What is it about Islamic fundamentalists?

Anybody who knows me (statistically, damned few of you) is aware that I am not a faithful churchgoer. And some of you probably worked that out from my nom de blog.

However, for all that unbelievers in America face discrimination, idiocy and occasional threats, we have it better than people in some parts of the world.

I tend to reserve most of my bile for Christianity, mostly because it's the religion that keeps trying to take over America. Which happens to be where I live. I don't happen to appreciate people trying to shove their beliefs down my throat - I'm not going to compare it to rape, but there are philosophical similarities. Much in the way that a house fire would be similar to a nuclear holocaust, but still...

In fact, due to the excessive and overwrought hatred of Muslims that is typically found among members of the Right Wing, I've tended to shy away from pointing out the less-brilliant aspects of Islamic beliefs. But let me just say this.

Muslim societies, on the whole, are less advanced than those of us in what they call the "West." Their educational levels frequently aren't even on a par with Mississippi, they are roughly as set in their ways as the Catholic church, and they share many beliefs with the Westboro Baptist Chuch. And they have an unpleasant tendancy toward violence similar to members of the NRA.

Bangladesh, for example, is nominally a secular democracy, but they seem to have forgotten what "secular" actually means. When Bangladesh gained independance from Pakistan in 1971, they set up a constitution that included "Four State Principles" - Secularism, Democracy, Nationalism and Socialism (factors which were upheld in Bangladeshi court in 2010).

However, with a population that is almost 90% Muslim (89.4% in 2010), they seem to be adding two more principles: Bigotry and Intolerance.

And Violence. So maybe three principles. (I could add "Murder," but it would rapidly grow into a Monty Python sketch about the Muslim Inquisition.)

See, there's an atheist blogger in Bangladesh named Asif Mohiuddin. In January, he was attacked in an apparent murder attempt, by three men who tried (but failed) to stab him in the throat. A month later, on 15 February, another atheist blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was hacked to death in a machete attack in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh.

For the crime of making himself a target, the surviving blogger, Asif, was arrested last Wednesday, and his blog on www.somewhereinblog.net ordered shut down by the government. He was the fourth blogger in two days to be arrested for "defaming Islam.".

The government is cracking down on athiests because Muslims are rioting. Which is, of course, the perfect response: you should always give in to violent threats. On 13 March, the Prime Minister's office formed a committee tasked with identifying "blasphemous" bloggers.

Earlier in the week, four online writers were arrested on charges of hurting Islamic religious sentiments in a country where 90 percent of people are Muslims.

Following recent protests over the war crimes tribunal, the government has blocked a dozen websites and blogs to stem the unrest. It has also set up a panel, which includes intelligence chiefs, to monitor blasphemy on social media.

Under the country’s cyber laws, a blogger or Internet writer can face up to ten years in jail for defaming a religion.

What is it about radical Islam that causes them to attack and kill anyone they disagree with? If girls try to go to school, they get shot. Cartoonists who draw pictures of Mohammed are attacked with axes. Being "too Western" or committing "sexual impropriety" will get a woman murdered by her family.

Now, among Christians, the percentage of fundamentalists varies: in the Bible Belt (sociographically, the "East South Central Region" - Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Alabama), it stands at about 58%, while in New England, it climbed slightly during the Bush era to 13%. If we assume that the same percentages hold for the Islamic peoples, that's still a buttload of fundamentalists. And in any religion, it's the fundamentalists who make the worst neighbors.

Here's the thing. Islam has been round for about 1400 years. Know what Christians were doing at about the same point in their history? Crusades and Inquisitions: killing people of other religions, and locking people up for daring to speak against them. The only difference is, modern Muslims have access to more technology than Christians did in the Middle Ages.

You have to wonder if this is a cycle that all major religions go through.

Chick-Fil-Ahole

"Families are very important to our country. And they're very important to those of us who are concerned about being able to hang on to our heritage. We support Biblical families, and they've always been a part of that."

Jesus, can't anybody see the logical disconnect between families being important and the right of some Bible pounding chicken plucker to interfere with the civil rights of his fellow citizens?  Freedom is important too and sure as hell, this kind of religion doesn't support freedom and has spent centuries killing people for thinking and acting free.

Well I guess not and it's just another example of how religion poisons everything; corrupts the critical faculties and undermines democracy.  Yes, it's Chicken Man Dan again "supporting Biblical Families" with a carefully extracted and deep fried opinion from a few extracts from the Greek section added on to the Hebrew Bible in the 4th Century CE.  

Tradition does not convey a right, particularly a right to interfere with freedom, nor does one "tradition" have the right to declare itself official in this free country any more than the smell of frying birds conveys wisdom or power or decency. 

So what about Lot's family, Abraham's family and all those Biblical examples of polygamy, romps in the sack with the serving girls, mistreatment of women, selling one's daughters into slavery and prostitution and the like?  Never mind.

Look, there's nothing that can't be supported by that pile of political hogwash written, edited, redacted and selected by ancient bastards greedy for power and that isn't being used by their smiling, Jesus plated contemporary imposters like Dan Cathy.  To be sure, he has the protected right to be an asshole, to act like he's got some special insight, to justify his petty, arrogant, small minded opinions about chicken plucking with what he calls the Bible and I call a fraud,  Indeed that's much more of a "heritage" than gay bashing, that horrible compilation of ancient ignorance having been used for every ill purpose including slavery, destruction of Native cultures and the burning of innocent women in this sad country.  And of course I have the right to call him any name I like, now that he's a public figure.

I have the right, as an American, to call him a malicious and ignorant and self-righteous idiot and we all have the right to take our hunger for greasy chicken to KFC or to that vacant lot a mile from here where they sell home made chicken, barbecue, greens, black beans and rice on the weekends and where they have a smile for everybody and mind their own goddamned Christian business.

"Chick-Fil-A Doesn't belong in Boston," says Mayor Thomas Menino. " you can't have a business in the City of Boston that discriminates against the population . . . and we're not going to have a company, Chick-Fil-A, or whatever the hell their name is, on our Freedom Trail."

Me neither, Mayor -- me neither. 

Religious Fascism: The Faith Masquerade

"When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." (generally attributed to Sinclair Lewis)

I grew up in eastern North Carolina. My immediate family converted to Catholicism when I was seven. Some of our relatives were convinced that we were going to hell for worshiping statues, praying to the Virgin Mary, and not being baptized in the name of Jesus only. In other words, I grew up with crazy fundamentalists in my family. However, I never feared their beliefs. They talked a lot but didn't appear to pose a threat to others who did not believe as they did.

But today I came across an organization known as the  The Liberty Counsel and their stated goal is Restoring the Culture by Advancing Religious Freedom, the Sanctity of Human Life and the Family.

Doesn't sound so scary in and of itself, but the Liberty Counsel doesn't literally mean freedom to believe or not believe as you wish. The Counsel believes that it is its mission to advance our freedom to believe in a Christian God. The anchor of the Counsel is its fully accredited law school, Liberty University School of Law, located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Its web site touts its "40 years of training champions for Christ." From its mission statement: "The proficient use of reason informed and animated by faith and a comprehensive Christian worldview is the means to revitalizing what is central to the American legal system--the rule of law." (There are 202 attorneys in the 112th US Congress out of a total of 535 members of Congress. Washington Wire, 1/5/2011).

The web site also features a video with a special message from Newt Gingrich. Presumably Gingrich is comfortable with the law school's blend of law and religion, and its goal of injecting that blend into the rule of law.

The document that lead me to the Counsel was a piece entitled Declaration of American Values, with excerpts posted to Facebook by author Pam Spaulding. (I count on Pam to lead me to interesting material and she never fails to do so.) The Declaration appears to be the Counsel's proposal for a new Declaration of Independence and contains such gems as the following:

• To secure our national interest in the institution of marriage and family by embracing the union of one man and one woman as the sole form of legitimate marriage and the proper basis of family.
• To secure the free exercise of religion for all people, including the freedom to acknowledge God through our public institutions and other modes of public expression and the freedom of religious conscience without coercion by penalty or force of law.
• To secure the moral dignity of each person, acknowledging that obscenity, pornography, and indecency debase our communities, harm our families, and undermine morality and respect. Therefore, we promote enactment and enforcement of laws to protect decency and traditional morality.
• To secure the individual right to own, possess, and use firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty.

There are ten declarations in all, plus a preamble and a closing vow asserting that an unidentified "we" pledge their names, their lives, and their honor to upholding this declaration of American values. 

The Christian fundamentalists of my childhood were goodhearted people for the most part who sincerely believed that it was their duty to try and save the souls of sinners. They were not interested in controlling the government; they sought their guidance from their churches and did their proselytizing via their churches. Today's Christian Right is a different breed. They are not necessarily fundamentalists; they adhere to a literal reading of the Bible only when it suits their purposes.  As a whole, they are better educated than their fundamentalists predecessors, churned out by private religious colleges and universities.  They encompass middle and upper class demographics. They seek power and control, and view religion as a tool to achieve both. They are dangerous. 

It is not enough that they share their beliefs with those who embrace the same values. What they want is to impose their beliefs, their will, on the rest of us. Fanaticism begets a rabid vigilance to convert or destroy all who would dare walk to a different drummer. There is no group more dangerous than those who believe or profess to believe in some mythological anointment of their cause by a supreme being. History is littered with atrocities perpetrated in the name of someone's God.

Please understand that it is not genuinely held personal faith or spiritual belief that I'm speaking of, but a rigid fanaticism in which one group insists upon imposing its views, its beliefs, its will upon others. I'm speaking of groups such as this Liberty Counsel, which adorns itself with the trappings of law, wraps itself in the American flag, and with its Bible clasped in one hand is as dangerous and frightening as any fascist.

Such groups must be revealed, dragged into the light if necessary. Their power lies in their chameleon like ability to blend in, to appear to be simply promoting sensible values that will benefit all of us. We must be vigilant and unafraid in shouting to the rafters that not only does the emperor have no clothes on, the emperor is also a liar and a fraud.


Definition of FASCISM

1

often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

2

: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control 

We used to pray for them, but it's all over now

Well the word is out on Main Street - Tim Geithner can't be trusted as Treasury Secretary because he is Jewish and Jews have divided loyalty. I was interested to hear that and not just because Geithner's family assures us he's an Episcopalian raised and married in that Church.

Is the phony honeymoon over? That the Republicans may be abandoning their pretense of being in love with Israel is a possibility. One perennial Troll at The Reaction called me "an arrogant Kike" for having asserted that no, Barney Frank bears no discernible responsibility for our global recession; but it's really too soon to tell if the frustrated masses yearning to breathe fire will switch scapegoats and replace witches, Liberals, illegal aliens and the ACLU as hate objects. Maybe they consider all those straw men to be Jewish anyway.

Of course it's hard to think of any immigrant group that isn't or hasn't been accused of divided loyalty in this nation of immigrants. John Kennedy stared down that bit of bigoted Waspery with grace nearly 50 years ago, but ask a Muslim -- hell, ask someone who isn't a Muslim but has a suggestive name.

Of course it doesn't often occur except to cynics, that preaching the impending destruction of mankind and the dissolution of secular nationhood might be taken as a dilemma in as much as commitment to preserving the USA and praying for lakes of fire and brimstone aren't compatible, at least to me. I can't think of loyalty more divided than that of the Religious Right, promoting the Christian Bible as the foundation of the United States rather than its secular Constitution. I can't help but think of divided loyalty when presented with a candidate who looks longingly forward to the destruction of our country and the flight of the elect to the Holy Kingdom of God in Alaska (no witches may apply.)

Two posts on gay marriage

As both are really, really long -- I don't know what it is that compels me, sometimes -- I'll just leave the links, rather than hogging the whole front page.

Wingnuts & Moonbats: My thoughts on Homosexual Marriage

Wingnuts & Moonbats: Is there a right to marry whomever one wishes?


Sorry I've been remiss in not posting, here. Nothin' lately seemed worthy...

Fight or flight?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This may be an existential moment for America, a "to be or not to be" dilemma. Still, not all of us are concerned with questions about whether to bail out the banks and brokers or to suffer the slings and arrows of market forces: some of us are more concerned about why God is allowing his chosen country to suffer.

The answer most satisfying to the Evangelistic ego of course is that, like most events tectonic and atmospheric, the credit crisis can be blamed on sex; gay sex.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies posted on the National Review's web site that he is sure that Washington Mutual's collapse is to be blamed on open minded hiring practices and not predatory lending and the risky loans it produced. Hiring Blacks, Gays and Hispanics with no regard to their dirty minority private lives or unacceptable ethnicity pisses God off.

No, this whole debacle is about sex and tolerance, not money, not debt. God likes money far more than tolerance after all, and as the late Jerry Falwell told us, you have to give money to God if you want to succeed. But you have to stop giving money to people who believe in abominations like birth control, says Christian leader Mike Heath. The credit crisis is about our

"sinful sexual culture, and the acceptance of gay unions"

So perhaps if I were Hamlet and had to choose between opposing our troubles and ending them: or to die, to sleep no more, to end the heartache. If I had to choose between caring what happens to this country and walking away, taking leave of the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, I would simply sail away, another orphan.