Thoughts on the Moral Basis of Religious Violence

I have been thinking of something for a while. As you probably know by now, I have been researching as much about ISIS as I can, and I’ve watched many of the videos they’re (un)kind enough to put online.

As an aside, I’m always struck by the difference between ISIS practice here and that of African Islamic insurgent groups like Boko Haram or Al Shabaab. It’s hard even to find still photos of those two groups’ troops. But then they aren’t trying to make a Hollywood style media splash, one of the many, many cartoonishly villainous things ISIS does that makes it hard to believe that they’re anything but an artificial bogeyman designed to stampede people into supporting the faltering Global War of Imperialism, alias Terror.

It was while watching yet another ultra-brutal Syrian beheading video – this one from the blood soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama’s stable of moderate cannibals and Al Qaeda surrogates, not ISIS – I asked myself, once again, a question I’d thought about many times before.

The original moderate cannibal, Abu Saqqar

These people, I thought, all claim to be acting in the name of a religion. In this case it’s Islam, while others, like the cannibal Christian militias in Africa, claim to be working in the name of Christianity; the Zionazi settler vermin in Occupied Palestine torture and kill Palestinians for the Judaic YHWH; the brutal Hindunazi lynch mobs in India cite Hinduism as their excuse to murder Muslims; and their counterparts in Myanmar and Sri Lanka burn people alive and beat them to death in defence of Buddhism. They murder, rob, rape, massacre, all in the name of religions.

Christian militia, Central African Republic [Source]

But are they really religious people?

In the case of ISIS, for one, a clear argument can be made out that they are not really Muslims at all. They have repeatedly, over and over, violated Islamic rules of warfare. They claim authority – unilaterally – over all Muslims in the world. They run what is basically a mafia state which rules by coercion and maltreats minorities, including fellow “believers in the Book” – Christians. They follow no established school of Islamic jurisprudence and they pretty much make up their interpretation of the religion as they go along. In other words, theirs is a rule by opportunism.

Are the rest any different?

I’m, of course, an atheist, but for the sake of argument, I’m willing to take at face value what the adherents of the multiple One True Religions say about their many different faiths; and if there’s one thing that runs through them, it’s the idea that one shouldn’t do to someone else what one doesn’t want done to oneself. In common discourse this is known as the “Golden Rule”. Do these people who kill in the name of religion obey this Golden Rule?

Of course they don’t.

It’s quite true that, to some extent, they can find some kind of justification of their crimes in some particular and warped interpretation of their Holy Books. Thus, the Hindunazis justify lynching Muslims on the basis that “cow killers” should not be allowed to live; Christians burned and hanged untold numbers of “witches” on the same plea about the King James Bible. In other instances, the religious authorities themselves, knowing that even a deliberate mistranslation of the religious scripture couldn’t cover their planned crimes, issued waivers and special justifications. That’s how Pope Urban II sent masses of European peasants rampaging, murdering, looting and destroying on the First Crusade – by promising absolution for all sins past and present to anyone who died in the course of the bloodletting. Just about anything, therefore, becomes possible when slanted in the right fashion by the top religious authority.

But do the troops on the ground – the ISIS men, or the BSWCBHO’s Jabhat al Nusra and moderate cannibal proxies, the Central African Republic murderers who go around with crucifixes hanging from the stocks of their guns, the Hindunazi mobs armed with iron rods and incendiary bombs made of gas cylinders, and so on – do they, individually, believe that they are actually doing as the religion they claim to defend tells them to?

Unless there is a very dangerous level of mental dissociation present here, I don’t think they do.

Let me explain. It is my contention that the people who are actually hacking off heads, burning villages, murdering innocuous people, and the like in the name of their religion are, in truth, not really believers at all. I won’t call them atheists, but I would call them at least agnostic where the issues of their own faiths are concerned.

Suppose now that I’m a religious stormtrooper for XYZism. My religion, officially, preaches love and forgiveness and getting along with people of all other faiths; adherence to these tenets promises an eternal reward in a hereafter while defiance will, I am assured, plunge me into the deepest pits of hell. However, I am involved in a savage religious war in which I murder, rape, rob and destroy without compunction, and with the full encouragement of my putative superiors. Can I fully believe their assurances that my actions are in line with the tenets I just mentioned, which enjoin me to love all people and forgive all their sins? Can I be certain that my deity, whoever that is, will forgive my actions, just because my superiors say so?

Unless I am a total automaton, without any shred of an ability to think on my own, I can not.

In other words, by following orders to kill and hack and dismember, I am basically doing what I would have perhaps done anyway, only I am able to assuage my conscience, at least partly, with the thought that this has the permission of my superiors.  If anyone’s to blame, it’s they, not I. It’s they, not I, who should be consigned to eternal torment – if any should follow as the consequences of my actions.

But again, unless I am very, very dim-witted, this is not a mental shield that offers much in the way of protection. In fact, the only way I can continue to do what I am doing and not come up against the inescapable conclusion that by going against the tenets of my faith I will suffer the consequences is if...I do not believe in the tenets of my faith. In other words, I’m only playing a part, and the religion I profess to follow is merely a fiction that serves to justify my crimes.

The old Inquisition, in fact, had a neat way of getting around this inconvenient little fact. The monks who tortured confessions out of “heretics” and the like would not sully their hands with actual blood; they had others do it for them. And then they would hand over their victims to the secular arm for execution. It would be the kings and barons who would bear the moral stain of burning these hapless people at the stake, not the monks themselves, who could therefore retain a clear and unsullied conscience.

It reminds me of a crime novel I once read, in which a loan shark defended his activities: "I'm not a bad guy. If you don't pay me back the money I lent you, with vigorish, I won't break your head. No, I'll call my enforcer Vinnie. He'll break your head."

To us, a thousand years later, it sounds like appalling hypocrisy, and undoubtedly it was. It also serves to recall that the monks of the time were the biggest property owners of Europe, and wielded political power of a level few despots today can dream of. Popes bought their office, whored and stole, and behaved in a manner to rival the decadent later Roman emperors. How could all that be squared with the original Christian ideals of poverty and simplicity?

Simple: it couldn’t, if they had the slightest real belief in their professed religion. They were an upscale version of the ISIS “judges” and executioners, no more.

It’s also my contention that out of a given group of people, most are, when all is said and done, morally weak. If given the opportunity, and the moral excuse, they’ll go along with whatever the majority of their neighbours are doing. Later, perhaps, they might look back and be appalled by their own behaviour – but not at the time it is going on. At that time they’ll do as others are doing, and reassure themselves it’s all right because everyone else is doing it anyway. The majority of the mobs that go periodically on rampages of murder and loot in South Asia, for instance, are mostly otherwise normal people who are morally weak, to the extent that they’ll do as directed by a few unscrupulous political leaders and agent provocateurs.

And these are normal people, not the kind of sociopathic thug actively recruited, throughout history, by fascist militias. When it comes to those, from the stormtroopers of Hitler’s SA to India’s Hindunazis – or the headchoppers of ISIS, or the BSWCBHO’s moderate cannibals, come to that – any excuse will do, as a cover to unleash their violent instincts.

Religion, in this case, is an enabler, nothing more.

Warning! Religion Article! Subtitled: Jesus and the Temple Cleaning

This is one of those things online – like this other one that I discussed a few days ago – that I’ve grown tired of analysing each time I see it, or variations thereof. Like that other meme, I’ve got to the point where I need to get my opinion, and the facts, written down for everyone and get it over with once and for all.

Now, the Jesus of the Bible was not a real person. I am not going to go into the question of whether he existed or not – there are websites for that sort of thing; I’m just stating a fact. The Jesus of the Bible is a composite character, whose details vary between even the four official Gospels in irreconcilable ways.  Therefore, he is not a real person. There may have been no Jesus at all, or he may be an amalgam of different historical people with a leavening of myth, or he may have been a real person whose life was mythologised out of all proportion, just like we see happening before our very eyes with certain political leaders these days I could name.

But he was not the Jesus of the Bible.

Still, if there is one story people seem to like about Jesus – even atheists and agnostics, and especially people of the leftist persuasion – it’s the one where he chases the “money lenders” and “animal sellers” out of the Temple with a whip. It appeals to all their sentiments against the parasitical banking industry and the commercialisation of religion. It is the one Jesus story that some say makes them believe he actually existed.

They’ve turned it into any number of memes, of which a typical example is this:

What a pity, isn’t it, that this is the one “fact” in the Jesus story which is utterly and totally impossible?

Let’s see why.

In the first century of the current era, Palestine – Judaea and Samarra – was a Roman possession. The Romans ruled, at the time, through puppet Jewish kings, but the power of Caesar, acting through the prefect, was paramount. [The prefect of the time, Pontius Pilate, actually existed. He was the fifth to occupy that position, and in real life was a blood-soaked war criminal implicated in several massacres, who wouldn’t have blinked at executing yet another Jewish rabble rouser. His “hesitation” in crucifying Jesus was an invention of the latter Gospels meant to make the new religion more acceptable to Roman converts.] Since Judaea and Samarra were Roman possessions, though the Jews living there were at that time allowed their own coinage, Roman coins were in wide circulation. Also, there were very large Jewish communities living elsewhere even then, in places like Alexandria and Asia Minor, and even further afield. They, naturally, used Roman currency exclusively.

But there was, by Jewish standards, a problem with these Roman coins. What was this problem?

The Emperor of the period was Tiberius Caesar, who ruled from 14 to 37 CE. These are his coins:

Image Source

Like every other Roman Emperor, the coins bore the profile of Caesar, in this case Tiberius.

But remember that YHWH commanded “Thou shalt not set graven images before me”? That's the third of the ten commandments.

Now, the Temple in Jerusalem was the centre of the Jewish religion at the time. Pilgrims came from all over the Jewish-settled parts of the world to visit it, pray to YHWH, and offer sacrifices. Remember that YHWH wanted sacrifices? And, of course, like any and all other religious activity, they were to donate money to the Temple.

Why would the Temple want money? Simple. All organised religion is ultimately commercial activity. How, without money, could anyone even build a house of worship, furnish it, and maintain it, even without the expenses of the flowers, incense, or wine and crackers used in the services, without money? It’s only common sense, right? Those who go on about the commercialisation of religion today are simply avoiding the point that it’s been commercial since the first “priest” banged one stone on another, proclaimed the advent of the Great God Ug and demanded contributions of fruit and meat from everybody.

But the point is that these Roman coins, being engraved with the profile of Caesar, could not be taken into the Temple.

And that is where the money-changers – they were money-changers, not lenders – came in. They provided an indispensable service, by converting the pilgrims’ Roman coinage, at a commission, naturally, into Temple coins. As for the sellers of animals, remember the sacrifices YHWH demanded? Pilgrims coming all the way from Egypt or Rome, Turkey or Syria, couldn’t be expected to bring sacrificial animals with them. They would naturally look to buy them as close to the Temple as possible, just as Russian Orthodox Churches today have candles for sale within the church itself. How much closer to the Temple can you get than the Temple forecourt?

And, yes, they were in the Temple forecourt, not in the Temple. Apart from the High Priest, nobody was allowed to enter the inner sanctum of the Temple itself, let alone the money changers and dove sellers.

You see where I am going with this? As a Jew, how could Jesus not have known all this? This is even more true if you accept the idea that he was, as per some accounts, so learned in Jewish law that even as a child he could hold his own in discussions with the “doctors”.

But perhaps Jesus did not accept Jewish law? Well, then you have to explain away what he, himself, allegedly said:

“Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished” (Mt. 5:17-18).

Therefore, these are the three possibilities:

First, it never happened. Jesus did not do any such thing. It is a story.

Second, Jesus was not a Jew. In which case the rest of the Bible becomes null and void, and raises the question of why a non-Jew would’ve wanted to go to the Temple anyway.

Third, Jesus was insane, like one of those religious fanatics who destroy things in the name of the voices in their heads – think ISIS, or the man who a few decades ago took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta, convinced that God had told him to smash it. In fact, it is possible that some random unstable person did do something like this, and it got attached to the Jesus story later.

There is no fourth explanation.

 You can decide which one you prefer.

The Rising Tide of Hindunazism

I believe the time has come to take a stand.

A few days ago I’d reviewed a film called PK, which I’d pretty unambiguously trashed, and I totally stand by that trashing. But, these days, I’m finding myself forced to defend the film – against the Hindunazis.

I haven’t spoken on this site about the Hindunazis for several months, not since Modi won the elections, because I wanted to wait and see which way they’d go. And for a few months they seemed to stay relatively quiescent. I didn’t know that they were merely waiting out the hot summer months before launching their multi-pronged campaign.

Well, it’s winter now, and they seem to have cried Havoc! And let slip the dogs of sectarian war.

The demand to ban PK is pretty farcical. The film has already recovered its investment many times over, and even if it were to be banned now, it would be tantamount to looking to shut the stable door after the horse long ago departed for greener pastures. So idiotic is the ban demand that I might almost imagine the Hindunazis had been paid by the producers to create a ruckus about the film. But they’ve already made so much money out of this terrible film that they don’t need any more.

In any case, it isn’t about money. The fact is that the Hindunazis are going ape at the idea of an actor with a Muslim name (Aamir Khan) dissing religion. The fact that the film trashes all religions isn’t relevant to the Hindunazis – how dare a Muslim (or at least someone who’s officially a Muslim) say a word against “Hinduism”, even though he actually reserves his ire for a corrupt godman of the type that infests India and doesn’t really represent any religion in particular at all?

All throughout India now, the Hindunazi tide is rising steadily. In North India, the Hindunazis are conducting what they call “Ghar wapsi” programmes – literally, “homecoming” – in which Muslims are “reconverted” en masse to Hinduism. How much of this is voluntary on the part of the Muslims being “reconverted” is impossible to say. Obviously, if they converted voluntarily, they’d say so. If they converted out of fear, they’d still say they converted voluntarily. But they’re just being used as a tool.

What do I mean by that? This – even if the Hindunazis were to make an attempt to convert Muslims across India all to Hinduism, they’d still never manage it, because there are over 150 million Indian Muslims. Not even Hindunazis imagine they can convert them all.

What they actually want to do is something quite different. The number of Hindus converting to other religions – Islam, Christianity or Buddhism – is much, much higher than the number making the reverse journey, and has always been. It’s not difficult to understand, given the brutal Hindu caste system, and the discrimination the lower castes still face on a daily basis. A longstanding demand of the Hindunazis has been to ban all conversions, and in Hindunazi-ruled states it’s become difficult if not impossible to change your religion even if you want to. But there was never an all India law, and one could move over to another state, convert, and come right back again, and the Hindunazis could do nothing about it.

Now, with their “reconversion” programme, the Hindunazis have thrown a challenge down to the nation. They say openly that if the politicians don’t like what they’re doing, they should make a law banning conversions. Of course, the people who would be hit by any such law would be the Muslims, Christians and Buddhists to whom the Hindus were converting in their thousands. The tiny number of reverse conversions – a few hundred at most – would be not even a drop in that bucket.

Not that the Hindunazis are even about to make that much of a concession. According to them, the “homecoming” programmes aren’t “conversions” because they have merely brought back people who were “stolen” away. So they have in any case no intention of stopping this quite deliberately provocative activity either.

Or other provocative activity, come to that. Before a recent state election, one Hindunazi politician asked people to choose between “Ramzaadon” (children of Rama, a mythological Hindu demigod/warrior king) and “haramzaadon” (bastards). This created a ruckus in Parliament, but nothing came of it since the politician in question simply apologised. The fact that she had gone against the oath she had taken to the Indian constitution was as immaterial as the fact that the Hindunazi demand to stop conversions is also against the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to all citizens.

And then there was Christmas, a national holiday in India. What happened on Christmas? It was declared Good Governance Day, whatever the hell that might be – and everyone was ordered to turn up at their offices or face the music. It’s so openly an attempt to sabotage Christmas that nobody seriously suggested it was anything else.

There’s a lot more to it – religious “riots”, which are actually usually carefully preplanned and prepared pogroms. There is the so-called “love jihad”, where Muslims were accused of seducing and converting innocent Hindu maidens. There is the Durga Vahini, a female Hindu jihadist group whose members are trained in combat and are taught absolute subservience to Hindu men and to be ready to give their lives for the religion. In Gujarat, Modi’s home state, which saw a vicious anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, an “antiterrorist exercise” was conducted in which the people acting as “terrorsits” were made to chant Muslim slogans. And there is the steady rise of shrill Hindunazi voices on social networks.

And what’s the reaction of the (actually elected, unlike the last one, and therefore perfectly genuine) Prime Minister? Mostly, deafening silence. Even though his own business base has reacted with concern and dismay, he’s chosen to keep his formerly strident voice totally in check. When the choice came between Big Business and Big Fascism, he’s obviously – by omission if not by commission – chosen the latter. And for someone who came to power talking of “development”, all he’s done is put incompetent morons in charge of various ministries and proclaimed – at a gathering of scientists, no less – that ancient Indians (read, Hindus) had plastic surgery and genetic engineering. Not one of the “scientists” there said a word in protest.

None of this is surprising, if you’ve read my earlier writings on this subject. I had pretty much predicted back then that these things would happen if the Hindunazis gained complete power. Unfortunately, there’s no organised political opposition worth a damn right now. The effete and corrupt Congress Party has yet to recover from its defeat at the elections seven months ago, and is disintegrating in slow motion. The less said of the various “centrist” parties, who can’t stand each other, the better. And as for the self-styled (mainstream) “Communist” parties, they’re still going through their self-inflicted and drawn-out hara-kiri.

It’s not a pretty sight, and all it’s doing is consolidating Hindunazi power.

The only avenue of dissidence remaining, it would seem, is the net, the equivalent of East European samizdat literature. But the Hindunazis are as well aware of that as anybody, and on 1^st January they banned 32 websites, including Vimeo and Internet Archive (apparently the ban has been lifted from four of them since). The excuse was that these sites were carrying “ISIS propaganda”, though some of them are sites primarily used by software programmers and have no political content at all. But YouTube, which does have a lot of jihadi propaganda, wasn’t touched, and as for ISIS, one of its main propaganda disseminators was arrested in Bangalore late last year. He used to send out ISIS tweets via Twitter. Nobody has tried to block Twitter.

Ergo, this blocking exercise has nothing to do with ISIS at all and is just a try-out for suppressing dissent. The writing is on the wall.

But the people who voted for Modi thinking he would bring in “good days” still have an awesome denial system. To them, Modi isn’t anything more than a victim of the intrigues of his colleagues, who want to undermine the poor man. They’d still look for a way to defend him if he turned up at their doorsteps, demanding they change to his kind of Hindufascism.

Yes, I did say that. The minorities are only a tool in the Hindunazi attempt to grab absolute power, Their primary target are the Hindus, who have always historically been an amorphous, disunited, heterogeneous and generally speaking highly tolerant religion. The Hindunazi project – which as I’ve said before is closely modelled on Nazism – seeks, more than anything, to force this religion, and the tolerance it’s represented, into a straitjacket where no free thought of any kind is permitted. And they’re getting away with it too.

And you know the irony? The majority of the Hindunazis – like the Zionazis, whom they also love as brothers-in-arms – are open about their personal atheism. Like the Zionazis, they do their killing in the name of a god they do not believe in.

Yes, as I said at the start of the article, the time has come to take a stand. There's no sitting on this fence. The choice is between siding with the Hindunazis, opposing them (at whatever cost to oneself), or being swept away with the tide.

You know which I've chosen.

2015 will be an interesting time.

Further Reading:

2014, The Year India Became A Hindu State

Hindunazi stormtrooper at weapons training

News from the Jerusalem Times, 33 AD

PILATUS OPENS GLADIATORIAL GAMES

21 March 33. This morning, in a glittering ceremony attended by people from all over Judaea and Samaria, the Proconsul Pontius Pilatus declared the long-awaited Gladiatorial Games open.

“It gives me immense pleasure to see the enthusiasm with which the citizenry has been awaiting these Games,” he said, with translators interpreting his speech in Greek to Aramaic and Hebrew. “Sport is indeed the health of a society, and by their love of and appreciation for these games, I can see for myself how the people of this far corner of the Empire are no less interested in their mental and physical well-being than the citizens of Rome herself.”

The Games will last ten days, and approximately a thousand retiarii, dimachaerii, hoplomachii, murmilli, samnites and secutors will kill each other in the course of the event.

For tickets, please contact Messrs ben Gurion and Dayan, Impresarios, Palestine Avenue, Jerusalem.

DANGEROUS TERRORIST JESUS CHRIST THREATENS JERUSALEM

22 March 33. The security services announced that the dangerous radical and terrorist, Jesus Christ, is approaching Jerusalem with a small but fanatical band of followers. Binyamin ben Barak, spokesman for the High Priest of the Temple, announced that Christ intends to storm the city in the near future, and announced immediate defensive measures.

What Christ’s actual demands are is not well known. It’s believed, however, that he is a charismatic demagogue whose far left wing ideology is aimed at overthrowing the long-established economic system in the city.

“He is a Communist and Socialist,” the spokesman said, referring to evaluations written by economists and psychologists at the Herod the Great University, “who has a Jehovah complex. He literally believes himself to be a kind of god. 

"Though his actual origins are shrouded in mystery, it's thought that he claims to be from the working class, possibly from a labouring background; a carpenter or something similar. Thus he may easily lead the workers astray with his demagoguery, and precipitate social unrest.

“He’s also announced himself to be the Emir of a new Jewish kingdom,” Barak added. “While this, of course, is not recognised by anyone, it is another dangerous idea that has to be nipped in the bud.”

He also said that Christ has established sleeper cells of agents throughout Jerusalem who intend to help him seize the city after his invasion.

“These agents are hard at work spreading subversion among the people,” Barak warned. “The sleeper cells with which he has seeded the city will emerge from hiding at the appropriate time and mobilise crowds of brainwashed supporters. They want to create the illusion of mass support, which will make it easy for Christ to claim he has popular backing for his Emirate of his self-proclaimed Jewish Kingdom.”

This newspaper asks its readers to immediately inform the authorities in case of any sign of activity from these sleeper cells.

JERUSALEM INVADED BY TERRORIST ARMY

23 March 33. The threatened invasion of Jerusalem took place today when the terrorist Jesus Christ stormed his way into the city at the head of his troops. As this newspaper had reported, his sleeper cells arranged for large crowds of civilians to line the route, and agents provocateurs among them raised slogans extolling him and the new Jewish kingdom he proclaimed.

Asked at the evening press conference why Christ able to invade the city despite all the warnings and precautions, Binyamin ben Barak, the spokesman for the High Priest said that the security forces’ hands had been tied.

“Not only did this Christ storm his way in using a donkey as a delivery system,” he said, “but his terrorist sleeper cells organised crowds which acted as human shields for him. Since our security services are very highly moral, we refused to risk harm to any of those people.”

Asked about the future activities of Christ, the spokesman said the security services were actively hunting him down. “He can’t hide and he can’t run,” Barak said. “He’s trapped in the city and it’s only a matter of time before we get him. In the meantime, though, we ask all citizens to maintain the highest levels of alert, especially in the places likely to be his targets.”

To questions regarding which areas are likely to be attacked by him, the spokesman singled out the Temple. “Christ has already announced that he is the Emir of a new Jewish Kingdom, and he will try and assault the centre of the religion in an act of terror. Also, as a communist and rabble-rouser, he wants to destroy the economic life of the city.” The market in the forecourt of the temple, which provides employment and generates wealth for so many people, would be a prime target.

The attack would come within the next few days, Barak claimed. “Time is not on Christ’s side,” he said. “If he does not carry out some spectacular action within the next few days he risks losing whatever measure of support he has achieved.”

All citizens need to remain vigilant and report all suspicious activity to the security services at once, he said. A reward of ten pieces of silver was announced, too, for information leading to the arrest of Christ himself.

CHRIST ATTACKS TEMPLE, CAUSES MASSIVE ECONOMIC DAMAGE

24 March 33. This morning the terrorist kingpin Jesus Christ personally led his fanatical team into the Temple and destroyed the market in the forecourt, using a deadly weapon comprised of flexible lengths of knotted high-tensile fibres at supersonic speed. The merchants were forced to abandon their stock and profits and escape for their lives.

“Everything I had was invested in that market,” one of the merchants, Ehud ben Netanyahu, told the Times.  “I lost everything because of that damned terrorist.” Other merchants had similar things to say.

Having destroyed the market, an act of unparalleled economic sabotage, the terrorist team disappeared into the city and is assumed to be holed up in safe houses. An intensive search will be conducted for them soon, the High Priest’s spokesman Barak said, and announced that the reward on Christ’s head had been increased from ten pieces of silver to thirty.

The total amount of damage could not be immediately calculated, but is estimated to be in the thousands of shekels. Much valuable merchandise was destroyed, and some of the merchants accused Christ’s followers of looting, though that could not be independently verified. Others said that the merchants were inflating their losses, which were minimal, for insurance purposes.

“Much worse than the immediate loss is the long term effect on investor confidence,” the head of the Merchant’s Guild, Menachem ben Sharon, told the Times. “How many merchants will be ready to invest their money in a market which can be destroyed at any time by a gang of vicious terrorists?” He demanded that a Department of Urban Security be created immediately to nip any future terror threats in the bud.

“We cannot and will not bow to Communists,” he said, vowing that the market would be reconstructed.

CHRIST CAPTURED! ASSOCIATES FLEE

25 March 33. Late last night, the radical Communist and self-styled Emir of the Jewish Kingdom, Jesus Christ was captured by a special anti-terrorist squad sent by High Priests Caiaphas and Annas from a garden in which he was hiding. Calling a special press conference, spokesman Barak said that the security services had successfully infiltrated the terrorist mastermind’s inner circle and had planted an agent among them. This agent finally led a hit team to the arch-terrorist himself.

“One of the security force personnel suffered injuries at the hands of some of the other terrorists with Christ, but fortunately should recover completely,” he said. “We categorically deny rumours that the security service resorted to bribery to get our hands on Christ. The security service does not pay bribes.”

According to available information, Christ’s immediate circle of terrorists managed to escape in the confusion following his capture. “It’s likely,” Barak said, “that they will attempt to set up fresh terror cells, possibly in neighbouring countries. Wherever they go, though, we will seek them, we will find them, and we will eliminate them.”

There has been no confirmation of a report that Christ’s second-in-command was spotted attempting to infiltrate the interrogation centre where the terrorist leader had been taken for preliminary questioning.

CHRIST EXECUTED

27 March 33. Yesterday, the captured terrorist leader Jesus Christ was executed by crucifixion.

“It was a fate he deserved,” the Temple spokesman Barak told reporters at the evening briefing. “Unlike what he had done with those opposed to him, he was given a full and fair trial before the Sanhedrin, and the sentence was confirmed not just by King Herod Antipater but by Pontius Pilatus himself.”

Asked about the possibility of popular anger, Barak was dismissive. “Christ badly overestimated the amount of support his agents had managed to provoke in his favour,” he said. “When given the choice of having him released, the people clamoured for his execution instead. It’s telling that they preferred to set a notorious criminal like Barabbas free instead of Christ; and they lined the streets to watch him being taken for crucifixion. The poisonous Communist doctrine he tried to spread has been definitively rejected.”

There was an attack by one of Christ’s terrorist cells, which threw devices in and around the Temple, damaging the great veil and causing panic among the people by producing blinding clouds of smoke. However, spokesman Barak rejected the possibility of it having been a rescue attempt. “The prisoner was well-guarded throughout the execution,” he said, “and was almost certainly already dead by the time of the attack.”

He said the body had been handed over for disposal to some of Christ’s carefully vetted and non-radical followers. “They can do whatever they want with his body,” Barak announced. “The problem has been dealt with.”

World leaders made no statement regarding the crucifixion, underlining the fact that Christ had not managed to gather any significant public support anywhere.

CHRIST’S CORPSE STOLEN

30 March 33. Yesterday morning it came to the notice of the police that the corpse of executed terrorist leader Jesus Christ had been stolen from its grave.

No other details are available.

PILATUS CLOSES GLADIATORIAL GAMES

31 March 33. In a splendid function today in Jerusalem, Proconsul Pontius Pilatus declared the Gladiatorial Games ended and congratulated all the participants and the audience.

He also announced that the Empire will be opening a gladiatorial training school to provide employment opportunities to the unemployed youth of Judea and Samaria.

“Perhaps some of them will be fortunate enough to fight and die for the entertainment of Great Caesar himself,” he said, to the cheers of the crowd.

More announcements about upcoming public entertainment projects are expected shortly.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014 

Image copyright David Elkington/Rex Features

Not Quite A Story

Once upon a time two gods made a wager.

It was a wager with fairly high stakes – the continued existence of the universe.

One of the gods was old and weary, but with the wisdom and treachery of untold aeons of existence. The other was young and brash, but filled with energy and drive.

From all over the multiverses the other gods came to witness the contest. Those with legs crawled, those with wings flew, those who had fins swam, and those who had none of these just came.  And they gathered round to watch.

The younger god pulled together energy out of the fabric of time and space, and fashioned it into a new universe. “I wager,” he said, “that perfection cannot last. It will inevitably degenerate.”

The older god just smiled. “You mean” he replied. “that things have a natural tendency to decay away from perfection towards imperfection.”

“That is what I mean,” the younger god said. He moulded the universe and breathed life into it, so that it spread through the billions of galaxies, seeking out homes for itself among a myriad of stars. “There you are,” he said. “We have merely to observe.”

But the older god merely smiled again. “What will you do if it does degenerate?”

“I shall destroy it. And you shall admit I have won.”

“And if it does not collapse into imperfection?”

“I shall destroy it anyway, because it will have served its purpose.”

“Very well,” the older god said. “As you wish, so shall it be.”

In a breath of time, untold ages passed.

And, on a little planet around an ordinary star on an outer arm of an unexceptional spiral galaxy, a primate stood on its hind legs and looked up at the sky.

**************************

The day Korola turned sixteen, her mother dressed her in white clothes and took her to meet the priest, to be blessed.

“I don’t want to go,” Korola said. “The priest is old and the way he looks at me makes me uncomfortable.”

“You still have to go,” her mother said firmly. “It is the tradition.”

“I am not interested in tradition,” she replied mutinously. “There is no point to tradition.”

“But unless you go, you won’t be declared a woman, and you’ll never be able to get married and have children of your own.”

“I don’t want to get married or have children.”

Her mother sighed. “Just come along, all right?”

So Korola had to go to the temple, where the priest looked her over with his lecherous eyes as he sprinkled her with powders and declared her, officially, a woman. Then she was allowed to go back home.

“I hope you understand this means nothing,” she told her mother. “I’ll never get married or have children.”

“Then what do you plan to do?” her mother asked.

“I will seek the mysteries of the universe,” Korola said firmly. “Tomorrow, I shall leave on a journey, to all the parts of the world. I will seek them and understand them, and only then will I be content.”

So it was that Korola left home, despite her mother’s tears and pleading, and by and by came to a city in a far off land which boasted of a great university. There she asked questions of all those who came thirsting for knowledge, or dispensed it; but nobody could tell her of the secrets of the universe.

Then she went away, by herself, and after years of wandering came to a strange and desolate valley, where only the winds blew with the voices of the desert.

Korola listened to the voices, and they told her things. And as the months passed she began to understand the things they told her.

That was how she became aware of the terrible danger.

Then Korola went back to the great cities, and preached her message – which was that the universe was the result of a mere wager, a whim of a young god, and that they were doomed to destruction if the perfection of the universe degenerated.

But the people laughed at her. “What is perfection?” they asked. “How can something which does not exist degenerate?”

Then Korola went back to her valley and thought some more. And this time she did not go back to the cities again.

Instead, she sought an audience with the gods.

*********************************

“You must admit,” the younger god said, “that I win. Imperfection is creeping into the universe wherever we look. We might as well destroy it and waste no further time.”

The older god shook his head. “Let us see what this young woman has to tell us,” he said.

So they summoned Korola into their presence. A breath later, she stood before them, unafraid.

“You can’t destroy the universe,” she told them both, the old god and the young god.

“And why not?” The young god held up the universe in his hands. It twisted and coiled like smoke. “Do you suggest it is perfect?”

“It is very far from it,” Korola replied. “Nothing is perfect in it, for it is changing constantly, and perfection cannot change.”

“There, you see,” the younger god said triumphantly. “I can destroy this right now.”

“But...” the older god prompted. “What else were you about to say?”

“Your wager,” Korola asked, “depends on the idea that the universe was created perfect. Is that not so?”

The old god glanced at the younger. “That is true, yes,” he said.

“But,” Korola said, “if it is to be created perfect, then the creator of it must also be perfect?”

The old god grinned. “Absolutely.”

“But if you created it on a whim, as a pride-fuelled dispute, then how can you be perfect?”

The old god eyed the younger. “Well? What do you think?”

Korola did not pause. “If you are not perfect, if you did not create perfection, then you have no right to destroy something for being imperfect. Do you see?”

“You know,” the old god said gently, “that as imperfection increases, it will reach a level that the universe will die of it anyway?”

“Perhaps,” Korola replied. “Perhaps not. Imperfection can itself lead in unexpected directions. How, not being perfect, can you tell?”

Korola shook her head. “I am as far from perfect as it is possible to be,” she said. “I cry, I laugh, I burn with anger and desire, I hurt with the pain of hopes and fears, I grow older as the years pass, but no wiser. How can I be perfect?”

“So all that you have told us is also imperfect? Which means you could be wrong?”

“Of course I could be. And so could you.”

The gods looked at each other. And the old god smiled.

“Put that down,” he said.

****************************************

Nobody ever saw Korola again. Not even the gods.

In the end, time and space spun on.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

The New Atheists, Racism and Bigotry

"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim."

 ~ Sam Harris, “atheist” ideologue and “thinker”.^[1] 

Question time: what is an atheist?

If you answered “Someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of a god or gods due to the absence of evidence”, you’d be completely correct. That’s all an atheist is – someone who doesn’t accept the existence of deities owing to the absence of acceptable evidence thereof.

But the times, they seem to be a-changin’.

As I believe everyone who reads my blog is well aware, I am an atheist. As the reader will also probably be aware, I have no sympathy for fascism. And, increasingly, that includes atheist fascism.

Atheist fascism, did I say?

Increasingly, atheism – as far as it exists as a public movement – is being hijacked by a fascist, bigoted clique. These people sometimes call themselves New Atheists, but there’s nothing new about their racist bigotry. At one time it used to call itself the White Man’s Burden and claim that it was on a civilising mission. Those were the days when open racism was much more acceptable than now; black Africans were still treated as farm machinery, Jews could still be confined to Pales of settlement, and as for the brown people, we were by turns massacred and forced to produce raw materials to feed our white masters’ economies.

The times may have “changed”, but the hatred and the bigotry haven’t disappeared; and now that you can’t, at least in polite society, openly hate people for the colour of their skin, what other excuse do you have?

There’s one easy answer: religion.

Now the marriage between bigotry and religion is nothing new. The imperialist campaigns to “civilise” the “lesser breeds without the law” had always included a Christianising mission, which was much more successful in some parts of the world than elsewhere. This had also had a strong component of “scientific racism” – the idea that some races were clearly superior or inferior to others, and that this could be proved by science.

Thus, the great French philosopher Voltaire could declare, about black people,

"They are not men, except in their stature, with the faculty of speech and thought at a degree far distant to ours. Such are the ones that I have seen and examined."

and his compatriot Christoph Meiners could say that Africans felt neither emotions nor physical pain.^[2]

You’ll note that both these eminent gentlemen perfectly produced the kind of “scientific” data most suited for justifying treating black people as farm machinery and colonial property.

These days, of course, religion as an excuse for colonialism is no longer acceptable in most societies. Even in the nations which actually do colonise others, some other excuse has to be found for colonial aggression and occupation. If the United States, for instance, invades and occupies Iraq and Afghanistan, it is on the excuse of “fighting terror” (whatever that might mean) or “weapons of mass destruction”, even though the administration at the time is fundamentalist Christian. The Zionist entity invades and occupies Palestine on the excuse of “security”, even though the fundamentalist rabbinical establishment calls for the expulsion of Arabs from the lands of “Eretz Israel”.

In both cases, though the aim of the invader and occupier is similar or identical to those of the religious establishment, religion isn’t the excuse given for the aggressive act. Even George W Bush went out of his way to state that his administration “wasn’t at war with Islam” – while devastating Muslim nations and ruining their social structures beyond recovery. But there’s a reason for this: no country, not even the US Empire, can conduct an openly religious war any longer. That’s only for the likes of ISIS or Al Shabaab, Boko Haram or the Buddhist mobs in Sri Lanka or Myanmar; non-state actors who don’t have to put up a facade of responsibility on what’s usually called the world stage.

But, of course, they are religious wars, whatever they may be called; as much religious wars as the Crusades, and as George W accidentally admitted early in his rampage. And there are one set of people who not just openly acknowledge that it is a religious war, but call for the worst kind of genocide to be visited on the targets. Who are these people?

The self-styled New Atheists, of course.

This is what the aforesaid Sam Harris has to say about the religion of Islam:

“We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.” (The End of Faith, p. 109)

To this end, Harris is perfectly happy not just to openly advocate torture of Muslims^[3] but the use of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Muslim nations and the acceptability of “collateral damage” in the destruction of Muslim countries. This is what Harris, in a self-exculpatory article, has to say about his advocacy of nuclear pre-emptive strikes (instead of using his critics’ words against him, I’ll let him speak for himself): ^[4]

What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

So, those Muslims (since we’re never told what an “Islamist regime” is supposed to be; remember that to Harris, in his own words, “we” are at war with Islam) can’t be trusted to think in any terms other than martyrdom and paradise – so it’s acceptable to nuke them rather than risk even the slightest chance that they might nuke “us”. If that isn’t an advocacy of pre-emptive nuclear strikes, I don’t know what is.

Not that Harris, of course, is alone in his anti-Islamic religious war. One of his best friends is Richard Dawkins, of whom I have said in the past that I respect his scholarship while entirely rejecting his bigotry. Not that his scholarship goes very far when it comes to Islam:^[5]

“Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter and verse like I can for Bible. But [I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today.”

So, the scholar who writes books depicting genetics and evolution in excruciating detail can't be bothered to actually find out something about the religion he himself cheerfully admits he calls the "greatest force of evil" today. Isn't that interesting?

From left: Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins

The third of the troika of New Atheists is the late Christopher Hitchens, whose one contribution to society, in my mind, was his part in debunking the myth of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, also known as Mother Teresa. Hitchens was a cheerleader of the invasion and destruction of Iraq, ironically an action which removed a secular Muslim bulwark against fundamentalism and jihadist terrorism. In fact, Hitchens’ stance on Iraq is the ultimate proof that whatever else the New Atheists pretend to be, their “war on Islam” isn’t anything of the sort – it’s a war against non-white people, period.

This, incidentally, is another of the sticking points I have regarding Dawkins. According to him, anti-Muslim animus (incorrectly called Islamophobia; the correct term is Islamomisia, hate of Islam) is not racism because “something you can convert to” is not a race.

That this superficially plausible argument is hogwash isn’t too difficult to intuit, even without Sam Harris’ quote with which I opened this article. Take a look at the usual depiction of “Muslims” in Western media; exactly how many white (or Kazakh, Indonesian or even black) Muslims would you see? In the aftermath of the 11/9 attacks, whom did the hate-fuelled specimens bent on vengeance in the US go around attacking? Brown-skinned people, irrespective of their religious orientation, wasn’t it? Who were the people put off flights because the pilots didn’t want to fly with them on board? Whom did the sky marshals arrest for “looking at them the wrong way”? If you Google image search for “terrorist”, who do you see depicted? All brown-skinned people, right?

There’s a reason why I call the comic strip I draw Raghead the Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist.

The stupidity of the kind of profiling Harris recommends is even more idiotic when you consider the idea of someone looking like they could “conceivably be Muslim”. How do you know who is a Muslim? Is it, say, by a beard? Didn’t Muhammad Atta and his cohorts shave their beards and look like anyone else? Isn’t it common sense for terrorists carrying out attacks for which they would have to go undercover, like the 11/9 hijackers, to dress up and act like anyone else? In that case, what do you have to go on?

Just the skin colour and racial origin, isn’t that so?

(And I’m not even mentioning white converts like those who turn up in Syria in disturbing numbers – how would you profile them? And how about non-Muslim terrorists...like, oh, Timothy McVeigh, for instance?)

Not a terrorist, obviously.

However, the mere fact that they are racist bigots (and, in the case of Harris, arguably not an atheist at all^[6,7]) hasn’t come in the way of the New Atheists becoming celebrities of the atheist “movement”. In fact, I have a big, a huge, an enormous problem with this atheist “movement”. As I said, over and over and over, atheism is not a religion. It does not have “leaders” or “prophets” any more than people who – like me – prefer to shave their heads and wear goatees have “leaders”. Once and for all, atheism is just a philosophical position that rejects the existence of any god in the absence of verifiable evidence. That is all there is to it.

A lot of atheists who agree with me about the bigotry and hatemongering of these New Atheists tend to think, wrongly, that they are harmless. They are anything but harmless. They are the intellectual descendants of the racist “scientists” of the 18^th Century who claimed black people didn’t have emotions and couldn’t feel pain. They claim that Muslims are all a monolithic mass who think and act alike, and the fact their position is as provably false, bigoted and ignorant as that of Voltaire et al isn’t making any difference to them or to the immature “atheists” who treat them as demigods and hang on to every word.

And in this lies an enormous danger.

A while ago, I was in an online discussion with a particular New Atheist acolyte who proudly proclaimed that he was “at war with Islam”. I asked him just what kind of Islam he was at war with, and whether he even had any conception of the differences between sects and schools of thought in the religion. Obviously he didn’t, nor did he want to know anything about them. I also asked him just how he intended to fight this “’war” of his – did he advocate genocide? He merely proclaimed that he did not want to discuss the topic with me and closed the conversation.

Let me repeat: this alleged atheist not only didn’t know what he was “at war” with, he didn’t want to know. He was proud of his ignorance.

Typical New Atheist "philosophy"

 Just how is this atheism again?

Now, there is a big problem with religion – just about all religions – these days. It is the disappearance of the moderate religious person. The formerly middle space, occupied by the moderates, is vanishing fast. A lot of people are drifting towards atheism or at least agnosticism, and this is of course a much welcome move. Leave the religion alone, and this is probably something that is irreversible, going by what’s happened to European Christianity. More educated and cosmopolitan people will, all other factors being equal, drift steadily towards moderate to no religion.

But all other factors are not equal. If the racist New Atheist bigots want to harden the fundamentalist core of the religions they target – primarily, of course, Islam – they are going about it exactly the right way, with blanket condemnation, incitement to violence, and casual racism. The enemy of the religious fundamentalist isn’t the atheist – it is the religious moderate, because the moderate proves to the so-called True Believer that another way of belief is possible without becoming an apostate. On the other hand, the aggressive atheist is nothing more than the best ally a fundamentalist can have, by convincing him or her that the world outside religion is his or her enemy.

All this is quite independent of the fact that the average religious person is - in daily life - more often than not a nice human being, and gratuitous insults are puerile and stupid. Also, this is apart from the fact that religion per se is not a problem. It only becomes a problem when it obtrudes into someone else's life.

The way the New Atheists go about it, they are making sure it will obtrude into everyone's life.

If you convince a people they are being targeted because of their faith, how long will it be before they decide to act on it? Why do you think jihadism is taking root in Muslim nations where it was a fringe movement once, nations which have been at the receiving end of Western armaments – while, in countries where representative democracy is allowed, fundamentalist Muslims have always done poorly in elections?

Bigotry feeds on bigotry. The New Atheists are setting themselves up to be the exact same kind of religious movement they are allegedly against, with prophets, acolytes, and utter intolerance for any kind of dissent for the “received wisdom”. As Noam Chomsky said^[5]

Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are “religious fanatics” and...in their quest to bludgeon society with their beliefs about secularism, they have actually adopted the state religion

They’re rapidly hijacking atheism and turning it into a fascist intellectual movement. They have to be stopped. We have to take atheism back from them before it is too late.

Remove the guns and give them laptops, and they're your New Atheists

This is not going to be a simple task. As I said, these poisonous individuals aren’t going to fade away with time. They have their second rung waiting in the wings, people like the Zionist shill and admitted liar^[8]  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to take over when they fade from the scene.

I may have been too generous in imputing the New Atheists' Islamomisia only to racism and bigotry. There is, of course, another and more commonplace side to it. Dawkins and Harris' opinions sell. In huge numbers, their books sell, and earn them gigantic amounts in terms of royalties. They get speaking fees for lectures. Like Creationism, for example, New Atheism is big business. And business protects itself by any and all means possible.

Fighting back may not be easy, but it has to be done. Just as the religious moderates have to fight back against the fundamentalists who are hijacking their religion, the original (and arguably the true) atheists have to fight back against the bigots.

Since I don’t consider the New Atheists atheists at all, what other name can we use for them?

I think I have a suggestion.

Bigotists.

Sources:

Note: I strongly suggest the reader check out these links for the detailed information they give on the subject of the Bigotists, especially the beliefs and statements of Sam Harris:

^[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus

^[2]  http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134210413618256.html

^[3]  http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/sam-harris-uncovered.html

^[4]  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sam_harris_responds_to_chris_hedges_fundamentalism_kills_column_20110726

^[5]  http://www.salon.com/2013/03/30/dawkins_harris_hitchens_new_atheists_flirt_with_islamophobia/

^[6] http://mondoweiss.net/2012/09/sam-harris-in-full-court-intellectual-mystic-and-supporter-of-the-iraq-war.html

^[7] http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/the-magic-wand-of-world-peace/

^[8] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/04/brandeis-retracts-activist.html