Via Reddit:

Pretty much everything these folks said in the video below sounds familiar, especially the person at the 1:00 minute mark who said that she eventually came to the point where she wanted the “scientific” evidence that Jesus and the Bible were real, not just in her head or heart, but, like, you know, real.

And she got her answer. It is amazing how a person’s life can change when they actually begin thinking critically. Religion is contemptible because, as the guy said here, it seeks to, at best, control, or at worst, destroy the one human trait that separates us from all the other species.

And that’s why it needs to be shown the door.

Via Why Evolution Is True.

OK, so while this is not entirely airtight, it’s amusing, especially the Allah column.

I would say, for instance, that Catholics, at least modern Catholics in America, are probably more accepting of gays than Protestants. Admittedly, I’m not in those circles anymore, so I could be entirely off base. I also think that the Protestant category should have been subdivided into traditional and evangelical. Also, the “Mary Is ..” category is not terribly accurate in the Protestant column since, while she was a nobody as far as her earthly life was concerned, she was the host of an immaculate conception and the “mother” of God.

Another atheist ‏@kaimatai: Why yes, we do know how the bacterial flagellum evolved http://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7116/F1.large.jpg #evolution#atheist #atheism:

Credit: National Academy of Sciences

Hannah ‏@thelifeofhannah: #ImEasilyAnnoyedWhen People are willfully ignorant and use religion as their excuse for refusing to educate themselves. #atheist #atheism

Patrick McCann ‏@pjmccann3: Kudos to Botson’s @mayortommenino for putting out the #unwelcomemat for Chick Fil-A! #atheism #Gay #humanism #bigotry #civilrights

ThankGod ImAnAtheist ‏@ThkGodImAtheist: “History teaches us that no other cause has brought more death than the word of god.” – Giulian Buzila #atheism #teamjesus

Eric ‏@CoolLikeHanSolo: I like how religious people call themselves “God Fearing.” Everybody knows the best relationships are built on fear. #atheism

Via Reddit from NaCheezIt:

Andrew Sullivan, on his blog The Dish, ruminates about the distinction between Christianity and his self-coined word, “Christianism,” in order to defend Christianity from those who use faith for political purposes, as he claims about Anders Breivik:

The core message of  Christianism is, in stark contrast, the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others. And so the notion that Breivik is a “Christian fundamentalist” seems unfair to those genuine Christian fundamentalists who seek no power over others (except proselytizing), but merely seek to live their own lives in accord with a literal belief in the words of the Bible.

… Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon.

Of course, one can’t ignore the “real religious faith” of the 9/11 attackers, in that they believed they would be rewarded for their efforts in heaven (with a slew of virgins no less).

Read the rest of this entry »

Related to my last post, here is a chilling yet stunning piece by University of Minnesota, Morris associate professor, P.Z. Myers, who puts forward what he calls a “black and white” case against the loss of life in light of the recent killings in Afghanistan during riots over Koran burnings in Gainesville, Fla. The entire thing is more than worth a read. Myers writes:

I’m an extremist in this debate, I will freely confess. I hold an absolute view that no killing is ever justified, that individuals have the necessity to defend themselves against assailants, but that even that does not grant moral approval to snuffing out the life of another. Don’t even try to pull out a scale and toss a copy of the Koran on one side and the life of a single human being on the other — the comparison is obscene. Do not try to tell me that some people are ‘moderates’ when they tolerate or even support and applaud war and death and murder for any cause, whether it is oil, or getting even, or defending the honor of wood pulp and ink.

The bone is bleached white. The flesh is burnt black. The blood splashes scarlet. You can’t render it in grays and pastels without losing sight of the truth.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings. — Heinrich Heine

As ever, Hitchens brings his acid wit to bear in writing about recent violent protests in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif and calls to burn humans in response to Pastor Terry Jones’ and Dove World Outreach Center’s decision to torch copies of the Koran:

How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to take offense; the easy resort to indiscriminate violence and cruelty; the promulgation of makeshift fatwas by mullahs on the make; those writhing mustaches framing crude slogans of piety and hatred, and yelling for death as if on first-name terms with the Almighty. The spilling of blood and the spoliation of property—all for nothing, and ostensibly “provoked” by the corny, brainless antics of a devout American nonentity, notice of whose mere existence is beneath the dignity of any thinking person.

Credit: Reuters/Stringer

Dove World Outreach center apparently takes the name of its church very seriously, since it seems to have spread its influence, quite like a malignant tumor, from its tiny location in Gainesville, Fla., to the far reaches of the Middle East. Why Afghan President Hamid Karzai feels the need to even bother himself with such tripe coming from a congregation of about 70, one can only wonder, but bother himself he has. According to Hitchens:

Unlike some provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows perfectly well that the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from policing religious speech among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings of the aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way to intensify mob feeling. This caps a long period where his behavior has come to seem like a conscious collusion with warlordism, organized crime, and even with elements of the Taliban. Already under constant pressure to make consistent comments about Syria and Libya, the Obama administration might want to express itself more directly about a man for whose fast-decomposing regime we are shedding our best blood.

Andrei Fedyashin provides a detailed look of the ugly situation, with the following to aptly sum up matters:

What Jones has is not a church, although it is often described as such. His congregation of 50 to 70 people qualifies it more accurately as a very small fundamentalist sect. Normal Muslims should, therefore, not take broader offense, but they, too, have their own such sects at the other end of the confessional spectrum.

Article first published as Terry Jones-Koran Saga Continues on Blogcritics.

***

Credit: Khalid Tanveer/Associated Press

Terry Jones has at least one sin for which he needs to be absolved.

According to a New York Times report today, one man is now dead following protests outside a NATO office in western Afghanistan over Jones’ “stunt,” as President Obama has called it, to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11 in his church’s own protest against Islam and, presumably, against the proposed mosque and community center near the Ground Zero site.

“A fringe Florida preacher may have suspended his Koran-burning, but word reached Afghanistan too late for 24-year-old Muhammed Daoud,” the report says.

And that death could have and indeed would have been avoided had Jones not gone on his hysterical, fire-branded campaign against Islam, and had the media simply ignored that which deserves no limelight. I and many other bloggers have given the story attention, but, at least in my case, I gave it attention only to condemn it and only after large media outfits had already begun courting the disastrous story.

But all this matters not for Daoud, of course, and I hope — but I highly doubt it will — prick like a stick on Jones’ conscience. Again, given what we know about this person, one willing to risk the security of his country and that of the men and women serving in Muslim-dominated countries — not to mention native Middle Easterners — to make his point, we can’t rightly pen a very positive account of the man’s ability to care for his fellow human beings.

Also late this week, in what appears to be a situation in which no one quite knows who said what, Jones is claiming that local imam Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, had made a deal with him to move the location of Park 51, the official name of the center. Thus, Jones would not hold the Koran burning. But Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man heading up the project, has on multiple occasions said the plan was moving forward. Here is Rauf’s column published recently in the New York Times and a statement made in an interview with ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour.

“Let’s say we moved under this current circumstance with this dialogue,” Rauf told Amanpour. “What will be the headline tomorrow in the Muslim world? ’Islam under attack in America.’ That’s the theme of it. ‘Mosque forcibly removed by whatever.’ That will feed the radicals. So diffusing terrorism is a necessity for our national security.”

It will feed the radicals indeed. And as Rauf notes in his column, the mosque and community center will not be just for Muslims, and nowhere have I read that the center’s purpose was anything other than about bringing people of different faiths together and fostering an atmosphere of mutual existence. It is only the extremists like Jones and his counterparts in the Middle East who eschew such co-existence.

“Our name, Cordoba, was inspired by the city in Spain where Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages,” Rauf said, later adding that the center would include separate places for prayer by which Muslims, Christians, Jews and others can approach their own respective deities.

Regarding Jones’ claim about the movement of the center’s location, Musri said Jones “stretched his words” in a news conference. My opinion: Musri may have conceded more than he was ready to concede in talks with Jones in order to avert the disaster that may have taken place had the book burning went as planned. I highly doubt that Musri overstepped his authority and said outright that the center’s location would be changed for sure. He may have simply implied something along those lines to appease Jones to curb the threat of protests or the loss of life. Or, Jones could be lying, or the truth could be somewhere in between.

Nevertheless the efforts are already too little too late for at least one person. Jones should return to the fire and brimstone pulpit from whence he came and get out of the public sphere, for outside his inflated world of angels and demons and eternal destinations — “one nice and one nasty experience,” as Christopher Hitchens puts it, — he’s a danger to civil society.

Article first published as Terry Jones: Wannabe Media Jewel? on Blogcritics.

***

And so, thankfully, we hear that Terry Jones, the much-condemned pastor of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., will not, at least in the immediate future, oversee a Koran book-burning party that would have, according to any person with a functioning brain, and also to senior officials in the U.S. Military, sparked widespread protest and possibly widespread harm to American soldiers and even other Americans.

As is The New York Times‘ typical style, the newspaper is out ahead of any other potential angles related to this story. Surrounding this foray is a sense that Dove World Outreach Center is attempting, in a quite macabre and dangerous way, to gain some notoriety for itself. As we have already seen (see my related post) the congregation numbers about 50 people. Most very active but humble congregations range from 100-1,000 members, some more. But in this case, we are talking about a 50-person congregation. That’s a small number.

As the Times notes, “Mr. Jones was able to put himself at the center of those issues by using the news lull of summer and the demands of a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause. He said he consented to more than 150 interview requests in July and August … By the middle of this week, the planned Koran burning was the lead story on some network newscasts, and topic No. 1 on cable news – an extraordinary amount of attention for a marginal figure with a very small following.”

Thus, correctly, the Times notes that a very, very – and I would add another “very” – small congregation that matters not in any substantial way has, for some reason, garnered the attention of not only the leader of the free world, but of the international community.

Since Jones’ plan of Koran-burning is problematic on so many levels, to the extent that it could have put his congregation and many Americans in jeopardy, it leads me to believe that it was, at least on some level, a subversive and also a very dumb and selfish attempt to gain attention for his very small church as much as anything else.