Saturday, September 25, 2010
The Founding Fathers Weren't Anti-Islam
The Founding Fathers were not nearly as anti-Muslim as many current American Christians.
As Ted Widmer writes in the Boston Globe:
The Founders were way ahead of us. They thought hard about how to build a country of many different faiths. And to advance that vision to the fullest, they read the Koran, and studied Islam with a calm intelligence that today’s over-hyped Americans can only begin to imagine. They knew something that we do not. To a remarkable degree, the Koran is not alien to American history — but inside it.
No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how worldly the Founders were, and how impervious to the fanaticisms that spring up like dandelions whenever religion and politics are mixed. They, like we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment, dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply pretend they didn’t exist.
Reports of Korans in American libraries go back at least to 1683, when an early settler of Germantown, Pa., brought a German version to these shores. Despite its foreign air, Adams’s Koran had a strong New England pedigree. The first Koran published in the United States, it was printed in Springfield in 1806.
Why would John Adams and a cluster of farmers in the Connecticut valley have bought copies of the Koran in 1806? Surprisingly, there was a long tradition of New Englanders reading in the Islamic scripture. The legendary bluenose Cotton Mather had his faults, but a lack of curiosity about the world was not one of them. Mather paid scrupulous attention to the Ottoman Empire in his voracious reading, and cited the Koran often in passing. True, much of it was in his pinched voice — as far back as the 17th century, New England sailors were being kidnapped by North African pirates, a source of never ending vexation, and Mather denounced the pirates as “Mahometan Turks, and Moors and Devils.” But he admired Arab and Ottoman learning, and when Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna succeeded in inoculating patients against smallpox, he led a public campaign to do the same in Boston (a campaign for which he was much vilified by those who called inoculation the “work of the Devil,” merely because of its Islamic origin). It was one of his finer moments.
This theory was eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters, Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”
As the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.” George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist, to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.
Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only two years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk radio extremists. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or “people of the book,” similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions.
What are Muslims Like?
Some Muslims really are terrorists.
Some Christians are as well.
In truth, the percentage of Muslim and Christian terrorists is very small compared to the huge numbers of adherents of those faiths.
Just like Christians range from abortion doctor killers to mystics, Muslims range from jihadis to poets like Rumi (Sufism - the mystical branch of Islam - is peaceful and contemplative).
As prominent Christian writer, psychiatrist and army doctor M. Scott Peck wrote, all humans - no matter what religion might be dominant in their culture - go through 4 stages of development:
1st: Chaos (a heroin addict, for example, who robs to support his habit)
2nd: Fundamentalism (clinging to dogma in order to fight off chaos; believing the book - whether Bible, Koran or Bhagavad Gita - is THE truth, and anyone who disagrees is evil)
3rd: Skepticism and questioning (feeling stable enough to question the dogma of the dominant religion and other institutions)
4th: Maturity (keeping the skepticism and questioning, but also being open to life's beauty, love and mystery; using both one's head and heart; being passionate and dedicated to making the world a better place)
(These 4 steps are not necessarily the full and complete truth, but they present one possible description which is useful for starting a discussion on religion).
Ignore the clothes, the skin color and the accent, and what do we see?
A drug addict in Saudi Arabia, America or Israel will look fairly similar. Fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews all think the other guy is evil, and that God wants them to wipe the other guy out. Skeptics look the same everywhere. And people who integrate their head and their heart all are operating out of the same basic dynamic.
We Helped Radicalize Islam
Moreover - in order to know our history and perhaps become a tad more humble in the process - it is important to recognize that we helped to create "radical Islam".
President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has openly admitted that he created the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. And it continued under President Reagan (here's a picture of President Reagan meeting with some of these folks).
As the Council on Foreign Relations writes:
The 9/11 Commission report (PDF) released in 2004 said some of Pakistan's religious schools or madrassas served as "incubators for violent extremism." Since then, there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to militancy.
***
It was Pakistan's leading role in the anti-Soviet campaign in neighboring Afghanistan during this time that radicalized some of these madrassas. New madrassas sprouted, funded and supported by Saudi Arabia and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, where students were encouraged to join the Afghan resistance.
And see this.
And veteran journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:
For half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.
***
Today it’s convenient to speak about a Clash of Civilizations. But ... in the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.
In the 1950s, the United States had an opportunity to side with the nationalists, and indeed many U.S. policymakers did suggest exactly that, as my book explains. But in the end, nationalists in the Third World were seen as wild cards who couldn’t be counted on to join the global alliance against the USSR. Instead, by the end of the 1950s, rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions. Choosing Saudi Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the United States has ever made in the Middle East.
A second big mistake ... occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And ... Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.
Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But ... America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.
Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.
And the chief of the visa section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (J. Michael Springmann, who is now an attorney in private practice) says that the CIA insisted that visas be issued to Afghanis so they could travel to the U.S. to be trained in terrorism in the United States, and then sent back to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.
In other words, if the U.S. and our allies hadn't backed the radical violent Muslims instead of more stable, peaceful groups in the Middle East, radical Islam wouldn't have grown so large.Stopping the Bad Guys
That's not to say that we don't need to stop the handful of Muslim terrorists that are threatening the U.S. (to give you an idea of numbers, there may be less than 50 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan according to the CIA itself).
But war is not the way to protect America, and defeating Islam is not the way to safety. And see this.
Specifically, according to top security analysts, the global war on terror is weakening, rather than strengthening, our national security, and making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks:
(And no ... 9/11 did not "change everything".)For those who still think that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are necessary to fight terrorism, remember that a leading advisor to the U.S. military - the very hawkish and pro-war Rand Corporation - released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida".
The report confirms that the war on terror is actually weakening national security. As a press release about the study states:
"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism."Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative". And Newsweek has now admitted that the war on terror is wholly unnecessary.
Beware of False Prophets
The neoconservatives who launched the wars in the Middle East may not even be people of faith themselves.
As I noted last year:
The godfather of the Neoconservative movement - Leo Strauss - taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.
As I have previously written:Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration. Indeed, some of the main neocon players were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years. Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli.Therefore, it is unknown whether the [Neocons] who [launched the wars in the Middle East] actually believed that the brown-skinned people they wished to [destroy] were Satan-worshippers who needed either to be converted or destroyed.
Strauss believed that "A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured" (quote is by one of Strauss' main biographers).
More likely, they just followed the old Straussian playbook in creating a threat which didn't exist - Satanic Muslims who wanted to take over the world - and using religion to rally the mid- and lower-level participants in the ... program to carry out their orders.
Atheists Versus People of Faith
I want to address one more divisive issue related to religion, which I think disempowers those of us working for a better world.
Many atheists believe that all religious people are pedophiles, idiots, crackpots or charlatans, and many people of faith think that all atheists are selfish, rootless, valueless and crude.
But let's look at the facts.
Initially, about two-thirds of American scientists believe in God if you count the social sciences. About 40% of physical scientists believe in God, and that number has stayed constant for almost 100 years. So atheists shouldn't assume that all people of faith are idiots.
And the Bible says that you shall know them by their fruits, not by what they say. So believers shouldn't assume that all people who say they are Christians are good guys.
Some Christians are pedophiles, murderers and con men. But others are fighting hard for justice, truth and social justice.
Some atheists are selfless, valueless hedonists. But others are tireless in their struggle for liberty, have a passion for freedom which they are willing to sacrifice their lives for, are selfless in their service and their love for the smallest of us.
Making the other side the "bad guys" only adds to the ability of the powers-that-be to divide and conquer us.
The left-right split is false, and hundreds of millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that the whole Republicans-Versus-Democrats things is a dog-and-pony show. They are waking up to the fact that both parties serve the big banks, big pharma, military-industrial complex, and the whole oligarchy.
These Americans realize that it doesn't matter whether a politician wears a red tie or a blue one: he or she either serves the big money boys or the American people, and that the "team" he's on doesn't matter.
We also have to wake up to the false dichotomy about faith.
Just as it is urgent that we recognize the left-versus-right split for the game it is, we atheists have to tolerate religious folks ... and we people of faith have to tolerate non-believers.I am lucky to call some incredible atheists and some amazing believers my friends and colleagues in the struggle for a better world. We may not see everything exactly the same ... but it is a big tent.
Postscript: Granted, there have always been some radical factions in Islam, just as there have always been radical factions in Christianity and Judaism. But - contrary to what fundamentalists would tell you - Muslims claim that the Quran does not promote going out and killing non-Muslims.
While there might be some stage 2 (using M. Scott Peck's system) Muslims who believe the Quran commands them to kill the "other guys", just as some stage 2 Christians or stage 2 Jews think that the Bible commands them to kill Muslims (the Crusades, for example) or atheists or abortion doctors or others. And remember, governments often use tactics to make the other guy seem more violent.
But again, the problem isn't any particular religion, it is the immaturity of a small handful of its followers, and the misuse of religion by the powers-that-be to divide and conquer us.
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Posts
Probably the key point here is the use of religion and the need for an enemy for population control. And somehow I don't think they're completely isolated.
ReplyDeleteReligion provides a convenient black and white view of the world, involves a legal childhood indoctrination which is hard to break for some, a reason for an enemy to hate you, a super-being to justify anything you do, knee-caps your critical thinking skills preventing you from being able to think for yourself, even a conformist environment which shuns (at best) independent thought (again, legally).
Scientists only need to know about 1 topic, they don't need to be generally ontop of the way of the world to do their job. As such their views outside of their topic don't really lend weight to much and are just of an indicator of the society in which they were measured. There are young earth creationists with phd's in archaeology for example ... who somehow manage to do their work with ideas in their head even 5 year olds would laugh at.
Such a vomited statement of tolerance is a common hallmark of delusion about what is important in this world -for human beings-.
ReplyDeleteIt's a common Cracker Jack box philosophy, the sort of mush that clogs the intestines, causes a constant rheumatoidal malady from a lack of proper exercise -and eventually- an early death.
Everyone's bones creak in old age. The tolerant have bones that creak at thirty -from a lack of proper exercise.
Such a life is wasted in Copley Square in that obscene and ridiculous new plaza under the shadow of Trinity Church -where bums and malefactors of every creed now spend their endlessly idle days. The permanence of it is nauseating.
Such intellectual mush breeds a volatile Existentialist ooze. That mud is not flammable-though.
The Governor of Massachusetts is some swarthy twit named "Deval" now. Great. Be tolerant.
What is important to human beings is that we recognize our intolerance as a survival mechanism. It is no less a survival mechanism than the feudal walls that should surround any proper town.
It is the vast differences between peoples we should cultivate, respect and cherish, not the immoral homogenization of tolerance that will eventually render humanity swarthy from one end of the globe to the other.
These are my two sons, nearly thirty years ago.
http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pPsRtz-uTsOxBDf2EaEyxacPdPDwLNVSgggxenV5Qk0m2sA_nMDlTWYi9jpUQoqMLH5Xs9tYKPhKWTuCGMESS9Q/oacalls.jpeg
Would you drive their type extinct? Doubtless you would with your tolerance -because their type is a target of the mongrel masses of humanity that are increasingly populating the vastly over-populated world.
Rest assured, the swarthy mass has no tolerance of us.
Some peoples need vast open spaces. Some can live standing one on top of the other a hundred feet in the air.
Diversity is what is important, regardless. So how do we protect diversity?
To protect diversity, we require intolerance, -and lots of it freely expressed and acted upon with a crude vengeance.
The deer are not tolerant of the wolves.
And the wolves are not tolerant of the deer.
And neither would either be all that they are -without their own intolerance.
I like all people -BUT where they are- not in Copley Square dragging about their shopping carts and lounging in the sun in indolence and a rank-human-shame.
Call me xenophobic if you will. But -get out of the way when I am swinging the broad ax I was born with between my teeth.
I honestly want to be able to dispense with that which I am intolerant.
I do not trust government to do the job. Government ...
The government is my enemy. Tolerance is my enemy.
I am probably most intolerant of government.
That is a statement that should explain better some of what I say here -for the vast majority of my fellow-intolerant-humanity.
We have all been sold a humanitarian feel-good fraud.
Tolerance does not make for a better world.
Read the transcript of Geert Wilders speech in New York. The founding fathers weren't anti-Muslim because the Muslims weren't even on the radar then. Wake up. http://europenews.dk/en/node/14505
ReplyDeleteOur Founding Fathers were indeed great self taught scholarly men who studied religion, history, philosophy, science and understood the dangers of religious fanaticism in government; they drew a distinct line to isolate religion from government as defined in our Constitution. Even though the US government was founded by Christians, we are not a strict Christian nation; we have freedom of religion, by design.
ReplyDeleteMajor religions are ancient myth but have a common theme that defines the difference between good and evil in the conduct of humans. There is little difference in major religions because the common thread of good and evil are closely intertwined in all religions.
To my experience, I find that modern day neo-cons are Existentialist who believe they are beyond Good and Evil and are not restrained by major religions.
To the godless Existentialist, Greed, Money and Power are good and how you acquire money and power is irrelevant; the only evil is being prevented from acquiring all the money and power.
That is their golden rule, those with the gold rule, nothing else matters. “Hurray for me and screw the other guy; I have got the gold so therefore, I am smarter, better and deserve to rule and make humanity our slaves,” is their mantra.
Existentialist, by pitting one religion against the other, is their method of controlling the masses; as long as the religious people are killing one another, the masses are distracted while they steal the gold and power.
The Existentialist who are in control of our government through the shadow government of the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations and the CIA, are hell bent on establishing world governance. The pool from which the ruling elite members are drawn comes from secret organizations that practice sociopathic pagan rituals that are satanic in nature.
For instance, the Bohemian Grove elite perform a ritual where a ritual baby is burned on a bonfire which represents “caring for humanity.”
The same is true with the secret elite Skull and Bones where Satan is ritualized and humanity is killed.
The Bush/Obama “Crusade” of pitting (good) Christians against (good) Muslims is but one example, killing begets vengeance and more killing; perfect for the Existentialist purposes.
Nice, GW; thank you for this insightful article.
ReplyDeleteDon and "commenters" like him are anti-American by definition. America is a legal definition by our laws; principle among them the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. Americans stand for freedom of religion.
Don is literally a bigot. His small mind cannot see self-evident facts: he cannot prove a religion's factual accuracy, or lack thereof. He attacks in ignorance; or at least preys (and yeah, that's a pun) on the readers' ignorance.
There are murderous "lessons" in the Bible, Don, and readers. Does that damn the entire religion?
Christians embrace the Commandment of Jesus: love God with all your mind, heart, and soul. Love your neighbor.
Enough said.
A bigot? What does THAT word mean, Mr. Herman?
ReplyDelete-"A person who is utterly intolerant of any creed, belief, or race that is not his own."-
I fail to see any proper use of the word -as it is defined-. Herman might re-read my original post, and explain his statement -to himself- and the anonymous blogger who moderates and posted such recklessly-malicious words.
Having been labeled a bigot, even if by a clown, there are surely those in this desperate world -who would venture to find justification for my eradication.
Herman is probably that INTOLERANT of me that he would ignore the possibility -and lay culpability for any possible misdeed -on god sorting it out.
Bigots are BAD people. God hates those labeled bigots!
Perhaps Herman meant the negative connotation implied by a loose usage of the word -bigot?
Herman would shun me and have the world put me on -IGNORE-.
I have read enough of Herman's posts to know that even if they play well in some crowds -his words and thoughts are disjointed from reality. Herman's ideas are illogical, archaic, and the popularly suicidal ideas of an ideologue.
Herman's ideas have no cogency. Herman clearly reads his Bible. He does not understand the concept of monism though.
I am not even the least bit surprised Herman or anyone else would ejaculate as did he upon discovering my thoughts.
My thoughts are only too true. Preaching tolerance is a mindless abomination of the human spirit.
We are not gods. We do not do anything like -it is done in heaven-.
Examine Herman's proselytizing-approach -urging humanity to continue down the Christian path of tolerance that has been so disastrous for humanity, debasing and increasingly imperiling the human experience for countless generations.
Looking at this "all your mind" approach, -the stubborn recklessness of it- has clearly for millennia invariably produced more suffering in the world.
This tolerance-approach has produced a grotesquely bloated population of an ever more perilously endangered humanity.
Does all this more-godly-ness make anyone, Herman, more god-like?
Are you a god, Herman? A near-god? Are you going to be immortal and live forever?
Is this your path to the immortality OF A GOD -to love God with all your mind, heart and soul, -and to love your neighbor -as you still believe god has commanded?
Is that what you are trying to tell me? Are you saying YOU are closer to being a god than I am?
I think you are.
You are saying that YOU are MORE AMERICAN and MORE GOD-LIKE than some BIGOT you have discovered existing within the vile machinations that go on in between your own ears.
If you are a god, then my kind clearly deserves to go extinct, for I am no god. I am not immortal. I do not aspire to be a god, nor even god-like.
Tolerance is suicidal idea, made-up long ago in a primitive world that was much safer, far cleaner, less infested with pestilence and disease and far less poisonous and dangerous than the world is today.
As the tolerant turn: this blog's author along with the neo-liberal Carls of the world are all to quick to condemn paradigms that don't accomodate their logically unsustainable worldview, but they openly embrace those that actively and routinely demand their annihilation. And then you wonder aloud why America is considered the psychopath of the world.
ReplyDeleteYou toss around qualifiers like "good" christians or muslims as if there were such a thing; if you turned down Rachel Maddow for a minute and picked up either of the texts behind those two ideologies you would immediately realize that not only are they incompatible, but the bible couldn't be more clear that according to God's perfect standards, NONE of us are good; no, not one. that includes you and me.
It's exhausting to see westerners so ignorant of what the koran commands, defending it blindly while willfully assaulting the bible that without argument serves as the touchstone of their own civilization. again, look around you at our nation for the consequences of such dogmatic doublethink.
(Psst...Carl: the "murderous" lessons you're likely referring to in the bible were ordinances specific to the israelites coming into the land of canaan, a land whose inhabitants were practicing bestiality and offering their children in fiery sacrifices to molech. yet i don't hear you condemning THOSE practices; in fact one could infer by your condemnation you were defending such atrocities -- which would line up perfectly with your defense of orthodox jihadist islam.)
so: if jefferson, adams et al and other koran readers weren't anti-islam, why not allow for the potential implementation of a theocratic shariah-like republic? why did they go out of their way to prohibit ANY state-endorsed religion, even if it was to validate the judeo-christian ethic that informed so much of the constitution? are you implying a nearsightedness that the founding fathers had? were these brave patriots cowards when it came to "defending" the koran?
Jesus tells us to judge a tree by its fruit. what was the fruit of the constitution? shariah law and the establishment of dhimmi america? no...it was the creation of perhaps the last truly free nation in the history of the world.
Stop rewriting history and start reading from the texts your so eager to defend.
Nice piece.
ReplyDeleteYou said:
> But war is not the way
> to protect America, and
> defeating Islam
> is the way to safety.
I think you perhaps meant to say "defeating Islam is NOT the way to safety." You might want to correct that!
I don't think the faith split is quite the same as the left-right split because the powers that be know that atheists aren't as susceptible to their brainwashing techniques. It's a lot easier to pit faith vs faith than faith vs non-faith. While I have friends who believe in a deity and I recognize they are well-meaning, at the same time I can't fully trust them to do the right thing every time because they are more susceptible to manipulations that take advantage of their faith. My way of showing tolerance is to think of them as having a mental illness, and try to find a cure for the afflicted.
ReplyDeleteAlso, how many atheists have gone to war in the name of their lack of belief in any god? Conversely, many Christians and Jews and Muslims believe in an apocalypse and are therefore prone to self-fulfilling prophecy. Atheists on the other hand have no "holy" book instructing us that it's inevitable. So, despite the realistic possibility that humanity might destroy itself, and that seems to be getting more and more likely every day, we atheists still have some room for hope. How ironic, that hope is better than faith.
Don,
ReplyDeleteGW’s article is about tolerance of Islam by our Founding Fathers. You argue against this idea in definite tone and vocabulary, although with indefinite meaning in my reading.
Yes or No: do you respect the 1st Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly?
Please explain: are you making an argument against the religion of Islam? If so, what is it?
Please explain: are you making an argument against the practice of loving God with all one’s heart, mind, and soul? If so, what is your problem with individuals doing so under the law?
Please explain: are you making an argument of loving our fellow man? If so, what’s the problem?
My sister’s name:
ReplyDeleteWho do you claim is actively and routinely demanding our annihilation that we’re embracing? If so, what is your evidence?
Yes or No: do you respect the 1st Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly?
Please explain: are you making an argument against the religion of Islam? If so, what is it?
Jesus does indeed say to judge a tree by its fruit! US law shows that US current wars are Orwellian unlawful. If you’re confused by this fact, please read, “Open proposal to US higher education” and/or “US war laws explained” by Carl Herman. Once informed, are current US wars unlawful? If not, please explain US war law and how these wars are lawful under the law.
Finally, what was/is Operation Mockingbird? Are you a current member of a similar group?
I do not -and- care not to attempt to understand your logical approach, Herman.
ReplyDeleteYou have asked, without being asked to ask, and in fact after having been told NOT TO ASK -four bizarre questions connected to your silly logical framework, -FOUR questions?
Thanks in advance -for not asking another one of your silly questions designed to prove your god-like immortality. You are not a god. You are not immortal.
You are not even clever, Herman. You are a bore, a clown and a waste of time.
Along those exact-same-lines -and only to prove a point, -I have just one question for you-
Will you ever stop asking these absurd questions that are designed within a fabulously strained logical framework that always implies you are some sort of immortal god-type?
You can take your hat off, -before you do not answer.
I do not want either the yes-or-no answer -the sort of answer you want to ascribe to this infinitely complex reality you interminably want to deny.
And neither do I want any other answer.
You are not an "American" or a "Christian".
You are an ideologue. As you define these terms, and all of your terms in your brief twenty-paged lexicon of terms -they are all contradictory one-to-the-next.
The concept of monism expects logical arguments of any given presenter to NOT include an implied conflict with the other logical arguments he imparts as he builds the mentally-constructed-model -he is trying to convince others -is a close facsimile to the one reality that exists.
It is the most important test of a cogent argument.
And even then, such implied cogency as monism imparts -does not necessarily guarantee -even- any approximate unity with the one infinitely complex reality that exists all around every one of us.
This unity is then commonly tested by prying minds tossing other logical arguments at the mentally-constructed-model of the presenter to see if it is as resilient as the one infinitely complex reality we all know exists outside our finite minds.
You are a prime example of how confused our conceptions of that reality really are.
You endlessly talk in terms of universals, universals which only exist in your head as you define them -quite apart from any remotely possible reality, and most often, -quite apart from how anyone else might define those same universals -and- regardless that those universals do not exist in reality under any possibly cogent argument about them existing within reality.
Herman, you argue constantly -like my younger son, when he awoke from a nightmare once when he was very young -many years ago- exclaiming in stark horror and with very real tears streaming down his reddened cheeks- "Birds don't have hands!"
Do you honestly need to be hugged, patted on the back like a distraught and delusional child -and told- "These things are not real." ???
Fine. These things are not real. Now gather up your strength and courage, and go back to sleep, Herman. Tomorrow is another day.
You'll see, -in the broad daylight- this will all seem quite silly -and far away from the soothing reality of a fine new day.
Don:
ReplyDeleteFine; I'm happy to allow our comments to speak for themselves.
Please enjoy the day.