Comments by NakedCelt
1. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
Comment #175684 by NakedCelt on May 5, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence
Agree so far...
which are unique to Islam.
...but there I beg to differ. Religious doctrines and believers' interpretations thereof are just as subject to historical and political contingencies as any other cultural construct. A thousand years ago Islam was the civilized, urbane religion, and Christianity the natural home of honour-obsessed psychopaths. The present situation should not be taken to be a better reflection of the two faiths' respective underlying character simply because it is present.
For what it's worth, I agree with Teratorn. "Oil oil oil oil oil oil oil oil" is a perfectly reasonable description of current global economics.
I strongly disagree with any suggestion to make democracy contingent on intelligence. My solution would be education, made freely and universally available.
2. Religion a figment of human imagination
Comment #171981 by NakedCelt on April 29, 2008 at 4:07 am
I can't back this up off the top of my head, but the source was a clued-up psychologist, so hopefully others will be able to verify it. What I've heard is that you can teach lots of different animals in Skinner boxes to press one switch and get food, and avoid pressing another switch because it gives them electric shocks. Move the animal to a new box with new switches and it starts from scratch, unless it's a human, who, having learned to fear one switch, will transfer the fear to all switches. That sounds like "imagination" to me, but the psychologist reckoned it was a by-product of having evolved language (which requires that very same ability/tendency to generalize concepts).
3. Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?
Comment #167285 by NakedCelt on April 23, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Having 'open source' science would be a tremendous idea if the world were more rational and knew what to do with it. Unfortunately, the reality is that science has to be wary of giving creationists fuel for their canards.
Creationists will get fuel for their canards no matter how carefully science treads. Surely open-source science would be a big step towards the world becoming more rational.
4. Russell T Davies: Return of the (tea) Time Lord
Comment #156124 by NakedCelt on April 6, 2008 at 10:05 pm
The BBC promises this will be even more intense in episode six, "The Doctor's Daughter".
Why is this surprising? He had a granddaughter in his very first incarnation (Bill Hartnell, 1963). Presumably she had parents.
Comment #149599 by NakedCelt on March 26, 2008 at 1:39 am
Here, I've got an idea. There's got to be somebody on this site who works for a magazine or newspaper or something that does reviews. They could volunteer to review Expelled, meaning they get to see it for free. And they could take along a video camera, record it, upload it to the 'Net, and let us all tear it to bits without paying the creationists a cent.
Comment #148738 by NakedCelt on March 23, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Comment #148701 by MPhil:
Using such a term as an ordinary word to describe simply an overbearing official seems to me to be belittling the suffering of the victims of the Nazi-regime.
Maybe I'm a bit oversensitive - but I think taking care not to belittle the Nazi-regime, its crimes and the suffering of its victims is an honorable thing.
I'm afraid this sort of thing is inevitable in the long run. People use extreme words for emphasis until they aren't emphatic any more — that's been going on since there was such a thing as language. Before you sneer at those who use "totally" to mean "quite", remember that "quite" once meant "totally". And yes, a historical entity so memorably and proverbially evil as the Nazis is paydirt for anybody mining for emphatic words for evil. Therefore, those words are going to get degraded. I don't approve of it any more than you do, but there are better things to spend your time and energy fighting.
7. Don't blame Islam for terrorism, expert says
Comment #148411 by NakedCelt on March 23, 2008 at 2:34 am
Comment #143385 by Styrer-:
To suggest, in any degree whatsoever, that America (however you wish to define it) bears any responsibility whatsoever for the attacks of 9/11 is to strike an utterly wrong-headed propitiatory stance which I cannot condemn strongly enough. By doing so you shamefully re-direct blame from the true and sole perpetrators of this act of mass murder: warped and despicable Islamic fundamentalists drenched in faith who despise everything that civilised, democratic countries represent.
I have no intention of propitiating Islamic (or any other) fundamentalists in any way whatsoever. If a dangerous criminal escapes from jail and harms people, it is not "propitiatory" to the criminal to question whether security provisions at the jail were all they should be. If one of those responsible for security turns out to have been in dereliction of their duty, that in no way ameliorates or "redirects blame" from the dangerous criminal. Responsibility is not zero-sum. Duty is duty.
Comment #142063 by NakedCelt on March 11, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Trying to articulate where his religious beliefs stand now, Godfrey's eyes fill with tears. "It's been so long, a lifelong struggle, to sort out," he says. He has flirted with atheism but found it too depressing. Several years ago, he stopped attending church for a year before returning. He believes in God today, he says, but tomorrow may be different.
I know where this guy's coming from. My position was similar. My family are "theistic evolutionists" and pretty solidly Bible-believing on other issues. I became a creationist/literalist fundie as a teenager, returned to theistic evolutionism when I took geology classes at university... and kept going in that direction until I was an atheist. I remember vividly the awful moment of revelation. I remember the look on my Dad's face — the same look he had when my uncle died. Fortunately, they decided that accepting my new views would be a more effective way of enticing me back to the fold than rejecting me. But I'm pretty sure they still want me back.
My conversion, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, was preceded by a severe bout of depression. I do remember being reluctant to tackle the atheism question in my head in case the result was more depression. But I also remember the sudden realization, seeing a bumblebee fertilizing a rhododendron, that insofar as there was such a thing as "creation" I was watching it happen right in front of me. That was when I realized atheism was a liberating truth, not a depressing truth.
9. Fleabytes
Comment #136756 by NakedCelt on March 1, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Comment #136728 by Brian English:
WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU LAST NIGHT? WAIT....IS THAT LIPSTICK.....????
Aphrodite been straying again?
No, I bet it's that Mary trollop.
10. Don't blame Islam for terrorism, expert says
Comment #136741 by NakedCelt on March 1, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Comment #133713 by Styrer-:
Fuller is simply adding his voice to the most contemptible imperative: 'Blame the fucking victim'.
Err... where does Fuller blame the World Trade Centre workers, exactly? Or the other innocents killed by the bombings in Bali or London? Or any Israeli civilian blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber?
This is the problem with nationalism. 9/11 was an attack on "America". But it didn't hit the "America" that bombed Iraq or supported Israel; it hit the "America" that went to work, paid its taxes, and came home to its partner and children each night. The America that 9/11 hit was entirely innocent. That doesn't make the Iraq-bombing America innocent. They were two different groups of people, one of whom happened, theoretically, to command the loyalty of the other. Arguably, the one was also responsible for the security of the other, but they seem to have done their damnedest to dodge that responsibility ever since.
To say that the militant, globe-bestriding America bears some responsibility for what happened to the working, tax-paying America on 9/11 is not to "blame the fucking victim". Quite the opposite.
Comment #135202 by NakedCelt on February 28, 2008 at 5:34 pm
What's the mutation rate in bdelloid rotifers?
12. Don't blame Islam for terrorism, expert says
Comment #131934 by NakedCelt on February 23, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Comment #131118 by Fanusi Khiyal:
The sickening, masochistic cowardice of Islamic apologists, is nothing more than the fear of confronting true evil.
Are you referring to the little debate we've been having over on the Blind Faiths comments thread? The one where you snidely accuse al-rawandi of being a closet Muslim fundamentalist?
13. Don't blame Islam for terrorism, expert says
Comment #131009 by NakedCelt on February 21, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Comment #130970 by Teratornis:
It's like lighting a match in a room with a gas leak. It's not fair to blame the resulting explosion only on the match, or only on the gas.
Nicely put.
Multiculturalism seems to mean different things to different people, to the point where you can't — well, I can't — just say "I agree with multiculturalism" or "I disagree with multiculturalism". Both statements are true for different applications of "multiculturalism".
Let me give a concrete example. If you walk into a job interview and shake the interviewer's hand, you're probably fine. If you lean in close and press your nose against his, chances are you won't get the job. There's no actual reason why a handshake is better than a hongi (the traditional Maori greeting), but one will get you the job and the other won't.
(I've deliberately chosen that example to forestall arguments along the lines of "Immigrants should adapt to the established culture". In my country, the handshakers are the immigrants.)
Fundies arguing against gay marriage often say "Gay people have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex that straight people have." The argument "People from minority cultures have the same right to use the forms of the majority culture that people who grew up in that culture have" is exactly as logical as that. Using those forms comes automatically to people who come from the majority culture; not to people from minority cultures. That means that people from minority cultures are at an unfair disadvantage, and fixing that disadvantage is plain social justice.
If that's multiculturalism, I'm a multiculturalist. But it goes further than that. Because cultural forms like handshaking vs. hongi aren't arbitrary; they form part of a network of memes and behaviours that also include deeper parts of culture such as worldview and religion. Westerners are "cultural Christians": if I start a joke with the words "A man turns up at the Pearly Gates, and St Peter says to him..." a Westerner, even a non-believer, will recognise the religious reference and understand what has just happened to the man. To someone familiar only with Buddhism, it would be incomprehensible.
Some, realizing this, go too far the other way, and argue that cultures are all of a piece; that to try and mix the forms and values of two different cultures results in disaster. There is some evidence that seems to support this view, but on closer inspection what's generally happening in such cases is that people of a minority culture find that culture to be a burden and a shame, and so reject it — without gaining sufficient familiarity with the majority culture to be able to function competently there either. Their children's environment then consists of a despised, shameful home culture and a bewildering, overbearing majority culture. In particular, procedures for defusing conflict are culturally specific, and children from such disadvantaged backgrounds often fail to master those of either their home culture or the majority culture. And so begins the cycle of violence in immigrant and indigenous communities.
I disagree with certain self-styled multiculturalists on two points. First, what I've just described is not an inevitable result of one culture attempting to adapt to the presence of another; it happens only in the specific condition of a minority culture that is despised even by its own members — in leftie parlance, colonization. Second, while I'm sure the colonized condition doesn't help, it's not sufficient to explain violence by religious minorities. If there's one thing that stands out about minority religions, it's that they don't despise their own culture. They despise the majority culture. Rather than failing to master conflict defusion techniques, they choose not to use such techniques when conflict arises between themselves and the majority. Let God be true though every man be false!
Broadly, there are four strategies a government can adopt when faced with cultural conflict:
1. Crude nationalism — foreigners can fuck off.
2. Refined nationalism — foreigners can stop being foreign or fuck off.
3. So-called multiculturalism — foreigners can be foreign amongst themselves, and we won't bother them.
4. Integrationist multiculturalism — let's talk to these people, and make sure we all understand one another. They will be doing some things that we find unacceptable, and vice versa; those will have to be negotiated and discussed and argued over, which will take time and effort, but hopefully it's worth it in the end.
14. Machines 'to match man by 2029'
Comment #128693 by NakedCelt on February 17, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Nanos in the brain? Maybe.
AI equal to human intelligence? I don't think so. Not because it's impossible in principle, but because human intelligence takes so damn long to achieve. AI and linguists together figured out that, to make a machine that can have a sensible conversation with a human being, it needs to have a degree of real-world knowledge comparable to the human being. And that, like it or not, means a learning time comparable to the human being. A childhood of over a decade.
Still could be done if someone wanted to do it, but it'd never, ever be commercially viable. Same reason there are no elephant farms. Same reason, come to think of it, that human eugenics will never work — by the time enough generations have passed for the effects to be obvious, society's values will have changed completely and they won't be running the breeding programme any more.
15. Murder plot against Danish cartoonist
Comment #126164 by NakedCelt on February 12, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Comment #125962 by agn on February 12:
Torture the bastards and make them reveal their networks, what family members were in on it, what imams they know of who has spoken in favour of terror, the names of mosque attendants under such speeches.
Enough is enough.
The following is extremely politically incorrect, having been written 100 years ago. It was also written by a religious man. For all that, it's a damn sight more enlightened than agn's point of view.
G. K. Chesterton, 1908:
Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the metaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons." Very well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our Christian civilization, that it does fight with its own weapons and not with other people's. It is not true that superiority suggests a tit for tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice immediately realizes that his only chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at the little hooligan. The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice; that is a matter which we may contentedly leave as a solemn psychological mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended to the Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out.
16. Exorcism undergoes a revival across Europe
Comment #125736 by NakedCelt on February 12, 2008 at 12:45 am
Comment #125711 by MelM:
Even at Amazon.com's reduced price of 216USD, it's pricey and I'd have no use for the Latin text. I'm hoping that the a 1 volume English version will be published for the general reader. The old translation is available and cheap so I may end up getting it just to see what the mentality was like.
Try available and completely free... http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/
17. Blind Faiths
Comment #125692 by NakedCelt on February 11, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Comment #120625 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Saying that the Eucharist is only metaphorically the body and blood of Christ is the same thing as saying that either the Bible is a fable, or the sacraments are ineffective. Either of those strikes Christianity at the root.
No, they do not. Precisely because there are many different books in the Bible, interpretation is a must. There is nothing in the scene of the last supper that makes it mandatory to believe in transubstantiation; there are ways of reading that differently, which is not so for Naskh. Doubting the efficacy of the Eucharist doesn't strike at the root of Christianity. What would is doubting the divinity of Christ. And it is that that is the equivalent of doubting the innerancy of the Qur'an.
OK, a better analogy then: Saying that the Holy Catholic Church is a human construct is the same thing as saying that either the Body of Christ on Earth is imperfect, or that St Paul made things up for his own benefit. Either of those strikes Christianity at the root. Mediaeval Catholics did argue that, vociferously and strenuously, and went on arguing it even louder (and with even more use of sharp objects and hot things for dramatic emphasis) after the Reformation. Nevertheless, Protestants still consider themselves Christians.
Comment #120625 by Fanusi Khiyal:
It is hard to exagerrate the reverence that the believing Muslim has for the Qur'an. In the same way that a believing Christian holds Christ to be the Word Made Flesh (a platonic influence here), the believing Muslim holds the Qur'an as the Word Made Paper. To doubt even a word of the Qur'an is the same thing as a Christian doubting Christ's divinity. After that, what faith is left?
In Islam the worst concievable sin, worse than murder, theft, lies, worse than anything, is shirk, unbelief.
Both of these (read "Bible" for "Qur'an", obviously) hold for many fundamentalist churches. In the one I grew up in, you could interpret certain parts of the Bible metaphorically, but if you actually doubted any of it you needed correction and counselling. When we talked about "God's Word", we meant the Bible, not Jesus. Likewise, you could be forgiven for theft, adultery, murder, homosexuality, having an abortion, or even unbelief... but only if you repented. And the reason why all those things were bad was because they were all rejections of God and his Word. Strictly speaking, unbelief was the worst of them, because it meant a total rejection of God, not merely a disregard of one point of his plan for mankind. There are lots of people, including many I'd have to call old family friends, who sincerely believe I'm headed for hell.
I'm sure you'll point out, about now, that these aren't the "roots" of Christianity, as if what a bunch of people who called themselves Christians hundreds of years ago could somehow reach through time and telepathically shift the current Christian (or fundamentalist-Christian) consensus back to its previous position. They'd be wasting their time if they did; we'd have known they weren't proper Christians because they disagreed with what we knew God meant. We knew, with a certainty that nothing could gainsay, that the first-century Christians believed exactly what we believed about the Trinity and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and all other beliefs about them were a departure from that original truth. Despite their own claims to the contrary, religions are no more immutable than species are.
Comment #120625 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Invoking poverty to explain Islam and Jihad, rather than the doctrine itself, is like invoking the treaty of Versailles to explain Nazism and blitzkrieg, instead of the doctrine itself.
Funny, that, I do think the Treaty of Versailles is a necessary part of the explanation of the rise of Nazism. There's no "instead of" here. Like any virus, the faith meme flourishes better in some conditions than in others. Among those that favour it are poverty, socioeconomic inequality, hostile outsiders, and the cruelty-towards-deviants meme. As any Darwinian could predict, it therefore tends to encourage those conditions in turn. But that doesn't mean it's useless to try and deal with them until the faith meme is gone; quite the opposite. An effective attack on the faith meme must involve changing the conditions that favour it.
Comment #120625 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Driving Muslims towards apostasy? Are you seriously so drunk on testosterone you can't imagine what effect confirming al-Qaeda et al's propaganda about The Great Satan would really have in Muslim communities?
Are you so shrouded in confusion that you think al-Qaeda is our only problem?
et al. — Latin et alii, "and [the] others".
Comment #120625 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Or do you really think that if we play nice, and crawl and grovel sufficiently, it will spare us?
strawman n. — a caricature of one's opponent's position in a debate.
Even in Islam, people don't automatically believe what other people say just because those other people claim to be good Muslims. Otherwise there'd be no Sunni/Shia split. This is what I'm afraid might be happening a lot:
1. Shit-stirrer says "The Western infidels want to wipe us Arabs off the map and steal our oil."
2. Western country invades Arab country somewhere.
3. Western soldiers kill Arab civilians.
4. Western country makes new oil deals.
5. Average Muslims in street look at (3) and (4).
6. Average Muslims in street think about (1).
7. Average Muslims in street say to each other "I thought at first he was just a shit-stirrer, but, you know, it looks like he might have been right."
8. Shit-stirrer says "To fight off the Western infidel we must embrace the Qur'an and Sharia law with all our being."
9. Average Muslims in street say to each other "Well, he was right before."
That is how the presence of hostile outsiders favours the faith meme.
With Europe rapidly turning into Eurabia, with preachers so evil that they were expelled from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt fearlessly doing business in London, with Iraqi Muslims complaining that the sermons heard in Britain's Mosques being too extreme for their country, I believe your simplistic vision of Muslims correcting their thinking on being confronted with the obvious superiority of our Civilisation, might be a trifle flawed.
strawman n. — a caricature of one's opponent's position in a debate.
Comment #120727 by Fanusi Khiyal:
"Continual Jewish presence"? Yes, but so what? So what if there have always been people in the Holy Land who happened to have the same beliefs as another bunch of people in Russia or Spain? Why does that mean the people in Russia or Spain have the right to take land off people in the Holy Land who don't happen to share those beliefs?
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but you gave the impression of holding opinion that jewish presence in the form of Israel was encroaching on the Muslim Arabs 'who lived there originally'. My point was that the Jews lived there originally, and if anyone has a historical claim on that area, it is them. So, that argument doesn't go anywhere. And if you are going to argue right of conquest, then the arab muslims loose out on that one to.
You certainly are misunderstanding me, and I'm beginning to suspect that you're doing so on purpose. I have no intention of arguing right of conquest. Who are these "The Jews" who lived in Israel originally?
So there's this country, right, I get that. So some people lived there a long time ago who held religious belief A, I get that. So some people came along later who held religious belief B. With you so far. So the people who held religious belief B weren't particularly nice to the people who held religious belief A. I can certainly believe that — especially given that both religious belief A and religious belief B's holy history books proudly showcase them being not very nice at all to people of religious beliefs X, Y, and Z. Still following you.
So then there are some people in some other country halfway around the world who also happen to hold religious belief A. So, because they happen to hold religious belief A, they should be allowed to settle in the first country and kick people who hold religious belief B off their land. That is where we part ways, Fanusi, because I don't think that follows at all.
Those people were not living in the country first. They just happen to hold the same religious beliefs as the people who were. Not the same thing.
Comment #120727 by Fanusi Khiyal:
By "fixing" Iraq, though, I mean getting to the point that people aren't starving or getting shot and are enjoying basic human rights there.
Well, good luck.
My point precisely.
Comment #120727 by Fanusi Khiyal:
And even though an occasionalist god intervenes constantly in the universe, he does so according to a plan that he has known since before creation.
Not so. An occasionalist god intervenes at every single moment. Everything is Inshallah - if Allah wills it. He could suddenly decide to make all muslims polytheists, or reverse his commandments, or make the sun change course, and the muslim is forbidden from speculating about this. He is only supposed to obey the divine will, never, ever seek to understand.
Which, when you think about it, flings the door wide open for potential reformers and revolutionaries. "You know how God can change his mind whenever he wants to? Well, he just did."
Comment #120727 by Fanusi Khiyal:
That is a huge, huge difference from the theist god who has set up rules that he occasionally violates (impregnating Mary and so on). Because such a god has a plan, and you may inquire as to what it is. That is a very big difference.
But a theist god's plan could have a big, permanent change happening tomorrow, which he knows about and we don't. You've just given the classic example according to Christian theology: impregnating Mary. ("Behold all things are made new.") Even a deist god might have set out the real rules of the universe in such a way that they'd fool us into thinking they were one thing and then suddenly change, at a predestined built-in tipping point, to another thing. It's not a huge difference at all.
18. Blind Faiths
Comment #118862 by NakedCelt on January 31, 2008 at 5:01 am
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
NakedCelt I'm glad to see that you at least understand that the threat to civilisation today comes from Islam and no other faith.Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
More importantly, have you ever met or studied the views of Christian fundies?
I think you must be confusing me with someone else.
Comment #110689 by NakedCelt:
I just have to think of some of the things I was taught, as a teenager, in my Christian youth group, about Satanism and the occult. Satan is real and hates God and the whole universe check. Satan has a whole lot of minor evil spirit servants check. People contact these spirits through vile anti-Christian rituals check. The evil spirits are really there and really do come when called check. This is the same thing as the "sin of witchcraft" in the Bible check. The devil-worshippers have infiltrated society check... Would it be better for a country to be run on these beliefs than on those of fundamentalist Islam? The question, you see, is not which Abrahamic religion is dominant, but whether Abrahamic religion is dominant.Comment #113895 by NakedCelt:
Islamic fundamentalism is currently roaring and ravening while Christian fundamentalism is just beginning to rub the sleep from its eyes.If this is how carefully you read things, that doesn't bode well for your credibility either.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Not wishing to repeat myself, al-Ghazali made his case based on chapter and verse of the Qur'an and the Hadith. This was why he was so successful.
Well of course he bloody did, he was trying to convince Muslims. So what? Kramer and Sprenger made their case in the Malleus Maleficarum based on chapter and verse of the Bible, but you've told me the Malleus Maleficarum doesn't prove anything about Christianity.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
And then you have the endless plagiarisms. Ali Ben Isa measured the circumference of the planet you say? He was only copying - yes, literally copying - worked performed by Erastothenes of Cyrene a thousand years previously. That's like saying my learning calculus is an 'achievement'. As Bertrand Russel noted, the Arab muslim scholars - such as they were - acted more as copyists or librarians, rather than original thinkers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Ben_Abdulmelik :
Together with Ali Ben Isa in 827, he measured at 35 degrees north geographical latitude, in the valley of the Tigris, the length of a meridian and thus the Earth's circumference, getting a result of 40,248 km (or, according to other sources, 41,436 km). The two researchers measured in Arabian ell, and determined the geographical latitudes of the end points they used from the star altitudes in a celestial horizontal coordinate system.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes :
Eratosthenes knew that on the summer solstice at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead. He also knew, from measurement, that in his hometown of Alexandria, the angle of elevation of the Sun would be 1/50 of a full circle (7°12') south of the zenith at the same time. Assuming that Alexandria was due north of Syene he concluded that the distance from Alexandria to Syene must be 1/50 of the total circumference of the Earth. His estimated distance between the cities was 5000 stadia (about 500 geographical or nautical miles). He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia. The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadion was about 185 m, which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, i.e. 16.3% too large. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the "Egyptian stadion" of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 1%.
So no, Ali Ben Isa and Khalid Ben Abdulmelik did not simply "copy" Eratosthenes' experiment; they verified his results, measuring what he had merely estimated and using star altitudes rather than the sun at solstice.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
After the Reformation, sure.
No, not after the reformation. Christianity has always separated Church and State, and this is one of the most significant innovations in the history of philosophy. Where, prior to Christ, was this found? In ancient Greece, where Socrates was executed for being against the state religion? Rome, where the Emperor was divine? Japan? China? Tibet? India?
No, the Church-State distinction is a unique legacy of Christianity. There is a very real difference between a ruler who takes religious inspiration, or religious consultation, and absolute rule according to Divine Law. You'd do well to understand that.
And Christianity never was totalitarian. Christ's teachings of humanity have always been seen to supercede the nightmare of the Old Testament. That is right from the start.
Right. So using your Socrates example execution for being against the state religion is a definite sign of non-distinction between Church and State? Well, looky, looky, looky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy :
The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I instituted the punishment of death for apostasy in the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), directed towards Jews, Samaritans, Manichζans, and other heretics (10 c., "De pag.", I, 11). This legal statute formed the basis of Western European law for several centuries.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
With an omnipotent, omniscient creator god, the distinction between occasionalism, deism, and any position in between, is fairly empty.
No, it is not. Francis Bacon, one of the greatest minds who ever lived, was able to advance the Enlightenment so much because he passionately believed that studying the World was a way of understanding a God of order. Such a view would have been stark heresy in Islam.
Under occasionalism, everything that happens happens specifically because God wants it. Right? Under deism, everything that happens happens according to laws of nature set out by God at creation. Do we agree so far?
Now, what's the difference between them? An omniscient god knows everything that is going to happen, in minute detail, for the entire universe. Hence, even though a deist god sets out everything at creation, he knows and intends every single consequence of the laws of nature he has set out. And even though an occasionalist god intervenes constantly in the universe, he does so according to a plan that he has known since before creation. An occasionalist god could intervene and prevent a candle from lighting; but a deist god could plan ahead and arrange the laws of the universe in such a way that that particular attempt to light the candle was bound to fail. In both cases, the intention (on the god's part) is eternally pre-existent, the effect immediate. So what's the difference? Really?
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
...which was mythologized away by the time the New Testament was complete.
Not even sure what this means.
Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.
And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.
Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works. Revelation 2:2023 (Jesus speaking in a vision)
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. Revelation 6:911
Rejoice over her ["Babylon", i.e. pagan Rome], thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. Revelation 18:20
And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God:
For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore ["Babylon", i.e. pagan Rome], which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.
And again they said, Alleluia And her smoke rose up for ever and ever. Revelation 19:13
And he that sat upon the throne [Jesus] said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. Revelation 21:58
Read back through the thread: you've seen these before. Revelation presents Jesus as an avenging warrior god, and it was probably written in Nero's time, before the Gospels attained anything like their present form. That's what I mean by the pacifist Jesus being mythologized away.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
It is irritating to have to repeat oneself, but I apparently have to: saying that "naskh" is a human construct is the same thing as saying that either the Qur'an is imperfect, or that Muhammad made things up for his own benefit. Either of those strikes Islam at the root. Naskh wasn't something dreamed up by later jurists; it's in the Qur'an itself.
Saying that the Eucharist is only metaphorically the body and blood of Christ is the same thing as saying that either the Bible is a fable, or the sacraments are ineffective. Either of those strikes Christianity at the root. The Eucharist wasn't something dreamed up by later jurists; it's in the Bible itself (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-24, Luke 22:19-20, John 6:51-57)...
...and yet a reformer did indeed come along, denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, and his followers certainly consider themselves Christians.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
soon. Muslims see themselves as being on the downside of an unfair economic world situation; they are
Oh, sure they are. Recipients of ten trillion dollars of unearned wealth from beneath their sands, and countless billions more in Infidel aid.
The reason that muslims are at the bottom of the heap is that Islam rots everything that it touches. This tired, shopworn marxism is utter nonsense.
Yes, I'm sure every gun-waving rioter in East Jerusalem or Kabul personally benefits from the oil wealth of the House of Saud.
Naturally, it's very much in the interests of the House of Saud and the other oil-barons to convince the average Arab that his poverty is the fault of the non-Muslim West, so that rising up against Muslim regimes would be siding with the enemy. Naturally, if you're suffering injustice, it feels good to have someone to blame, someone to hate. Naturally, those with a bit more education and wealth than others (provided they've insulated their faith against the education) have more wherewithal to arm themselves for jihad. But every one of these points is mirrored in the Crusades; the French and English kings made great shows of piety while the barons and lesser lords led armies of impoverished serfs to the Holy Land.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
We should be assaulting Islam right left and centre: breaking apart the Dar al-Islam whereever possible, cutting off aid to Muslim countries, thus draining away the money weapon, end Muslim immigration, supporting apostates and human rights groups, not to mention infidel minorities in Muslim countries, shutting mosques and expelling or executing jihadists preachers in our own, and launching an agressive campaign of counter Da'wa, driving Muslims towards apostasy.
Driving Muslims towards apostasy? Are you seriously so drunk on testosterone you can't imagine what effect confirming al-Qaeda et al's propaganda about The Great Satan would really have in Muslim communities?
And ending Muslim immigration, oo, that's a good one. We wouldn't want Muslims seeing the truth about life outside Dar al-Islam for themselves, would we?
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Contra to what you seem to believe, integration of those muslim populations that we already have will only work if we are unafraid to lay down the law, and lay it down hard. We need to be unafraid to say "The free ride is over. Every other religious group has learned to behave itself. You will do so, or be expelled." And why do we want a 'fixed' Iraq? A free and democratic Kurdistan, combined with a deep fissure between the Sunni and Shia will split and weaken the camp of Islam internally, which is exactly what we want. And so on.
No, I agree with most of that. I'd just point out, though, that most of the suicide bombers in the attacks in New York and London socialized almost entirely with other Muslims throughout their time in the West. Without social integration, mere law is of little effect; check out any ghetto in the world if you don't believe me. People with little stake in civic society regard the police as a nuisance at best.
By "fixing" Iraq, though, I mean getting to the point that people aren't starving or getting shot and are enjoying basic human rights there. Whether it involves Iraq still having the same borders as before is not quite so vital a question. I like the idea of a free and democratic Kurdistan (by the way, did you know the great Muslim leader against the Crusaders, Saladin, was a Kurd?) but there's already a pretty big rift between Sunni and Shia and it doesn't seem to be weakening Islam internally much yet.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
What about Zionism? How, exactly, does believing in one religion rather than another make the land your ancestors lived in 2500 years ago belong to you rather than the people who've lived there since the Crusades?
...
There is so much wrong with that statement that I have trouble knowing where to begin. Judea has had a continual - continual, mind you - Jewish presence for over three thousand years. The Muslims overran it as conquerors - I have already written about the Crusades elsewhere, and I am tired of repeating myself. The modern Muslim Arab presence is mainly due to mass migration in the 19th century. And finally, the State of Israel is less than one thousandth of the Muslim Arab lands, and is the only one of those that can be called civilised. I have already explained this in detail.
"Continual Jewish presence"? Yes, but so what? So what if there have always been people in the Holy Land who happened to have the same beliefs as another bunch of people in Russia or Spain? Why does that mean the people in Russia or Spain have the right to take land off people in the Holy Land who don't happen to share those beliefs?
The modern European presence in New Zealand, where I live, is mainly due to mass migration in the 19th century. The Europeans overran North America as conquerors. Does that mean that I, a white New Zealander, am an invader? Does it give people who subscribe to Native American religious beliefs anywhere in the world the right to return to the USA and kick Christians out of their houses?
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
they were "operative" when Europeans colonized America
Oh Jesus - as it were - it looks like someone's taken to the Michael Moore school of journalism and historical accuracy.
http://gbgm-umc.org/UMW/Joshua/manifest.html :
"We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us...," the Puritan John Winthrop wrote. The Puritans who disembarked in Massachusetts in 1620 believed they were establishing the New Israel. Indeed, the whole colonial enterprise was believed to have been guided by God. "God hath opened this passage unto us," Alexander Whitaker preached from Virginia in 1613, "and led us by the hand unto this work."
Promised Land imagery figured prominently in shaping English colonial thought. The pilgrims identified themselves with the ancient Hebrews. They viewed the New World as the New Canaan. They were God's chosen people headed for the Promised Land. Other colonists believed they, too, had been divinely called. The settlers in Virginia were, John Rolf said, "a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God."
This self-image of being God's Chosen People called to establish the New Israel became an integral theme in America's self-interpretation. During the revolutionary period, it emerged with new force. "We cannot but acknowledge that God hath graciously patronized our cause and taken us under his special care, as he did his ancient covenant people," Samuel Langdon preached at Concord, New Hampshire in 1788. George Washington was the "American Joshua," and "Never was the possession of arms used with more glory, or in a better cause, since the days of Joshua, the son of Nun," Ezra Stiles urged in Connecticut in 1783. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson wanted Promised Land images for the new nation's Great Seal. Franklin proposed Moses dividing the Red (Reed) Sea with Pharaoh's army being overwhelmed by the closing waters. Jefferson urged a representation of the Israelites being led in the wilderness by the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day. Later, in his second inaugural address (1805), Jefferson again recalled the Promised Land. "I shall need...the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life."
The sense of divine election and the identification of the Americas with ancient Canaan were used to justify expelling America's Indigenous Peoples from their land. The colonists saw themselves as confronting "satanic forces" in the Native Americans. They were Canaanites to be destroyed or thrown out.
Comment #118160 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Listen, I have been discussing civily with you. But it irritates me when I make points, backed up with considerable scholarship, and you seem not to have read them.
Considerable scholarship? Then why do the other sources I check you against consistently fail to support your point? Is there a big pro-Islamic conspiracy between al-rawandi, Mark Rosenfelder, and the moderators of Wikipedia?
Comment #118598 by NakedCelt on January 30, 2008 at 7:32 pm
If I were recommending the use of mockery as a tool for changing people's minds, NakedCelt would have a point. But that was not my intention. Perhaps I should have been clearer.
The point of the mockery that I am advocating is immunization, not cure. That is why I stressed in my original post that it needs to be witnessed by the young.
Young people brought up with religious traditions can easily get the unjustified idea that religion is respectable. They see that their parents, whom they trust and respect, are religious. They see the deference that is accorded to priests and imams. They see centuries of religious tradition, colleges of theology, religious architecture and art. They see religion embedded in the forms and language of government and the symbols of the state.
In these conditions it can be hard for an individual, without outside, help to come to the conclusion that it is all just one huge, steaming tower of horseshit. After all, how could all those respectable, intelligent people have had it so wrong for so many centuries?
There should be voices in the land, credible voices, loud and clear, which never go away, pointing out that it is all ridiculous, that the priests and the imams are all idiots deserving no respect, and that, yes, all those people really were wrong for all those centuries -- that Mohammed and Paul and others like them have made fools out of billions.
Don't let them make a fool out of you.
By holding back from pointing out what is ridiculous, we are colluding in the illusion of respectability.
OK, I can see where you're coming from. And it's not from a religious upbringing. Unlike mine.
You see, I was brought up in an evangelical Christian family. Not creationist, 'cause my mother's a biology teacher, but I was certainly brought up to believe Jesus was the resurrected Son of God.
I encountered plenty of mockery of Christian ideas as I went through school. Mostly from my coevals, teachers wouldn't have done that, and to be honest it was mixed in with a lot of mockery of me (I'm autistic) as well. But I can assure you all it ever did, from the very earliest age, was make me angry. People who said believing in God was stupid were insulting me and my family and all the people who were my kind of people. But worst of all, they were making mock of God Himself, just like the people who mocked Noah as he built the Ark (you'll find that in every contemporary retelling of the story, though not in the actual Bible). It achieved neither immunization nor cure, but rather the memetic equivalent of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Accordingly, when I became a rebellious adolescent, my form of adolescent rebellion was to become more of a fundamentalist than my parents ever were. I embraced creationism, among other things. It wasn't until I was twenty, and struggling with the contradictions inherent in my religion, that I seriously started questioning it. And it was Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, which argues against religion without a hint of mockery, that finally brought me to enlightenment.
So, in conclusion it's a respectable hypothesis, but not one borne out by experimental data.
Comment #117775 by NakedCelt on January 29, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Comment #117479 by Janus:
Ridiculous beliefs need to be ridiculed sometimes, though. Never doing so creates the impression that they aren't ridiculous.
If you come across someone who believes that Elvis Presley is still alive, you don't nod politely, and carefully, non-offensively begin to point that the Elvis believer might have made one or two logical errors, do you? You just laugh, or stare incredulously, or shake your head in amazement, or ask if the guy is quite sane.
I'm afraid it would make no difference, though. No matter how ludicrous an idea seems to you, it doesn't seem ridiculous to the person who believes it. Making it clear that you think it's stupid will only convince them that you're a scoffer and a moron.
Let's not forget that some scientific ideas are, at least intuitively, equally bizarre: abiogenesis, designerless design, Zahavian self-handicapping, relativistic time dilation, quantum indeterminacy, and dark energy spring to mind. You have to look really closely at the evidence and the maths to realize that hey, these actually do make sense. Creationists get a lot of mileage out of scoffing at the first two in particular. Ridicule is not reason.
As for how you do convince someone their belief is wrong... I'm afraid the only way to be sure is to start from their own assumptions and work forwards gradually. While, at every point, making sure they don't think of you as an opponent because, regardless of our belief systems, humans are still primates and the primary purpose of language, from our genes' point of view, is alliance formation.
I've given this example in another comment already, but recently I was chatting to a guy who believes in Lemuria and stuff like that, and he brought up the subject of pole shifts. Rather than scoff at him, and rather than browbeat him with physics (which I would have had to look up in a textbook anyway), I said "But the shaft from the central chamber of the Great Pyramid points directly towards the present celestial North Pole." Which I'd seen on a TV documentary sometime, and which he accepted immediately as evidence that there hadn't been a pole shift since the Great Pyramid was built. Because I was on his wavelength, you see.
St Paul might have been a credulous true believer and a sexist bastard, but he knew the art of persuasion: "To the strong I became as one strong, that I might win the strong. To the weak I became as one weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by any means win some."
Comment #117472 by NakedCelt on January 28, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Comment #117358 by Steve Zara:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How can anybody be such a fucking moron? You're full of shit, Giskard, and you know it. I mean, how can anybody take such an obviously intellectually bankrupt position seriously? You must have the brains of a footballer...
Have I convinced you yet?
I think you are confusing laughing at beliefs and ranting at people.
Oh, please. Like that's a meaningful distinction. You think beliefs exist separately from people? You think people can have their thoughts ridiculed and not feel insulted themselves? What a farcically stupid idea.
...Is that any better?
It's not, is it?
22. Blind Faiths
Comment #117380 by NakedCelt on January 28, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
You don't gain credibility by referring to Mark Rosenfelder as a "whackjob". I don't always agree with him, but he's earned my respect; he supported the war on Iraq when it began, then reconsidered his position in the light of the evidence something I'm still waiting for from you
Okay, first of all, I was unaware that a position on Iraq was a litmus test of accuracy. For the record, my position is a partition that gives maximum control to Kurdistan.
More importantly, the reason I called this man a whackjob is that his thesis of tolerant Islam has been definitively exploded.
Don't play dumb. I respect Rosenfelder because he reconsidered his position in the light of the evidence. Yours seems to be as unassailable as any blind faith. If it comes to a question of your credibility versus Rosenfelder's credibility, my money's on Rosenfelder for that reason alone.
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Al-Ghazali made the case that any form of trying to understand the laws of nature was inherently heretical. He was able to do this beause Islamic metaphysics are, to use the technical term, occasionalist . In the West, and this is also true of Christianity and Judaism, things are explained in terms of cause and effect: A causes B. Not so in Islam; A is only the means by which B is caused by Allah. If I light a candle, it doesn't burn, according to Islam, because I have lit it, but because Allah at that point wants that candle to burn. There is a section of the Qur'an railing against the Jews for saying that Allah's hand is bound; they are referring to the view that you can infer any laws of nature, as they imply a limitation of Allah's power.
Looked up Al-Ghazali too. Wikipedia says he originated the occasionalist school of thought. It wasn't, as you imply, the pre-existing metaphysic. It seems Al-Ghazali embraced a God-centred philosophy as an easy way out of epistemological solipsism... just like Descartes and (especially) Berkeley centuries later. Some have indeed suggested that Descartes plagiarized from him.
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
It's worth noting that in THe History of Western Philosophy Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy takes up nine pages in a eight hundred and thirty-six page book. And as regards the achievements of Islam in the last seven hundred years, you could fit them onto the back of a matchbox.
The last seven hundred years? Maybe. But before that... well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_scientists_and_scholars
Ali Ben Isa(9th century)
He was an Astronomer. Together with khalid Ben Abdulmelik in 827, he measured the Earth's circumference, getting a result of 40,248 km (or, according to other sources, 41,436 km).
Armen Firman (c. 830, Cσrdoba, Spain - ?, Spain )
He made one of the earliest examples of a parachute.
Ibn Tahir al-Baghdadi (980, Baghdad, Iraq - 1037, ? )
He wrote about different systems of arithmetic in a work of great importance in the history of mathematics.
Ibn Al-Baitar (1197, Malaga, Spain - 1248, Damascus, Syria)
One of the greatest scientists of Muslim Spain and was the greatest botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages.
Ibn Bajjah ( ?, Saragossa, Spain - 1138, Fez, Morocco)
He had a vast knowledge of Medicine, Mathematics and Astronomy. His main contribution to Islamic Philosophy is his idea on Soul Phenomenology, but unfortunately not completed. He was also the teacher of Ibn Rushd.
Ibn al-Banna (1256, Marrakesh, Morocco - 1321, Marrakesh, Morocco)
He wrote a large number of works including an introduction to Euclid's Elements, an algebra text and various works on astronomy.
Al-Baqillani (?, Basra, Iraq - 1013, Basra, Iraq)
Muslim theologian. He introduced the conceptions of atoms and vacuum into the Kalam. He extended atomism to time and motion, conceiving them as essentially discontinuous. Once when he entered the court of the Roman Emperor while he was among his Christian monks and priests, he mockingly said to one of the priests: "How are you? How are your family and children?" to illustrate a point.
Al-Battani (850, Harran, Turkey - 929, Qasr al-Jiss, Iraq)
His best-known achievement was the determination of the solar year as being 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds.
He was able to correct some of Ptolemy's results and compiled new tables of the Sun and Moon, long accepted as authoritative, discovered the movement of the Sun's apogee, treated the division of the celestial sphere, and introduced, probably independently of the 5th century Indian astronomer Aryabhata, the use of sines in calculation, and partially that of tangents, forming the basis of modern trigonometry...
And that's only going as far as the Bs.
Funny that, though, they do seem to dry up after Ghazali's time. You know, Christian fundamentalism is coming out of the woodwork right now in the West...
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Christianity had important 'fault lines' allowing reform: separation of Church and State,After the Reformation, sure.
a non-occasionalist metaphysics,Like Islam before Al-Ghazali? Not consistently, anyway. With an omnipotent, omniscient creator god, the distinction between occasionalism, deism, and any position in between, is fairly empty.
and the character of Christ as a pacifist....which was mythologized away by the time the New Testament was complete.
Reformers could argue that they were trying to return to the original teachings, but in the case of Islam, that kind of an argument only leads straight to Salafism or Wahabism.Unless and until a reformer declares that naskh is only a human construct and there's some other way of interpreting the Qur'an that lets in things like "Let there be no compulsion in religion". There's no theoretical reason why that shouldn't happen.
Hence, Islamic reform is very unlikely - the best we can hope for is to bring this evil down.Thank you for exemplifying the major practical reason why there isn't likely to be Islamic reform any time soon. Muslims see themselves as being on the downside of an unfair economic world situation; they are. They consider their civilization to be under attack; it is. Their best option might quite likely be to abandon Islam, secularize, scientify, and join the modern world, but they won't consider that until it stops feeling like surrender. And that means the West has to take a constructive and relationship-building approach to the Muslim world. That'll involve, among many other things, (a) weaning ourselves off oil, (b) getting the fuck out of Iraq, (c) fixing Iraq, and (d) integrating Muslims in Western countries into their adoptive communities. (b) and (c) might be quite hard to do both of. You can thank Bush for that.
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
I'll say it straight: Moses, Joshua, et al., all those Jewish and Christian heroes-of-the-faith I named, were "totalitarian" "warlords" just like Muhammad.
They were warlords, but not totalitarian, and - this is very important - if you speak to any modern Christian or Jew they will say that the horrors of the Old Testament are descriptive, not perscriptive.
Any modern Christian or Jew. Say it again: any modern Christian or Jew. And I'm not sure you're right even about that. What about fundamentalist Christians who want to criminalize homosexuality and abortion? 'Cause, let me tell you, there's a lot of 'em. What about Zionism? How, exactly, does believing in one religion rather than another make the land your ancestors lived in 2500 years ago belong to you rather than the people who've lived there since the Crusades?
...Oh, sorry, I forgot. You believe that too.
Any definition of "totalitarian" that doesn't include Leviticus is pure hair-splitting.
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
That is, if you're not an Amalekit or a Philistine (tribes long since extinct), you have nothing to worry about.
However, if you are gay, or a witch...
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Those commandments are long since nonfuncional. Once again, you can argue about this but the very fact that you can argue is the point.
Nonfunctional... you mean it's like naskh in Islam?
Comment #115980 by Fanusi Khiyal:
There is not, neither in Christianity of Judaism, such an open-ended commandment to wage total war on nonbelievers and subject the whole world to a totalitarian political system, as there is in Islam. The Qur'anic curses on the jews, Christians, Polytheists, and infidels of all stripes are very much operative today, and are routinely quoted by jihadists to attract a following.
Yes, I know they are. The Biblical curses on unbelievers in the Promised Land are "operative" in Zionism, they were "operative" when Europeans colonized America, and they were "operative" during the Crusades. Religionists always like to pretend their way of interpreting their holy books is the one true way, the way their co-religionists have been doing it since their religion was founded, but it isn't. It really isn't.
Comment #117356 by NakedCelt on January 28, 2008 at 4:02 pm
3. Comment #116783 by Friend Giskard:
"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."
Twit.
Religion needs to be held up for public ridicule as often as possible, especially before the eyes of the young. While we have no actual vaccine against religion, we can still weaken its power to take hold of young people's minds by fostering an atmosphere in which the point of view that holds religion to be utterly ridiculous and contemptible is highly visible to all members of society. If the media were to give frequent exposure to the point of view that laughs at religion, and openly reviles the pushers of religion, they would be doing for the public no less a service than the doctors who immunise us against certain diseases.
As long as there remains any part of the world in which political power is wielded, or basic human rights are denied, in the name of religion, the mockery and belittling of religious beliefs should be regarded as an absolute moral good.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How can anybody be such a fucking moron? You're full of shit, Giskard, and you know it. I mean, how can anybody take such an obviously intellectually bankrupt position seriously? You must have the brains of a footballer...
Have I convinced you yet?
What, no?
Think about that.
24. Blind Faiths
Comment #113895 by NakedCelt on January 21, 2008 at 12:17 am
Comment #113653 by Fanusi Khiyal:
I never denied that there is a hideous record of oppression thanks to Christianity. I was concentrating on nonsense like this:
Historically, for instance, Islam has been much more tolerant.
I don't know what whackjob maitains that website (bear with me, I'm feeling a trifle malicious today), but this is utter nonsense. May I suggest a good online book? "The Monks of Kublai Khan", which has good material on the decline and destruction of Nestorian Christianity thanks to the Muslims.
You don't gain credibility by referring to Mark Rosenfelder as a "whackjob". I don't always agree with him, but he's earned my respect; he supported the war on Iraq when it began, then reconsidered his position in the light of the evidence something I'm still waiting for from you. Nobody here is disputing that Islam has caused a lot of grief through the ages. Nobody here is disputing that it is the most dangerous of the Abrahamic religions today. What we are disputing is that this is because Islam is just plain Eeeevil in some way that the other Abrahamic religions aren't.
Piling Islamic atrocity on Islamic atrocity isn't helping your case; all I have to do in response is pile Christian atrocity on Christian atrocity. Pointing to the viciousness and backwardness of the Islamic world now isn't helping your case either; the contingencies of geography and economics, plus the memes of faith and holy war shared by all Abrahamic religions, account for that. The particulars of Muhammad's life aren't relevant; as Christianity amply demonstrates, religions mythologize their founders whatever way suits their momentary needs.
Comment #113653 by Fanusi Khiyal:
The key point about Thomas Aquinas is that he was canonised by the Catholic Church, while his islamic equivalent - Averroes - was persecuted as a heretic. There is a reason for this and that is that Islam regards any kind of scientific or rational study of the world as inherently heretical. It is viciously anti-Reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes :
It was Ibn Tufail ("Abubacer" to the West), the philosophic vizier of Almohad Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, who introduced Averroes to the court and to Ibn Zuhr ("Avenzoar" in the West), the great Muslim physician; both men became friends. Ibn Rushd later reports how it was Ibn Tufail that inspired him to write his famous Aristotelian commentaries:
Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl summoned me one day and told me that he had heard the Commander of the Faithful complaining about the disjointedness of Aristotle's mode of expression or that of the translators and the resultant obscurity of his intentions. He said that if someone took on these books who could summarize them and clarify their aims after first thoroughly understanding them himself, people would have an easier time comprehending them. "If you have the energy," Ibn Tufayl told me, "you do it. I'm confident you can, because I know what a good mind and devoted character you have, and how dedicated you are to the art. You understand that only my great age, the cares of my office and my commitment to another task that I think even more vital keep me from doing it myself."
In 1160 Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was made Qadi of Seville and he served in many court appointments in Seville and Cordoba, and in Morocco during his career. At the end of the 12th century, following the Almohads conquest of Al-Andalus, his political career was ended. Averroes' strictly rationalist views which collided with the more orthodox Islamic views of Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur led to him banishing Averroes though he had previously appointed him as his personal physician. Averroes was not rehabilitated until shortly before his death. He devoted the rest of his life to his philosophical writings.
I have to assume that Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Zuhr were Muslims, and that whoever made him Qadi of Seville, whatever a Qadi may be, was a Muslim as well. Strange, given Islam's vicious, inherent rejection of any kind of scientific or rational study of the world, that not only was Averroes/Ibn Rushd not banished until late in life, but that Ibn Tufayl actually encouraged him to study Aristotle at the behest of the "Commander of the Faithful", no less. Dear me, whatever can be the explanation?
How about... Islam is no more "inherently" viciously anti-Reason than Christianity is, and, just like Christianity, some sects were willing to dally with reason during prosperous times as long as it didn't challenge their core beliefs?
Oh, and hey, look at this! I kept reading the Averroes article, and look what it said:
Averroes is most famous for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works, which had been mostly forgotten in the West, and for his early secular thought. Before 1150, only a few translated works of Aristotle existed in Latin Europe, and they were not studied much or given much credence by monastic scholars. It was through the Latin translations of Averroes's work beginning in the 12th century that the legacy of Aristotle became more widely known in the medieval West... His ideas were assimilated by Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas and others (especially in the University of Paris) within the Christian scholastic tradition which valued Aristotelian logic.
So Aquinas, and through him Christianity, got reason from Averroes, who got it from Aristotle. But Averroes had access to Aristotle because Islamic scholars had preserved Aristotle's writings more carefully than Christian copyists.
I'd never have known all that if you hadn't drawn my attention to Averroes. For future reference, when talking nonsense, it pays to keep inconvenient facts on the down-low.
Comment #113653 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Who
Come on, do I really need to spell this out?
No. You need to go back and read my previous comment again, with your sarcasm detector turned on this time. I'm not going to descend into Godwin's Law territory, and I'll say it straight: Moses, Joshua, et al., all those Jewish and Christian heroes-of-the-faith I named, were "totalitarian" "warlords" just like Muhammad. To reiterate my position: Islam is no worse in and of itself than any other Abrahamic religion; it is for geographical and socioeconomic reasons, not because of the specific content of their respective holy books, that Islamic fundamentalism is currently roaring and ravening while Christian fundamentalism is just beginning to rub the sleep from its eyes.
25. King Me!
Comment #113552 by NakedCelt on January 20, 2008 at 2:26 am
I disagree. There are ways and ways of arguing with believers.
The trouble is not that believers are irredeemably stupid. I used to be one, and I don't think my enlightenment involved my actually growing any new brain matter. The trouble is this:
I'm sure we've all been in the situation where we're arguing with someone and we just know they're wrong, but we can't quite verbalize the reason why they're wrong. If you stump a believer in a head-on argument, they simply assume that they are in that precise situation, and hand-wave it away.
No. There is a way, and it goes like this.
1. Distasteful as it may be, start out playing by the believer's rules.
2. Confine yourself to gaining one point per argument.
Recently, I was in a car with a friend of mine, who's a very decent, soft-spoken old gentleman who happens to believe in Lemuria, Atlantis, and things like that. Well, he happened to mention pole shifts.
Now, I could have started talking astronomy and basic physics, but (a) I don't have the facts ready to hand and (b) he'd have figured I'd been taken in by "orthodox science", and things would have ended up much like the characters in the comic strip.
Instead, I said: "Well, there certainly hasn't been a pole shift in the last few thousand years, because the Great Pyramid had a shaft leading from the central chamber aimed exactly at the present celestial North Pole." (Something I'd heard on a documentary somewhere.)
And he accepted it immediately.
That's how it's done.
26. Blind Faiths
Comment #112678 by NakedCelt on January 17, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Comment #110851 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Actually, I have quoted much of the same material in my long arguments with Christian fundies, about the horror that Christ's exaltation of faith an unreason unleashed, about the connections with the Holocaust. As I said, I am not exactly a defender of Christianity.
But that does not mean Christianity and Islam are equivalent. There is a very real difference between a religious system that has been, on occasion an accessory to totalitarianism, and one that is fascist and totalitarian quite literally from day one.
On occasion an accessory to totalitarianism? The Church led the charge on witchcraft. Muhammad may have led pogroms against the Jews, but in Crusader times Jews found sanctuary in Muslim cities against Christian atrocities. And Christians took their example directly from the Gospels. Where modern students (including Christians) see Jesus reacting against "the existing religious leadership", Christians up until about the 19th century saw him fighting simply "the Jews". And they rushed to follow suit. The examples I gave earlier weren't isolated. The Nazis' anti-Semitism drew directly on Christianity's longest-standing tradition.
Yes, longest-standing. Christians might name Jesus as their founder, but Christian ideas since the late first century have been dominated by the sect of St Paul. Non-Pauline Christianities mostly disappeared early, apart from the one strand of Gnosticism, the Cathars, who managed to hang on into the Middle Ages. And to St Paul, the great thing about Christianity was that it made Judaism ("the Old Law") obsolete. Those who obstinately clung to "the Old Law" were enemies of Christ. That attitude only deepened and solidified for some eighteen centuries.
Comment #110851 by Fanusi Khiyal:
1. There was a separation of Church and State, meaning that enlightened Princes and rulers could support freethinkers 2. The fathers of the Church, particularly St. Clement, could not bear to rid themselves of their loved pagan writings in Greek and Latin and so prserved them by reinterpreting them in Christian terms; this became the bedrock on which the great thinkers of the Enlightenment built. 3. Thanks to the scholastic tradition of the Jesuits and others, the culture of intellectual Western Europe was suffused in Greek and Latin; the classics were known by everyone in the intellectual classes. 4. Many of the clergy in fact aided the enlightenment reformers, because they wished to return to what they saw as Christ's true message of humanity, and 5. Theologically, the God of Christ is a rational one - that is, he is bound by rules, and you can reason about his nature. The importance of this cannot be overstressed; it was St. Thomas Aquinas who ended the Dark Ages, and there is a direct line from him to Bacon. This is emphatically not the case in Islam; the very idea of 'natural laws' is blasphemous. Allah is a being of total whim, capable of ordering whatever he wants, and even the idea of trying to study the natural order is heresy.
By what strange permutation of history can Thomas Aquinas be said to have ended the Dark Ages? It was Martin Luther who broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church on power and perceived truth. Then his followers and the Catholics started killing each other. Christianity had been a prerequisite for citizenship in most European polities previously, but with two churches to choose from, state leaders found themselves under threat of terrorism from one group if they bowed too readily to the other's demands. Out of pure expediency, they had to distance themselves from church affiliation entirely.
Not that I don't credit Aquinas with having reintroduced reason to the European world-view, but you have to remember that his goal was to preserve Christianity from heresy. Whenever he found himself unable to produce the orthodox answer by reasoning, he reasoned that God had said what God had said and God knew better than any mere fallible human. Giving human reason even that degree of credit sat ill with Luther, though; that was part of his beef with the Church.
http://www.zompist.com/rants.html#60
The key to understanding Islam is that it's very, very much like Christianity-- not the watered-down kind that offers singing and sleeping twice a year, but the systematic ideology that wants to convert the world to The Way-- "the" here indicating that there is no other Way to worry about. And if you think that "jihad is inherent to Islam", go ask an evangelical about the Great Commission.
There are differences, of course. Historically, for instance, Islam has been much more tolerant. Christian Europe barely tolerated the Jews and suffered no resident Muslim communities at all; Islam gladly accepted resident Christian and Jewish minorities...
The key point, perhaps, is that for a thousand years Islam saw Christendom-- with a good deal of justice-- as a forgettable pile of barbarism. As one vivid example: a 12th century writer mentions how a Crusader baron summoned a local, Syrian physician when some of his followers were ill. The doctor found a knight with an abscess on his leg; he applied a poultice, the abscess burst, and the man felt better. He also examined a woman with a "mental disorder"; he prescribed a mild diet. A "Frankish" (European) physician declared that the Syrian obviously knew nothing of medicine. For the knight, he prescribed amputation-- by axe. The amputation took two blows; the second killed the patient. The woman with a mental illness was said to have a devil in her head; he shaved her head, inscribed a cross on it, pulled off the skin to expose the skull, and rubbed it with salt. She died immediately.
Comment #110851 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Pay particular attention to points 4 and 5. Get into any argument like this with a Christian and they will argue that things like the Witch Hunts or the anti-jewish pogroms are unsuportable given Christ's teachings. Now you can argue about this, but the very fact that you can argue about it is the point.
This simply can't be done in the case of Islam. Would Muhammad approve of anti-Jewish pogroms? You betcha; he organised the damn things himself. Wars of conquest? Yup. Raiding and banditry? Hell, that's how he made his living. Killing of anyone who even ventured to criticise him? Uh-huh. Extermination of native populations that don't convert? Take a guess.
In fact, let's expand our comparison a little. Where else can you find a figure like Muhammad in the history of religion and philosophy? Christ? Hardly. Siddharta, the Buddha? Nope. Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism? Definetly not. Confucious? Aristotle? Plato? Any of the Greek philosophers? Don't make me laugh.
There is one parallel, and only one that springs to mind: Another warlord who came to a broken and divided people, unifying them, and bringing a message that controlled the totality of every aspect of life, was visciously anti-reason, exalted war and militarism, and said that the woman's place was Children, Kitchen and Church.
Think about that.
Who you mean Moses? Joshua? Gideon? David, the illustrious ancestor of Jesus? Elijah? Elisha? OK, those are Old Testament but read Acts 7, or Hebrews 11, and you'll find that their example is much admired. The Jewish law might have been superseded, but Old Testament militarism in the cause of faith was a shining light something that hadn't changed in the 1980s when I went to Sunday School. Read Revelation, probably written around 6070 CE ("666", the number of the Beast, most likely stands for "Nero Caesar"): Jesus has already become a warrior god. Yes, Christianity's nominal founder was a peaceful man. But right from the beginning, Christians have been more interested in the mythological warrior Messiah than the human preacher and faith-healer.
Ooo, no, I know! You're talking about Peter the Hermit, who inspired the Crusades! Or, no Martin Luther!
27. Blind Faiths
Comment #110689 by NakedCelt on January 12, 2008 at 12:59 am
Comment #110002 by Fanusi Khiyal:Christianity is any nicer or more reasonable, at its roots, than Islam.
That's easily done:
"The Malleus Malificarium is not one of Christianity's roots".
OK, my bad. "Roots" was a bad way of putting it. The beliefs of the Malleus Maleficarum are still now, today, in "tolerant modern day Christianity" being promulgated. I just have to think of some of the things I was taught, as a teenager, in my Christian youth group, about Satanism and the occult. Satan is real and hates God and the whole universe check. Satan has a whole lot of minor evil spirit servants check. People contact these spirits through vile anti-Christian rituals check. The evil spirits are really there and really do come when called check. This is the same thing as the "sin of witchcraft" in the Bible check. The devil-worshippers have infiltrated society check. There are two major differences that I can see: (a) those singled out as witches nowadays aren't vulnerable elderly ladies, they're astrologers and psychics and yoga practitioners and meditators and role-playing gamers and feminists (apparently the real reason feminists are pro-abortion is because their "Goddess", that being Satan in disguise, demands infant sacrifice); and (b) devil-worshippers these days only worship Satan and kill people for him, they don't have sex with him. Would it be better for a country to be run on these beliefs than on those of fundamentalist Islam? The question, you see, is not which Abrahamic religion is dominant, but whether Abrahamic religion is dominant.
Comment #110002 by Fanusi Khiyal:
But Muslims killed more than that during one single genocide in East Timor. And that was a minor genocide by the standards of this religion; it's nothing in comparison with, say, the Armenian genocide, of the Hindu Holocaust, already mentioned.
Ah, but the Armenian genocide was passively supported by the Ottomans' German allies, Germany was a Christian nation, and therefore Christianity is partly culpable too. At least, that is precisely the same logic as claiming that Islam is partly to blame for the First World War just because the Germans and Ottomans were allies. The Arabs, equally Islamic if not more so, were allies of the British. So what?
The Hindu Holocaust? I've done some quick searches and found two entirely different applications of that term:
(1) Muslim violence against Hindus at the partition of India. Not really comparable to the Jewish Holocaust, since there was plenty of Hindu violence against Muslims as well, and many Hindus had also, previously, been calling for partition. Secularists and some Hindus (notably Gandhi) opposed it. By 1947, Muslims had been living in India far longer than the Pakeha colonists have currently been living in New Zealand; does that make me (a Pakeha New Zealander) an "invader"?
(2) The sum total of all killings of Hindus on account of their Hinduism, throughout history. On balance, mostly committed by Muslims but then, India didn't share a border with European Christendom in the Middle Ages. A fair comparison would be the sum total of all killings of Jews on account of their Judaism throughout history; and I'll wager a majority of those would be in the name of Christ. Especially if you include the Nazis as Christians on the grounds that the churches in Germany supported them, which would certainly be consistent with your treatment of Islam.
There's another important point, too, if we're comparing body counts: the slaughters in East Timor, India, and Armenia were all done with firearms. The Crusaders did not have access to firearms. By the peak witch-hunting period, firearms had arrived, but were still too inaccurate for precision use you couldn't shoot a suspected witch from the other end of a village street without risking hitting innocent bystanders. Back then, firearms were only useful in mass military actions; if you fired one at an approaching army, you might not kill the guy you'd aimed at but you'd quite likely at least injure somebody. For a fairer comparison, research the conquest of the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese, and later English and French, Christians, with firearms, and nary a turban in sight. You'll find words like "genocide" and "holocaust" spring quite readily to mind. And yes, the conquistadores did what they did explicitly in the name of Christ.
Comment #110002 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Now, let's turn to those 'roots'. The actual roots. Christ says the following:
Put up again thy sword into his place: All they that take the sword shall persih with the sword
And here is what the Qur'an says:
Fight those who do not believe in Allah, ... nor follow the religion of truth... until they pay the tax in acknowledg-ment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."
Qur'an, Sura 9:29
A bit different, no? Muhammad is also know, by and to pious Muslims, as the Prophet of the Sword.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. Matthew 10:34 (Jesus speaking)
And he [Jesus] said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.
Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. Luke 22:3536
Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.
And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.
Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works. Revelation 2:2023 (Jesus speaking in a vision)
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. Revelation 6:911
Rejoice over her ["Babylon", i.e. pagan Rome], thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. Revelation 18:20
And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God:
For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore ["Babylon", i.e. pagan Rome], which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.
And again they said, Alleluia And her smoke rose up for ever and ever. Revelation 19:13
And he that sat upon the throne [Jesus] said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death. Revelation 21:58
Fair's fair. If the nasty, belligerent passages in the Qur'an trump the nice peaceful ones ("Let there be no compulsion in religion", etc.), then the nasty belligerent passages in the New Testament trump the nice peaceful ones there too.
And since "roots" apparently means "founding document", let's take a look at Christianity's...
They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham.
But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.
Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.
Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. John 8:3944
How did this influence the later history of Christianity, you may be wondering...
Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said: "But as for these my enemies, who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them." [Luke 19:27; the speaker is a character representing God in one of Jesus' parables.] You Jews should have fasted then, when drunkenness was doing those terrible things to you, when your gluttony was giving birth to your ungodliness not now. Now your fasting is untimely and an abomination. St John Chrysostom, 387
Now from the time of the Passion of our Lord there ceased not amongst the Jewish people, who chose the seditious robber and rejected Christ the Saviour, either external wars or civil discord... The Lord shews how Jerusalem and the province of Judaea merited the infliction of such calamities, in the following words: "But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten." [Mark 13:9] For the greatest cause of destruction to the Jewish people was, that after slaying the Saviour, they also tormented the heralds of His name and faith with wicked cruelty. The Venerable Bede, between 709 and 726
As a proof of the truth and credibility of the matter we now adduce something which we have heard from the lips of Theobald, who was once a Jew, and afterwards a monk. He verily told us that in the ancient writings of his fathers it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland. Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ, that so they might avenge their sufferings on Him; inasmuch as it was because of Christ's death that they had been shut out from their own country, and were in exile as slaves in a foreign land. Thomas of Monmouth, 1173
They are real liars and bloodhounds who have not only continually perverted and falsified all of Scripture with their mendacious glosses from the beginning until the present day. Their heart's most ardent sighing and yearning and hoping is set on the day on which they can deal with us Gentiles as they did with the Gentiles in Persia at the time of Esther. Oh, how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope. The sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty and vengeful people than they are who imagine that they are God's people who have been commissioned and commanded to murder and to slay the Gentiles. In fact, the most important thing that they expect of their Messiah is that he will murder and kill the entire world with their sword. They treated us Christians in this manner at the very beginning through out all the world. They would still like to do this if they had the power, and often enough have made the attempt, for which they have got their snouts boxed lustily. Martin Luther, 1543
We reject the absurdity and the neo-Marxist-Leninist distortion that somehow all men are created equal. We believe that this Humanistic tenet of philosophy from the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" is diametrically opposed to true Christian teaching. Thus, if you believe, as the Bible teaches, that no comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ, the Son [John 14:6]; and that there is no other name or authority given under Heaven or earth whereby men may be saved [Acts 4:12]; and that the Apostle Paul was right in saying that the religions of the heathen were nothing but demon-worship [I Corinthians 10:20], then you too are a Christian Supremacist, a bigot, and the object of hatred by Talmudic Jews, Jewish, Zionistic supremacists, neo-Marxist supremacists, and Humanist supremacists, all of whom hate the Living Christ, His Holy Word, and His Holy People. The Christian Separatist Church Society, 2001
Comment #110002 by Fanusi Khiyal:
I'm guessing you're an ex-Muslim
I do not know where you get that impression. I'll take that as a complement, since those that convert out of Islam tend to be first-rate human beings - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat etc. - while those that convert into it tend to be, shall we say, less intellectually endowed than most - Adam Gadahn, Ibrahim Hooper.
I feel strongly about Islam because I deeply value such minor things as Justice, Freedom, Reason, and Civilisation. You know, minor matters.
I got the impression from your evident familiarity with the Qur'an and Muslim history, combined with pardon me your equally evident unfamiliarity with Christian teaching and history.
28. Blind Faiths
Comment #109780 by NakedCelt on January 9, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Comment #109677 by Fanusi Khiyal:
Listen, I'm not defending what the Christians have gotten up to over the centuries. But to believe that modern day Christianity is the equivalent of Islam, or that Christ and Muhammad are equivalent characters, isn't just unfair and unjust, it's pathalogical.
Who's claiming that modern day Christianity is the equivalent of modern day Islam? I'm saying that mediaeval Islam is the equivalent of modern Christianity and vice versa. Look, I'm guessing you're an ex-Muslim and presumably feel very strongly about Islam, as indeed does Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Well, I'm ex-Christian, and I can remember feeling just as enraged about Christianity for a year or two after my, what shall I call it, deconversion. Among other things, I did a dissertation on the witch-trials for my anthropology degree. Read the Malleus Maleficarum sometime it's online in English translation; Google it and then try and convince me Christianity is any nicer or more reasonable, at its roots, than Islam.
Jesus (or his scriptwriters, if he didn't exist) advocated peace and forgiveness, openly admitted that his healings were powered by belief, laid the responsibility for male lust solely on men, and stated directly, many times, that salvation could only be achieved by renouncing worldly wealth. Christians have been hand-waving away all four of these teachings (except, sporadically and when not in power, the first one) from St Paul onwards. You can't tell me religions are most strongly influenced by their founders' ideals!
29. Blind Faiths
Comment #109386 by NakedCelt on January 9, 2008 at 12:57 am
There are two civilizations.
One is moderately enlightened, mostly populated by moderate religious believers with a few extremists in the background. It has the best science and technology of any society in the contemporary world. Its recent past includes a fair amount of blood, and even the odd shameful massacre. It does have an undercurrent of militarism to a lot of its relations with other societies. It also has a powerful majority religion, many of whose clerics are impressively scholarly. Nevertheless, it's probably better to grow up in that civilization than in most other places on Earth, although a few oppressed minorities within it might well beg to differ.
The other is impoverished, scientifically backward, tribalistic in the worst sense, feudal, ruled largely by warlords, infused with a violent honour code, and fanatically devoted to its religion. In recent years, some of its members have attacked the strongholds of the first civilization in the name of that religion, wreaking shocking destruction in the process. A very small group of hereditary rulers are very rich, partly as a result of trade with the first civilization. Oddly, the worst extremists seem to be coming from that particular ruling group's country.
One civilization's chosen religion is Christianity. The other's is Islam. Which is which? That depends on the answer to another question: are we talking today, or a thousand years ago?
Undoubtedly, religion matters. But it's not all that matters. The difference between the West and Islam today is not that one has an inherently peaceful religion and the other an inherently violent one, any more than that was the case during the Crusades. The difference is socioeconomic, historical, and geographical.
To switch topics a little remember the "What have you changed your mind about?" essay question? We've seen Richard's response on this website, and I think a few others as well. Go to this page:
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_9.html
and scroll down to Scott Atran's essay. It's not perhaps all that new an observation; as Richard says in TGD, it doesn't get religion off the hook because religion still catalyses the formation of violently opposed social groupings in the first place. But it does open a whole new line of possibilities for a solution. What if, instead of browbeating religious communities with satire and well-reasoned but unlikely-to-be-listened-to polemics, we went out of our way to be friendly to their members, to knit them into our society's social networks before they have time to organize for its destruction? I don't mean being all-accepting and all-respectful and leaving them alone to do their own thing, I mean precisely not leaving them alone but making sure each young man of Muslim origin has a stake in the wider community before friendship networks of resentful religionists have a chance to form.
Comment #104864 by NakedCelt on December 29, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Hmmm. This is in response to the article, not the debate thread:
"Happy Holidays" sounds terribly bland to me, as it evidently does to Professor Dawkins. But you have to remember that both of us are non-American English speakers, for whom the word "holiday" primarily means what Americans call a "vacation". I understand that "holiday" still has some of its original connotation of specialness (it's derived from "holy day") for Americans, which it has lost for the rest of the English-speaking world. Americans, imagine having to say "happy vacations", and you'll understand how the rest of us feel.
And this is a response to a debate back on the first couple of pages. Somebody described Copernicus as living in "the dark ages" when you could get "burned at the stake". Somebody else objected that Copernicus lived in the Early Modern period, not the Early Mediaeval period which is so often popularly referred to as the Dark Ages (though not by mediaeval historians). True enough, but the burning at the stake was the point, and that reached its zenith in the Early Modern period. It might not have been The Dark Ages, but it was a pretty dark age. Arguably the Enlightenment began as a backlash against it.
31. God rest you merry atheist
Comment #99883 by NakedCelt on December 17, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Does no-one but me find "God rest ye merry gentlemen, pass on your DNA" funny?
32. Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too
Comment #86219 by NakedCelt on November 8, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Bonzai pointed out:
In order for someone to abandon his religion, something has to happen to erode his faith at the "gut" level.
Agreed. I am coming to realize that simply dissecting and pointing out the logical flaws in apologetics is not sufficient; what those kinds of beliefs need is a good thorough mocking, with heaping dollops of amused sarcasm and a disdainful snort or two for garnish.
Which, for the person concerned, will simply strengthen his belief that atheists are engaging in cognitive dissonance in order to justify their own sin. Take it from an ex-believer, that's what they'll think. Basic underlying mechanic here: believer believes atheism is bad, believer gets unpleasantness (in the form of mockery) from atheist, believer is confirmed in belief that atheism is bad. Doesn't work. Yes, you can argue I would certainly argue that believers are hyper-sensitive to mockery. Be that as it may, if your goal is to convince people to abandon their religion, this is an utterly self-defeating strategy.
33. Washoe, the sign-language chimp dies
Comment #85406 by NakedCelt on November 5, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Not so; Washoe never mastered complex grammar and never discussed abstractions, but she was quite capable of conversing in simple sentences about her immediate world. Read Roger Fouts' Next of Kin. He does draw some possibly unwarranted conclusions, but if Washoe was no more than a trained parrot then he's not just jumping to conclusions, he's lying through his teeth.
Chomskyan linguists objected on the basis of their own signing chimp, Nim Chimpsky but, as Fouts points out, Washoe was brought up like a child whereas Nim was trained like a dog. There's a difference.