I'd Rather be a Bright than a Dhimmi

Under Sharia law a Muslim is obliged to pay a dizzying 2.5% tax to the poor, the Muslim poor naturally, Duh. They really don't feel comfortable with the notion that most rich atheists consider this a rather small contribution and that most European democracies regularly tax their citizens at much higher rates and don't charge different taxes to believers and unbelievers as the Sharia system requires - a very modest tax to cover the poor charged only on Muslims and a much higher tax on Dhimmis, members of tolerated religious minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians which is levied to demonstrate their submission and goes to help protect them. This is strange indeed, rather similar to a tax on blacks in Alabama to protect them from lynchings. But no, that parallel does not work because Dhimmi status is not available to the most despised of all, under Sharia Dhimmis status is only available to monotheists, People of the Book, those with no religious belief or polytheists have no protection at all and can be captured by Muslims at any time and made into slaves or just killed without consequence. That explains why it is atheists who are the most concerned with not giving in to these religiously empowered barbarians. It also casts a lot of light on the history of violence that surrounds the Muslim communities in India. Christians have less to fear from Islam, they do have a status of sorts under Islam, it is a permanent underclass which has to pay for the privilege of being tolerated and humiliated but it is allowed to exist. There is no religious obligation on Muslims to allow polytheists or atheists any status or protection at all if they have power in the land.

The Dhimmi system is totally unacceptable on a number of levels. First of all it is the rule of a dead man over the living, a law which is unquestionable, indeed to attempt to question it is to reveal yourself to be evil and under the influence of the enemies of Allah. There is a fundamental difference between those who believe in democracy, rule of the people by the people for the people, and those who believe humanity's place is face down in the dust in submission to unquestionable authority and absolute power. Why should the teaching of this theology of total human subjugation be given respect when it is clearly the absolute antithesis to freedom and democracy? Islam has no place for human rights, there are no human rights under Islam, all rights come from your relationship with the absolute tyrant, you are either in submission to him or you are his enemy and you deserve to be crushed. Either way there are no rights for humanity under Islam.

Religion is not entitled to respect. Ideas are not entitled to respect, even if they are right and true. Imaginary beings are not entitled to respect. But people are. Under Islam the opposite is the case, I as a non-believer have no right to exist and Allah who does not exist is entitled to complete respect, as is his dead false prophet. Of course it is only the prophet of Islam, the warlord Muhammad, who is entitled to respect, not all the prophets of Islam. The company which makes the Jackhammer Jesus dildo and Baby Jesus butt plug does not receive death threats from Muslims, they also at one time made a Moses dildo but fear no consequences from that either as despite the claims that these are prophets of Islam the Muslims don't see fit to get uptight about such blasphemy. Of course there is no equivalent device depicting Allah or Muhammad, despite the fact that it would probably outsell any Christian or Jewish themed product at least 20 to 1 as there are far more Americans who would get perverse satisfaction from defiling an object sacred to Islam than would feel the need to buy the same product that featured Christianity or Judaism. This has nothing to do with respect and a deep understanding of the sincerity of Islamic beliefs, it is simply naked fear, the people selling these devices want to have a bit of fun and make a little money, they don't want to have to hire armed bodyguards for their children. Christians and Jews rarely react with inappropriate physical violence, not in the last hundred years anyway, and they certainly don't indulge in murder in the belief that their God will ensure their safety and fast passage into heaven in the way that we know Muslims do react.

Of course the desire to indulge in desecration really requires a sense that objects can be sacred in the first place, personally the idea of flushing a Qur'an down the toilet makes no more sense than flushing Webster's awful dictionary. Unwanted books should be recycled. Blocking drains is a selfish indulgence.

The Qur'an is not an object, it is the words, not the pages. Any Muslim who gets upset at what happens to a copy of the words of the Qur'an is not following the will of Allah or the teachings of Muhammad because Muhammad did not write or dictate any book and no Qur'an was committed to book form in Muhammad's lifetime. Getting upset at the desecration of a book is unislamic, a written form of the Qur'an treated as a holy object is a form of idolatry. The question as to why the Qur'an was not committed to paper in Muhammad's lifetime is interesting. The idea that he could not write is probably false, he could write, just not very well. To have dictated the words would have required him to learn them himself! Speaking good rhetoric is a skill but to speak it and then later re-tell it at a slower dictation pace would require it to be committed to memory. This is a task that is comparatively easy for a well-beaten child but it would be hard for a man in his fifties to recall accurately what he pulled out of his arse five years before.

I'd rather be a Bright than a Dhimmi. In fact because I am a Bright there is no option for me to be a Dhimmi, because I do not have any superstitious beliefs I am considered a person denying Allah. This is absurd. I don't belief in fairies but that doesn't mean I am being flagrantly disrespectful and rude to TinkerBell and Sugar Plum. I am not denying the existence of something whose existence is self evident out of perversity, I genuinely don't believe in any supernatural beings of any kind. The god hypothesis is one which I find is not compelling. I do not choose to disbelieve I just don't believe, and I am comfortable with my disbelief. I am not one of those atheists who would welcome faith and I do not try to believe, I gave up that effort when I was eleven and I felt a lot better for doing so, honest, comfortable with who I am. If you don't know what I mean by being a Bright. I shall explain briefly. A Bright is a person without supernatural beliefs. For some people the term atheist seems just too negative both in its meaning and in much of the baggage the term has picked up over the years. I didn't stop believing in God when I was eleven I accepted that I didn't believe in the supernatural at all. I didn't believe in spirits, souls or ghosts. I knew, although I may have had difficulty articulating it, that I was just my brain working. The first person perspective within my skull is not a soul it is a model formed in my brain that enables me to make sense of my world. I stopped believing in myth and magic and God and the immortal soul and ghosts. Or, probably more accurately I stopped trying to believe in any supernatural nonsense, I preferred rational explanations and science to myth and magic. You don't have to call yourself a Bright if you fit the definition, the whole point about the description is that it is a badge only you can pin on yourself. If you don't like it then don't use it.

I use the label on myself because it says more than the term atheist does. An atheist can have plenty of irrational superstitious beliefs and still qualify as an atheist. All the term tells people is that you believe in a god count of zero. Just as there are great differences between a Muslim suicide bomber and the Archbishop of Canterbury who both agree on a god count of one there are plenty of differences between people who share a god count of zero. By using the label of Bright I am demonstrating that my rejection of the various god hypotheses is part of a general preference for rational and scientific explanations rather than a way to be loyal to the Communist Ideal or to spite Allah or to annoy my parents or to sell more records or poems or justify a life of selfish hedonism.

Muslims don't know how to cope with Brights. They really can't get their heads around the idea that there are people who simply don't believe in all the hocus pocus that they take for granted. We don't believe in evil spirits. We believe in bacteria, viruses, personality disorders and psychologically damaging trauma. We don't believe in a creator, we believe in the power of the evolutionary algorithm. We have a better description for how the world works which explains all the mysteries gods were invented to explain, and we can explain the genesis of myth better than they can explain the myth of Genesis. We have a good idea about where we came from and why we are here and those explanations need no supernatural beliefs. We are sometimes accused of being arrogant, by those who believe they are the special creation of and following the will of the creator of the universe. That's a bit rich isn't it? They also say we are arrogant to call ourselves Brights because it implies they are dim. I say it is arrogant to give a label to those who are not a member of your club. Gentiles, kuffar, infidels are labels used by the supremely arrogant. There is no term for those who are not members of the Barrow in Furness golf club so why do the religious feel the need to call those outside their group by a handy hate label? All labels pinned upon you by those who reject you from their number are hate labels and should be regarded as offensive.

I generally don't approve of national pride, well, it's not very British is it? But one thing that I am proud of is the fact that there is no offensive label for people who are not Englishmen. OK, I'll admit that English is not short of offensive labels to give to specific groups of outsiders: wogs, krauts, waps, nips, chinks, paddies, jocks, sheep-shaggers, frogs and dagos for example, but they are all specific. We don't have a universal label to hang around the necks of the rest of humanity. That kind of hatred usually requires divine sanction.

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I'd Rather be a Bright than a Dhimmi

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