With absolutely no permission from David Vance's often excellent blog; 'A Tangled Web', here is an interesting piece:
''Al Azhar University in Egypt is regarded as the highest centre for Sunni learning in the world.
So it's interesting to read that a cleric at this university has decreed that any two people who act out an Islamic marriage on screen, effectively get married in real life. This poses a problem for any actress who is already married as it means she would be committing polygamy, legal for Muslim men but not Muslim women, and of course a previously unmarried actress would have to divorce her actor "husband" before she could marry in real life.''
So what can we learn from this? Well first of all we learn that organised religion has absolutely no place in the real world. The type of semantics illustrated above would disgrace a couple of five year olds in the school playground.
And secondly we learn that, nonsensical though this decree is, it probably isn't any dafter than edicts on contraception, abortion, circumcision, trans-substantiation, confession, homosexuality, evolutionary theory and stem-cell research, none of which are subjects which a bunch of clerics (usually frustrated bachelors) should even be discussing, never mind decreeing on.
