Friday, March 31, 2006

Something Strange About Muslims


There is something very strange about Muslims. When they are not murdering women, children and other innocents of the “unbelievers”, they fully occupy themselves with killing each other. If you doubt me just look at what Sunni and Shi'ite followers of Mohammed are doing to each other in today's Iraq OR look at the overall history of the conflict between those two groups.

Of course, Christians went through two-plus phases (Eastern VS Western Churches; Catholic VS Protestant movements; And, conflicts between the many Protestant Churches). We Christians have, I hope, learned that God does not approve of “murdering for God”.

It does not appear that Muslims have learned that lesson. Although the teachings of Mohammed forbid his followers from attacking each other, Muslims have set up a culture which worships death more than life; A culture known for its murders, rapes, genocidal actions, robberies and the destruction of real religions and real civilizations.

Islam is also not known for any originality in inventive thought or actions. Its only historical claim to a “golden age” was based on borrowings from India, pre-Islamic Egypt/Persia and Greece---A golden age (Like all other positive movements in Islam) which resulted in a return to the horrid and basic teachings of Mohammed and to the culture of death and crime as noted above.

Until such time as the vast majority of Muslims will publicly declare that those teachings of the Koran and the Hadith (The collected sayings of Mohammed), which support and encourage such crimes are NOT the will of Allah, and govern their lives accordingly, there is little hope for Islam OR for the others Peoples who must share the world with Muslims.

Until Western journalists, government officials and ministers of non-Islamic religions are willing to acknowledge the above, truthful, statements (And base their policies on them), there will be little hope to safeguard true civilization OR to guide our Muslim brothers and sisters into light.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Every Theft A Little Murder

The below is parapharsed and modified from another author (Jack Vance?)

All property represents the time individuals and collectives of people create by the honest application of mental or physical effort. Every theft takes from such persons that part of their lives which has been expended in such honest efforts.

Every successful theft takes from such honest workers that part of their lives, not to be replaced, invested in such creations of property. THEREFORE, every theft is a little murder and every thief a small-scale murderer.

This is true for all: Common thiefs (Robbers, burgle rs, shoplifters); Politicians who do
pay-for-play” wrongful actions which take unneeded money from the tax payers; University professors and administrators who misuse their positions to the costs of students, their families and other citizens; Enron-type executives; Drunken or reckless drivers who increase our insurance rates; Drug users whose related thefts are often forgotten; Illegal immigrants who poof up, at a disproportional rate, our criminal justice and public health costs; Prostitutes who cost us in health and social service tax monies; And, all other like criminals.

Perhaps, such thiefs should be punished as murderers when the sum of their thefts reaches the average life-time income of the workers in the USA.



Friday, March 24, 2006

The Victory Of Christian Reason

FROM THE HERALD SUN (AUSTRALIA)


Our sacred things



RELIGION in general – and Christianity in particular – is crucial to society. So I've argued for years.

Now a US academic has unexpectedly trumped me.

Rodney Stark is his name.

Stark's new book, The Victory of Reason, is a 235-page show-stopper, unpublished in Australia as yet, but which promises to revolutionise many of our contemporary political and moral debates.

And if it doesn't do that, it will at least make a lot of people angry.

Western society in 2006 is fractious to the point of fisticuffs over matters of reason and religion.

If you doubt this, take two hot debates: the death penalty cases in Indonesia and the parliamentary vote on RU486.

I believe -- as a god-given matter of principle -- that every human life is sacred from conception.

Therefore, RU486 should be banned.

Legalising it will lead to the destruction of the sacred, quite apart from its effect on women's health.

A sock on my jaw, anyone?

Now -- since I also think that as every human life is sacred, even the nasty ones, the Australians convicted of drug-running in Indonesia must not be executed -- would anyone else like a go?

Of course, not everyone will share the Christian premise on which these arguments are based.

But if Christianity is irrelevant, why should anyone get angry?

Which leads me back to The Victory of Reason.

It has has angered many people in the US and looks set to do the same here by proving that not just the health of civilisation, but its very existence of civilisation depends on Christian faith.

Stark is no bible-thumper. He's a Baylor University professor of social sciences and a Berkeley graduate.

His earlier work -- using secular data -- explained how Christianity took over the Roman empire in pagan times through its superior values.

"Christianity created Western civilisation," he authoritatively asserts.

"Without a theology committed to reason, progress and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: a world with many despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys and pianos."

Christianity is such an obvious story of civilisational success that you wonder why so many refuse to believe it.

As Stark says, rather than accepting the facts, many people now prefer to think Christianity has contributed nothing to civilisation except intolerance.

Of course, it's widely believed that, for centuries Muslim Arab civilisation kept the flames of civilisation burning while medieval Christian Europeans languished in the mud.

Stark upends that belief.

Yes, he says, Islamic scholars kept ancient Greek and Roman learning alive, but their culture didn't do anything progressive with it.

It was the "ignorant" Westerners, steeped in Christian theology, who developed the power of reason and applied it to making the world a better place.

Stark says the so-called Dark Ages of Europe are, in fact, a myth.

The Dark Ages were actually bright.

It was in this period that our modern ideas of the separation of church and state, non-hereditary and elected government, personal freedom, property rights and capitalism were born.

Stark lists some crucial Christian inventions of these "Dark Ages", including clocks and bells, deep-earth ploughs which created northern European agriculture and effective cannons which transformed warfare.

European "round" ships, and compasses, which could tell direction at sea, enabled international transport, communication and travel.

Meanwhile, Christian ideas about personal freedom and individual rights also caused the abolition of slavery and the enshrining of property rights for the first time in the Magna Carta, without which, Anglo capitalism could never have developed.

And it wasn't the later Protestant Dutch and English who invented goodies like capitalism and representative government, Stark proves.

It was the medieval Catholics of Venice, Genoa and other Italian city-states.

They did it by electing their town councils and pioneering modern manufacturing industries.

Today, Africans and Asians, including Chinese Communists, are converting to Christianity in vast numbers.

And Stark says it's not just for existential satisfaction but because of Christianity's appeal to reason and its inseparable link to the rise of the West.

"For many non-Europeans, becoming a Christian is intrinsic to becoming modern," Stark writes.

S TARK ends his revolutionary volume with a recent quote from a Chinese scholar who concluded it was not military, political or economic causes, but rather a religious one which explained the pre-eminence of the West throughout the world today.

"The heart of your culture is your religion -- Christianity. "That is why the West is so powerful," he writes.

Our society will remain a progressive and desirable place to live to the extent that it remains fundamentally Christian.

paulgray@skynet.net.au

Monday, March 20, 2006

"Discrimination" & Freedom

Perhaps I am out of touch with these times; But, I was raised with the lesson that "discrimination" meant making choices and, in fact, the best choices between what was good and what was not-good. I was taught to choose between: Good food and bad; Literature and trash waste of ink and paper; Constructive order and destructive disorder or chaos; Those moral and cultural values (And cultures) which support ordered and productive civilization VS. those which do the opposite; Between good rational thought and bad thinking habits; G ood emotions and sick ones; Freedom and slavery (Within or to self or to others); AND, all those other choices which are made OR should be made every day by both individuals and collectives of persons.

I see no reasons why I should not "discriminate" against: That part of "Black culture" represented by disproportionate murder, rape, robbery and other crimes AND such "music" as "ganstra rap" and such concepts that acedemic effort is "thinking "White"; Islam as a 1400-year old criminal and terrorist ideology (NOT a religion) based on the power of murder, revenge, rape, genocide, the destruction of civilization and real cultures and all the other horrors that it has brought to the world and still, to this day, still inflicts on humanity; And, its civilization destroying cousin "secular humanism" which uses "more legal" means to the same ends.

I see no reason I should not "discriminate" in favor of Western Civilization (Which has brought more scientific, engineering, philosophical, artistic and like progress than all other cultures) and of its prime and underlying force, Christianity and, more specially, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and Peoples.

Most of all, I support to freedom to make such "discrimintions" against all of the "political correctness" limiting it in our world---Especially in the now self-destructive and once civilized area of Western Europe.

Legal Defintions Of Islam & Secular Humanism

I suggest that our law is very confused as to what is a religion and that definitions need to be in place as they are for what are "charitable" or "non-profit" organizations. Therefore, I suggest that the following two definitions be put into legal-effect by the Congress or the Supreme Court or both OR, if necessary, by amending our Constitution.

ISLAM: Not a religion; But, a 1400-plus year old terrorist-criminal ideology or force or loose organizaition based on the power of murder, revenge, rape, robbery, genocide, the destruction of cultures-and-civilizations AND the deprivation of equal social, legal, sexual, economic and other rights to non-members and all women.

SECULAR HUMANISM (AND, ATHEISM): Religion(s) based on the "theological" concept that there is no God nor gods and, therefore, entitled to neither less nor more rights or protections under the Constitution as are or would be any other religion.

Friday, March 10, 2006

DNA Testing NOT Infallible



If you believe or maintain that DNA evidence is “infallible” or beyond question I strongly recommend that you obtain a copy of the April, 2006 issue of Discover magazine and read “WHO'S YOUR DADDY? Don't count on DNA testing to tell you” (Pages 68-69).

The considerable and serious questions raised therein, as to DNA testing, are based on the following two problematic areas: Inaccurate (ie “Sloppy”) testing of the provided samples; And, the phenomena of persons (Called Chimeras) who DNA “signatures” vary according to the place from which samples are taken.

As to lab errors, you should recall the not too-long-ago flurry of news as to errors in medical testing due to errors committed by overworked technicians. It appears from the noted article that the same can be the case in paternity cases and, perhaps, in criminal cases. Defense attorneys and their opponents, should insure that DNA samples are: Kept in a legally AND scientifically secure manner; Divided up and randomly selected for testing so as to maintain a fair sample for independent testing if the defense requests it; And, used as evidence if-and-only-if the reliability of the testing agency and technician can be demonstrated. To do otherwise would leave the prosecuting/plaintiff's case open to serious challenges and doubts—In the trial court or upon appeal.

On the other hand, there may be cases where the innocence of convicted criminals was “proved” by DNA evidence may be in error IF the post-conviction sample were from (As is usual) a mouth swab and the original material was blood, semen, fingernail scrapings (Presumed to be from an attacker) or the like AND the accused is a chimera. To assure the validity of DNA testing in such cases, the source of tested materials should be the same in pre-conviction and post-conviction testing OR evidence presented that the accused is NOT a chimera.

I suggest that you keep the above in mind when reviewing news stories based on DNA testing.


Monday, March 06, 2006

I Wish I Had Written This--On Islam

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The Islamic double-standard

by Nathanael Blake

“There is certainly freedom in America to deride Christ. This is done every day on Broadway, and every other day in Hollywood. Americans do not take up arms in protest.”
— William F. Buckley Jr.
With his usual insight, Buckley has located the dog that not only isn’t barking, but has apparently taken an eternal vow of silence. As Muslim mobs torch embassies and Muslim governments begin boycotts in response to European newspapers’ publication of cartoons mocking Mohammad, there has been little surprise at such savagery.
There have been plenty of platitudes about respect and dialogue, many mealy-mouthed statements about the value of a free press, and bountiful bromides about tolerance. What there hasn’t been is any serious inquiry into the special status Islam enjoys.
Let Christians so much as stage a peaceful protest against the latest “art” to blaspheme Christianity, and the liberal media chorus will issue a cacophony of condemnation. Not at the offending art, of course, or the tasteless artist, but at those bourgeoisie boobs who had the audacity to display disgust at the demeaning of their religion. Art, we are told, exists to break taboos and transgress standards.
And Christianity is considered ripe for ridicule, as it is thought Puritanical and hierarchical, repressive and patriarchal. Islam, of course, possesses such attributes in spades (Sura 4:38: but chide [women] for whose refractoriness ye have cause to fear … and scourge them), but it’s awfully gauche to say so. Also, doing so isn’t nearly so safe as Christian-baiting; there’s no Moral Majority equivalent of Mohammad Bouyeri, the chap who butchered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a film critical of Islam.
When Muslims worldwide go on violent rampages over a few caricatures published in a newspaper they would never have heard of otherwise, no one is surprised, and the storm of disapprobation that would arise if anyone else did such a thing is forestalled. Bluntly put, we expect Muslims to behave barbarously: Muslims die in protests over supposed insults to Islam, ho-hum.
Saudi Arabia has recalled its envoy to Denmark in response to the cartoon kerfuffle, blathering about how showing such disrespect for Islam is unacceptable. I would suggest to the Saudi government that if they want me to show their pedophile prophet (yes, Mohammad first had sex with his favorite wife when she was nine and he was in his fifties) any respect, they ought to make it legal to publicly practice my religion in their kingdom. Not executing Muslims who convert to other religions would also be good.
Notes Victor Davis Hanson, “Ever since that seminal death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy, the Western world has incrementally and insidiously accepted these laws of asymmetry … the Muslim Middle East can insist on one standard of behavior for itself and quite another for others.” We are not, he acridly points out, “to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.” In that case, the Vatican declined to call another Crusade in response.
When I read passages in the Koran like Sura 8:40: “fight then against [the infidels] till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s,” I started doubting the “religion of peace” cant. Perhaps this “peace” is the peace of the grave.
Christianity grew on the blood of its martyrs; Islam grew on the blood of its enemies. The only combatant a modern Muslim martyr is sure of killing is himself; he prefers that the others be women and children.
Oh, I’m sorry; I forgot that those extremists don’t represent the majority of Muslims, who are kind and peaceable. I suppose that I’ll have to suppress the knowledge that the Palestinian majority just elected a terrorist group to govern them.
There are, to be sure, individual Muslims who are quite nice, and even a few Muslim countries that aren’t run by tyrannical kleptocrats or theocrats. But on average, Islamic nations are oppressive and poor.
The problem with Islam is that it is an immanentist religion. While Christianity teaches that the kingdom of God is not of this world, Islam holds that it is the duty of Muslims to bring the kingdom of God to this world. Islam allows no distinction between religious and governmental authority, and proclaims that good Muslims will always triumph over their infidel enemies. That’s hardly a metaphysical view that inclines toward tolerance and religious freedom.
If Muslims are incapable of separating the political from the spiritual, then both the right and the left are going to have to examine some of their favorite views. Conservatives need to take a hard look at whether the Muslim Middle East really can be remade in a free, democratic image. I used to think so, but now I’m skeptical.
Liberals, meanwhile, need to consider if their vision of multiculturalism is really possible, or whether it will succumb to what Leszek Kolakowski called “The self-poisoning of the open society.”
Finally, the “moderate” Muslims that are constantly touted need to demonstrate that they have the will and ability to lead their religion out of barbarism.
Nathanael Blake is a senior in microbiology. The opinions expressed in his columns, which appear every Wednesday, do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Barometer staff. Blake can be reached at forum@dailybarometer.com.

Friday, March 03, 2006

A Psalm For Today AND Future Times

PERHAPS, WE SHOULD CHANT THIS PSALM EVERY DAY UNTIL THE FORCES OF ISLAM AND MILITANT SECULAR HUMANISM ARE DEFEATED AND ONLY BRIEF FOOTNOTES IN OUR HISTORY BOOKS.

Psalmus 143 (144)

Psalm 143 (144)

1 Benedictus Dominus Deus meus qui docet manus meas ad proelium digitos meos ad bel lum 1 Blessed be the Lord my God, who teacheth my hands to fight, and my fingers to war.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Islam And Freedom VS. Hurriyya

This post is provided to allow you to better understand the great differences in thinking between Muslims and civilized people.

From The American Thinker On line.



In No “Hurr(i)y(ya)” for Freedom
March 1st, 2006

During several notable speeches since 2003, including both inaugural and State of the Union addresses, President Bush has repeatedly stressed the paramount importance of promoting freedom in the Middle East. Speaking in an almost messianic idiom, he has termed such a quest

“the calling of our time …the calling of our country.”

Most recently, he reiterated this theme while speaking to The American Legion on February 24, 2006, and offered the following sanguine assessment of progress:

“Freedom is on the march in the broader Middle East. The hope of liberty now reaches from Kabul to Baghdad, to Beirut, and beyond. Slowly but surely, we’re helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we’ll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace.”

Despite President Bush’s uplifting rhetoric and ebullient appraisal of these events—which epitomize American hopes and values at their quintessential best—there is a profound, deeply troubling flaw in his (and/or his advisers) analysis which simply ignores the vast gulf between Western and Islamic conceptions of freedom itself.

Hurriyya (Arabic for “freedom”) and the uniquely Western concept of freedom are completely at odds.

Hurriyya “freedom” is – as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized “Greatest Sufi Master”, expressed it - “being perfect slavery.” And this conception is not merely confined to the Sufis’ perhaps metaphorical understanding of the relationship between Allah the “master” and his human “slaves.”

The late American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal (d. 2003) analyzed the larger context of hurriyya in Muslim society. He notes the historical absence of hurriyya as “…a fundamental political concept that could have served as a rallying cry for great causes”. An individual Muslim

“…was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior…”.

Thus politically, Rosenthal concludes,

“…the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed…In general, …governmental authority admitted of no participation of the individual as such, who therefore did not possess any real freedom vis-à-vis it.”

Bernard Lewis, in his analysis of hurriyya for the venerated Encyclopedia of Islam, discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a few “cautious” or “conservative” (Lewis’ characterization) reformers and their writings, Lewis maintains,

“…there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary….”

Lewis also makes the important point that Western colonialism ameliorated this chronic situation:

“During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after.” [emphasis added]

And Lewis concludes with a stunning observation, when viewed in light of the present travails in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, President Bush’s optimistic assessment notwithstanding:

“In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.”

Hamas’ resounding victory in the January, 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections represents, unfortunately, a much wider trend in the Islamic Middle East. Each time open or even relatively open elections occur, authentic Islamic movements either emerge with outright electoral victories—as in Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, and the West Bank/Gaza—or at minimum, bolster their representation dramatically, as happened in Egypt under more controlled (i.e., governmentally constrained) circumstances. Historian Meir Litvak notes aptly that this consistent contemporary phenomenon,

“..highlights once more the power of Islam as the primary framework of identity in the Arab world, and the structural weakness of non-Islamist ideologies and political movements.”

The great 20th century scholar of Islamic Law, G. H. Bousquet, wrote in 1950,

“Islam first came before the world as a doubly totalitarian system. It claimed to impose itself on the whole world and it claimed also, by the divinely appointed Muhammadan law, by the principles of the fiqh, to regulate down to the smallest details the whole life of the Islamic community and of every individual believer….the study of Muhammadan law (dry and forbidding though it may appear to those who confine themselves to the indispensable study of the fiqh) is of great importance to the world today.”

Bousquet’s admonition to study Islamic Law (Shari’a), or at least recognize the profound importance of its influence on basic Muslim conceptions, has perhaps even greater urgency more than a half-century later, in 2006. While electoral processes in the Islamic Middle East may have further enfranchised the Shari’a-based understanding of hurriyya, it is delusional to equate this conception with the freedom espoused by John Stuart Mill in “On Liberty.

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad.