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ItsjustMe

ItsjustMe's Journal
ItsjustMe's Journal
November 20, 2023

The Hunt for Sarah Yarborough's Killer

A high school student on her way to drill team practice is found murdered on campus. What it took to close the case after 30 years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/the-hunt-for-sarah-yarboroughs-killer/

November 19, 2023

Quincy church youth leader sentenced to 12 years for sexual abuse

Quincy church youth leader sentenced to 12 years for sexual abuse

A Quincy man who was a youth leader at Hope Lutheran Church in Quincy was sentenced Friday to 12 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Court records show that 22-year-old Isaiah Mikkelson was sentenced to 6 years each for two counts of criminal sexual abuse of a victim between 13 and 18 years old.

Mikkelson must serve the two sentences consecutively and will receive 4 days credit on each count for time served.

In September, Mikkelson pleaded guilty to two of the seven total charges against him. One count of criminal sexual assault, two charges of child pornography, and two other counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse were dropped as part of the plea agreement.




November 18, 2023

It's Caturday (11/18/23)











































November 18, 2023

Why I am now a Christian - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why I am now a Christian

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

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To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.


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