I have no tolerance for Islam. I'll show you why.
Here's an excerpt from an Associated Press story on a man who might be executed in Afghanistan for converting from Islam to Christianity:
"'Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die,' said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001."
This guy is considered "moderate" in Afghanistan? Oh boy, we're in bigger trouble than I thought. The Muslim clerics that are calling for the Christian convert to literally be torn to pieces are barbarians. Ironically, they help to prove evolution right. I know monkeys more civilized.
Yeah, I know I'm supposed to have religious tolerance. Let's see if cleric Raoulf has tolerance. Here's another quote from this esteemed man of God:
"Cut off his head!" he exclaimed, sitting in a courtyard outside Herati Mosque. "We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left."
It is entirely unreasonable to have tolerance for this kind of intolerance. These Muslim clerics are loathsome. They make Pat Robertson look kind-hearted. At least, Robertson isn't demanding that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez be dismembered, just killed.
How are you supposed to have a conversation with people this irrational? Chipping away at their madness is hopeless. We have to do a frontal assault. We have to engage in a much bigger culture war.
Their culture is wrong. Secular culture is right. You cannot engage in rational discourse with people who don't believe in being rational. They believe in ancient mythologies that are rooted in utter nonsense.
God doesn't care about being "humiliated." He is not a jealous God as the Bible and the Koran claim. There is no God that favors the Muslims or one that favors Israel. I can't believe I have trouble convincing people in the year 2006 that it doesn't make any sense for God to favor one set of people over another. Are you people so blind that you cannot see the utter irrationality of that concept?
Is the Muslim God so small that he can't take an insult from a petty human? Is he so insecure that he cannot countenance the slightest challenge to his supremacy? If the characteristics given to God were exhibited by a human, he would be the worst person on earth.
Obviously, none of the religions are exempt. Christianity claims that God killed his only son for us. Other than being a nonsensical injustice, that is also barbaric and would be the highest crime if God were a man. Which society would allow a deranged man to kill his son to cleanse the souls of others?
If we don't take these religions on in a frontal assault, they will continue to spread their irrational poison throughout the world. If you buy into the premise that the man in the sky tells you what to do and will torture you forever if you so much as slightly displease him, then you will believe any illogical thing someone tells you.
Religion has to be torn from the root, otherwise we will not be able to speak sense to these people. If these Afghan clerics think that Allah is telling them to rip someone's head off, no amount of rational discourse will disabuse them of that idea.
Until we change the culture -- theirs and ours -- invading all these countries to give them democracy isn't going to do a bit of good. They will vote to put the clerics of Santa Allah in charge. Even in Iraq, the leading vote getter in all of the elections so far has been the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
The neo-cons in the Bush administration had it exactly wrong. They believed that if we changed the governments in the Middle East, we would be able to change their culture. In fact, we have to change the culture before we change the governments.
Of course, the problem is that in order for us to realize we have to head down this path, we have to confess that our own religious fundamentalists are wrong. And politically, we are not willing to let that happen. We must hold on to Santa Jesus. He is going to put us all into Heaven if we are good little boys and girls.
As Cedric the Entertainer says, come on, you're a "grown-ass man" now. Don't you feel embarrassed in believing these childish fairy tales about Gods and goblins?
Fundamentalists claim that the Bible is the perfect word of God -- that every word in the Bible is true. The Bible (which by the way is also the foundation of the Koran) says that it is an abomination against God to eat shrimp or to wear two different fabrics at the same time. It says that you can take slaves, as long as they are not from Israel.
How can you believe this madness? And how can you judge the Afghanis for believing their version of this madness when you hold on to the same false premise?
I want to make clear that I am not speaking against spirituality or the belief in a higher consciousness in general. I know that many of you believe that you experience things that cannot be explained by science yet. I have no beef with that.
But when you say we must all follow the mad rants of a long dead rabbi, priest or imam, you cross the line. And when some of you say we should run our government based on these ancient fairy tales or that we should kill based on them, you are so over the line that it requires action against you.
I do not believe violence is the answer. Wars are sometimes, though very infrequently, the only viable solution. But much more often than not, they are to satiate the lust for power, religious or otherwise. Violence is the currency of Neanderthals like the clerics in Afghanistan who don't have enough intelligence to be able to debate with their minds. They resort to violence like animals because they don't have the intellectual capacity to act like human beings.
So, when I say action, I mean cultural action. There must be an open dialogue about whether religion makes sense. Its lack of logic and historical accuracy must be confronted. When the rational people in society sit by and do nothing because they are afraid of offending the least tolerant people on earth, you have to wonder how rational they really are.
Religious dogma has no tolerance for you if you do not buy into all of its tenets. In fact, it usually has a special place in hell reserved for you. So, why would you have tolerance for this type of ideology, which certainly does not return the favor?
Polite acquiescence is complicity. Religion is entirely irrational. It must be confronted and defeated. Otherwise, we are going to go another thousand years with people threatening to rip each other's heads off because they don't believe in each other's specific brand of crazy.
It's time for reasonable people to be reasonable -- and fight back.