Guest lecture and insight

The guest lecture that I found most informative, inspiring, and/ or challenging was Debra Mason on digital religion in global landscape. I thought this was real informative considering all the issues we are having with ISIS and the Syrian Muslim refugees crisis.


As stated by the First Amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Unfortunately the world does not really work like that. In recent times with the 911 and Paris attacks by Muslims everyone has a biased against that religion and thinks everyone that is Muslim is a terrorist. As Debra showed in her presentation that religion restrictions in the Middle East and Asia are at a much greater level than America and it evident as bloggers have been killed for just speaking their mind. Many are blaming the whole religion and some don't feel safe with Syrian refugees. It's hard to control hate speech especially with the growing digital world. The digital world makes us a much smaller world with connections that also means that people's opinions can be spread much more and that there is more hate evident. I thought this presentation was really on point with the times today. As our Human Rights we have the right to believe in what we want and say what we feel, but many get punished for doing so. Our perception have been so distorted simply by what we see and hear that we apply it to an entire religion, an entire race and it is only increasing the division and the hate speech. It's a challenging subject because everyone wants to express themselves, but won't accept others form of expression. 

The insight that I gained doing research in Egypt is that they are having some major issues politically and along with climate issues. The continual issue of global warming is causing the rise of sea level and Egypt being a costal county it is trouble of losing land and income. I learned that 95% Egypt's population lives along the Nile River, which means most of Egypt is not habitable. Being the biggest Arabian country they still have many issues to fix regarding Human right, women equality and after the removal of their past president there is some tension with the Brotherhood. There is much fear that the Brotherhood will turn into a terrorism group, if they don't already have issues with ISIS. Being born in Ethiopia the only thing I really knew about Egypt was that we shared the Nile, but there is a lot more to this country than I thought. I have a whole new perspective for this country along with gaining much insight on their issues.