Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Speech at Yale: "The Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West."
Her speech begins at about 10:30:
"Breivik in Not a Christian. That's Impossible." |
Summary Answer:For a list of the top ten hateful verses in the Qur'an see here.
The Qur'an contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.
Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Qur'an are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Qur'an.
The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today's Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book's call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.
Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad's own martial legacy - and that of his companions - along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Qur'an have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history. LINK.
As ISIS slaughters its way though Syria and Iraq, it became inevitable that we’d hear from the apologists who claim that ISIS is not in fact “true Islam,” and that its depredations are due to something other than religious motivation. Those motivations, say the apologists, are political (usually Western colonialism that engendered resentment), cultural (societal tradition), or anything other than religion.
The apologists have yet another form of denial. Yes, they say, jihadis may be motivated by Islam, but it’s not “true” Islam. True Islam is peaceful, and its adherents would never slaughter apostates, behead journalists, or forcibly convert non-Muslims. Their religion is simply a perversion of “true’ religion.
Well, if ISIS is not Islamic, then the Inquisition was not Catholic. The fact is that there are no defensible criteria for whether a faith is “true,” since all faiths are man-made and accrete doctrine-—said to come from God, but itself man-made—-that becomes integral to those faiths. Whatever “true faith” means, it doesn’t mean “the right religion: the one whose God exists and whose doctrines are correct.” If that were so, we wouldn’t see Westerners trying to tell us what “true Islam” is....Everyone who is religious picks and chooses their morals from scripture. And so, too, do religious apologists pick and choose the “true” religions using identical criteria: what appeals to them as “good” ways to behave. The Qur’an, like the Bible, is full of vile moral statements supposedly emanating from God. We cherry-pick them depending on our disposition, our politics, and our upbringing....By all means let us say that ISIS is a strain of Islam that is barbaric and dysfunctional, but let us not hear any nonsense that it’s a “false religion”. ISIS, like all religions, is based on faith; and faith, which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence, isn’t true or false, but simply irrational....In the end, there is no “true” religion in the factual sense, for there is no good evidence supporting their truth claims. LINK.
Labels: j. m. green, Samson, terrorist
A belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world. These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith. That is why the popular Saudi cleric Mohammad Al-Areefi sounds like the ISIS army chaplain. The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, you should probably consult a neurologist.------------
Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity.
The idea that any book was inspired by the creator of the universe is poison—intellectually, ethically, and politically. And nowhere is this poison currently doing more harm than in Muslim communities, East and West.------------
Religion produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut. It causes in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths.Bravo Sam!
Hirsi Ali, in her bestselling books Infideland Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations,made no secret of the fact that Islam, as interpreted by militants, extremists, and even (in some cases) casual believers, was not only untrue but harmful to the world. Between female genital mutilation, honor killings, the idea of martyrdom, and the murder of her friend Theo van Gogh, you could understand why she would courageously put her own life on the line to speak out against the horrors of the faith. In her mind, the problem wasn’t radical Islam. It was Islam, period. That’s why she was very blunt in a 2007 interview about her goal of trying to defeat Islam because she didn’t believe the “religion of peace” was capable of being saved in its current form.Enough with the liberal mindset that a religion, any religion, should not be criticized, enough!
Almost immediately after the announcement of her honorary degree, Muslim groups began to protest her selection. LINK
Let Hirsi Ali speak, and students are welcome to respond and challenge her views. This notion that she’s unfairly critical of Islam is one that anyone is welcome to refute. She’s hardly someone who’s critical just for the sake of getting a rise out of people — she has plenty of reason to find fault with the faith.
I hope that these students who would rather she not be invited at all actually attend Monday night’s event. Don’t just protest outside and leave. Listen to her story and respond if necessary. That people are so sensitive to criticisms of Islam is reason alone for why her invitation is a welcome one.
Labels: tweet
[T]here’s one bedrock of Abrahamic faith that is eminently testable by science: the claim that all humans descend from a single created pair—Adam and Eve—and that these individuals were not australopithecines or apelike ancestors, but humans in the modern sense. Absent their existence, the whole story of human sin and redemption falls to pieces.In another place he adds:
Unfortunately, the scientific evidence shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed, at least in the way they’re portrayed in the Bible. Genetic data show no evidence of any human bottleneck as small as two people: there are simply too many different kinds of genes around for that to be true. There may have been a couple of “bottlenecks” (reduced population sizes) in the history of our species, but the smallest one not involving recent colonization is a bottleneck of roughly 10,000-15,000 individuals that occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That’s as small a population as our ancestors had, and—note—it’s not two individuals.
Further, looking at different genes, we find that they trace back to different times in our past. Mitochondrial DNA points to the genes in that organelle tracing back to a single female ancestor who lived about 140,000 years ago, but that genes on the Y chromosome trace back to one male who lived about 60,000-90,000 years ago. Further, the bulk of genes in the nucleus all trace back to different times—as far back as two million years. This shows not only that any “Adam” and “Eve” (in the sense of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA alone) must have lived thousands of years apart, but also that there simply could not have been two individuals who provided the entire genetic ancestry of modern humans. Each of our genes “coalesces” back to a different ancestor, showing that, as expected, our genetic legacy comes from many different individuals. It does not go back to just two individuals, regardless of when they lived.
These are the scientific facts. And, unlike the case of Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, we can dismiss a physical Adam and Eve with near scientific certainty. LINK.
I have already written about my amazement at the frequent flirtations between Islam and the western political left, which, ideologically one would think, should be each others' worst nemesis. But this is not the kind of cognitive dissonance that is going to go away any time soon; every once in a while, we get reminded that tearing atheism apart is perfectly politically correct, while the same is not true for Islam. (No one, perhaps, exemplifies this dichotomy in the political left more blatantly than the revolting Noam Chomsky.) And on cue, they have delivered again.
As I’ve said many times, we need to stop thinking that there is such a thing as Christianity or Islam. There are multiple versions of each that differ from each other in hugely significant ways. Decent, compassionate people find all the support they need in those holy books to justify being decent and compassionate. Violent, hateful people find all the support they need in those books to justify being violent and hateful. They all pick and choose the parts of their religion that they like and find ways to explain away or ignore the rest. It’s also not reasonable to claim that one or the other of these versions is the One True Religion. LINK.
Labels: tweet
Looking the immense scale of the universe portrayed in the video [below], and the fact that not only is our solar system on the non-descript edge of our galaxy, but our galaxy is in a dull suburb of Laniakea, it is hard to feel that there’s anything special about where we are. And even less that any supernatural being should have been particularly interested in us. I am even tempted to feel that there really must be life elsewhere out there, even if I know that, for the moment, we only have evidence that life appeared once, in our boring fractal surbubia, nearly 4 billion years ago.
Labels: Scale of the Universe
The best book I've read yet that compares and contrasts the arguments for and against a Christian God. Loftus takes an even handed approach in presenting both sides. Believers and non-believers alike should read this book to see if they can learn to strengthen their own arguments for or against. This is a very well researched book. I recommend readers skip the first two chapters and read them last or not at all. They really detracted from the meat of the book in my opinion. I picked the book up several times and put it aside after losing interest trying to get through the first two chapters. After the first two chapters, the book really takes off! LINKWell alrighty then. In case others might feel the same, okay, have at it. ;-)
The qualities that make religion matter so much to people are the same ones that make it so dangerous. LINK.
A caliphate is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader known as a caliph – i.e. "successor" – to Muhammad...under Islamic law (sharia). ISIS claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control, beginning with Iraq, Syria and other territory in the Levant region, which includes Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and part of southern Turkey.So let me get this straight, okay? ISIS wants to establish an Islamic theocracy under sharia law ruled by a caliph and this isn't a religion? Every important aspect of ISIS is religious in nature. Remove the religion and it guts everything important they hope to achieve. Without the religion there would be no ISIS. With no theocracy, no sharia law and no caliph there would be no ISIS. Their religion provides the rationale, the agenda, the justification, and the motivation to do what they are doing. It doesn't matter whether other Muslims around the world reject their religion by saying it doesn't represent true Islam. It still is a religion, a hybrid if you will of Islam, in the same way as other types of Christianities are still representative of Christianity in general. Just call it the religion of ISIS then, if you still disagree. It is a religion. To see this just ask yourself what would happen if we extracted their religion from them, every aspect of it. Would they still seek to set up an Islamic theocracy based on sharia law under an Islamic caliph? No, they wouldn't.