11 Aug (Wed) - We had a symposium on Terrorism, Democracy and Muslim States and it lasted from 4pm to 7pm... had three speakers; one is a supposedly renowned professor on Islam & politics and he's from Indonesia, one is a government minister from Pakistan and the last one is the first international journalist who interviewed Osama in his caves after the 9/11 attacks. Like, you can feel there was tension in the symposium? Cos it's open to the public too u see.. then i think the Pakistani minister was doing India-bashing.. and it caused an uproar from some guy (presumably Indian) during the Q & A session later... yeah, and like there was this moment when some Muslim woman who veiled her entire self except the eyes walked into the Octagon LT.. i'm not trying to suggest that it's wrong to be covered up in all black or what, but it just felt weird. And after that, w/o having any dinner (or lunch) I went to the guys' prayer meeting at Peter's place. Nothing much. just like some normal crapping session about what we went through during the past week.
Yesterday (14 Aug), was sth called the National Prayer Day.. where all the OCF centres across Australia pray for each other... then for the WA centres (i.e. Perth (UWA), Curtin and Murdoch) we had our combined prayer meeting at the South Perth church of Christ.. and i here i was in justin's car going to South Perth and i saw a road sign called "mabel street". like, cool :) Then they gave out this whole thick booklet of prayer points for each OCF centre across Australia... and i didn't exactly quite agree with what they wanted to "pray against" - some of the prayer points wrote - pray against homosexuality in UNSW, Melbourne U etc blah blah. Opposing sexual promiscuity is fine.. but i'm inclined to see that it's not wrong to love, regardless of w/er it's heterosexual or homosexual or whatever. There were also prayer points that went "pray against the growth of Buddhism, Islam... urm Baha'i groups blah blah...", but i just think that sounds politically incorrect to me? For the record, Christianity happens to be the religion of the imperialists.. many Europeans used Christianity and missionaries to justify their subjugation of the natives, to exterminate "savages" or "barbaric people"... like, i believe a religion can tell others that "hey we are good, we are this and that..." but a religion should not go "hey u should join us becos ur religion preaches nonsense".
Say, i just found out yesterday that in WA, the biggest uni (in terms of enrolement) is Curtin, with 31 000 students.. UWA has 16 000, so does Murdoch. Yeah basically in WA there are four main Unis: UWA, Curtin, Murdoch and ECU (Edith Cowan University).
I've got an anthropology essay due this friday 20/8 and a polit sci essay due this 23/8 mon. so i'm under quite a bit of stress these days.. hope things will turn out fine. and yeah, olympics has already started.. and over here, i'm like watching australians winning gold, silver or whatever medals... was watching the beach volleyball match btwn oz and china yesterday... okie. u could say i was watching becos it's women's beach volleyball.. can see tanned girls, but huge muscles at that. :)