Google images. But be warned: it's incredibly graphic. If you want more info on krokodil, head over to the Wiki page for desomorphine (krokodil is the drug's street name).