The Bible Is Evil

This web site is designed to spread the vicious truth about the Bible. For far too long priests and preachers have completely ignored the vicious criminal acts that the Bible promotes. The so called “God” of the Bible makes Osama Bin Laden look like a Boy Scout. This God, according to the Bible, is directly responsible for many mass-murders, rapes, pillage, plunder, slavery, child abuse and killing, not to mention the killing of unborn children. I have included references to the Biblical passages, so grab your Bible and follow along. You can also follow along with on-line Bibles such as BibleStudyTools.net or SkepticsAnnotatedBible.com.

from Evilbible.com

"Why I am Not a Muslim" by Ibn Warraq -- Review

Review of "Why I Am Not a Muslim" by Ibn al-Rawandi

[This review was originally published in the New Humanist, Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald's Road, London, England WC1X 8SP.]

In one of his early works the traditionalist writer Frithjof Schuon makes an acute observation about the mentality of Muslims: `The intellectual - and thereby the rational - foundation of Islam results in the average Muslim having a curious tendency to believe that non-Muslims either know that Islam is the truth and reject it out of pure obstinacy, or else are simply ignorant of it and can be converted by elementary explanations; that anyone should be able to oppose Islam with a good conscience quite exceeds the Muslim's powers of imagination, precisely because Islam coincides in his mind with the irresistible logic of things'. (Stations of Wisdom). How true this is will strike anyone who has tried to have a rational discussion on religion with a Muslim born of Muslim parents and raise d in a Muslim culture.

However, that this situation does admit exceptions is proved by the author of the book under review. Ibn Warraq was born into a Muslim family and grew up in a country that now describes itself as an Islamic republic. His earliest memories are of his circumcision and first day at Quran school, and his family still consider themselves Muslims. He, however, now considers himself a secular humanist who believes that: `all religions are sick men's dreams, false - demonstrably false - and pernicious'.

Given such views, arrived at against such odds and expressed at such risk, the pusillanimous attitude of many Western intellectuals to the Rushdie affair is described with scorn:

The most infuriating and nauseating aspect of the Rushdie affair was the spate of articles and books written by Western apologists for Islam - journalists, scholars, fellow travellers, converts (some from communism) - who claimed to be speaking for Muslims. This is surely condescension of the worst kind, and it is untrue. Many courageous individuals from the Muslim world supported and continue to support Rushdie. For Ibn Warraq support for Rushdie has to be seen as part of a larger war against the rise of `fundamentalist` Islam:

For those who regret not being alive in the 1930s to be able to show their commitment to a cause, there is, first, the Rushdie affair, and, second, the war that is taking place in Algeria, the Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a war whose principal victims are Muslims, Muslim women, Muslim intellectuals, writers, ordinary decent people. This book is part of my war effort. Considering the number of Muslims now resident in Western countries this is a war towards which no one, who values critical thought, free speech and democracy, can afford to be indifferent.

This is not simply a matter of `the demonisation of Islam', but of simply and honestly looking facts in the face, something that Muslims and their supporters are notoriously incapable of doing. It can be predicted now that the main response of the Muslim community to this book will be to shout `Apostate', accuse the author of every kind of moral degeneracy, and leave the facts and arguments he adduces completely unaddressed.

These facts and arguments concern the wholly human origin of the Quran, the wholly tendentious and invented character of the hadith, the sexually-obsessed and anti-feminine nature of the sharia, the Arab empire spread by the sword and maintained by terror, the persecution of religious and intellectual minorities in that empire in the name of Islam, the incapacity of Muslims for any kind of critical or self-critical thought, and the abject intellectual and moral poverty of Islam compared to the modern secular West.

The amazing thing is that it has taken so long for such a book to appear and that it has been left to a non-Westerner to write it, since the material for its assembly has been around for anything up to a century. The mealy-mouthed and apologetic character of so much Western scholarship on Islam springs from the fact that many of these scholars, were, and are, believers, albeit in the rival creed of Christianity. While they might be willing to show Muhammad in a poor light compared to Jesus, they were not keen to press the non-historical and non-divine arguments too far, since they realised that such arguments could just as well be used against their own cherished beliefs. They preferred a complicity of intellectual dishonesty with the Muslims in the face of an increasingly skeptical and secular environment.

Perhaps the most important thing demonstrated by Ibn Warraq is that Islam is fundamentalist by nature, and not by some peculiar and aberrant recent development. All Muslims, not just the fanatics, believe that every word of the Quran is quite literally the word of God, absolutely and unquestionably true for all times, places, and people, and practically the same goes for the hadith and the sharia. Anyone who wishes to argue that the fanatics' interpretation of these elements is wrong and that a far more `liberal' interpretation can be made and that that is the real Islam, have really only their own tastes and inclinations to support them. There is no Pope in Islam, nor any Councils with authority to impose a Creed. The fanatic who thinks that all unbelievers should be killed has just as much authority as the Sufi who thinks that all religions are true and that even atheists go to heaven. Both parties could adduce Quranic texts and hadith to support their positions, and both would be drawing, in their own minds, upon the immutable word of God. As Ibn Warraq observes: `Even if we concede that Muslim conservatives have interpreted the sharia in their own way, what gives us the right to say that their interpretation is the inauthentic one and that of the liberal Muslims, authentic? Who is going to decide what is authentic Islam?'

With regard to so-called liberal Islam this manifests in the West chiefly in the form of `Sufism or Islamic Mysticism'. the title of Chapter 12. Unfortunately, this is the shortest chapter in the book, a mere six pages, and has the appearance of an afterthought, since Sufism is only really dealt with in the first two pages and there inadequately. This is unfortunate because Sufism has been taken up by many Western intellectuals for whom real Islam is Sufism, and real Sufism is the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. This is in fact a ludicrous position, since it amounts to saying that real Islam is a minority view within a minority view, a view, moreover, that for most of the history of Islam has been suspected of heresy. What is needed with regard to Sufism is an in-depth critique of the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi as expounded in the works of such contemporary scholars as William Chittick and Michel Chodkiewicz, together with a sociological survey of the circus that surrounds such contemporary Sufis as Sheikh Nazim al-Qubrusi; but that would amount to another book.

Another important achievement of Ibn Warraq is that he explodes the myth of Islamic tolerance, a myth largely invented by Jews and Western freethinkers as a stick with which to beat the Catholic Church. Islam was never a religion of tolerance and it is not tolerant by nature. Despite the way the apologists would like to depict it, Islam was spread by the sword and has been maintained by the sword throughout its history, not to mention the scourge and the cross. In truth it was the Arab empire that was spread by the sword and it is as an Arab empire that Islam is maintained to this day in the form of a religion largely invented to hold that empire together and subdue native populations. An unmitigated cultural disaster parading as God's will. Religious minorities were always second-class citizens in this empire and were only tolerated on sufferance and in abject deference to their Arab/Muslim masters; for polytheists and unbelievers there was no tolerance at all, it was conversion or death.

These repulsive characteristics are written into the Quran, the hadith and the sharia, and are an ineradicable feature of the religion. There is no way that Islam can reform itself and remain Islam, no way it can ever be made compatible with pluralism, free speech, critical thought and democracy. Anyone convinced they already possess the truth have no need for such things. Although Muslims resident in non-Muslim countries clamour for every kind of indulgence for their own beliefs and customs, there can be no doubt that given any kind of power they would impose their own beliefs and eliminate all difference. In short, as Ibn Warraq describes it in his Dedication, Islam is religious fascism, and it is only a feeble-minded political correctness that prevents it from being recognised as such.

Finally, we should note two further important points made by Ibn Warraq. First, that Islam never really encouraged science, if by science we mean `disinterested enquiry'. What Islam always meant by ' knowledge' was religious knowledge, anything else was deemed dangerous to the faith. All the real science that occurred under Islam occurred despite the religion not because of it. Second, how indebted the Muslim world has always been to the West, not only to the Greeks in the beginning, but particularly in modern times in knowledge of its own intellectual and cultural history.

These unpalatable, half realised home truths are manifest in the contemporary Muslim world in the form of a massive resentment and inferiority complex:

It is a depressing fact that during the Gulf War almost every single Muslim and Arab intellectual sympathized with Saddam Hussein, because, we are told, `he stood up to the West'. In this explanation is summed up all sense of Islamic failure, and feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis the West. The Muslim world must be in a dire way if it sees hope in a tyrant who has murdered literally thousands of his own countrymen. Indeed, and a Westerner can hardly imagine the courage it must take for Ibn Warraq to say as much.

The problem with a book such as this is that it will most likely never reach those most in need of it. That is to say young people in general and young Muslims in particular, those whose minds have not already been closed by fanaticism. How many libraries will stock it, or dare to stock it if they knew its contents? A hardback at over twenty pounds, published by an American publisher, is not likely to find its way on to high-street book shelves alongside all those uncritical, paperback apologies for Islam that seem to be appearing in ever increasing numbers. What is needed is more books like Ibn Warraq's, published by British publishers, at reasonable prices and with good distribution. But dare they do it?

A minor fault that could be corrected in future editions is that several important books and authors mentioned in text and notes fail to appear in the bibliography.

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Hadith. A tradition of the sayings or practice of the Prophet. One of the main sources of Islamic law.

Sharia. Islamic law consisting of the teachings of the Quran, the sunna of the prophet which is incorporated in the recognized traditions; the consensus of the scholars of the orthodox community; the method of reasoning by analogy.

Sunna. Properly, a custom or practice, and later narrowed down to the practice of the Prophet or a tradition recording the same.

British Covenant of Security with Islamists Ends by Daniel Pipes

British Covenant of Security with Islamists Ends by Daniel Pipes

Terrorism usually comes like a bolt from the blue, but not so the four explosions yesterday in London, killing at least 37. Some British Islamist leaders have been warning for months that such violence was imminent.

An Islamist British group called Al-Muhajiroun - "the immigrants" in Arabic - for some time publicly stated that Britain was immune from Islamist violence because of its acceptable behavior toward Muslims within the country's borders. In an April 2004 conversation, the 24-year-old Sayful Islam, who heads Al-Muhajiroun's Luton branch, announced that he supported Osama Bin Laden "100%" in the quest to achieve "the worldwide domination of Islam," but went on to voice an aversion to himself performing terrorist acts in Britain.

Yet, Sayful Islam endorsed terrorism in Britain in a broader sense "When a bomb attack happens here, I won't be against it, even if it kills my own children. … But it is against Islam for me to engage personally in acts of terrorism in the UK because I live here. According to Islam, I have a covenant of security with the UK, as long as they allow us Muslims to live here in peace." He further explained. "If we want to engage in terrorism, we would have to leave the country. It is against Islam to do otherwise."

Covenant of security? What is that? In an August 2004 story in the New Statesman, "Why terrorists love Britain," Jamie Campbell cited the author of Inside Al Qaeda, Mohamed Sifaoui, as saying, "it has long been recognized by the British Islamists, by the British government and by UK intelligence agencies, that as long as Britain guarantees a degree of freedom to the likes of Hassan Butt [an overtly pro-terrorist Islamist], the terrorist strikes will continue to be planned within the borders of the UK but will not occur here."

The New Statesman story drew from this the perversely ironic conclusion that "the presence of vocal and active Islamist terrorist sympathizers in the U.K. actually makes British people safer, while the full brunt of British-based terrorist plotting is suffered by people in other countries."

A Syrian immigrant to Britain who headed Al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri Mohammed, confirmed the covenant of security, describing companions of the Prophet Muhammad who were given protection by the king of Ethiopia. That experience, he told the magazine, led to the Koranic notion of covenant of security: Muslims may not attack the inhabitants of a country where they live in safety. This "makes it unlikely that British-based Muslims will carry out operations in the U.K. itself," Mr. Mohammed said.

But in January 2005, Mr. Mohammed determined that the covenant of security had ended for British Muslims because of post-September 11, 2001, anti-terrorist legislation that meant "the whole of Britain has become Dar ul-Harb," or territory open for Muslim conquest. Therefore, in a reference to unbelievers, "the kuffar has no sanctity for their own life or property."

The country had gone from safe haven to enemy camp. To renew the covenant of security would require British authorities to undo that legislation and release those detained without trial. If they fail to do so, British Muslims must "join the global Islamic camp against the global crusade camp."

Mr. Mohammed went on overtly to threaten the British people: "The response from the Muslims will be horrendous if the British government continues in the way it treats Muslims," explicitly raising the possibility of suicide bombings under the leadership of Al-Qaeda. Western governments must know that if they do not change course, Muslims will "give them a 9/11 day after day after day!"

When Sean O'Neil and Yaakov Lappin of the London Times asked Mr. Mohammed about his statements on the covenant, he said his definition of Britain as Dar ul-Harb was "theoretical" and he provided a non-bellicose re-interpretation:

It means that Muslims can no longer be considered to have sanctity and security here, therefore they should consider leaving this country and going back to their homelands. Otherwise they are under siege and obviously we do not want to see that we are living under siege.

In a less guarded moment, however, Mr. Mohammed acknowledged that for him, "the life of an unbeliever has no value."

Yesterday's explosions mark the end of the "covenant of security." Let's hope they also mark the end of an era of innocence, and that British authorities now begin to preempt terrorism rather than wait to become its victims.

Cruelty in the Quran (Koran)

The Skeptic's Annotated Quran shows the Quran to be more hateful and intolerant than the Bible. The Koran has made hate and violence into a fine art form. Read and weep.

Cruetly in the Bible

See the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Rather long but worth keeping in mind.

Pages after pages of intolerant hate violence and all sorts of nasty things being done and the faithful being commanded to do by a monotheist god who is brimming with hatred.

Makes one wonder that there are people who actuall believe in this sort of crap. Actually, considering that the average human is basically brainwashed idiot, it should not come as too much of a surprise.

Gore Vidal on Monotheism

This is a must read. Gore Vidal is a hero to me because of his fight against the intolerant bigoted monotheistic philosophy.

New York Review of Books, 1998

Gore Vidal

on monotheism

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved--Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal--God is the Omnipotent Father--hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and those of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

The founders of the United States were not enthusiasts of the sky-god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether and placed man at the center of the world. The young Lincoln wrote a pamphlet against Christianity, which friends persuaded him to burn. Needless to say, word got around about both Jefferson and Lincoln, and each had to cover his tracks. Jefferson said that he was a deist, which could mean anything or nothing, while Lincoln, hand on heart and tongue in cheek, said he could not support for office anyone who "scoffed" at religion.

From the beginning, sky-godders have always exerted great pressure in our secular public. Also, evangelical Christian groups have always drawn strength from those who have been suppressed economically. African slaves were allowed to organize sky-god churches, as a surrogate for earthly freedom. White churches were organized in order to make certain that the rights of property were respected and that the numerous religious taboos in the New and Old Testaments would be enforced, if necessary, by civil law. The ideal to which John Adams subscribed--that we would be a nation of laws, not of men--was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through those supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex,
alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly anti-human.

Roman Catholic migrations in the last century further re-enforced the Puritan sky-god. The Church has also put itself on a collision course with the Bill of Rights when it asserts, as it always has, that "error has no rights." The last correspondence between John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson expressed their alarm that the Jesuits were to be allowed into the United States. Although the Jews were sky-god folks, they followed Book One, not Book Two, so they have no mission to convert others; rather the reverse. Also, as they have been systematically demonized by the Christian sky-godders, they tended to be liberal and so turned not to their temple but to the ACLU. Unfortunately, the recent discovery that the sky-god, in his capacity as realtor, had
given them, in perpetuity, some parcels of unattractive land called Judea and Sumeria has, to my mind, unhinged many of them. I hope this is temporary.

In the First Amendment to the Constitution, the founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is--yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does not have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos. This separation is absolute in our original republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase "In God We Trust" onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment. Although many of the Christian evangelists feel it necessary to convert everyone on earth to their primitive religion, they have been prevented--so far--from enforcing others to worship as they do but they have forced--most tyrannically and wickedly--their superstitions and hatreds upon all of us, through the civil law and through general prohibitions. So it is upon that account that I now favor an all-out war on the monotheists.

Let us dwell upon the evils that they have wrought. The hatred of the blacks comes straight from their Bad Book. As descendants of Ham, blacks are forever accursed while St. Paul tells the slaves to obey their masters. Racism is in the marrow of the bone of the true believer. For him, black is forever inferior to white and deserves whatever ill-fortune may come his way. The fact that some monotheists can behave charitably means, often, that their prejudice is at so deep
a level that they are not aware that it is there at all. In the end, this makes any radical change of attitude impossible. Meanwhile, welfare has been the price the sky-godders were willing to pay to exclude blacks from their earthly political system. So we must live--presumably forever--with a highly enervating race war set in train by the one God and his many hatreds.

Patriarchal rage at the thought of Woman ever usurping Man's place at the helm, in either home or workplace, is almost as strong now as it ever was. According to the polls, most American women took the side of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill. But then the sky-god's fulminations against women are still very much part of the psyche of those in thrall to the Jealous God.

The ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sex sexuality has made the United States the laughingstock of the civilized world. In most of the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, private sexual behavior has nothing at all to do with anyone else, much less with the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquake and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about anything, except perhaps the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.

We are now slowly becoming alarmed at the state of the planet. For a century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. The lower atmosphere is filled with dust, we have just been told from space. The
climate changes; earth and water are poisoned. Sensible people grow alarmed but sky-godders are serene, even smug. The planet is just a staging area for Heaven. Why bother to clean it up? Unfortunately for everyone, Mr. Bush's only hope of winning in the coming election is to appeal to the superstitious. So he refuses to commit our government to the great clean-up partly because it affects the incomes of the 100 corporate men and women who pay for him and largely because of the sky-god who told his slaves "to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Well, we did just like you told us, massa. We've used everything up. We're ready for heaven now. Or maybe Mars will do.

Ordinarily, as a descendant of that eighteenth-century enlightenment which shaped our republic, I would say live and let live, and I would try not to "scoff"--to use Lincoln's verb--at the monotheists. But I am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens. We are forbidden abortion here, gambling there, same-sex almost everywhere, drugs everywhere, alcohol in a dry county. Our
prisons are the most terrible in the First World and the most crowded. Our Death Row executions are a source of deep disgust in civilized countries where more and more we are regarded as a primitive, uneducated, and dangerous people. Although we are not allowed, under
law, to kill ourselves or to take drugs that the good folk think might be bad for us, we are allowed to buy a handgun and shoot as many people as we can get away with.

Now, as poor Arthur--"there is this pendulum"--Schlesinger, Jr. would say, these things come in cycles. Every 20 years liberal gives way to conservative, and back again. But I suggest that what is wrong now is not cyclic but systemic. And our system, like any system, is obeying the second law of thermodynamics: Everything is running down; and we are well advanced along the yellow brick road to entropy. I don't think that much of anything can be done to halt this progress under
our present political-economic system. We lost poor Arthur's pendulum in 1950 when our original constitution was secretly replaced with the apparatus of the national security state that still wastes most of our tax money on war or war-related matters. Hence, deteriorating schools,
and so on. For some years, I have proposed that we hold a constitutional convention on the ground that it would be better to get the whole business out in the open for discussion. Unfortunately, every one of us has been conditioned by school and pulpit and media to believe that the original constitution is perfect even though it no longer functions except as a sort of totem like the flag. Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the
constitution as a working machine. The thoughtful are also afraid that if the religious folk could review and revise the constitution, all our liberties would go. Certainly, they will try. But I don't think they'll win. Madison's iron law of oligarchy is too strong. The Few, presumably enlightened about their rights, will guide the Many, as usual. In any case, it is better to lose our rights dramatically at a convention--thus provoking civil war--than to lose them gradually and furtively, as we are now losing them.

Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us that we are a classless society where anyone can make it. Ninety percent of our newspaper stories are about winners of lotteries or poor boys and girls who, despite adenoidal complaints, become overnight millionaire singers. So there is still hope, the press tells
the folks, for the 99% who will never achieve wealth no matter how hard they work. We are also warned at birth that it is not polite to hurt other people's feelings by criticizing their religion even though that religion may be damaging everyone through the infiltration of our common laws. Happily, the Few can not disguise the bad times through which we are all going. Word is spreading that America is now falling behind in the civilization sweepstakes. So isn't it time to discuss what we really think and feel about our social and economic arrangements?

The authors of a recent book, The Day Americans Told the Truth, gave it a try. Unfortunately, they revealed that 92% of those polled confessed to being habitual liars. This is a bit like the oldest recorded joke: a citizen on the island of Crete said, "All Cretans are liars." Proposition: is what he said true or false? So the book's information on attitudes may not be useful. But the pollsters should have examined the reason why people are so frightened that they must habitually lie about their true feelings and thoughts. Tocqueville suspected that the instinctive tyranny of the American majority would produce a terrified conformity. He seems to have been right. Certainly, nothing of any importance may be discussed in our political life.

Even today, with two anti-establishment candidates in the field, only Brown has begun to examine the amount of money that the national security state siphons out of the economy to pay for Pentagon, CIA, SDI--as well as the potential cost of the latest scenarios of possible upcoming wars in the future. Though the specifics of these wars are absurd, the implications are grim: because the Ownership will make those wars happen, as they always do, whether comically in Grenada or tragically in Vietnam. War is all that they know and all that they care about, because through the demonizing of this or that enemy they can keep the money flowing to them--while depriving the people at large of all those things that other First World people possess--from schools to health care. Now the war budget is the only subject for a political campaign at the end of what has not turned out to be the American century after all. In fact, the year 2000 will not only mark the end of American primacy but the end of the hegemony of the white race. We shall comprise about 16% of the world's population in eight years. Let us hope that the other tribes, particularly those of Asia, in their triumph, do not treat us as badly as we have treated them.

Although we may not discuss race other than to say that Jesus wants each and every one of us for a sunbeam, history is nothing more than the bloody record of the migration of tribes. When the white race broke out of Europe 500 years ago, it did many astounding things all over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions. Now the tribes are on the move again. Professor Pendulum is having a nervous breakdown because so many different tribes are arriving to live here and so far not one has had time to read The Age of Jackson. I think the taking in of everybody can probably be overdone. There may not be enough jobs for too many more immigrants though what prosperity we have ever enjoyed in the past was usually based on slave or near-slave labor--new arrivals who would work in the sweatshops much as they do today in every restaurant kitchen. No wonder the Ownership has always denied us a strong labor movement and that the 14% of the work force that is organized is constantly demonized as tools of the Soviet Union of yesteryear or of the Mafia today.

On the other hand, I think Asiatics and Hispanics are a plus culturally, and their presence tends to refocus, somewhat, the relentless white versus black war. Where I am as one with my friend
Pendulum is that the newcomers must grasp certain principles as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Otherwise, we shall become a racially divided state like the old South Africa, while enjoying, of course, the new Brazilian economy.

For 30 years I have drawn attention to the fact that we do not have political parties in the United States. This always caused distress among the media who are in place to make us think that we have a choice every four years to elect a president who will represent the people at large. Instead, we get someone like Bush whose only program, other than war, is cutting the capital gains tax, the price demanded of him by his 100 angels and their friends. I am happy that, finally, my views have begun to seep into the public debate. Even the dullest newspaper reporter now agrees that there isn't a lot of difference between Democrats and Republicans. Also my idea of limiting election campaigns to six weeks has been noted favorably, while there was actually a discussion on the admirable Crier's program that if networks and cable and radio were to give free time for the candidates they would not need to raise so much crooked money. Sad to say, my noblest cause--the taxation of all religions--has not surfaced this year, while the legalization of drugs is a non-subject since drugs have replaced communism on the Pentagon hit list.

But to revert again to the unmentionable, religion. It should be noted that religion seemed to be losing its hold in the United States in the second quarter of this century. From the Scopes Trial in '25 to the Repeal of Prohibition in '33, the sky-godders were confined pretty much to the backwoods. Then television was invented, and the electronic pulpit was soon occupied by a horde of Elmer Gantrys who took advantage of the tax exemption for religion. Thus, out of greed, a religious revival has been set in motion, and the results are predictably poisonous to the body politic.

It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us together, oh, lord, in our common humanity. Well, we have heard these exhortations for a couple of hundred years, and we are further apart now than ever. So instead of coming together in order that the many might be one, I say let us separate so that each will know where he stands. From the one many, and each of us free of the sky-god, as secular law-giver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation.

Book: Islam Unveiled by Spencer and Pryce-Jones

or the record, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith.

Editorial Reviews
From AudioFile
Spencer proclaims that Islam is not the religion of peace that many claim it to be. Opinions on his conclusions differ (to put it mildly), but it's difficult to argue with Robert Spencer's method of inquiry: It's lawyerly, in the best sense of that term. Spencer considers the testimony of many sources--of the West and the "House of Islam"--from which he deduces meaning, intent, and possible consequences. This approach makes his findings sound valid and credible--like them or not. Nadia May's brisk reading conveys the author's certitude with bantering good humor. Difficult pronunciations are well rendered, a strength that helps listeners keep track of the myriad depositions on this most important of problems. T.J.W. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist
To proclamations that Islam is a religion of peace, Spencer responds (in chapters entitled with questions such as "Is Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?" and "Is Islam Tolerant of Non-Muslims?") with evidence, historical and recent, of harsh treatment of women, other religionists, and social minorities in Islamic societies. Besides the facts Spencer presents, his citations of the Qur'an; the hadiths, or sayings and deeds of Muhammad; and Islamic authorities across the liberal-to-fundamentalist spectrum verify attitudes and practices that secular Westerners and present-day Jews and Christians don't think of as peaceable, just, or decent. For instance, slavery and polygamy may be waning in Islamic societies, but they aren't disapproved of or banned because the Qur'an and hadiths endorse them. Islam hasn't adapted to change nearly as much as Judaism and Christianity have, and that accounts for its savage relations with the West. Spencer doesn't see either Islam moderating or the West regarding Islam realistically any time soon. Barring "some wondrous intervention from the Merciful One," he concludes, the immediate future "will be difficult." Alarmingly cogent. Ray Olson

Richard Dawkins has the first word

We begin with Richard Dawkins and his article of Sept 15th 2001, immediately after the destruction of 9/11, Religion's Misguided Missiles.

Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. "Mindless" may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

Here then is the rationale behind this blog. It will argue the case that the monotheist religions are the prime cause of most of the evil existing in the world today. Islam is the extreme example but Chistianity and Judaism are not exempt from the charge because they are the foundation upon which Islam is based. Islam merely took the intolerance and bigotry of its ancestors to its logical conclusion.