Yep, that was me being courteous to the original poster. It's easier to have productive conversations about sensitive topics when you're polite and culturally engaged. Anglicizing Arabic words is a tricky proposition, so I usually go with a best-effort phonetic spelling.

I looked at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction when it launched and was surprised to find errors in the very first entry I looked at. Hopefully they've stepped up their game a bit this time around.

I think you may have misread my post (or maybe you're just using "you" where you mean a 3rd person?). I'm actually not a Muslim, and agree with everything you just said. I just happen to be well-acquainted, well-read, and respectful of their beliefs and practices (even if I don't think their belief system is logically…

The statutory rape laws weren't mentioned by name*, but they happen to codify exactly the situations you described in (1) as being rape with no burden on the justice system to determine if it was consensual at the time. If either party had alcohol in their system, they are assumed to be unable to give consent. In…

Go read the article the guy above you linked to. It explains it pretty clearly.

Wrong. The "killer downside" of that article has to do with the interstellar debris you pick up en-route and deposit on arrival.

I don't think I've ever met a Christian who doesn't, at least in principle, give lip service to rejecting legalism, and I suspect that a law-centric framework for Christian belief hasn't been in the majority since the middle of the 1st century AD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Jerusalem). Of COURSE, how that…

I'm glad to hear that you find it horrifying (as do all my Muslim friends) :)

As in....the article?

I'm not sure if my future writings will use "waeponmann" or "were" for a male human, but both are awesome.

Primary plot device, at least.

My point was that Who and Star Wars are *both* closer in tone to Fantasy than Sci-Fi. Who has a little bit more variation in tone, but a very large number of the episodes feel like fantasy or even fairy tales.

If Who qualifies as "science" fiction, Star Wars does too. Just sayin'.

You've been mislead by the use of the word "action figure" in reference to a work of art. Classy ones like this are frequently called figurines.

I think he was just pulling his punches against Iron Man. More like shaking a pesky kid off your leg than a real fight. He wasn't there to hurt humans. He was there to bring his brother home.

You also missed the point of Stargate. It wasn't about "dismantling gods". It was a serious inquiry into what it means to be a god or to be worthy of worship, which including dismantling a lot of false versions of what a god could be like along the way.

You've apparently never watched Doctor Who on Christmas before.

I'm glad to hear it :)

So lets recognize the separation of appreciating "geek culture", with actually having a geek/nerd/hacker mentality and personality. How many self proclaimed "geek girls" (or "geek guys" for that matter) would have been hit by this truck? http://xkcd.com/356/ As far as I'm concerned, that's the litmus test, and…

Presumably. I would hope that if you thought Christians or Hindus or Buddhists could give you more answers about human nature or the cause of hard-to-explain events in your personal life, or what happens after you die than atheists can, you wouldn't continue to be an atheist. And vice versa.