I just thought I’d get it out in the open, my opinion of Islam. I mean, considering this March 26 Reuters story:
U.N. Body Adopts Resolution on Religious Defamation
“GENEVA — A United Nations
forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning ‘defamation of
religion’ as a human rights violation …”
…
The U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed
by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in
favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions.
Western governments and a broad alliance of activist groups have
voiced dismay about the religious defamation text, which adds to recent
efforts to broaden the concept of human rights to protect communities
of believers rather than individuals.
Pakistan, speaking for the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC), said a “delicate balance” had to be struck between
freedom of expression and respect for religions.
Ha-ha. Good one.
“Defamation of religious (sic)
is a serious affront to human dignity leading to a restriction on the
freedom of their adherents and incitement to religious violence,” the
adopted text read, adding that “Islam is frequently and wrongly
associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”
It called on states to ensure that religious places, sites, shrines
and symbols are protected, to reinforce laws “to deny impunity” for
those exhibiting intolerance of ethnic and religious minorities, and
“to take all possible measures to promote tolerance and respect for all
religions and beliefs.”
And just to show you Islam is serious, all
Islamic countries hereby commit to ensuring that all other religions,
shrines and non-Islam religious observers in Islamic countries receive
every possible protection and freedom.
Not.
In the West, we have no trouble
understanding that individuals have rights that transcend
organizations. The Catholic Church, for instance, doesn’t own the
people who attend it, despite the evident wealth and power of the
Vatican (what other Western church has its own country, after all?).
The recent priest-altar boy molestation
cases are proof of the point. Those kids were wronged, and the Catholic
Church’s attempt to cover things up only made it worse in our Western
eyes. In the end, the church had to pay millions, and apologize to its
victims, rather than the other way around.
But in Islam?
Imagine that a Catholic school was on
fire, and a group of little girls were trying to escape the burning
building. Every adult in the vicinity would RUN to get them safely out,
some of them risking their own lives to do it. If even one of those
little girls died in the fire, the local community and every person in
it would feel not only heartbroken, but deeply guilty. They would
consider it a personal failure that those girls couldn’t be saved, and
would shoulder the responsibility of taking steps to see that it never
happened again. Every decent person who heard the story, in every
western country, would see it as a tragedy.
If we later found out that those little
girls died because a strict Catholic priest kept them from leaving the
burning buildings until their school uniforms were straight and tidy,
the response would be universal revulsion.
Yet this exact incident happened in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on March 11, 2002.
“Religious police” (can you even imagine
such a thing?) stopped a bunch of schoolgirls from leaving a blazing
building because they were not wearing the correct Islamic head
covering. In fact, three of these Allah-cops were seen beating young
girls to prevent them from leaving the school. Considering that 15
girls died in the fire, the Islamic rationale, that they were not
wearing some bit of cloth over their heads, is insanely trivial to
those of us who don’t happen to be Muslims.
According to the BBC account:
“The Saudi Gazette quoted
witnesses as saying that the police — known as the Commission for the
Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — had stopped men who tried
to help the girls and warned ‘it is a sinful to approach them.’ The
father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even
refused to open the gates to let the girls out.”
Note that this didn’t happen in some weird
outlying province where the latest Islamic memos had yet to arrive,
allowing un-Islamic extremist ideas to fester. This was in Mecca,
the central core of the faith. (If church cops in the Vatican, or Salt
Lake City, did the thing, few of us would have any doubts about whether
or not the action was directed by official church policy.)
In the West, the REAL thing is people.
Organizations and beliefs are fictions that people adopt for matters of
convenience or comfort or tradition.
But in Islamic countries, the clear
message of this incident is that the real thing is Islam, and people
are its servants and its property. Islam is the heart of society — a
religion, a culture and a lawmaking government — and individuals are
only its hands and feet. People exist to serve Islam, and even the
lives of children are forfeit to its every rule and requirement.
That there are people who would even think
of turning little girls back into a burning building is disturbing.
That they could have official positions of power and long-term
community acceptance that would lead them to carry out such an act —
clearly, they thought they were doing the right thing, and didn’t think
twice about it — is, to those of us in the West, outrageous and
disgusting. Putting it bluntly, this is some sick shit.
Okay, now imagine a future world where
it’s no longer okay for me to say what I’m saying here. Imagine that
Islam were to gain protection from any and all criticism. The very
reporting of such a story could well be banned, and any backpressure
against future such incidents would vanish.
Really, if the Catholic Church had had
such protection from criticism, would we have ever heard of the
molestation cases? No. The priests involved would have had a free hand
to do whatever they chose, and even IF a local outcry forced a molester
out of some specific diocese, he’d be quietly transferred to another.
But it’s more likely that the person accusing the church would suffer,
rather than the church.
Here’s what I think: Scientology is a
twisted mess of laughable garbage that came from the mind of a
third-rate science fiction writer. Mormonism is transparent crap that
got created from scratch by a small-time con man. The Jehovah’s Witness
religion — my father was a Witness, so I know a little something about
it — is a mess of humorless, tight-assed nonsense. The Southern Baptist
religion, where I watched my own grandmother run through the church
speaking in tongues, is silly in the extreme, but also scary as hell
because they take it seriously.
So are we going to pass resolutions banning me from saying such things? No.
In fact, the very attempt to do such a
thing is a clear admission that religions are losing the battle for the
hearts and minds of ordinary people … because the subject would never
come up unless people were ALREADY speaking out more and more with
their honest feelings.
It seems disturbing that this UN body
passed this resolution. But what the whole thing really means is that
Islam, cloistered away for so many hundreds of years, has finally
stepped out into the larger world. The same Enlightenment that softened
and weakened western religions now shines on Islam, and the
stranglehold it has had on its victims is being torn loose.
Evidence of which is that the resolution met with considerable protest.
“The European Union does not see the
concept of defamation of religion as a valid one in a human rights
discourse,” said a European Union representative. “The European Union
believes that a broader, more balanced and thoroughly rights-based text
would be best suited to address the issues underlying this draft
resolution.”
The Canadian representative said it best: “It is individuals who have rights, not religions.”
What this means is that because religions
have no rights, and should not have them, we, as individuals, must
always have the right to express our heartfelt opinions of any and all
of them. As long as the adherents of each religion have the right to
give glowing public testimonials of each, as they so obviously do, all
others should have the right to give less glowing opinions, in the same
public domain.
Here, I’ll demonstrate:
Islam sucks donkey butt.
Islam is an unflushed turd in the shiny
porcelain bowl of human intellectual progress, a reeking spot of cat
piss on the sofa cushions of human togetherness and tolerance, a
pus-leaking wound full of spreading, deadly ignorance that already
infects the minds of a billion innocent victims.
…
But then, I feel the exact same way about
the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,
the “church” of Scientology, and all the rest.
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