Posts Tagged ‘Muslim’
Mumbai
The Mumbai attacks have Islamabad cautioning New Delhi not to “over-react”. This makes my blood turn cold.
India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers. India and Pakistan are disputing Kashmir. India and Pakistan have a history. India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers… And India and Pakistan only exist as separate countries because Hindus and Muslims believe different things about absolute nonsense.
More than a million people died in the religious killing of establishing the two states. Three wars have been fought and blood still flows freely and regularly on the border of two countries that are separated mostly by mythological bullshit.
Gujarat 2002 speaks to my fear and loathing. Sam Harris quotes C.W. Dugger: “Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then… set on fire. A pregnant woman’s belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city.”
The only difference between the peoples of India and Pakistan is the things they believe about… “God”.
We should be tolerant of religious belief?
People who believe that death – especially death in the execution of infidels – is the highest calling; people voted into office by the people of Gujarat, have access to nuclear arsenals.
We should be tolerant of religious belief?
Religion scares me shitless.
Are you okay with “Belief”?
Barack Obama is a Christian!
Several rumours that Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim – and therefore that Americans should not elect him to the White House – abound in the United States. So persistent are the rumours that Obama recently gave a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church a highly personal account of his spiritual journey and a promise that he will make “faith-based” social service “a moral center of my administration.”
Unless one subscribes to the beliefs Christians live by, one has no chance whatsoever of winning the White House. Americans demand their leaders be delusional. A 1999 Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans would vote against an atheist on the grounds of their atheism alone. Simply having a naturalistic view of the universe makes a candidate unelectable in American politics.
A national survey conducted by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology, the results of which appeared in the April 2006 issue of the American Sociological Review, indicated that Atheists are America’s most distrusted minority:
“Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans’ acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.”1
Obama, should he have been a Muslim, would have had a better chance (by 10 points!) at the White House that had he been an atheist – the said Gallup poll indicates the following percentages of people saying they would refuse to vote for “a generally well-qualified person for president” on the basis of some characteristic:
Catholic: 4%
Black: 5%
Jewish: 6%
Baptist: 6%
Woman: 8%
Mormon: 17%
Muslim: 38%
Gay: 37%
Atheist: 48%
Beware: Both presidential candidates are Christian. Christians hear a Voice. And they act on the Voice…
Well, I guess it’s kinda cute – this belief thing; this naïveté. As long as God does not tell you to invade Iraq, as His Omnipotence apparently told George W Bush. 2 As long as you don’t claim Jerusalem for the Jews in the face of the Palestinians, ‘cause the Bible tells John McCain so. As long as you don’t cry Allah Akbar before parking a Boeing in the World Trade Centre. As long as you aren’t convinced that consensual sex between men somehow irks some cosmic peeping tom as Bishop Akinola feels certain the Bible teaches.
Be careful. They are, the both of them, McCain and Obama, Christian.
Christians are deluded people – they believe that Homo sapiens sapiens will somehow live forever if only they accept some resurrected Galilean Shaman as their personal “saviour”.
Be warned: McCain is a Christian. For sure. Be careful. Obama is a Christian. For sure. Be careful. Be careful because religion is the single most destructive force ever to debase humanity… a pernicious bane, an insidious hegemony, a grotesque pasquinade of insight, an egregious insult to intelligence and responsible for well-nigh all of human suffering. Religion has failed mankind. The god-fearing has left mankind precariously perched on the precipice of catastrophe. The time is now for sentient beings to shed religion’s hegemony. Social dictates are to be purged of religious influence in the immediate term to give historically divergent peoples a reasonable chance at coexistence in the long term; to give ordinary people a better chance at life.
Physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg once observed that “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.” Northern Ireland, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, to name but the few most prominent hotspots, speak eloquently to this point.
The prime problem with Christians is that even the most intelligent ones (Francis Collins comes to mind… and very many individuals I know personally) and the most well-meaning ones (Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu… and very many individuals I know personally) are readily reducible to delusional idiots, believing all sorts of absolute nonsense, such as the supernatural, gods and demons, and everlasting life.
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(1) Edgell, Penny; Gerteis, Joseph; Hartmann, Douglas. 2006. Atheists As “Other”: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society. American Sociological Review, Volume 71, Number 2, April 2006. pp. 211-234(24).
(2) “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” (George W. Bush).
Bush made this statement, according to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas – from minutes acquired by Haaretz from cease-fire negotiations between Abbas and faction leaders from the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular and Democratic Fronts (circa June, 2003), quoted from Arnon Regular, “‘Road map is a life saver for us,’ PM Abbas tells Hamas” (Haaretz.com:June 27, 2003). See also Did Bush really say God told him to go to war?
Another editor grovels before believers
Last month, the Johannesburg-based Jamiatul Ulama complained about the Zapiro cartoon of Allah published in the Cape Times and The Star, describing it as “a distasteful affront to our religious beliefs”.
The group has now accepted an apology and the issue is now closed.
Editor of The Star and editorial director of Independent News and Media Moegsien Williams says he would have censored Zapiro’s “Story Character” cartoon had he seen it before publication.
Pathetic, Mr. Williams. Pathetic!
Do Independent News and Media editors yield to the gullible as a matter of course? Is the information in Independent News and Media newspapers subject to Bronze Age tarradiddles cloaked in Dark Age fear and mendacity? Am I to value stories and articles and comment and opinion in Independent News and Media newspapers when they are not able and willing to expose even myth for what it is? What is “Independent News and Media” – a guardian of the naive?
Is Allah now no longer incensed by the cartoon, now that an apology is accepted on behalf of Al-Quddoos (القدوس) – The Most Holy?
Is “Allah” now, subsequent to the apology, after all not on a par with Santa and the Tooth Fairy?
If an apology is required, it is to be delivered to my address: I believe, nay, know, beyond a velleity of doubt, that the gnome keeping in the South Eastern corner of my small garden created everything – everything! – some 15 minutes ago, complete with historical record and memory, before turning itself into a plaster likeness of His Once Greatness. You guys who do not accept this truth owe me an apology. Or the wrath of “Kabouter the Gnome” on you all!
“A distasteful affront to our religious beliefs”? Ag shame! How piteous can believers be?
Religion. Respect? Ridicule!
