Politics

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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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“Shariat” Courts Must NEVER Be Allowed In India

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I recently happened upon this disinformation article by IndiaToday claiming to be factual. It is full of misdirection, omissions, and lies and I want to prove it to you all.

Sharia law courts must NEVER be allowed in India. Do not allow this horrible, disgusting system infect India because of “religious tolerance” — it is not worth it.

The Sharia is essentially Divine Command Theory put into practice; Sharia scholars can only act based on the Quran, the Quran interpreting other parts of the Quran, what the pedophilic Islamic Prophet Mohammad did in his life because he’s seen as the perfect human being in Islam, and then “verified” Hadiths are used to support following certain practices so long as the Quran allows it; after that, Sharia scholars can give an “independent opinion” so long as it follows the Quran, Mohammad’s behavior, the Hadiths, or the First Followers of the Quran. Making new and updated practices for the modern era is strictly forbidden under the rule called “bidah” (invention) in a religion. One thing should be make explicitly clear here: The Sharia Court System is Fundamentally Opposed To All Outside Logic and Reason. No non-Muslim opinion is considered valid. When a Sharia scholar gives a ruling, Muslims are divinely mandated to follow it as unquestioned fact of Islam that they aren’t allowed to dispute. Keep in mind all of the following below has to be accepted by Muslims as unquestioned fact under Divine Command Theory of Sharia.

Don’t believe me? A link to the Tafsir explanation by a noteworthy and respected Islamic Cleric. I’ve added full links next to the one-clicks, if you don’t believe me: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/205290/tafseer-on-the-basis-of-narrated-texts-and-tafseer-on-the-basis-of-individual-understanding

The Sharia means “Divine Law” and in Civil Sharia Proceedings, a woman has half the say of a man even in cases of rape. Meaning two women must be there to verify the statements of a single man in cases of rape.

The Quran supports killing Apostates so in Civil Proceedings, anyone who wants to leave Islam would be killed for apostasy. http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=4&verse=89

Women and little girls being held captive to rape is considered morally justified in the Sharia: http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=4&verse=24

Beating your wife is acceptable under Sharia as per Quranic instructions: http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=4&verse=34

Violence against other religious groups, even different Islamic groups, is mandated thanks to Chapter 9 of the Quran; here’s just a small snippet: http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=9&verse=29

Raping little girls is legal in Sharia Civil Courts because the Pedophile Prophet Mohammad had sex with his 9 year old bride Aisha when he was around 50; it is justified by Aisha’s own admittance in the Hadiths: https://islamqa.info/en/answers/124483/age-of-the-mother-of-the-believers-aaishah-may-allah-be-pleased-with-her-when-the-prophet-blessings-and-peace-of-allah-be-upon-him-married-her

Here’s a link to a Harvard Divinity Graduate of Islamic Theology in the US justifying sex with 9 year-olds on the basis of Aisha’s age when she was raped by the pedophile Prophet of Islam.

This has real world consequences in Sharia Legal Systems across the Arab world because Sharia courts don’t consider raping women or little girls a crime: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2017/05/mais-haddad-arab-world-laws-protect-the-rapist-not-the-victim/

Look at what happened with Sharia Courts in Great Britain

Let’s step back a bit and think over the logistics of tackling the wave of crimes that’ll occur and that the Indian police will be ill-equipped to deal with since – to the best of my knowledge – the ratio of the police force in India is 1 for every 400 people and not 1 for every 100 people.

British adaption of Sharia Courts have caused systematic discrimination against millions of women with British government officials not aware how many Sharia courts operate in their own soil once they were in effect despite not having legal authority and supposedly only being customary.

This causes systematic abuse of women and still remains a problem ever since Britain accepted Sharia courts. Large subsets of Muslim men and women willfully choose to ignore secular laws when Sharia Courts are implemented despite even when they have no legal power and act only as ceremonial decrees from the perspective of British law. Despite this, they’re treated as the de facto law of the land by a large swathe of British Muslims of Pakistani descent because they’re viewed as divine law — which is what Sharia means. Muslims must see Sharia Courts as divinely mandated by their God and thus superseding Secular Laws despite the actual codified law of the land. Islam’s Sharia Courts are Divine Command Theory put into practice.

This has had real world consequences in Great Britain with Christian British and Hindu British women being raped by Pakistani Muslim immigrants.

Sexual grooming amongst Hindu girls

In Australia, Muslim men violating and beating their wives is a severe problem throughout the country.

Examine the borders close to India and see what Sharia legal systems have wrought

Raping minority Christian, Atheist, and Hindu women on the streets is normalized in Bangladesh due to support for Sharia. Massacres, arguably genocide of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, are the norm in Islamic majority countries. Bangladesh has had persecution and violence against Hindus both in recent years and going back in the recent past that still continues on nowadays. Christian groups have attempted to document abuses to defend Hindu human rights, but also suffer persecution and possibly risk death along with Hindus by doing so.

From journalist and Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at UCLA, Nushin Arbabzadah, in what was an attempt by a lecturer from a Liberal College to warn the US public about the dangers of Islam in Afghanistan with an article about the Mujahideen and Islam:

28 April marks the 19th anniversary of the mujahideen’s victory over the Red Army forces in Afghanistan. The original mujahideen of the 1980s and today’s Taliban may use the same language of holy war, but their understanding of jihad is worlds apart. The key difference between the original mujahideen and the Taliban is that the former waged a traditional type of jihad. In a traditional jihad, if waged locally, a contest over control of resources takes place between rival strongmen who each run their own private armies. In this scenario, the ultimate legitimacy to rule draws upon military strength, but the contest itself is called jihad simply because Islam is the sole language of political legitimacy.
Crucially, in a traditional jihad, the victorious party has an unspoken right to pillage, rape and loot the conquered population. This is because militia fighters are not paid soldiers in a regular army and hence looting is the material reward they receive for fighting. The original mujahideen followed this traditional pattern of jihad upon coming to power in 1992. Since competition over resources rather than ideology is key to traditional jihad, the mujahideen’s war focused on Kabul where the nation’s wealth and the foreign embassies, another potential source of funding, were to be found.
Judging by a historical account from the 1920s, back then the women and girls of the conquered populations also belonged to the pillage package offered to militia jihadis. Hence, in the diaries of court chronicler Katib Hazara on the siege of Kabul in 1929, we read that the victorious mujahideen of the time had demanded to see the list of girls registered at a Kabul school so as to allocate female students to militia fighters.
Katib’s account might be exaggerated, but the story still reveals that there was an unspoken rule that women and girls were part of the conquest package. As such, the mujahideen’s struggle over Kabul was a continuation of traditional jihad complete with internal rivalries, pillage and looting. The mujahideen were part of the realm of traditional politics in which a conquered region is a turf that can be exploited by strongmen, who call themselves mujahideen so as to appear respectable.

This had dire consequences in Afghanistan:

Three years ago, the remaining few Sikhs and Hindus threatened to leave the country if they were not given a seat, but still the majority in the Afghan parliament turned down the Hamid Karzai government’s much touted decreegranting reservation. Those against the reservation argued that the Afghan constitution prohibits any discrimination among its citizens.

Therein lies the irony. It is endemic discrimination against Hindu and Sikh minorities, who are usually clubbed together, which has driven out almost all members of these once thriving communities from their homeland to foreign countries such as India and Germany. Hindus and Sikhs have lived on this land for hundreds of years, but in a span of three decades, they are on the verge of becoming confined to the pages of Afghan history.

Until the Taliban overran Afghanistan, Hindus and Sikhs were a small but influential part of Afghan society. They were at the forefront of business and trade, engaged in money-lending and shop-keeping, selling everything from charms to herbs. Some had also joined the army and police in the last century and in the 19th century before that. President Mohammad Najibullah, who was hanged from a lamppost in Kabul by the Taliban, had also tried to involvethem politically.

An investigation by TOLO News, a leading news channel in Afghanistan, revealed that 99 percent of Hindus and Sikhs have left Afghanistan in the last three decades. The report, published in June, said that there were 220,000 Sikhs and Hindus in the 1980s, but their population came down to 15,000 after the Taliban took over in the 1990s. Now, only 1,350 Hindus and Sikhs remain. Discrimination and government neglect are responsible for the exodus.

During the Taliban regime, Hindus wore yellow badges and non-Muslims were not allowed to hold government jobs. It was because of those horrifying yellow badges that much of the world first came to know about these religious minorities living in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after the fall of the Taliban, those Hindus and Sikhs who remain are contending with growing insecurity, loss of land and property to warlords, hostile neighbours who object to their practice of burning their dead, bullying in schools, and dwindling economic prospects. More than any other time in their history, they feel like outsiders now.

In Pakistan, kidnapping and forced conversions are a continuous problem for Hindus and Sikhs by Muslim sexual predators:

After partition from India in 1947, and the creation of Pakistan as a separate state for Muslims, marriages of the Hindu minority were not officially recognized, leaving Hindu women without protection under the law.

Hindus in Pakistan are now estimated to number around 3 million out of a population estimated at nearly 190 million. Discrimination and violence against religious minorities is common.

“Our married daughters and sisters have been kidnapped by local non-Hindu influentials and forced to convert to Islam,” said lawyer Arjun Das, chairman of Pakistan Council of Meghwar, a Hindu community, who campaigned for the marriage law.

“Then they have been gotten forcibly re-married off to their influential kidnappers … without their victims’ consent.”

KIDNAPPED

Sixteen-year-old Anjali Kumari was kidnapped three years ago from her home in Dharaki in broad daylight – and was forcibly converted to Islam within a day.

“We had to take refuge in Karachi as we faced murder threats by the kidnappers with connections to a local political group when we raised our voices and took to the streets calling for release of our daughter,” Kumari’s father, Kundan Mal Meghwar, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“She was forcibly converted and married off … against her free will,” Mal Meghwar said.

A court in the port city of Karachi ruled in 2014 that Anjali should stay in a shelter in the city where her parents could visit her.

“But we were never allowed to meet our daughter, giving her the impression that we were no longer interested in saving her … from her kidnapper,” he said. “She succumbed to the pressure and eventually went away with him.”

Hindu girls as young as 6 continue to be targeted to be raped by Muslim men in Pakistan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i24jg4mJ4I

Finally, here’s a look at the Hadiths of the Pedophile and illiterate Prophet’s moral conduct; Muslims accept the Islamic Prophet Mohammad as the perfect human being so any conduct that he does is considered morally good.

From the Hadiths:

Bukhari (80:753) – “The Prophet said, ‘The freed slave belongs to the people who have freed him.'”

Bukhari (52:255) – The slave who accepts Islam and continues serving his Muslim master will receive a double reward in heaven.

Bukhari (41.598) – Slaves are property. They cannot be freed if an owner has outstanding debt, but rather used to pay off the debt.

Bukhari (62:137) – An account of women taken as slaves in battle by Muhammad’s men after their husbands and fathers were killed. The woman were raped with Muhammad’s approval.

Bukhari (34:432) – Another account of females taken captive and raped with Muhammad’s approval. In this case it is evident that the Muslims intend on selling the women after raping them because they are concerned about devaluing their price by impregnating them. Muhammad is asked about coitus interruptus.

Bukhari (47:765) – A woman is rebuked by Muhammad for freeing a slave girl. The prophet tells her that she would have gotten a greater heavenly reward by giving her to a relative (as a slave).

Bukhari (34:351) – Muhammad sells a slave for money. He was thus a slave trader.

Bukhari (72:734) – Some contemporary Muslims in the West, where slavery is believed to be a horrible crime, are reluctant to believe that Muhammad owned slaves. This is just one of many places in the Hadith where a reference is made to a human being owned by Muhammad. In this case, the slave is of African descent.

Muslim 4112 – A man freed six slaves on the event of his death, but Muhammad reversed the emancipation and kept four in slavery to himself. He cast lots to determine which two to free.

Bukhari (47:743) – Muhammad’s own pulpit – from which he preached Islam – was built with slave labor on his command.

These Islamic teachings have real world consequences in India already; don’t make them stronger.

To conclude: This “fact file” article is full of lies. Compare what it says to what I’ve just informed you with in this blog post.

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I Shared A Post About How The Rohingya Committed Genocide And Got Blocked By Reuters

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It was this post, authenticated by the BBC on a article they wrote about the Rohingya in their comments sections and on Twitter: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44206372 

Extensive details by Amnesty International here.

Evidently, whatever doesn’t fit the “poor, oppressed Muslims” narrative is ignored. It’s not about defending human rights; it’s the typical Oppressor vs Oppressed narrative with no acceptance of nuance or reality. This hasn’t been the only news organization that did this. The lives of Hindu and Buddhist civilians slaughtered by Rohingya Muslim Militias don’t seem to matter to the Western Mainstream Media at all. Have the massacres ever once been mentioned in the extensive coverage of the situation in Myanmar? Have they been given as extensive a coverage considering the well-documented evidence by Amnesty International? A brief article mentioning this systemic mass slaughter of Hindus and Buddhists are mentioned briefly in passing, but the coverage of the Rohingya gain global infamy.

If you think I’m full of shit, then go ahead and share that news stories linked above on Reuters on their comments sections about the Rohingya on their Facebook page, watch what happens to your message. Sign off your account and check; they literally filter it out. They don’t give a damn about Non-Muslim human rights. Go ask why they’re blocking it. I doubt you’ll get a response, but I seriously welcome being wrong here.

I really hope that I am wrong, but it seems more and more like anytime you bring up accredited news stories of Rohingya Militias, chiefly the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) committing genocide in the Rakhine area, then you’ll be filtered out, ignored, and blocked.

Update: I seem to be able to post again, finally. But only to a limited extent. Comments still being filtered out.

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Free Speech Petition Against Sony’s PS4 Censorship Policies

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Please consider signing this protest. The reasons are quoted below:

It has come to my attention that Sony has confirmed that it has a content censorship guideline that disproportionately impacts the Japanese game industry. Evidently, Sony has seen fit to ignore the fact that ESRB ratings exist in the US to help parents distinguish which games might be suitable for their children and has elected to censor content for any game on their system regardless of the rating systems of other countries. This comes at a high cost for developers to rework scenes so that they can get approval to be sold on Sony’s PlayStation 4 platform. They erroneously use the #MeToo movement as an excuse to impose sexist and racist standards exclusively upon Japanese developed games; recent examples include games such as Devil May Cry 5, the Dead or Alive Series, and the Sengan Kagura Series. The latter of which caused the series producer of Sengan Kagura to resign over Sony’s insistence on censorship. There have been talks by Sony about massively censoring Atlus’s Persona 5: The Royal which is expected to release around 2020.

These policies are racist because they exclusively target Japanese developers and aren’t imposed upon Western game developers; the age-old racism of the West is clear to see since anything sexual Japan does is seen as deviant and weird while sexual content by Western developers is seen as a breakthrough and progressive. It is also little more than patriarchal conservatism imposing sexist double-standards upon artistic depictions of female sexuality and has an undercurrent of misogyny as a policy while disgustingly using #MeToo as an excuse to conduct these sexist double-standards. Furthermore, it is against the principles of Free Speech and Free Expression and must be stopped now before it does further damage than it already has on video games that consumers and customers of Sony Entertainment enjoy.

https://www.change.org/p/sony-protest-against-sony-california-s-racism-and-misogyny-against-the-japanese-game-industry

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Why do the Abrahamic Faiths Dominate The World?

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Rape, torture, slavery, and genocide. They’re the most likely to support human violence as per their holy books. Slavery in Islam began during its formative years and still exists today despite the West forcing the Middle East to make it illegal, Christians has years of raping and torturing kids under its belt all the way from the 1870s to even now, and the Old Testament… well… people already know the contents supporting rape and genocide.

The Abrahamic faiths still are the most successful at committing violence; always using one negative aspect of a non-Abrahamic foreign culture to justify rape,torture and massacres, and genocide en masse of millions.

Westerners are correct to point out the barbarity of Islamic conquests; but see the rape and torture of Native American children in Christian schools, mass killings of Transgenders in India under British rule, forced amputations and slaughter of indigenous people across the world over, and genocide as “rational” when Western imperialism is what is responsible for it.

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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.

Rape Culture Comes From Religion; Stop Defending It

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Patriarchy, rape culture, and violence against women. It’s long past the point where we should acknowledge religious teachings are culpable. The plethora of abuses should at least give people pause by now.

The most recent case of Ex-Muslims being hunted down to be killed by their father and brother for the crime of changing their beliefs about Islam; this particular case is one where the pair of sisters are stranded in the Eastern European country of Georgia.

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#SaveHamo / #Save_Hamo Sudanese Ex-Muslim facing death via Egyptian Sharia Law By His Own Family

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His story from his own words:

Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/ExMuslimTV/status/1112728971353960448

Youtube Link of the same video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPazJUasZT8

Sudanese Ex-Muslim Humanist fled to Egypt from his family who wanted to kill him, his family followed him there and UNHCR Egypt refuses to do anything to help him get Asylum. He was apprehended by the Muslim Brotherhood and tortured. He recently informed Twitter that he’ll likely be killed tomorrow.

He explained his family arrived in Egypt to hunt him down:

https://twitter.com/7amoo101/status/1112104621122695169

He says he will likely be killed tomorrow by his family under Sharia Law in Egypt:

https://twitter.com/7amoo101/status/1113548338064916481?

fbclid=IwAR0uS6rd8pebrKjfBkMlGIhsbgh5LrIwsMeE5N8as0acrd_KCRSFaCAIxBc

If anyone is willing and able to spend a few minutes, I honestly don’t know how much help this can be, but if you think it is worth a shot: Contact your Congresspeople / Parliament, contact any human rights agency you know of that you think can be of help, contact whomever you think can be of help. I hope some organization can just get him somewhere safe from harm. Doesn’t have to be any specific country if immigration is a no-no for some people, just safe from being killed. If you think it’ll even slightly help, then please try. I’ve been emailing every international human rights organization that I know of and my Congresspeople.

Update: 

Well, his case just got murkier. The French Embassy is looking into his case and will act accordingly should they find his asylum case legitimate. Zineb El Rhazoui, the woman who translated his tweets and has been in contact with him, including sending him money to hide in an undisclosed location in Cairo until his family stops hunting him down, has withdrawn support because the French Embassy claim that the emails he shared with Zineb were faked and deny having ever communicated with him. Other Ex-Muslims found that he had tweets of himself liking Islamic content and opened up questions on why.

Her thread of tweets explaining the information, with a useful translation button at the bottom, can be found beginning here: https://twitter.com/ZinebElRhazoui/status/1114220927238144000

He claims that he liked the Islamic content from several years back to convince his family so that he wouldn’t be killed by them:

https://twitter.com/7amoo101/status/1114245965341429762

So, it is possible that he is lying, but it is also possible that he is being entirely sincere and was just desperate to prevent his family from killing him a few years back. He may have tried to show he was a sincere Muslim to prevent them from killing him. Situations like this are sudden and the need to respond to protect Ex-Muslims is urgent, but evidently some people do try to fake it for asylum so it is a question of which possibility is the truth and with limited time to determine it. The wait and see approach can lead to people being killed and that puts even more pressure on the entire situation. Despite that, I do believe – given the limited time – that asking international amnesty organizations and Congress/Parliamentary people to check into it is the right course of action given the consequences of what could happen. Zineb says if its determined to be fake, then it needs to be vigorously denounced because it makes sincere cases all the harder to gain asylum. The French Embassy is on standby and if they determine his case is sincere then they’ll help, but they’ve maintained a standby approach for now until more evidence accumulates. If he is a sincere case, then he should be safe in the previously mentioned undisclosed location that Zineb helped him get.

I’m not sure if this update will engender ire towards me in particular, but I would like to thank you all who shared an email or calls to your respective government and international organizations for responding in a timely manner and for helping. I will accept any condemnation since I did choose to make this post. I do still believe it is important to share and respond quickly when situations like this arise so that people who can help can verify the claims. We can only proceed with best of information that we have available, but I am trying to maintain as much accuracy and accountability to you all as possible for this post with this update. After listening to Ex-Muslims and reading more in-depth on Islam, I just feel disgusted by how much the most vulnerable people are being marginalized when talking about their own human rights, even being thrown out of social media when trying to talk about their human rights. I suppose I also felt it was a case similar to Sherif Gaber. In any case, he should be safe and the French Embassy is looking into his case and is ready to help him, if it’s found to be sincere. Thank you all again.

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Thus Spake Zarathustra Review

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“He who said ‘God is a Spirit’—made the greatest stride and slide hitherto made on earth towards unbelief: such a dictum is not easily amended again on earth!” – Thus Spake; Zarathustra,  Chapter LXXVIII: The Ass-Festival. Thomas Common translation.

Nietzsche’s philosophical novel was an amazing read. At the time I began to read it, I hadn’t really been captivated by a novel since the Harry Potter series (which I love) and I found most fantasy stories to be really boring. I had first become familiar with it after reading a philosophical analysis of one of my favorite video games, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. I knew Nocturne was conveying some philosophy, but I didn’t know what at the time. I discovered Nocturne is a spiritual re-telling of certain portions of the novel.

I didn’t expect much at the time, it was mostly curiosity in relation to the game. I suspected that I’d find it boring. To my surprise, it was initially quite a laughable read. Zarathustra is humiliated in front of a crowd whom he tries to speak with as equals. The crowds throughout the novel are always seen as hateful and resentful of anything outside of their small town or village community, they resent and fear any change to better themselves, and spend their days not having a clear opinion on what they want from life or any direction on how they seek to motivate their own improvement, but rather live in indolence seeking only self-gratification and nothing else. This is one of the recurring themes of the novel when Zarathustra travels. Zarathustra seeks to be honest with himself and philosophizes his views, but doing so means he’s ridiculed, ostracized, and labeled dangerous for criticizing core beliefs that are held as sacrosanct. People just don’t want to listen to him and instead make spurious personal attacks based upon the most haphazard of claims.

Nevertheless, the beginning portion goes from particularly inspiring with his evocative words about teaching people of the Ubermensch in the beginning of the novel to a bizarre sort of tragicomedy immediately after. Zarathustra speaks to a crowd that doesn’t wish to understand him and instead ask him about the Last Man which he warns about; the Last Man being the aforementioned indolent dweller who doesn’t care about anything but self-gratification. The tightrope walker falls off from their circus act and severely injures himself which scares the crowd into fleeing. Nobody from the crowd helps the dying tightrope walker except Zarathustra who listens to his dying request to be buried. Zarathustra takes his body, which people in other parts of the village use as shortsighted “evidence” to accuse Zarathustra of grave-robbing, and leaves it up a tree to avoid wolves eating the dead man’s flesh. He sits down and gets absorbed into his own thoughts for awhile before leaving the dead body in the tree. I had laughed at this at first because Zarathustra clearly misunderstood the man’s request and didn’t really follow through with it despite convincing himself that he had. It was really peculiar and apart from being comical, I don’t see much on what that specific scenario was meant to convey. By contrast, the chapter immediately after about making good habits was immediately clear and brought back the interest.

Throughout his journey, Zarathustra extols some very interesting perspectives, but it’s always with the pernicious culture of vitriol and hatred for his teachings by various small town or small village communities who refuse to engage and don’t care to change their habits. Zarathustra points out that people prefer simplistic narratives of good and evil based on their culture or community instead of evaluating right and wrong for themselves. This is particularly evident in religious cultures. They claim to be about their own justice and goodness, but put their brains to sleep when faced with corruption or just blame humanity in general instead of fighting back against such corrupt individuals and corrupt institutions. He guides the reader into asking, if these religious teachings of your community are truly so moral and wonderful, if their values are universally correct as your religion might claim them to be, then why doesn’t it stop abusive behavior from happening? And on the charge of blaming humanity in general when they fail, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra argues that this is responding to genuine criticisms with pure hatred. Theologians and the herd who argue that humans will always be violent or abusive by nature in this circular reasoning argument that “humans are humans” are actually expressing pure hatred for humanity. It doesn’t challenge or confront people who harm you or who harm those you love, it’s just a way of throwing away an argument by refusing to listen and instead opting for a nihilistic hatred for all of humanity as a sort of divine answer.

His criticisms of religion, which are his most salient and paradoxically his most ignored contentions, seem to have gone completely unchallenged. I’ve looked for critiques online and nobody mentions his criticisms on religion. In fact, when I join Nietzsche groups online (which usually have 2000+ members) and begin discussing his criticisms of religion, I am immediately banned from such groups. So-called Nietzsche fans like saying that he contradicted himself or didn’t really say anything, but no one ever seems to be aware or brings up his criticisms of religion. So-called readers of Nietzsche never once speak of it. The closest I’ve seen to an honest critique is Alain de Bottom and a lecture video by Jordan Peterson in one of his classes. By contrast, Christian theologians are notoriously dishonest; repeatedly claiming Nietzsche said things that he never did. I even read an online book in which the author cited Nietzsche by cutting out half the words in a aphorism to claim Nietzsche said something that he never advocated for. I’ve seen Nietzsche quotes pages on facebook full of quotes that Nietzsche never once wrote. Most other scholars of Nietzsche, even on Quora, seem to have read critiques of Nietzsche but never Nietzsche’s actual works. They don’t read to form their opinions on Nietzsche, they read criticisms of Nietzsche and believe those criticisms to be absolute fact and never bother to actually read Nietzsche. Some might argue its due to the confusion over Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche appropriating his works for her Nazi ideologies, Heidegger’s own appropriation in which he created a Strawman, or perhaps the strawman delusions of Bertrand Russell; but in all honesty, these sorts of strawman depictions exist for every famous person. Even the US Founding Fathers are constantly misinterpreted. I think what underlies all this confusion is the human capacity of heuristics. People believe they can judge and know everything about a single human being from a few short excerpts and judge their entire life based on a few short sentences they read. This does have evolutionary benefits like spotting really dangerous people like Adolf Hitler, but it can be misused and people can be manipulated into seeing hatred, dishonesty, or evil from people who want to criticize bad beliefs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi seem more like exceptions than the rule, where the character assassinations against them eventually backfired. But for people criticizing ideas without civil disobedience or in a context where civil disobedience isn’t a factor, it becomes much harder to be listened to from others.

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