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Appeasing Islam

I do not believe in gods. Why would I seek to look at an old foreign religion with an old foreign god?

What's in it for me? I don't believe in creation by gods, the existence of gods, the power of gods or the idea that morality comes from the will of gods.

For me the optimum number of mythical beings is zero. I thank the Arab world for giving the world the concept of zero and await more human progress from them any millennium now but I don't expect any while they spend all their energies on conversing with the non-existent.

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

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Islamic Threat

Islam and Women

You Don't Have to be Ahmad

Female Circumcision

Circumcision

Islamic Golden Age

Respect for Islam

Anti-Semitism: The Big Lie

Swords, Prophets and the Weakness of Gods

How many religions claim to possess the temporarily relevant answer to the fashionable question about life, the universe and everything? None. All religions claim to be eternally true and relevant, to have found or rediscovered the truth that will always be true.

Islam is just one religion amongst many. It has become a successful religion because it has a successful recipe:

1 ] Monotheism

2 ] The final prophesy. Which is good because it does not deny previous prophesies and traditions but puts them firmly in their place, as of minor significance compared to the ultimate revelation and it closes the door on anybody who would like to pull the same trick as Mohammed.

3 ] Ambiguity. Just like Judaism and especially Christianity there are enough ambiguities within the teachings to cover most things that are ever likely to happen so rulers can show themselves to be following the tradition no matter what they decide they want to do.

4 ] Jihad. The idea of holy war is very useful in spreading the message. If you can't win over hearts and minds you can just grab them by the balls and teach them what submission to the will of God really means, or kill them and that's considered doing them a favour.

5 ] Optimal sacrifice. The duties and obligations on the Muslim are exquisitely well balanced, going just far enough and yet not too far. They are sacrifices that can be made by large numbers of people which are onerous enough to build a community spirit and yet not being so onerous as to prevent converts. Historically most conversions to Islam have been coerced but the sacrifices are not so immense that they prevent some willing conversions and of course willing religious converts are usually the most committed of psychopaths.

I would have to be out of my mind to give up alcohol, pork, large parts of my free time and my foreskin. If I did make such sacrifices no doubt I would then feel rather committed to the cause. That is part of what makes Islam so strong: it builds a community on such silly and arbitrary distinctions. People then make the connection between observing these ridiculous conventions and being moral, as if a selfish brute of a bully would become a good man just because he didn't have a foreskin and took his shoes off inside the house. It is an absurd idea that the creator of the universe would actually want men to give up their foreskins, not eat bacon, go for a walk around an old pagan altar and avoid all depictions of people and animals and yet stick a symbol of an old pagan moon god everywhere as if it was the symbol of a jealous (of what?) monotheistic god.

I do not know for certain that there is no supreme being but I am rather certain that if there was one and if he did have any ideas about the way he wanted people to behave (two enormous ifs) he would be more interested in people doing good for good reasons than out of the self-imposed mental strait-jacket called faith. I am also just about certain that if such a being did exist the last way he would ever seek to communicate with mankind would be via a prophet because an all-wise deity would be fully able to anticipate the trouble such a strategy would cause. If there is a God (capital G God signifying a monotheistic One True God rather than a team player god like Hermes or Thor) he would be a much better memeticist than I have ever been, he would know all about charlatans, manipulative and/or crazy false prophets and human gullibility.

A true God would not allow his true message to be presented in the same sort of way as the false messages of false religions, unless he didn't care about those people deluded by lies and if God doesn't care we're all fucked anyway. A true God would make a single, simple revelation that stood on its own independent of anything that went before and did not resemble any false religion and when those people who were committed to false religions saw it they would cast aside their previous faiths as easily as I walk out of a bath robe.

Depending on how you define them there are dozens to thousands of religions. None of them claim to be anything other than The Way. Sometimes The Best Way and sometimes The Only Way. None of them claim to be anything less than the best way. Can you really believe that there is a single god out there who understands the way we think and cares about us and yet allows us to take part in this genetic and geographical lottery in which the vast majority of people who have ever been born do not get a fair chance to experience the only way to salvation? If Allah knows everything he knows how likely it is for a white male born to a moderately poor family in Arkansas, Aberdeen or Antwerp to accept the word of the Quran as being the definitive Word of God. Honestly he stands a much better chance of winning the lottery. And you can take that same argument and substitute the places and religions in any way you want. If god works like that why does anybody worship the arrogant, heartless bastard? If a man was responsible for seeing billions of people meet an avoidable calamity on anything like the scale that your god seems to be witnessing they would be rightly thrown into prison for life for crimes against humanity.

Frankly, God's best and only defence against the charge of crimes against humanity is the ultimate alibi: he wasn't and isn't there.

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

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