Fitna

Although I absolutely do not endorse in anyway, shape, or form, the ideology that is behind the people who made this video, I would encourage people to watch it. I really hate having to get into bed with right-wing extremists like the people who made this video, who are a dutch, anti-immigration Christian lobby, it pains me greatly. I wish instead it had been made by people I actually admire, like Christopher Hitchens. I would also point out that I don't necessarily agree with everything in this video, particularly the stuff about the Netherlands. Nevertheless, given this has largely gone offline because of the death threats that Muslims around the world have been sending people who had shown this video, I think it's extremely important that it does stay up.

You can see it here in dutch and in English:

http://www.debaasjes.nl/index.php/comments/fitna1/

Please remember, I am not opposed to Muslims. I loath all religions fairly much equally. Credit where credit is due, it was the Jews who started the whole violent god thing, and the Christians who perfected the concept of a just and holy war. It just happens to be Muslims in this day and age who are the ones who scream and carry on when anyone dares raise an alternative to their dogmatic belief systems. My I remind you also, that these people in the video are AS MUCH Muslims as Sufi mystics who practice peace and love. They both claim to believe in the same book. Just as I have many Christian friends who are liberal and left-wing, and still believe in a the ludicrous, violent nonsense in the Bible, I have many Muslim friends who love humanity as much as I do, and yet claim a belief in a book described at best as a "confused pile of dreams".

Racism and faith

This will not be an interesting study into the correlation between racism and religious faith (although I do think that would be exceptionally interesting given all the references to Hamites in the Bible, dark skin and light skin in the Book of Mormon and slavery in Islam). Instead, it will focus on the tendency in western society at large to associate legitimate criticism of Islam with racist attacks against an "ethnic group".

Overwhelming advances in the field of genetics have shown that, for all intents and purposes, race, as it is popularly understood, does not exist. Skin colour is literally...skin deep. Despite this, I believe that pejorative concepts such as ethnicity and nations do serve some purpose, even if they have very little grounding in reality. To ignore altogether the concept of a nation or an ethnic group would be to ignore significant cultural and historical borders that separate peoples. As such, Arabs are still Arabs, Germans are still Germans, San are still San, regardless of whether we're all pretty much the same genetic stock.

A movement that does have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever however is the attempt to associate opposition to Islam with a hatred of ethnic minorities. Let me make this clear from the beginning: you cannot change your skin colour or genetic makeup, in the same way you cannot change your sexuality or your eye colour. It will always be what it is. You can however change your faith. People do it all the time - it's called conversion. There are white converts to Islam, and there are black converts, and there are Chinese converts and Jewish converts. Muslims are not some monolithic ethnic group, nor do they share a single culture. The huge difference between Islam as it is practiced in Saudi Arabia and Islam in Java is indicative of this.

When I criticise Islam, then, I am not criticising an Arab for being an Arab, in the same way that when I criticise Judaism, I am not slandering Jews, or when I criticise Christianity, I am not defaming Romans (or who else?). What I am in fact criticising is a single book, and then a corpus of literature associated with that book - the Qur'an and the hadith. These are perfectly legitimate targets of criticism in a pluralistic, democratic, and free society. Just as I am able to criticise Shakespeare without fear of being labelled racist against people of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origins, so should I be able to criticise the Qur'an without fear of being labelled an anti-Arabist.

If my (or anybody else’s) criticism of Islam was largely based on the idea that Arabs were a threat to humanity, or that Bangladeshis were intellectually inferior on the basis of their birth, or that Persians were a particularly ugly people, then yes, that would be racist. However, I have yet to come across sophisticated discussions of Islam that fall to that level. Admittedly, on the academic playground that is YouTube, there are some instances where grievances boil down to slanging matches with statements like "Muhammad was a dirty Arab pedofile" and "fuck you, jewdog", but overwhelmingly, this is not the case. To slander people like Hitchens et al with the ludicrous title of being a "racist", simply because they do not feel the need to genuflect before a vile religious ideology, shows the extent to which the children of the enlightenment have lost their way.

The stupidest book ever written...

There are so many books deserving of this title. According to Red Dwarf, "Football: It's a funny old game" gets the award, but in my opinion, it really has to be the Qur'an. What's even more terrifying is that Qur'anic literacy seems to be much higher in the Islamic world that Biblical literacy is in the Christian world. I mean, most Christians don't really seem to have a clue what's in the Bible, and yet many muslims spend years memorising the Qur'an from go to woe. Admittedly, it's in Arabic, and classical Arabic at that, so there is a sizeable chunk of the world's muslim population who have to rely on translation than the actual text, but nevertheless, devout muslims seem more familiar with the book than devout Christians are with theirs. This is what really worries me - can' they see just how amazingly, stupidly, incredibly erroneous this book is?

The Qur'an starts with a prayer, which, to the skeptical mind, might straight away bring into question the idea that it was dictated by god verbatim. After all, why does god need to pray to himself? Oddly enough, the one "atheist" I found who converted to Islam (and is now a lecturer in mathematics at Kansas university) considered this to be a really smart move - it really pulled him. I don't see it for myself, but there you go. The book itself is not organised thematically, or chronologically, but rather by length, and often the suras themselves will jerk randomly from one topic to another, without any kind of coherent reason. Many of the topics raised in the Qur'an require some kind of relevant historical knowledge that most people don't have today.

Despite what muslims say, the Qur'an just repeatedly contradicts itself, again and again and again, hence the necessity of the doctrine of abrogation, where by later suras abrogate earlier ones. This leaves us with a situation where all the Qur'anic nasties (jihad, killing infidels, beating women etc) are pretty much the only ones still relevant. All the niceties (don't force your religion down other peoples throats) are abrogated. On top of this, the Qur'an is piled high with really boring, uninteresting, go nowhere stories. It's kind of like Muhammad picked the worst, most bland stories from the bible, forgot most of the details, and cobbled together just the bare bones of the story. How 1.3 billion people can believe (or at least, claim to believe) this is the pure word of god, unadulterated, good forever, is really beyond me. Worst of all though, is that I've never heard a muslim give a good answer. They always fall back on the "you haven't translated it properly" excuse. Well, I'm reading muslim sources guys, you'd think they'd at least try and get it right.

Love, Christ and Rael...

It's not often you find a major cultural event where representatives from the three biggest churches in Sydney fail to turn up, but the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is one such event. A survey of the grounds at Victoria Park on the 17th of February showed a myriad of tents, with everything from Turkish Gozleme to gay dating, dog shows, and more. Yet, despite this panoply, not a single representative from the Uniting Church (which was unusual, given their lenient attitudes towards homosexuality in the church), the Catholic Church, or the Anglican Church (hardly surprising) was present. These three churches together would comprise about 75-80% of Australia's Christian population.

In fact, the only religious groups that were there were the Quakers, the MCC (Metropolitan Community Church), and some "gay Catholics". The two former bodies, as far as I could discern, were about dogmatic as the Dalai Lama. The Quakers in particular declared that they had dispensed with the Bible as anything other than "an important text" alongside Quaker writings and the writings of other faiths. The MCC similarly took the line that Bible was only a guide, and that the church was open to all regardless of gender identity/sexual orientation. The question that always occurs to me after such meetings is - why bother? I mean, the Bible (unless you take the Secret Gospel of Mark found by Morton Smith to be true) is probably one of the most prejudiced books in existence today. If, in an alternate universe, I happened to churn one out for public consumption, it would probably be banned on the grounds of inciting hatred against sexual minorities (as well as a whole host of other people). Why try and beat out interpretations that are pro-homosexuality, when the book is so clearly, fundamentally opposed to same-sex relations?

The gay Catholics, I thought, were just a tad more dogmatic, if only about the fact that they don't have a dogma. Operating outside the church proper, they met in a Catholic Church on Friday where a priest would provide a mass and the Eucharist, and then "party on", to quote a member. Further questioning on their religious position made me question however their commitment to liberal values. For instance, while they seemed to support the "Sorry" speech by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, when my partner pushed them on the issue of abortion, they quickly froze, referring to the issue as "deeply personal". Again, she pointed out that, as Catholics who "just happened to be gay", they would surely agree with the Pope on the issue of abortion, and indeed, contraceptive use, sex before marriage, etc. All too quickly the shutters were drawn, and we were quickly reminded that just because a person has an alternative lifestyle, that doesn't necessarily mean they're progressive on other issues. Can gay Christians be as bigoted as straight Christians? Absolutely, and I think the likes of these men, as well as the infamous Ted Haggard, prove this to be true.

On a lighter note, the Raelians were present, and as always, were a delightful laugh. Far less insidious then the Scientologists (who, in my opinion, are hands down one of the most evil organisations in existence today), their stall had a UFO model as well as various books by Rael, including my favourite "Sensual Meditation". They also had a pity quote, declaring that intolerance against homosexuals and bisexuals was foolish and misguided, as the issue was purely genetic, and was akin to "hating a cat just because it was a cat, or a chicken because it was a chicken". While I agree with the sentiment, I'm not sure about the metaphor.

A new speaker...

Is it just me, or does the new speaker of the house of reps look vaguely like Bill Bryson? Or do I just have a Bryson fetish?

Bill Bryson

Harry Jenkins (the new speaker)

The mediocrity of Bah'a'ullah and the paltriness of the Baha'i

Does my anti-religious position really stretch so far as to condemn a faith which has been persecuted since its inception, that lists the equality of the sexes, the unity of humankind, the establishment of an universal auxiliary language, and the harmony of religion and science as some of its major precepts? Yes. For the Baha'i faith, as its zealous and unquestioning followers refer to it, is frankly, not much better than any other dogmatic cult that has the misfortune to spread enmity on the earth.

Indeed, many of the proclamations of the Baha'i are actually incredibly superficial. The equality of the sexes extends only so far as to the supreme decision making body of the Baha'i community, where women are barred from election. This rather obvious discrepancy is dismissed with the rather pathetic excuse that the reason for high-ranking inequality "will be revealed by god in the fullness of time". Moreover, although Bahaullah encouraged his followers to make wills, in the event that they didn't, women get a comparatively poor deal compared to men in the division of any inheritance. Fathers over mothers, brothers over sisters, boys over girls.

The harmony of religion and science, often touted as one of the greatest things about the Baha'i faith, is equally skin-deep. While the Baha'is recognise that science should be allowed to progress, it is science that benefits the Baha'i faith, rather than any science that does not seek to find "the truth". While Shogi Effendi may have declared this was in reference to theological hairsplitting, one wonders what the Baha'is would do if it were found that universe came into existence from a quantum fluctuation - would the Baha'is really still support science? What about evolution, particularly when Bahaullah proclaimed that man has existed since all eternity? No, of course, as usual, the Baha'i's do some rather nice reinterpretation and come up with some claptrap about "the essence of man having always existed through mutations". Props to them Abdul Baha for coming up with it so early though.

However, I think what really gets to me about the Baha'is is how obviously, painfully, fascist they really are. I've finished reading the Kitab i-aqdas (the most holy book in the Baha'i faith, it's pretty short), and it's essentially like reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy, or the more boring parts of the Qur'an. Notes upon notes, minutiae upon minutiae, ridiculous laws and patterns of how they must be performed. Every aspect of life, from dawn till dusk, maturity (15) till death, is regulated by these "infallible" scriptures. The same infallible scriptures that still preach that homosexuality is wrong, and can be overcome through the help of doctors and prayer. And just in case you're worried about using a watch, it's ok! Bahaullah (god) makes sure you know that clocks are fine to use.

The Baha'i model is at its very core, utopian, idealistic, and dangerously, dangerously fascistic. With infallible leaders, scriptures, and elected elders, it differs little from the communist parties in many countries across the world (and I say this as an ex-communist). Its concept of divine manifestation, and immutable laws that will last a thousand years is all too similar to the "thousand year Reich" of Adolf Hitler. And with execution, exile, and excommunication as tools in the Baha'i apparatus of control, this supposedly tolerant faith seems as though it might go the way of Jim Jones' Peoples' Temple.

In principio...

Howdy all. Having blogged as an atheist on Facebook for the past year or so, I thought it was about time I got off my virtual armchair, and delved into the real blogosphere. I know there are a thousand and one atheist/agnostic/skeptical blogs out there, but you know, the more the merrier. I hope believer and non-believer alike will enjoy, and above all, spark some healthy debate.