Islam a Religion of Peace? Excuse Me While I Laugh

I am not a troll. I do not search out internet fora, Facebook and MySpace groups, or any other online community with the intention of creating inflamatory comments or rousing rabble of any sort. That doesn’t mean that I’m not tempted to do so from time to time. Usually, I just like to gain some perspective, see how people debate and support their positions (on all sides), and sometimes get some good ideas for blog posts.

I came across a doosie of a group a while back while browsing MySpace groups about Islam. There is a section devoted to the groups “rules”, some of which are very telling about not only the religion of Islam, but the sacred protection religion thinks it deserves in discourse.

The first few rules are reasonable enough:

• No hate speech
• No bigotry
• No attacking another person’s religion

While I do not think that there is any such thing as hate speech in the way it is typically defined, I don’t think that every forum should have to be a stage for debate. No big deal so far, but the next two are quite revealing.

• Non-Muslims are welcome and will be protected
• Non-Muslims have the right to ask anything they wish. However if they abuse their privileges they will be banned!!!!!!
• Anybody insulting my religion of Islam or my holy prophet Muhammad (saaw) will be banned !!!!!!!!!

It doesn’t say great things for your religion if you have to reassure non-adherents of their protected status when joining for discussion. Oh, and as for that discussion, ask anything you want, but don’t abuse those privileges. What the hell does that even mean? Is this like Scientology in that they will answer questions until one of the questions pisses them off or makes them reveal something embarrassing or heinous about their belief system? For instance, if I wanted to ask “How does the holy prophet Muhammad taking a child wife and consummating the marriage with intercourse when she was only 9 years old fit in to traditional Arab marriage roles during that time?”, I would probably be banned.

Even though it is a perfectly valid question whose basis is well document in the Hadith (Sahih Bukhari Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64), this question would almost certainly be seen as an affront to Islam. As a non-adherent, this is a topic on which I would like more information, and what better place to ask questions than in a forum of Muslims?

Well, thinking about all of this again got me wanting to visit the group and put forth my two cents. Having bookmarked the link, I clicked through only to find that the group is no longer accessible. The group still shows up in search results, but cannot be viewed, which could possibly mean that the group has been made private. I’ve included the link in case it should ever be accessible in the future.

Funny Jesus Videos

I came across this video a while back. Apparently, in anticipation of an upcoming DVD release, Seth MacFarlane has set a bunch of his Cavalcade of Comedy videos as private, but thankfully, they are mirrored by plenty of folks. A much more racy video is available after the jump.

Continue reading Funny Jesus Videos…

Poll Results and New Poll

I’ve been so bogged down lately with school and work that it has been difficult to get any updates out. I did recently update the sidebar poll though. The question from the previous poll was “Have you ‘come out’ as an atheist or nonbeliever to any of the following?”. The poll ran for just over a month and a half with 224 responses.

• Spouse/Significant Other - 152 votes
• Family - 167 votes
• Clergy - 31 votes
• Friends - 194 votes
• Coworkers - 131 votes
• My closet is just fine, thank you. - 6 votes
• I’m just waiting for the right time. - 18 votes

The results weren’t really shocking and mirror the experiences of people that I have known and spoken with. The purpose of the poll was to get people thinking about the idea of “coming out” as an atheist or nonbeliever. Living in Alabama, I am the first to admit that there is a huge social stigma involved in this, as I’m sure is the case in many areas, however, the only way to overcome this stigma is to make our numbers known and be vocal in all areas of rationality and freethought.

My new poll ties directly to this concept asking “If you are ‘in the closet’, would you support a Coming Out Week?”. While 18 respondents expressed that they were waiting for the right time, I would like to open the discussion for a unified event that could bring attention (and who knows, maybe some acceptance?) to the viewpoints espoused by atheists, nonbelievers, and freethinkers.

Call to Action: Vote in the poll and leave comments in this post with your statement in defense or opposition of this idea as well as ideas for improvement on the concept.

Loving God Isn’t Rocket Surgery

From FAILBlog.org

Rationality Present Aplenty in Fiction

The above video is a clip from Firefly featuring a dialogue between characters River Tam and Shepherd Book, a preacher.

If only more people would take River’s stance in this clip. Unfortunately, most people take the view of Reverend Book.

“It’s not about making sense. It’s about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It’s about faith. You don’t fix faith. It fixes you.”

Want to know how I read that? “It’s not about making sense. It’s about letting disbelief take over your better judgments, and letting your muddled judgment blindly guide your life. It’s about faith. You don’t trust your better judgment. Let faith ‘fix’ you.”

A Few Bill Maher Quotes

A while back, one of my friends sent me some quotes from her Real Time with Bill Maher daily calendar. I share them now for your enjoyment.

To even win a nomination in this country, you have to say you’re a person of great faith. You have to pledge the people out there that you put your faith in things that are unable to be proven — that you suspend critical thinking as the way to go.

Now I’m sure you are all aware of what’s going on down in Alabama, where that judge insists of placing the monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. The good news is the U.S. Supreme Court will not hear of keeping the Ten Commandments in the courthouse…. No, the Supreme Court was very clear. They said you cannot install a giant slab of granite in a state building unless its name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In New York, Catholic groups have forced an art gallery to shut down an exhibition of a six-foot image of Jesus in chocolate. So, the Archbishop of New York was very upset. He said, “It is appalling to make Jesus out of food! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bake some communion wafers.”

New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn’t make you spiritual. It’s right above the crack of your ass, and it translate to “beef with broccoli.” The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren’t pregnant. You’re not spiritual. You’re just high.

But He Believes the Silliest Things!

A great comic from XKCD. This one is a bit old, but still very relevant.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is Dead Wrong!

A holy man saying that atheism is a greater evil that sin? Surely not.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former Archbishop of Westminster, at the installation ceremony of his successor, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, commented that he believed that lack of faith was responsible for war and destruction.

On the contrary Cardinal, I believe faith has been the driving force behind much of the human-caused destruction throughout Earth’s history. The fall of the World Trade Center, the 7/7 London bombings, the unrest in Gaza, and the mounting threat of Iran are just a few modern examples of faith-based initiatives.
A quote from Archbishop Nichols’ homily was referenced by Ruth Gledhill in her article at the TimesOnline blogs.

“Faith in God is not, as some would portray it today, a narrowing of the human mind or spirit. It is precisely the opposite. Faith in God is the gift that takes us beyond our limited self, with all its incessant demands….Some today propose that faith and reason are crudely opposed, with the fervour of faith replacing good reason. This reduction of both faith and reason inhibits not only our search for truth but also the possibility of real dialogue.”

Faith IS a narrowing of the human mind. It enigmatically trumps all desires for proof and evidence that are rightfully wanted. Demoting humans to beings with “limited selves” and “incessant demands” is the only way you can even suggest that faith has a place in day to day life. The curiosity and “demands” of humans are what brought us out of caves and gave us fire. These same urges gave us the automobile and space travel. Faith has given us nothing except certainty where there is none. Certainty which some people are willing to kill and die for.
Back to our friend, Cardy Cormac. He further commented that:

“But what is most crucial is the prayer that we express every day in the Our Father, when we say, deliver us from evil. The evil we ask to be delivered from is not essentially the evil of sin, though that is clear, but in the mind of Jesus, it is more importantly a loss of faith. For Jesus, the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils.”

“You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people.”

“The inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils”? First of all, who said that I am unable to believe in God? It’s not that I am incapable of such a belief; I just do not have any need or desire to attribute the unknown and known to the unknown. While science and observation may not be able to provide answers to all of life’s most pressing questions at the moment, it would be an affront to reason to cast our hands into the air and proclaim that “God did it!”.

As for his last quote, I can’t possibly understand how he thinks that secularism has resulted in the “destruction of trust between peoples.” Differing faiths has been the driving force for conquest and destruction through so much of history including the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the modern battle with fundamentalist Muslims.

Quite the opposite of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, I believe that when God becomes meaningless to people, we will have our first real shot at true peace and justice.

For a  great read on the the reasons that faith is damaging our ability to live peacefully, check out Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.

Contest Winner!

It’s over! Finally, a winner has been chosen in the “Search for Christian Kitsch” contest! It was a tough decision, and when Sarah and I couldn’t come to a consensus, we enlisted the help of a room full of trained marmosets to make the final call.

A fellow free mind at A World Quite Mad submitted the following gem and won themselves a fine Scarlet A t-shirt from The Out Campaign:

I don’t have a picture so a description will have to do. I saw it at a funeral one time (hence why there’s no picture, there’s a time and place for everything and that was neither the time nor the place).

It was, you know how they have those flower arrangements beside the casket, usually on a tripod like thing, and there’s flowers usually in a circular pattern. Well, there was one of them, it was light blue, with blue flowers around it, and in the center was what looked like one of those Playskool rotary telephones, it was plastic, three dimensional, and the words written next to it were ‘Jesus Called’. I’m not even joking.

Congratulations!

Happy Mother’s Day!

First, I would like to wish all of the mothers out there a very Happy Mother’s Day! While I am personally a big fan of letting my mother know how much I appreciate her every time I speak to her, I am not out to rain on anyone’s mother-loving parade.

I would, however, like to rain on some theists’ nonsensical-beliefs parades.

I was listening to XM earlier, and instead of playing music, the DJ, who was blabbering on about shit that I could care less about, decided to close his verbal segment with some quotes about mothers. I don’t subscribe to XM to hear talk on a music channel, but I was too close to home to be channel zapping for alternate programming. One quote, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, stood out.

“God couldn’t be everywhere. That’s why he invented mothers.”

Yeah, I get it. You’re setting out to raise mothers to a godlike standard because they do indeed balance a frightfully heavy load when it comes to child rearing. But in repeating this, what every Christian is actually doing is impugning the omnipresence of their own Lord and Savior. For my Christian-troll readers, I don’t want to hear any of your, “It’s a joke you angry atheist! If you stepped down off your soapbox once in a while to stop persecuting people, maybe you’d have a sense of humor.” To responses like that I can only respond that this phrase does indeed lower God, and should be phrased so many of the other infinite ways it could be worded to give a boost to moms. Why, like so many other “cute” and “fun” sayings, has this caught on as an oft-repeated maxim without any critical thought given to its meaning?

It reminds me of a shirt, sign, or some other crap that I saw at Cracker Barrel that said, “And on the 8th day, God created chocolate.” No he didn’t. He just didn’t. There is no scripture to back this up, and instead of critically analyzing the natural processes that have formed every living thing on this planet, you instead create humor out of one of the most nonsensical leaps in logic in the world: the creation story. This gets repeated with many other things apart from chocolate: beer, Marines, tattoo artists, Legos, hairdressers, ad infinitum. Unlike moms, who deserve more than a pat on the back, these selfish people seek to create some kind of humorous inference related to the creation story that they are somehow special. Guess what? You’re not. You’re a sheep, and a dumb one at that.

Happy Mother’s Day! Unless you are a mother that stifles her children’s learning and discovery of the world by force feeding them bullshit stories from ancient, poorly-edited texts. If that’s the case, I hope the Mother’s Day Fairy leaves you coal in your apron.