Posts Tagged ‘religion’

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Curious cuddles between the Cathedral and Islam

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

If someone is a called a “moderate Muslim”, he is probably part of the establishment, part of our ruling elite, or spends much of his day in their circles.

If someone is a Muslim, and part of our ruling elite or close to it, he is probably a terrorist, or spends much of the rest of his day in their circles.

There is at most one degree of separation between the elite, and Islam.  In contrast, there are several degrees of separation between the elite, and conventional Christianity.

Exhibit A in this story is Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, who spent a great deal of time walking and talking with US presidents Clinton and Bush and the usual parade of the good and the great – and who also addressed terror rallies demonizing the US. In 2004 was an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate the man who is now King of Saudi Arabia. So Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi is zero degrees of separation between the Cathedral and the terrorists.

Well, perhaps the Cathedral just happened to have one bad apple? But it’s other Muslim apples have smelly connections also.

Suhail Khan: Wikipedia tells us “Khan serves on the Board of Directors for the American Conservative Union, the Indian American Republican Council, the Islamic Free Market Institute, and on the interfaith Buxton Initiative Advisory Council. He speaks regularly at conferences and venues such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the Council for National Policy (CNP), the Harbour League, and the National Press Club and has contributed to publications such as the Washington Post/Newsweek Forum On Faith, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Human Events.”

Suhail Khan is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, a Christian organization dedicated to religious freedom worldwide.

And yet this same Suhail Khan, moderate, pillar of the establishment, advocate of tolerance, also seems to spend a lot of time with people dedicated to blowing up infidels.

So Suhail Khan is one degree of separation between the Cathedral and terrorism.

Similarly for Imam Feisal Adbul Rauf, of the ground zero victory mosque. So of three Muslims that I noticed as being Cathedral insiders, three had ties to terror.

It does not appear the Cathedral is consciously and cynically cozying up to terrorists – Suhail Khan put quite a bit of effort into appearing to be moderate.  Rather, they turn a blind eye to terrorist connections, because to do otherwise would be racism and discrimination – while quite slight and vague connections to conventional Christianity cause them to reel back in shock and horror, like a vampire at the sight of the cross, as they do from Sarah Palin.

They want to include Muslims, but terrorism is as central to Islam as the Eucharist is to Christianity, and so if someone is an important Muslim, he is apt to have important connections to terror, and if a Muslim is in with the Cathedral, he is an important Muslim.  In contrast, if a nominal Christian knew what the Eucharist was, the Cathedral would treat him with extreme suspicion.

This is not a pro terror bias, but an anti discrimination bias – which bias in practice means we are not allowed to discriminate against people trying to kill us.

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Britain goes totalitarian

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Sean Gabb, speaking very carefully to avoid saying things he could be arrested for, tell us:

Without thinking very hard, I can remember how Nick Griffin of the British National Party stood trial for having called Islam “a wicked vicious faith”. I can remember how a drunken student was arrested and fined for telling a policeman that his horse looked “gay”. I can remember how a man was arrested and charged and fined for standing beside the Cenotaph and reading out the names of the British war dead in Iraq. I remember a case from this year where a pacifist unfurled a banner outside an army cadet training base. “Stop training murderers”, it said. His home was promptly raided by police with dogs, while a helicopter hovered overhead.He was arrested and cautioned. If I started mentioning the cases where Christian street preachers have been arrested for quoting the Bible, or where Moslems have set the police on people for alleged words or displays, or if I even alluded to the Public Order Act or the various racial and sexual hate speech laws, this article would swell immensely. It is enough to say that anything said in public is now illegal if someone complains to the police, or if the police themselves take against it. And, when something is not illegal, we are all getting used to the idea – second nature in most other countries – that we should “watch ourselves”. Even I find that, if I discuss politics in a coffee bar, I sometimes drop my voice. A few weeks ago, I found myself looking round to see who might be within earshot.

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Losing to Islam

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Islam is theocratic.  It intends to conquer. Shariah law, as interpreted by most Muslims, treats women fine.  Trouble is, as interpreted by all Muslims, even Sufis, it requires that infidels submit to law that makes them second class to believers and that Muslims fight to impose such law – and we are in fact submitting to such law.  The rather small Sufi minority merely propose less drastic measures to impose inferiority.

East Lansing, Michigan Police Department offers $10,000 reward in Qur’an-burning case

The department is offering $10,000 for any information that would lead to the identification and prosecution of those responsible for this act.

In November 2009, a high school senior was suspended in order to protect him from violence when he wrote an essay criticizing perceived special treatment for Somali Muslims in his school. In Dearborn, Mich., Christian missionaries were arrested for proselytizing at an Arab festival. In Minnesota, the state accommodates Shariah’s prohibition on interest payments by buying homes from realtors and reselling them to Muslims at an up-front price. Thereby providing Muslims with preferential access to homes at the expense of infidels.  Apparently the Constitution requires separation of Church and state, but no separation of mosque and state.

While Christianity is forbidden in government schools, Islam is preached and sponsored by the state.

Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist whose artwork sparked the controversial “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” has gone into hiding, changed her name, and so forth.  The state is not protecting her.

Similarly for the Sweden Democrats.

In much of Europe, including England, people who criticize Islam are capriciously prosecuted

One supreme court justice has proposed that burning the Koran be banned – though none would suggest similar courtesy for the flag or the bible, or the 9/11 dead.  When an obscure church proposed to burn the Koran its website was  shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, and its mortgage has been called in by its bankers.

In England two men were arrested for watching a video of a Koran burning

Muslims are abducting infidel women, raping them, getting them pregnant, and forcibly marrying them as additional wives, and everyone is closing their eyes to it.

Our official moderate Muslim, Imam Rauf, is curiously evasive about 9/11.

How many Christians reacted violently to Piss Christ? Not a one, zero.  How many Muslims reacted violently to cartoon Mohammed?  Hundreds of thousands committed criminal acts, millions cheered them on.

All the great leaders of Islam were war makers, military leaders, conquerors, slavers.  This just is not a pattern you see in Christianity.  Not only did the original prophet of Islam massacre defeated populations, every subsequent great Islamic religious leader acted similarly – some better, some worse, but all directly commanded wars, personally led them, and took extreme measures to subjugate the defeated population.  In contrast, absolutely zero great Christian religious leaders has done this – you do not see popes and bishops leading armies, burning towns, and personally ordering the rape of the women of the conquered.

Christian fanatics generally lock themselves in dungeons and meditate.  Islamic fanatics blow themselves up.

Christian leaders that combined the role of military and religious leader have always been a marginal phenomenon, and phenomenon that  occurred only among those directly at war with Islam: the Knights of Malta and the Knights Templar.  Further, those combining Christian religious and secular power have frequently led their followers to disaster by recollecting Christ’s command to forgive one’s enemies and turn the other cheek at some highly inopportune moment, as Grand Master Bolheim of the Knights of Malta did.

Just as there is in all the world not one Christian who called for violence against the creators of Piss Christ and Andres Serrano, there is in all the world not one Muslim very few Muslims who condemned the fatwa against Molly Norris.  In that sense, every single Christian in the entire world is opposed to holy war and seeks peace, and every single Muslim in the entire world supports holy war and seeks conquest.

Let us imagine the situation was reversed, and some notable Christian preacher was to call for the murder of Andres Serrano. Obviously, if this happened, which it never would, every other notable Christian leader would condemn that call. Compare and contrast with the call for the murder of Molly Norris.  Not every Muslim has called for the murder of Molly Norris, but not one Muslim has condemned the call either.

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Iran tells it like it is:

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

In his April 15, 2009 speech, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told America:

We say to you that you yourselves know that you are today in a position of weakness. Your hands are empty, and you can no longer promote your affairs from a position of strength.

… with the grace of God, and thanks to Iran’s national unity, the recommendations of Supreme Leader, and the following of his [path], nearly 7,000 centrifuges are spinning today

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The problems with Laissez Faire sexuality

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

In traditional society, women were strongly encouraged to refrain from sex before marriage, and marry responsible men with good jobs who were able and willing to support a family.

Today, women are encouraged to follow their hormones, which tends to result in them have offspring with a long succession of sexy males who disappear, often into jail or dying violently, and who often rough them up and steal their money before leaving.

Bryan Caplan correctly argues that the non traditional family does not necessarily harm children, because the low conventional success rate of children from such families may well reflect them behaving like their fathers, who have a different standard of what constitutes success, and may well be very successful by that standard – more chicks banged, less time wasted from nine to five, and more enemies maimed.  Further, women who choose to have a non traditional family presumably prefer it – there can be little doubt that the sex is hotter the badder the boy.

Now this is a good deal for alpha males, and lots of women argue it is a good deal for women, but it has a sizable externality, in that it encourages male behavior that causes problems for other men, and produces children that cause problems for other people.  Bastards are bastards. The production of bastards creates large external costs.  Encouraging fidelity, chastity, and female preference for responsible mates, even though their hormones tend to cry out for demon lovers, reduces other people’s costs – in traditional society the costs to fathers, uncles, and brothers of grown women, in modern society the cost of the welfare state, in all societies the cost of crime.

The welfare state reduces the costs of hormonal female behavior to parents of those females, since the cost of bastardy is externalized to the rest of society to a greater extent, and thus reduces the incentive of parents to inculcate their daughters with traditional values and deprecate the natural behavior of females – the natural inclination of women being more towards the demon lover.  Women can be socialized, pressured, and monitored into fidelity to males that materially support them and help raise their kids, but it takes a firm hand and a watchful eye.  While Islamic society takes this to extremes, the other extreme, total neglect of this problem, has costs also.

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Global Average temperatures to 2008-October

Friday, November 21st, 2008

This is the running twelve month average world temperature, as measured by satellites, as reported by The National Space Science and Technology Center.

World temperature change in centigrade degrees.
Global temperature change in degrees centigrade to 2008 October

It goes up, it goes down. If there is any trend, the trend is less than the decade to decade fluctuations, and is not at all apocalyptic. This differs from other graphs you may have seen because it starts at the start of the satellite data and ends at the present, instead of starting in with a reconstruction of what might have been a cool year if we had accurate global data way back then, which we don’t, and ending in 2005, the most recent warm year.

Similarly for the amount of ocean ice

Again, it goes up, it goes down. If there is any trend, the trend is less than the decade to decade fluctuations, and is not at all apocalyptic. Again this differs from similar graphs you may have seen, which usually start in 1988 (a year with exceptionally large ice area) and end in 2007 (a year with exceptionally small ice area), and show only the Northern Hemisphere, where we recently had some exceptionally warm years, leaving out the Southern Hemisphere, where we recently had some exceptionally cold years.

As you can see, nothing much is happening – looks like the world is warming, but not enough to be noticeable – nor enough to be sure that it actually is warming.

Thus irrespective of the validity of anthropogenic global warming, the belief that apocalypse is upon us, that something urgent must be done, is religious, based on the feeling that we have sinned against Gaea and her wrath will come upon us, not based on any scientific evidence.

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Genocide and environmentalism

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Bryan Caplan writes

When someone says “There are too many Jews,” we suspect that he wants to kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler’s propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people.

And if you’re tempted to say that Hitler proposed a barbaric solution for a real problem, take a look at how Germany actually did feed its population since 1945: increasing agricultural productivity and increasing exports. The two methods that Hitler dismissed out of hand transformed Germany into one of the richest nations in history.

Religions that command human sacrifice are good at providing power to their priesthood. Thus we see the first greenie famine being welcomed with delight by the true believers, much as they previously welcomed the return of malaria.

Environmentalists confidently state with immense confidence all sorts of “facts”, most of which are impossible to meaningfully test, some of which can be easily tested, and which test false – which test does not impair the confidence of the environmentalists in the slightest, just as the obviouse falsehood of the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation does not trouble those Christians who believe in it in the slightest.

Two obvious and extreme example are:

  1. the much repeated “fact” that we are in the middle of a vast mass extinction, that ten thousand species go extinct every year. Ask any greenie to name a species that has recently gone extinct. He will not be able to answer, and will be entirely untroubled by his inability to answer.
  2. the much repeated “fact” that the ice is melting, even though satellites show that the area of the world under ice has not changed significantly since satellites have been observing.

When environmentalist “scientists” report the disappearance of ice, they are not in fact reporting the disappearance of physical corporeal ice and snow, the stuff that causes your car to slide, and has to be shovelled off the path, the stuff that is apt to sink ships at sea. What they are really reporting is the disappearance of magic ice, the spirit of the ice, Gaia’s infusion of spirituality into a frozen wilderness that they contemplate from the comfort of Starbucks. Hence their total indifference to physical evidence. The holy ice, which is melted merely by man’s unholy gaze is disappearing, even though the merely physical ice continues to endanger shipping in pretty much the same places as it has for the last century or so.

Similarly when environmentalist “scientists” report that the polar bear is endangered, they are entirely indifferent to actual numbers of polar bears. Far from being endangered, polar bears, like deer, a pest and a hazard. Rather, because they raid garbage dumps, because they have become a pest and a hazard, the holy spirit of wild nature of which the holy bear is a manifestation, is in danger of going extinct.

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