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To Tariq, Harrak:Reader comment on item: White House Nonchalance toward the Middle East Submitted by William (United States), Apr 5, 2006 at 18:05 Gentlemen,Please reflect deeply upon what I write below. I write not to be combative or insulting. But I believe your minds are overrun with disease. You are brainwashed. You believe religious fantasies because where you come from, a man can be beaten, punished, and even killed for daring to think as an independent, free man. And then there are the benefits of Islam-brainwashing. You get to form your own Allah-sanctioned mini-harem with a good little woman (girl?) or two or three or four whom you can order around (or beat) and have sex with whenever you want to breed more good Muslim warriors. Sounds perfectly harmonious and moral, doesn't it? But at one time, maybe when you were a boy or a young man, you asked yourself, "Is Islam really true?" Instantly, you were paralyzed with fear. You were afraid that if you did not believe, you would be punished: beaten, ostracized, banished, even killed if events spun out of control. You were overwhelmed thinking your entire society and history are based on a mountain of barbarous lies. Your people – your ancestors, your mamma, your babba, your babba's other wives, that little girl your neighbor gave your babba to marry as soon as she grows breasts – you have all been defrauded and defiled. You see the West in all its greatness and think, "They do not need us. My people and I are superfluous, trivially unimportant, like a doorknob on a bathroom door in a great Christian cathedral built by Westerners. We Muslims may as well not even exist." The thought is unbearable. So you simply do not think it. You do not use the power of your mind to question your mommy and daddy's cult of lies. You simply conform. If I were in your shoes, I would probably believe as you do. I would hate the world because everything is flipped -- Muslims are supposed to be strong, successful, and just. Unbelievers like this awful William are supposed to be inferior. It says so all through the Koran: "(As for) those who disbelieve and turn away from Allah's way, He shall render their works ineffective." But that's obviously not what really happened, is it? I empathize with the pain you and your people must feel. Believe me, though I may insult you and play with you, it is only to shake your beliefs to the foundation so that maybe you will stand up and think for yourselves like real men. Contrary to what you probably assume, given your medieval, primitive mindset, I am not a Christian. I am just a free man with a free mind who is blessed to live in a free society. I suspect you have absolutely no idea what that really means. I will describe my own experience with freedom of religion. It is one of millions and millions repeated throughout the western world. I was raised as a Catholic Christian in the United States. My parents forced me through a Catholic education until age fifteen. When I was very young, I believed in God as Christianity portrays it. By the age of ten, I realized it was all just nonsense. Jesus was a man who a mob elevated to divine status in a classic example of mass religious hysteria. Jesus was just a man, a charismatic religious leader crucified, tortured to death by the Romans. In my opinion, only people who either feel deeply frightened or who are desperate to believe in simple, easy answers could believe otherwise. A few days before I was confirmed a Catholic, I told my priest, face-to-face, that I do not believe in Christianity. I went through with the ceremony in order to please my parents. (They really gave me no choice. I was not free back then.) During the ceremony, I carried a copy of an ancient Buddhist text in my breast pocket as a quiet sign of protest. Can you imagine what bodily harm, what ostracism and alienation you would encounter if you were to act as I did? You, gentlemen, are not free. Though I know that all religions are just cults like stupid, backward, primitive Islam, I have tremendous respect for the core message of Christians, Jews, and Buddhists. (I have only studied these religions in reasonable detail.) Christ was no warrior, murderer, rapist like Mohammad. He taught two core principles – forgive others, for we are all lowly sinners in the eyes of God, and treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself. It is hard to imagine a more beautiful message than that. If you really need to cling to a religious delusion, why not at least choose a moral and beautiful message like Christ's? Christ was killed for his message of peace and love. Mohammad killed others to spread his message of conquest and subjugation. The contrast between this man of peace and this man death couldn't be more stark. The Buddhist message is just as peaceful and beatific as Christ's. Desire is pain. Attachment to the material world causes desire. Therefore, in order to achieve bliss, detach yourself from the material world. Though I think the Buddhist message is too passive and impractical, it's not hard to see how it encourages peace and goodness in people. I have had the pleasure of working many years with several Buddhist software engineers from Thailand and Vietnam. They are beautiful people and I love them like brothers. Their Buddhist faith has much to do with why they are such good people to work with. The Jews have a somewhat more problematic message, in my opinion, since it revolves around Jewishness and adherence to incredibly outmoded and arbitrary laws. But there is no arguing that Jewish culture and the Jewish worldview have had a profoundly positive impact on mankind. Jews argue about their religion, justice, laws, etc. all the time. They do not take things on blind faith like Muslim Neanderthal warrior slaves. When they doubt the existence of God or the goodness of man or the justice of a law, etc., they discuss and argue like lions. Many of them decide to be secular for this very reason. They question, question, question and challenge, challenge, challenge. You think it is a worldwide Zionist conspiracy that makes Jews as incredibly successful as they are in science, culture, business? No way. It is their culture of open-minded study and debate. And their culture is firmly rooted in their religion. You may think that because Mohammad was a bloody, greedy warlord, you cannot believe in God. Somehow, you think that because God exists, Mohammad must be the messenger of God. But I believe in no religion of man, but I have always known God exists. Just look around. What is the world, if not God? What is consciousness, our own self-awareness, if not incontrovertible evidence of God? But my understanding of God was not demanded and beaten out of me by some cult of man, where God is nothing more than a proxy for a greedy imam or politician. I am studying for a PhD in astrophysics at one of the best universities in America. Quantum mechanics, the Jew Einstein's theory of relativity, string theory, galaxies, etc., etc., etc. The universe is beautiful and strange beyond anything your feeble minds can imagine. God exists. I see Him everyday in the equations of quantum physics and the telescopic images of distant galaxies. But do I believe that God "speaks" to a warlord like Mohammed, as one person speaks to another? Do I believe God "knows" or "thinks" or "sees" like a person? Do I think God "wants" me to do anything at all? Your primitive, feeble conception of God is nothing more than a means that imams and kings and men saying peace and justice while carrying clubs and guns can control you as slaves. All through the Koran (and other religious books), God wants and talks and acts just like a very powerful and demanding human being. The God of the Koran says nothing of his most beautiful and mind-boggling creations, like the galaxies, the laws of gravitation, relativity, chemistry, the beauty of life, atoms and molecules, etc. Mohammed's fraudulent God speaks coarsely, even vulgarly, just like a seventh century warlord, of wars and vengeance and killing. Suppose that God really did "speak" to humans, like one human speaks to another. Think of all he could say! Think of all the wonders of science, of the beautiful and magnificent world around us. None of this is in the Koran. Everything we know about this wonderful universe had to await discovery by unbelievers centuries after Mohammad terrorized and killed -- although "He shall render their works ineffective". The God of the Koran talks of death, obedience, war, and subjugation. These topics sound suspiciously like those that would preoccupy a seventh century Arab warlord obsessed with acquiring power, fortune, and women captives, don't you think? Why does the God of the Koran not mention anything about the earth, the other planets, the solar system, other galaxies and stars? (Primitive passing references are made. They match the understanding of a warmongering rapist warlord who's trying to control his people by making up a religion.) Why nothing about atoms and molecules, about the molecular and cellular structure of life? The very first page of a university physics, math, chemistry, or biology book is infinitely more informative than all the useless and corrupt pages of the Koran. Take for example, the content of the chapter called "Mohammad". In how many ways can Mohammed mutter that those who follow God will be rewarded and those who don't believe will be punished? Can't God at least say something interesting or of substance? As far as writers go, your Mohammad is boring, uninformative, repetitive, comically ambiguous, and just primitive. And he seems preoccupied with killing! If Mohammed decided he wanted to fool everyone around him into believing that God had spoken to him and that they should all do what Mohammed wants them to do, what would Mohammad say God told him? Mohammed, having fabricated everything, would make God sound just like a human being who "punishes" and "sees" and "loves" and seeks _vengeance_ just like a human being. Mohammed would tell everyone, "This is God's will!" And then, "Oh, and by the way, God said He only talks to me! And no one else! And you can all have four wives! (Of course, God does not say anything to women. They're just for breeding.) But I can have as many wives as we can capture! Now go die for me in battle! But don't worry -- if you are killed, I promise I will have sex with your wives every night!" Well how convenient for the warlord rapist Mohammed! God spoke to Mohammed, no else could hear, and God won't speak to anyone else! Now bow down and beg and grovel before Mohammed, or rather God, you slaves! Fourteen hundred years later, you are still slaves, begging and groveling before the man Mohammed five times a day. Mindless. Muslims stupidly follow a seventh century warlord rapist's lies because they crave EASY answers. They want things simple -- there is one book with all the answers. Follow these seventh century incantations and no one will beat you, you can marry those four Muslims, and you'll even go to heaven in the end. What gullible fools Muslims are! If anything, science has taught us that there _are_ answers to all questions, but that the answers are very, very difficult to discover, and none of us will live long enough or be smart enough to know all the answers in our lifetimes. Too bad! ... I do not say this to insult you. In fact, if you were somehow to find your way out of the cult in which you find yourself, I would respect you more than you can imagine. I was born free and never had to be very courageous to be free. I never had to fear for my life or property or place in the world if I questioned my parents' religion, politics, or anything else. You, on the other hand, were born slaves, like African slaves of centuries past. Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". << Previous Comment Next Comment >> Reader comments (289) on this item
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