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Admin of Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) Subreddit Bans Free Speech Discussion Criticizing Islamic Violence

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I shared a post about a newlywed couple, a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, marrying for love only to be harassed and threatened with death by their local community and the Muslim woman’s family because the Hindu man didn’t convert to Islam upon marrying his wife. It was very popular on the subreddit and brought in much discussion on the problems of religious tolerance in regards to a large minority population of a Islamic community and how India is a test-case for what happens when societies respect religious tolerance above Free Speech. Unfortunately, an Admin decided to ban it with no explanation. I wonder how it is that a subreddit claiming to be about open dialogue and good faith discussion about politics and philosophy can just ban topics arbitrarily. I followed all the guidelines, giving a Submission Statement explaining how this was important to better understand the problems that Religious Tolerance can create in a society by using the example of a Democratic country that actively tries to ban criticism of religion instead of allowing Free Speech. In Islam, a Muslim woman can’t marry a non-Muslim man because Islam treats women as property and not as people. While a Muslim man can marry a woman who is a “person of the book” meaning the Abrahamic faith traditions of Judaism and Christianity, even this is not acceptable for Muslim women. This is imposed upon Muslims by Islamic rulings as per Islamic theology and claims that Quran’s Chapter 2 opposes this is moot because Islam’s Tafsir system abrogates older passages and chapters of the Quran with newer chapters. If anyone is confused or curious by how Islam’s theory of Abrogation works and wish to be more informed to better understand why an entire Muslim community is threatening to kill these newlyweds over a Muslim woman’s choice to marry a man she loves, please click here. The US government – supported by both Republicans and Democrats – even has a list of Islamic countries that impose this religiously sanctioned misogyny upon Muslim women. When the newlywed couple sought police protection, the police physically and verbally threatened the Hindu man to change his religion to Islam in defense of the Muslim community’s outrage towards a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man, who were growing in ire over the marriage. The couple then went to the Indian media to beg for help and only the BJP-favorable media like OpIndia has shared the story of their suffering at the hands of Islamic violence.

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Progress Note: Very Close To Completion, But Hiccups Remain

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Note: Two chapters left, but it seems I wasn’t able to make it by the deadline of today, but I am so very close.  

Part of my issue has been that I spent far too long last year on reading and considering the views of US Indology, which I had believed to be of credible academic value, only to learn, upon reading The Oxford Handbook of Indology, that they don’t actually do anything else but interpret Sanskrit and other Indian languages to their own subjective opinion. I was astonished to later learn that they had a complete ignorance of Islamic doctrines, which they purportedly aimed to compare the behavior of Hindus in the Medieval era to, and even more astonished to read Will Durant’s book to fact-check Far-Right claims and . . . well, facts didn’t care about my feelings. I learned to value Free Speech upon discovering the truth from credible historians that I could trust like Will Durant much later on. I had purchased and read all of Siva Gita by Andrew J. Nicholson and then several chapters of his other book Unifying Hinduism only to compare to Will Durant’s historic fact-finding research and conclude that Nicholson and the Indologists that he cited in his book were entirely ignorant of Islam’s actual impact in India. He even refers to Hindu intellectuals arguments against Islamic invasion as mythic. I had to spend so much unnecessary time re-evaluating my information and came to unsettling conclusions that I didn’t want to be true, but soon recognized was the truth based on factual evidence and a greater understanding of Islamic theology thanks to the College panel discussions by Ex-Muslims of North America. I feel I owe a great deal to them for opening my eyes to problems that were right in front of me, but for which I didn’t notice.

This may sound odd, but I feel a sense of oddness when reflecting how far my views have been reshaped and changed by doing my utmost to go on fact-finding for my book. I hope there’s no issues – and there shouldn’t be – with Amazon’s guidelines once I’m able to self-publish it. It’ll probably be about a week more; if anyone has been eager to read, then I sincerely thank you for your patience. I really am trying to do my utmost in making this a book full of useful information and critiques for all who are interested in a critique of religion through social and cognitive psychology, Nietzschean philosophy, and my own views and thought experiments added onto it. I hope for the best, but I have no idea how good or bad the book will do in terms of sales and generating interest. When I’m done, I feel like hibernating for a month, because my brain feels like it is on fire and melting as I go through the process of writing, editing, citing, re-editing, and then probably editing once again. My main issue is keeping the word count of the remaining two chapters of Hinduism within the 828 page limit of Amazon’s self-publishing physical copies. I hope I can write concisely and informatively enough to squeeze it in.

Overall, writing this book has been one of the most thrilling and satisfying experiences of my life.

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Blocked From Facebook For Criticizing Nazism

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Here is the message I wrote as a complaint against the ban:

I shared a post to show evidence that Hitler stated the Nazi movement was Christian. He did say that in the speech that the picture mentioned. That is a factual historic statement. I was neither endorsing Nazism or Hitler when showing that. Instead, I was agreeing with the person who made the topic that I posted in, the person shared his own image and stated that the Nazis were largely were Christian and backed by Christian organizations. All of that is factual, unambiguous history of the rise of Nazism, Hitler, and their connections with Christianity. I sharing further historic evidence in concurrence with that argument, I was showing the horrifying connections of Christianity and Nazism. I wasn’t endorsing hate. I was challenging religious believers in a debate forum on harsh historic facts about Nazism. Please rescind your bans on my account now. It is absolutely absurd that I was blocked from being allowed to challenge the community guideline ban to begin with. Please rescind now.

It won’t do anything. Why? Because Facebook banned me from being able to complain about being banned. This is absurd.

Facebook, and most Social Media Companies, just aren’t capable of making good policies on Free Speech and often wrongfully ban people all the time. After finding out that Trump’s Free Speech complaint website was closed, I decided to just email my Senators and House Representative. It won’t do shit like always.

Well, so much for making connections on Facebook for my book release. If anyone is curious about the email I sent to the US Congress:

Could you please extend the First Amendment upon social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? It’s quite clear they’re too incompetent to make any sound policies, their arbitrary removal of content and then dismissing any ability to file a complaint about how our actions haven’t harmed their policies, and the fact a wide swathe of important functions from running small businesses to paying rent often requires using Facebooks services should be sufficient grounds of imposing standards of treating them like public utilities when they become so large and important for people’s very livelihoods. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal determined a Presidential election and if that’s not sufficient grounds to change policy on large social media companies once they reach a certain level of audience, then what is?
I was just banned for 30 days on the Facebook platform for criticizing Nazism because they thought my criticism of Nazism was somehow an endorsement of it. This is ridiculous. I was blocked and then when I went to file a complaint, I was blocked from being allowed to do that. If someone wants to run a small business or to pay rent and uses the Facebook software, but then gets banned from it, then what’re they suppose to do? If you have no ideas on how to fix this situation with Social media companies, then do your country a favor and retire to allow people who are intelligent enough to understand how Social media works to pass laws that can make changes. Because right now, from the outset, you all seem too ignorant and incapable of making any policy changes that protect the US public’s Constitutional rights.
“Let your voice be heard!”, “Speak out!”, “Democracy needs public participation!” — Stop lying. Voices will always be drowned out by the arbitrary whims of those who have more money than you’ll make in your entire lifetime.
The image I shared as a criticism of Christianity and Nazism’s connections which was misinterpreted as endorsing Nazism:
Screenshot_111
Private companies aren’t competent in doing the US government’s job.

Progress Note: I Am An Idiot

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Upon nearing the final portions of Part II of my book, I decided to check my word count and page count by making a separate file to place all that I have written into one word document, I found that, to my own chagrin, that I had undervalued myself and overshot the lengths I had already written… to the point that I will have to make this 4-year book project into a series. If you would like to read portions from the actual book to better understand what it’ll contain, here is a sample draft of chapter 6 which doesn’t reflect the final version, but it is still mostly the same.

At the time I decided to check, I found that my word count for Part II was 325,718 and combined with Part I which was on a separate file, it became 404,444 words. It amounted to 881 pages in word. For comparison, my first and terrible attempt at an ebook is around 18,000 words and takes up 203 pages double-spaced on Amazon’s ebook page count. As of now, my word count is 406,958 words and 1,001 pages in what has been completed thus far. So as you can plainly see, I have indeed worked on this book for four years. I will have to change it into a series and I wonder if I should scrub all references to Part III that were made to allude to that portion so that readers would look forward to it, or if I should keep it there so people get interested in future book releases… I really don’t know. It is intended to be a Two-Part Book series now though. I feel a strange and confusing feeling of pride and self-contempt that I’ve done this to myself.

I will now need to make two separate conclusions and I am struggling to think of what would even be appropriate for this book, since the intention was to finish Part III and make a conclusion for what was to be a single book. I’m contemplating a few ideas on how to conclude the entirety of the book as of now. I still haven’t finished the section on Hinduism, but I’ll probably do that one last because I really want to be sure that I can provide a satisfying conclusion that challenges people. I’m not sure if I’ll succeed on that point, but I’ll try with what I have thus far.

For those of you who might be curious, here is my Table of Contents. I wish to take down any notion that I’ll be going soft on Islam and harsher on other religions. I wish to show my ruthlessness upon all of them out of my compassion for the victims of religion:

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Happy Buddha Purnima / Vesak

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Today is evidently the Buddha’s birthday as recognized by several Buddhist schools of thought and Buddhist traditions. I thought I’d add this post as a celebration. The art is by Sherman Nepali and can be found here. For a quick rundown, on the celebration of the Buddha’s birthday, click here. More information can be found here.

I wanted to celebrate Buddhist art and culture due to the horrifying degree in which it is being culturally erased in Afghanistan, Maldives, and it is quite saddening how little of the Greco-Buddhist culture is left due to Islamic conquests that made a thoroughgoing attempt to destroy it all.

Before and After Images of The Taliban’s violent destruction of the massive 1700 year-old Bamiyan Cliff Statues in Afghanistan via dynamite due to their faith in Islam.

Islam has destroyed so much beauty and wonder, yet still can claim victimhood despite all its horrific actions. Meanwhile, actual peaceful teachings and cultures suffer being referred to as bigoted even after losing so much to such a violent and atrocious ideology as Islam.

Buddhism has such an inner sense of clarity, reflection, and sense of peace towards the world; building beautiful monuments, paintings, and civilizations. Yet, when it is forcibly taken away by a demented and psychotic belief system like Islam, Buddhists are depicted to be the aggressors. I ask you, who gives more value to a civilization? Which culture offers more beauty, wonder, and interest to our collective human experience?

I oppose anti-Muslim bigotry, Muslims should never endure violence because of terrorist organizations like the Taliban or stupid people like in Maldives, but don’t pretend Muslim culture isn’t complete shit.

While I may not agree with many doctrines, it should go without saying that Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity all have beautiful depictions of art, music, and culture. We mustn’t ever allow them to be erased.

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What The Fuck Happened To Intelligent Discourse?

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Dear Reader,

Do you remember when intelligent interviews and discussions were the norm? When you got to learn something of incredible value from an interview and it wasn’t a pissing contest with an interviewee leaving the stage because they couldn’t take a few basic questions that journalists asked so they could clarify any confusion for audiences? Or when people could just be part of a panel and not have someone storm off for hashtags and tweets and then be rewarded by the worthless rabble for refusing to even be part of a discussion?

Free Speech seems to already be dead and it is dead because so-called advocates of it don’t even follow its core tenants. The people who behave like the recent so-called “public intellectuals” have killed it and continue to defecate on its corpse while claiming to be its paragons.

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Progress Note: Writing A Book Is A Second Job

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Fully completed revising and citing all of Part I, finished revising and citing the sections on Original Sin and Judaism, and currently in the process of revising and citing the section about Christianity for Part II. I spent too much time on revising the section on Islam for the third time, but admittedly I did think it was necessary because it helped for me to write further clarifications on the problems of Islam. I haven’t spent as much time on the section of Buddhism and I didn’t even begin Hinduism, but I do have the outline set and after researching further, I haven’t found any reasons why the outline would need revision before I begin writing the chapters down for the section on Hinduism.

It feels surreal that this four year journey of writing, revising, and trying to improve will finally be coming to an end soon. I had felt bad about it taking so long until I read that most authors take 4-10 years to finish a book, read up on the book Getting Things Done and realized writing a book wasn’t easy, and recalled the difficulty of the entire endeavor from Hank Green’s explanation on distinguishing tasks from projects. A book is a long-term project. People who believe it is easy probably don’t think about the numerous steps required for writing an exceptionally good book. It requires knowing your audience for the book, selecting a fitting genre that hopefully won’t drown out your book from the tens of thousands of others, it requires knowledge of copyright so you don’t get scammed out of your money both in your own country and overseas, possibly hiring an editor to fix your grammar mistakes (I won’t be doing this and instead rely upon my essay writing abilities from years of college — potentially to my detriment), paying someone to make a good cover that’ll attract readers (I used fiverr.com), and purchasing a ISBN from your home country. All of that is before marketing your book, which I’m not sure I have a good plan for. The most daunting prospect throughout all of this is that you can spend so much of your time and effort and you may not even make a single sale. The three books I’ve written, the political ones I could have admittedly done a better job in, didn’t really sell much beyond $60 combined throughout all the years they were available up to the present moment and I spent over $50 on advertising. Alternatively, when I released my first ever book for free, it was downloaded just above 100 times, but the moment it was on sale, there was maybe 5 or 6 sales at best over several years. And only one review which didn’t go into any details on any criticisms they had about the book and gave it a 3/5. The dystopian-comedy fantasy novel I wrote to mock Neo-Nazis and their ilk did marginally better since it made 4 sales within the first year and got 2 positive reviews. To be clear though, I don’t really mind since I didn’t put in my best effort, but rather just wanted to prove to myself that I could write about such topics. I think it was probably a detriment overall and I wonder whether I should just pull all the books I’ve written thus far off of Amazon permanently and have only this specific book I’m writing to be the only one available for sale. The only reason I don’t is because if a reader ever gets curious as to how much I’ve changed in my thought process over political issues, they can read about my previous beliefs and compare them to my contemporary ones.

I’m not sure how many of you who are unfamiliar with the habits of writing will believe this, but I honestly feel that writing a book is harder than most mundane physical labor jobs and even the job I had at the Veteran’s home as a Health Unit Coordinator for patients with dementia. I’ve been an unloader, taking palettes off of trucks, and I think that writing a book is several orders of magnitude harder. As an unloader, I had to physically pull things, flee whenever a badly formed palette off a truck began to fall near me, and move it to specific locations in a store. It’s quite a thoughtless job. By contrast, writing a book requires making an outline, researching several topics at great lengths to give an informed opinion, and possibly making additions or changes. For fantasy or Sci-fi writers, its several orders of magnitude more difficult since you have to make a culture that feels authentic or possibly multiple cultures that feel authentic to readers, focus on other aspects of the setting, make interesting subplot points, foreshadowing specific twists in stories, making realistic characters, pinpoint an entire journey and the overarching theme of the journey, write everyone’s dialogue, and provide an engaging motivation to hook readers. Moreover, regardless of if its non-fiction or fiction, you’re competing with every other book in your genre. And even after all that, you may not make a single penny for all of your effort. George R.R. Martin is right to say that writing a book is a gamble. In fact, according to fictional writers who report on their experiences, the average fictional novel may take anywhere from 4 – 10 years to complete. People really underestimate the difficulty. For example, if you’re working two jobs and one of your free days from one job overlap with a day you’re off of work in your other job, then you’ll probably find it practically impossible to work on a book. Laundry, possibly taking care of kids, groceries, and so forth will all take time. And you need time to unwind especially if just one of your jobs is physically or mentally taxing and demands a high level of work performance. It may not seem important, but writing a books table of contents, chapters, and even taking free time to think over the book (especially if you’re writing a fantasy or Sci-fi novel) is important. You can’t concentrate and think over such aspects when doing rudimentary chores or when doing tasks at your job. Even free time at lunch isn’t enough to think over concrete stories or methods of researching new information. At best, you’ll be jotting down a couple of notes that you could never get to or potentially could forget. Writing takes concentration and habit; it is a job all on its own and its one that you may never get paid for and possibly never even finish. You really do run the risk of wasting so much of your time and effort on something that yielded nothing valuable as a return of investment.

Despite all that, I really do feel what I’m working on warrants the risk and is vitally important to write. At best, it’ll hopefully inspire others. I’m sure every author who has ever written a book wishes to become famous and I’m not going to pretend I’m an exception as that would be dishonest. I do hope it is financially successful too, but I doubt it judging from my own track record and some of the responses I get for some arguments I share online. I hope religious believers at least give the book a shot and that it gets decent reviews at least. I want it to be the sum-total of all my arguments against religion and a critique of different religions methods and assumptions about the world. I suspect that all I’ll be seen as is arrogant though, but I hope not. I’m still focused on trying to finish this and hopefully it’ll be done by either this month or early next month.

Update: Currently working on my book for the next few weeks

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I am cutting out time from the internet to focus strictly upon writing my book and hopefully finishing it by this month. I want it done, but every time I learn something new, I feel compelled to incorporate it. It doesn’t help that I am always deeply involved in political topics due to my focus of study and interests. There’s always so much going on and changing or something new I’m learning that I fear discredits a specific point I wrote down in my book and so I must check, re-check, and re-write so that my points and criticisms are salient. The book will be utilizing logical fallacies, Cognitive and Social psychology, and Nietzschean philosophy for my critique of religion. I want this book to be the sum-total of all my criticisms of religion. It doesn’t help that I deep dive into rabbit holes of knowledge over and over to thoroughly learn something specific and new. I fear it may weaken my critiques unintentionally at this pace, but also feel like covering as much ground as possible is incredibly important. These incidents have been the entire journey of writing this book so far; I originally intended a book of general critiques for all religions and then expanded when I realized it wouldn’t hit the crux of the matter. I divided the book into Parts with Part I being the general criticisms and Part II being the criticisms related to specific religious theology. Even in the context of Part II, I need to make some generalizations because being completely specific to certain branches of a religion is impossible to cover accurately in arguably even one lifetime and so I focus on core teachings. I think the approach of focusing on the core teachings of each major religion is the best middle-ground for Part II. I often have to utilize different approaches to different beliefs. However, as I was writing Part II, I began to realize the excuse that “religion does good for some people” could be used to exonerate bad beliefs and so I made yet another expansion. I have yet to write Part III at all so far as I’m currently finalizing Part I and amending Part II, but I will hopefully have Part III written down and have at least the draft form completed by this month.

For that matter, when going through the process of writing and critiquing each particular religion, I was forced to make different amounts of chapters depending upon the religion. Buddhism doesn’t have as much convoluted sophistry as the Abrahamic faiths. Thus, I could finish the entirety of my critique in one chapter in the draft I have so far and it includes both the Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism. By contrast, due to their respective forms of convoluted sophistry, Christianity and Islam are both taking 6 chapters for their Part II critiques. A friend has suggested I’m taking too much time and that I should just make it into separate books, but the Part I critiques are to introduce guiding principles in order to go forth critiquing Part II and I think Part III will be very relevant to that entire ensemble for the book. I want it all there and I think its best that it’s all placed together in one whole book to cover all of my criticisms.

Honestly though, throughout the process and years spent writing this book, half the time I’m spent wondering that it’ll all be for nothing. That it’ll all be a complete waste of my time. That despite all my time and effort, it will have meant that I just wasted 4 whole years of my life. The other half of the time, I get enticed by the prospect of making a best-seller… but let’s be serious, every author who has ever written a book has probably dreamed of their book being a best seller and making a lot of sales at some stage in the process. I do hope this book does well, but I have very good reasons to doubt all the effort I’ve put into it. It truly worries me that I’ve just been wasting my time. But, I have to finish it and once I do, I’ll either be promoting it or moving onto another book and learning from failure.

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The Intolerance of Nerdfighteria: How Discussing Human Rights Gets You Muted And Banned

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So, awhile back I attempted to share Ex-Muslims of North America content on Nerdfighteria Discords in an effort to join their communities while sharing information on an important human rights topic. When doing this, I was immediately accused of bigotry, when talking about human rights I was accused of making a strawman (even though no opposing argument was given nor any discernible information regarding any opposing argument), and I was told that I was posting on “incorrect channels” — the channels I selected were related to Politics and stated it was for divisive and controversial topics. Evidently, human rights wasn’t included in that package as I was muted by one Nerdfighteria community and the other refused to respond to my question of whether they valued the human rights of Ex-Muslims.

A part of me just didn’t want to believe that Nerdfighteria, a community that seemed so calm, compassionate, and open to polite communication of ideas could be so intolerant towards the human rights of some of the most vulnerable people in the world today who live in fear within their own societies for the crime of having their own opinions. So, I made and used an alternative account to check and see if I could open discussions about the human rights of Ex-Muslims who essentially have to live in fear for their very lives and the human rights abuses that women in Islamic majority communities suffer. I primarily did this because as far as cost-benefits analysis, the human rights of people should outweigh the woeful ideal of religious tolerance. If that seems like an excuse for “trolling” then I would honestly respond by pointing out that the human rights of these people and the ability to give their human rights issues a platform should be paramount to the public discourse. Just as we discuss Yazidi and Christian women being abused as sex slaves by ISIS, Ex-Muslims being hunted down and killed for the crime of freedom of thought is just as relevant of a human rights issue. Also, I find it astonishing and sickening that fellow Liberals can dismiss the human rights of these people so callously without any regard for what they’re condemning these people too. I suspect it’s because people don’t want to open the discussion on the hot topic of religion in order to protect their own religious traditions. As such, I suspect that their own religion is more important than people’s human rights. Furthermore, trolling seems to just be a meaningless personal attack for shutting down discussion whenever a topic that is personally uncomfortable comes up. It’s a meaningless term that ignores critical examination of the content in order to swipe away all nuanced discussion due to personal comfort levels. I personally feel a sense of frustration and disbelief that this crucial human rights issue hasn’t found a stronger acceptance in Left-leaning public discourse.

For this new attempt, I used another username and shared videos of human rights crimes.

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