The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins Too

Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins Too
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, April 15 2011, 10:34:52 (UTC)
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I know fundamentalist Muslims, and Jews, can match Christians crime for religiously-inspired crime...I am not defending Islam, never have...what I am doing is condemning Christianity for its bias against Islam as being worse than it is, and of Christians as being morally superior to Muslims. Some of those who condemn Islam, who should know better, since they present themsleves as clear-thinking rational scientific types, nonetheless display the same sort of religiously inspired, logic-killing, bigotry as the religious types they appear to be condemning....maybe they could never get rid of the infection picked up as children growing up in Christian countries...they may have eventually rebelled against the obvious dogmas in their own religious faiths, but it seems there has been a carry-over....some of the infection persists. No matter how much they condemn their own religion, still, as white folk, they can't help but feel that Islam is worse...much worse...dangerously worse.

Their greatest error and what exposes them most is their insistence that the retaliation and defense and yes, offense, which Muslim people are aiming at the Christian West is primarily or even exclusively a result of or a mandate from Islam and has nothing to do with anything political or military or social or economic...it is ALL inspired by Islam...as if without Islam, Arabs and others of this religion would not mind these illegal wars and occupations and theft of their natural resources, destruction of their homes and countries and infrastructure, treasure, artifacts and children.

This is religious bigotry at its worse and that self-declared athiests and men and women of "science" should be so appallingly blind and overeager to condemn a religion which may have objectionable practices, all of them aimed internally and at their own people, while not seeing the difference between that and the violence Christian nations EXPORT and visit on completely innocent people and then blame their religion for "teaching them violence" if they dare fight back, when all they are doing is defending themselves is, well, un-scientific, to say the least.

Two examples, both from Richard Dawkins' excellent book "The God Delusion", though one is a direct quote from Sam Harris.

In a list of religiously motivated hate-crimes against those of other, or the same, religion intended to show what kinds of awful things people have done to other people purely on the basis of religious beliefs and divine comandments, Dawkins includes the flying of airplanes into twin towers. This was done, he claims, because the perpetrators were told it was okay, even laudable, by their religion. While I agree with his other examples, such as the crimes of the Inquisition, the Holocaust etc., and all other acts of murder based soley on faith, the attack of 9/11, assuming we buy the governments Conspiracy Theory, had little or nothing to do with religion...no more than any American soldier's believing his Chaplin is right when he blesses him in the name of Jesus before going into a battle from which he knows he has little chance of surviving. The religious exhortation is secondary...it is intended to make the soldier/killer feel better and to let him know God will reward his sacrifice....but Marines didn't go to Bataan because of Jesus...and no Muslim fighter engages the world's greatest superpower, even if all he has to do it with are its own jet planes, no less, because of Muhammad.

The attack of 9/11 does not belong in the same category with the Inquisition, nor with the religious wars of Europe, or the persecution and slaughter of Jews by Christians, or of pagans by Christians or of Christians by Christians...these acts were indeed motivated by religious beliefs...but 9/11 was a political/quasi-military retaliation, using jet fuel, in response to the ongoing war the United States has been waging, sometimes by proxy, against the people of the MidEast, most of whom are Muslim...and who additionally have to hear that the reason the Christian West must do this is to protect itself from THEIR Muslim faith..

If Muhammad was invoked at all it was in the same light as James Dolittle invoked Jesus when he and his men set out on what was seen as a suicide mission to bomb Tokoyo civilians in WW II. Muhammad had nothing to do with the reasons for retaliating against the United States...Americans could have been of any religion, or no religion, and Muslims still would have wanted to fight back...same with Palestinian anger at Jews...it isn't their religion that Muslims resent, it's what they are doing, often in the name of that religion...but it could be any other religion, or none...it is the acts, not the faith, that has caused these desperate attempts at self-defense through offense. Muslims would be just as pissed if they were Christians and the Jews were followers of Muhammad. Conflating 9/11 with acts of Christian bigotry and pure religiously-motivated violence, of which Christianity is historically the most guilty, clouds the issue, and I think, deliberately....in their eagerness to condemn Islam, I get the feeling that Hitchens and the rest of them think they have to also expose their own religions, to be seen as fair and unbiased...and yet this appears more and more to simply be a tactic in a strategic war on Darkies for their resources. But in the end they come down much harder on Islam, and that makes me wonder because Islam is as much the victim of Christian violence, bigotry and greed as were the Jews only a few short decades ago...

Harris is another one who, under the guise of examing all religious beliefs dispassionately and fairly, always manages to come down harder on Islam than the others. Christian nations have been ganging up on Muslims for some time now. That's hardly news. But what they try to MAKE news of is that Muslims are only fighting back because of Muhammad, because their religion tells them to...that without this religion, "as deplorable in its way as Christianity", they would be peaceable, or at the least not fight back when Christians walk all over them. The West wants to attribute Muslim determination not to be bullied to their religious beliefs and in this they do Muslims another wrong...they rob of them of simple humanity, of common fellow-feeling which resents the murder of ones children and the despoiling of ones homelands...Muslim response to Christian attacks is NOT the same thing as the religious hatred practised by the West, as perfected by Christians, because it is Muslims who have been attacked, not Christians.

A quote from Harris:

"Why did nineteen, well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation"?

This is where I sense that the curtain is lifted on Harris and we see the cheap tricktster underneath. His last sentences are no different than the religious fundamentalist who says everything is explained in the bible, "why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation?".

And who are the "neighbors" these middle-class Muslims, none of them resident in New York, attacked? Neighbors? That's not how they were perceived by their attackers. Muhammad's promise of paradise was only to be granted in a JUST CAUSE. No Muslim, believing voices from Allah told him to kill innocent children could expect to go right to Paradise if the police shot and killed him in the act. Oddly enough it is the Christian soldiers who are engaged in an unjust war, an illegal war sold on the basis of fantastic lies, which is still being prosecuted, even though we all know it was stupid and illegal and counter-productive...and yet what American soldier does not believe that his Chaplin speaks for God when he blesses him before he goes out killing innocent civilians? Never mind the hundreds of thousands of helpless Iraqi infants this nation starved to death....when has Islam EVER done such a thing?

Harris' "satisfying explanation" could only satisfy a religious bigot...even one who has decided to hate his own religion and in the process, and as the means by which, he can be seen as "honestly" hating ALL religions, because hating his own gives him license to hate and validates all the hatred he feels for another religion, in this case Islam...(where it was once Judaism)...which he can't help but portray as worse than his own, when it is his own that began the damage TO that other religion he hates so much, ostensibly BECAUSE it is a religion, and not for the real reason...which is that Darkies are fighting back....and so adds insult to injury by accusing them of ONLY defending themselves because of Islam. THAT is the "problem", that is the danger! not what Christians have been and are doing to Muslims, but just that pesky Muhammad who makes these silly and dangerous people eager for Paradise.

The sight of these 40 or so Christian nations, every one of them better equipped with weapons than Muslims, ganging up on someone who happens to be Muslim, and blaming their RELIGION for the fact that they fight back, desperately and against great odds, is sickening. And it is a mark of just how sickening this Christian religion is, and how it can cloud even the judgement of scientists who pride themselves on reason and logic and facts and evidence, that it tries to blame the religion of those it persecutes, making it THEIR fault, and their religion's fault, that they dare defend themselves.

Muslims are defending themselves....they are not "attacking". It isn't an attack when a woman punhces her rapist in the face. If the United States can spend years bombing innocent Iraqis...why the hell can't Muslims bomb back? To blame their religion for this is not only absurd, but might be a hint that it is Christians who do these things for their religion...you can always make that safe assumption because these people have a penchant for blaming others for what they know they themselves are guilty of, as a way of disarming critics and turning recriminations and examination away from themselves.

Oh, and not to forget...the only reason the United States declared war on Japan........ was because of Jesus. It had little or nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Right?



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