Tag Archives: Muslim

If Israel shouldn’t exist….

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……neither should Pakistan. BOTH states were founded after World War II by followers of a specific religion who wanted to establish a society in which that religion would dominate it. Pakistan excluded Hindus and remains a hotbed of Muslim extremism to this day (which is why it was stupid for President Bush Jr. to accept Pakistan as an ally in his “War on Terrorism”, when in fact Osama Bin Ladin was hiding out in Pakistan for years until President Obama finally had him killed). And Israel continues to violate the rights of Palestinians by building and keeping Jewish settlements on the West Bank, thus stealing land the United Nations said was not theirs in 1947. Yet the United States also continues to support Israel, no matter what. Why is Jewish extremism more acceptable than Muslim extremism? Either accept both and the states made from them or condemn both and the states made from them. Not only one or the other, unless you are a religious bigot.

This understanding came to me after reading this:

http://skepchick.org/2013/03/whitefeminism/

While other countries are “Muslim” or “Islamic” because they just so happen to have a large Muslim population, Pakistan was founded by Muslims as a Muslim country in rather deliberate fashion.

I replied as follows:

Likewise, Israel was founded by Jews as a Jewish country in rather deliberate fashion. If one is illegitimate, so is the other. Can you discuss this too?

The blog author replied:

That isn’t at all part of my focus or within my scope as a blogger. There are plenty of critics of Israel and Zionism who can speak to such matters better than I can.

I then said:

I understand. My actual point is that I know of no anti-Zionists that also attack Pakistan for its existence as a Muslim state founded to separate its people from mostly Hindu India. Proving that they are more biased towards Islam and against Jews than any just person should be.

As an non-theist, I’m one of those “a plague on both your houses” people that gets it from both sides.

Contradictions of orthodox Islam

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For the sake of argument, I define “orthodox” in Islam as including the beliefs common to both the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, though the Sunnis themselves say only they are orthodox (much like orthodox Christians may be defined as including much more than the denominations called “Orthodox”, including Catholics and most Protestants).

There are several issues in Islam I find contradictory and thus I would never become a Muslim, even if I were to ever believe in a god again.

  1. Islam is said to be a world religion, appropriate for all peoples of the world to follow. This is absurd because Islam also makes Mecca the city that all Muslims must pray to five times a day and to make a pilgrimage to at least once in their lives. Islam also makes Arabic the default language for the Quran and for Muslim prayers and calls to prayer. Even Roman Catholicism no longer makes Latin the default language for Mass around the world. A truly worldly religion would have NO default language, no one city as the center of prayer and pilgrimage, and would see holiness in all places. We Unitarian Universalists might regard Boston as a place of historical significance to us, but we don’t pray to it!
  2. Islam is said to be the final religion, the Quran is Allah’s final revelation and Muhammad the last of the Prophets.   This contradicts the idea of Allah as an all-knowing, all-powerful, and thus totally sovereign deity. If Allah wills another revelation by a new Prophet, as Baha’is have claimed, it is not for anyone to deny this. The argument that past revelations have been corrupted is pointless, since Islam is still divided into various sects. A truly pure and uncorrupted revelation from Allah would never have allowed this.
  3. Islam condemns idolatry. Really? Then Muslims should stop regarding the Quran as the Word of Allah. Even official histories of Islam admit that it wasn’t put together until some years after Muhammad’s death. Why didn’t Muhammad himself do this? Also, walking seven times around the Kaaba in Mecca during pilgrimage looks too much like idolatry to me! It’s just a building! Also, see point 1 above.
  4. Islam teaches that men can have no more than four wives at a time. Then why did Muhammad have nine or ten wives at the time of his death? Muslims should make up their minds; you cannot hold Muhammad as a supreme example of Muslims to follow and then ignore that he himself broke a basic rule of marriage!

Revert Muslims?

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After a brief discussion with a Muslim friend in Facebook about religious tolerance, I noticed she often used the word “revert” in reference to herself and certain other Muslims. I’d never heard of that term before, so I googled the phrase “Muslim reverts”. I then found this:

http://www.revertmuslims.com/glossary.html

Revert            A person who returns to a religion they previously had; Muslim custom is to apply this term to converts to Islam as well, on the grounds that Islam is the religion that every person was born into, but their parents made them another religion. (Emphasis mine)

Gee, I wonder where that delusion came from. As I stated earlier, I don’t accept that babies are born atheists either.

Some atheists have gone further and asserted that atheism merely means “lacking belief in a god”, but that is illogical since what would follow from that is all newborn babies would therefore be atheist (they are born with NO beliefs at all) and this actually makes the term atheist useless for statistical purposes as well. It is ideologically useful (you can thus argue that atheism is a child’s natural state and thus religious indoctrination violates the child’s “true” nature), but has no empirical foundation.

An empirical case against the idea that a person can be born a Muslim is that babies do not practice any of the five pillars of Islam from birth; they must be taught those rituals by their parents and others.

Why can’t babies just be considered blank slates? Then one could argue that the default religious position of any child would be the religion his parents agree to raise  him in. I was raised a Southern Baptist, so that was my default position. I later deconverted from Christianity, joined a Unitarian Universalist church, converted to the Baha’i Faith, and finally reverted to Unitarian Universalism.

But no matter what else I do in my life, my past memberships in both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baha’i Faith will always be a part of my existence. As I told my Muslim friend:  “I will pick fights with Christian extremists, atheist extremists, and even Muslim extremists. That’s because I figured out long ago that religion cannot be about objective truth, but about what fits your soul and identity. Whether there is one God, a billion gods, or no God, we all must live by what we know and can accept. To demand otherwise is to violate the very nature of what it means to be human.”

And to the end of my life, I know that my soul and my identity always will be linked to:

  • Agnosticism (my view of God)
  • Unitarian Universalism (my religious allegiance)
  • and Honorable Skepticism (my ethical philosophy)

NOT ISLAM OR ANY DOGMATIC GOD-CENTERED RELIGION!

Egyptians should be wary of the Muslim Brotherhood

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Look at this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110131/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_egypt_protest

Egyptian reform leader calls for Mubarak to resign

CAIRO – Egypt’s most prominent democracy advocate took up a bullhorn Sunday and called for President Hosni Mubarak to resign, speaking to thousands of protesters who defied a curfew for a third night. Fighter jets streaked low overhead and police returned to the capital’s streets — high-profile displays of authority over a situation spiraling out of control.

Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei’s appearance in Tahrir, or Liberation, Square underscored the jockeying for leadership of the mass protest movement that erupted seemingly out of nowhere in the past week to shake the Arab world’s most populous nation.

<snip>

Asked if Washington supports Mubarak as Egypt’s leader, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton avoided a direct answer, telling Fox News: “We have been very clear that we want to see a transition to democracy, and we want to see the kind of steps taken that will bring that about.”

<snip>

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to establish an Islamist state in Egypt, has made some statements that it was willing to let ElBaradei act as point man for the movement. But it also appeared to be moving for a more prominent role after lying low when the protests first erupted.

On Sunday evening, the presence of overtly pious Muslims in the square was conspicuous, suggesting a significant Brotherhood representation. Hundreds performed the sunset prayers. Veiled women prayed separately.

A senior Brotherhood leader, Essam el-Erian, told The Associated Press he was heading to Tahrir Square to meet with other opposition leaders. El-Erian told an Egyptian TV station that the Brotherhood is ready to contact the army for a dialogue, calling the military “the protector of the nation.”

Clinton suggested there were U.S. concerns over the possibility of the Brotherhood seizing direction of the movement. She warned against a takeover resembling the one in Iran, with a “small group that doesn’t represent the full diversity of Egyptian society” seizing control and imposing its ideological beliefs.

Indeed, if the Muslim Brotherhood does seize control of Egypt, it could easily become just as destructive to Egypt as the Taliban was to Afghanistan before it was overthrown in 2001.

The protesters should be supporting freedom, justice and peace. Any ideology that is based  on religious bigotry is the antithesis of these ideals. The people of Iran replaced one tyrant, the Shah, with another, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1979, and now Iran’s government is a fraud, supported by rigged and phony elections.

We must also remember that Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar El Sadat, was assassinated by army members opposed to peace with Israel. Most likely they were similar to the Muslim Brotherhood members in their political views.

I don’t care if one chooses to follow Islam as a personal religion, but I urge Muslims to stop trying to make it the basis of a government!