World War Three has been much talked about in the seven decades since World War Two ended. At that time, almost all of Europe and large parts of Asia were in ruins, scourged by years of brutal, mechanised, industrial war. Since the beginning of that peace, war has raged incessantly throughout the world. It has … Continue reading
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I was asked today if I was a ‘liberal’. Now in all honesty, until quite recently, I would just have said ‘yes’ and moved on. Simple, easy, checks the right boxes. But the world is not as it was; liberalism has become infected with some appallingly bad ideas that we have to stand up to … Continue reading Socially aware, libertarian, scientific, secularist
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In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’ There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. In an oral … Continue reading Inanna and Jesus
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The Hadith constitute the third pillar of Islam, on which the ‘religion of peace’ is based. They are the ‘commentaries on the life of the Prophet.’ They are second in authority only to the Qur’an itself. The other pillars are the Qur’an and Sharia. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah. … Continue reading The Hadith: Sahih al-Bukhari
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A prominent Pakistani Facebook personality, Qandeel Baloch, has been brutally murdered by her own brother, in an ‘honour killing’. To be an independent woman in an Islamic place is to invite your own close relatives to kill you. Not only was Qandeel killed by her own brother, her parents, who were present, did nothing to … Continue reading Qandeel Baloch: killed by Islam.
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We wake to a morning of black tragedy in Europe as it has, again, been scourged by a Muslim terror attack. This great continent with its myriad and vibrant culture, that has given so much to the world, is on the long march to its final Calvary. And all I can say, my heart breaking, … Continue reading
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Outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando on the night of the Islamist shootings.
Islam is locked in a war with secular democracy and moderate Muslims themselves.
Ten days ago a Canadian, Robert Hall, had his head hacked from his body in a brutal public murder. Two days later, over 100 people were gunned down in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; forty-nine died. Two days after that a married couple, both police officers, were stabbed to death in their home outside Paris and their infant child held hostage until the killer was shot by police.
There is nothing whatsoever to connect these victims, on the face of it. Nothing. A middle-aged professional, young people in a nightclub, serving police officers. They died in equally unrelated
Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his partner Jessica Schneider, murdered in the name of Islam. Pic: Reuters
locations — the Philippines, the USA, France.
But they are connected all the same: they were all murdered in the name of Islam.
These are but the tip of the iceberg; all over the Middle East, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, in the same time, hundreds of innocent people were murdered — in the name of Islam. And most of them were Muslims.
Robert Hall (left) prior to being murdered in the name of Islam
These victims join the tens of thousands of others who have been murdered, raped, or enslaved in the name of Islam, just since 2000. If we go back to the 20th century, we find that millions were murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of Islam. When we call the roll of violent, murdering ideologies of that century, we always forget one; Nazism, Communism — and Islam.
Yet we may not speak a word against this. We may not name what we see, what is manifest, what is plain as day — that Islam perverts men into monsters who kill, rape and enslave in its name and expect a heavenly reward of unlimited, unending sex with 72 perpetual virgins for doing so. (The Orlando shooter was homosexual and we wonder what he imagined his reward might be; 72 Christians, perhaps — the porn star, not the religion.)
Despite the blindingly obvious truth about Islam, we are not allowed to say a word against it. Why? Because Islam is mainly practised by people who do not have white skin. And the intellectual fascism of ‘identity politics’ insists that no-one of non-white skin colour may ever be criticised for anything.
This of course reveals the excruciating irony that ‘identity politics’ is itself a form of racism; but then, you have to have some intelligence to divine that. Bill Maher calls it the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, and Bill is right on point.
Well, enough is enough. Identity politics is indeed a form of racism and fascism, and a spade should be called a spade.
This war began a long time ago and we ignored it. We misnamed it, pretended it might go away. We vacillated, imagining that our trinkets and compromises, our cavilling appeasement, might quench our enemy’s thirst for blood. But all that failed long ago.
We are not ‘at war with terrorism’ — or rather that is too tautological a euphemism to let pass. All states, everywhere, are perpetually at war with terrorism. That is why a state exists: to protect the people from terrorists. But nobody says ‘the King of France gave land at the mouth of the Seine to the Normans so that they could protect the country from terrorist attack’. They say, ‘from the Vikings.’
To be at war against terrorism is a permanent and necessary part of a state’s very reason to exist; to use this term to describe our current crisis is to deliberately deny the real name of the enemy.
We are not at war with a people, or a ‘race’. We are at war with a Dark Age socio-political ideology that promotes injustice and is based on a pack of barefaced lies. This war is no different from the war against Communism. It’s not about people. It’s about ideas.
Islam is just a religion; just a set of ideas. It is an ideology invented to make some men rich and powerful by controlling women, children and all the weaker men. It’s just our old enemy, the patriarchy; and it is no less hideous, oppressive or murderous for being a version mainly promoted by men with non-white skin.
Islam stands against literally every single value that Western democracy believes in. Every value that European democracy — and that includes the Americas and parts of Asia and Africa, for better or worse — has fought for centuries to develop and preserve.
Islam hates women and gays, considers that children have no rights, animals have no rights. I insists that anyone who does not accept it as the literal truth should be killed. It hates art. It hates poetry. It hates music. It hates science. It hates secularism. It hates democracy.
Anything that could be considered civilised, Islam hates. It would rather turn the world back in to a desert nightmare of brutality and discrimination where warlords do as they like. Where women are personal chattels of men to be raped when they are nine, or burned alive when they break its rules about marriageor for refusing to be whores for jihadists. Where they have acid thrown in their faces for not covering them. Where homosexuals are thrown from rooftops then stoned till they die. Where the ‘crime’ of having an opinion is punished by death.
The last war that European civilisation fought against Islam — a defensive war, just as this one is –lasted for a thousand years. This time the enemy is ahead of us. We now can see that there was no victory before the Gates of Vienna in 1683; just an armistice and we did not seize the opportunity it afforded us to smash the enemy forever.
Instead of striking the head from the serpent, we took our boot from its neck and let it go. We allowed it compassion — which is a part of our culture. But it is not a part of the enemy’s and anyone who thinks that jihadists will spare the sword, should the world ever be unfortunate enough that they do seize the advantage, is barking mad.
Surely, if Islam is indeed a religion of peace, then no blasphemy could be greater than murdering, raping and enslaving in its name. Where, then, are the screaming hordes who protested against cartoons of Mohammed and called for the artist to be killed — for blasphemy? Those who called for the death of Salman Rushdie for the same? These men killed no-one, raped no-one, enslaved no-one; yet their ‘blasphemy’ was such that it merited death.
Why are the same people who called for this not out on the streets right now, demanding that the atrocities committed in the name of their religion must stop?
Such protesters are nowhere to be seen. One might even be forgiven for thinking that murder, rape and slavery are not ‘blasphemous’ at all, and that could only be because Islam — the religion of peace — actually condones them.
Do they, then, Muslims all support the jihadists? No, of course not, but the fact that the majority of Germans were not Nazis did not prevent the Holocaust; and the fact that the majority of Muslims are decent people, who do love peace, has not and will not prevent more killing.
If moderate Muslims are to neutralise the jihadist threat, then they need our assistance, because they too are under threat — indeed, they are under the greatest threat of any, since, after all, they live with the jihadists in their midst.
We need all the support we can get from moderate Muslims, yet this is confounded by Political Correctness. Partly, this is our own fault. We have allowed the Regressive Left to set a picket line around Islam, so that it may never be criticised, even by Muslims; just look at how they treat Maajid Nawaz, Ayan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie.
This very ring-fence helps to muzzle moderate Muslims and to deliver them up to the jihadists. It isolates them from their natural allies — non-Muslim moderates — and pretends that this is ‘defending a culture’. It is more important , for the ‘identity politics’ airheads, that This attitude — promulgated by the regressive left, those ‘useful idiots’ — is pure racism in itself. It is, as Maher says, the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. After all, how could we possibly imagine that people of brown skin could do better? And not only that, they must be allowed to do their worst without a word of protest.
Well if Islam, as a culture, has value, it is not in its ability to murder the innocent. Peaceable Muslim communities have already proven themselves to be rich recruiting grounds for jihadist murderers who have but rarely been turned over to the authorities and who, rather, are all too often hidden instead.
If there is a solution — other than massive ‘ethnic cleansing’, which nobody wants to see, even if it were possible — then it is in mobilising moderate Muslims to denounce extremism and violence. It is in standing with them against the jihadists. It is by funding their organisations and helping them to counter jihadism within their own communities. It is in protecting them from the threats they surely receive and ensuring that their voices be heard, by Muslims.
Furthermore, Islamic apostates — threatened with death by Islamists — must be protected and their voices must be heard. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain, according to this article in the UK Guardian, assists about 350 people a year to leave Islam in the UK, ‘the majority of whom have faced threats…either by their families or by Islamists.’
The ghettoisation of Muslim communities turns them into pressure-cookers where violent extremists dominate. This is exacerbated, not hindered, by the politically correct Regressive Left.
In its towering conceit and racism, the Regressive Left considers it better that moderate Muslims be terrorised in their own communities by extremist Muslims, than that they be helped by non-Muslims. After all, goes Regressive thinking, they all have brown skin; they should be allowed to get on with killing each other undisturbed by white colonialists trying to enforce Western mores. Meantime, the Regressive Left gets on with really important things, like whether a man with a beard can legitimately ‘identify’ as a woman.
Why is it that public debate is always between an Islamic extremist, or a barefaced apologist for extremism, and someone of the political right, usually white? Because to expose the schisms within Muslim communities is to confuse the all-important message — white bad, non-white good. So what if moderates are sacrificial lambs? The Regressive Left couldn’t care less.
Our strategy must therefore be twofold: on the one hand to completely disgrace the Regressive Left and its intellectual fascism of ‘Identity Politics’. On the other we must massively support moderate Muslims, politically and financially, wherever they live, while denying any support or platform to Islamist extremists.
There is no certainty that we will win this war, even with the best of our efforts. What is certain is that if we continue to refuse to recognise what is happening and do not take immediate steps to counter it, then we shall lose it. Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ may yet come true; and none of us will be the better for it.
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The Qur’an is the base text of Islam, which is today followed by approximately 1.2 billion people.Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?
Just this week, new reports arrived of how the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) murdered 19 Yazidi women by burning them to death in steel cages because they refused to become sex slaves. In Pakistan a mother burned her daughter to death for marrying without consent. These are but the tiniest tip of an iceberg of atrocities that never stop.
Naturally, any thinking person must be repulsed by such evil; but not a week goes by now without some example of completely intolerable behaviour, carried out by Muslims, frequently on women, somewhere in the world. In fact, hardly a day passes.
Yazidi women captured as sex slaves under Qur’anic authority
Saudi Arabia, which has gained for itself the reputation of being the most sadistic and barbarous legally constituted state on the planet, routinely carries out ‘punishments’ — better described as tortures, many ending in death — all the time. We now know that at least 14 million Africans are held as slaves by Muslims. 14 million. In 2016.
But many of us in the West know Muslims; we eat in their restaurants, shop in their convenience stores. Clearly, these Muslims are good, decent people. So the bombers, the beheaders, the immolators, the lapidators, the slavers and kidnappers must be misunderstanding Islam, right? They must be misreading the Qur’an?
Wrong. They are doing EXACTLY as the Qur’an insists they must, to be good Muslims. If they do not do so, then they will receive no reward in the afterlife. This is why the poison of Salafism — which advocates strictly following the letter of the Qur’an — is so effective and why moderate Muslim states so quickly collapse before it. Salafism — founded in and exported and funded by Saudi Arabia — perverts decent people into monsters by persuading them that if they do not follow the letter of the Qur’an, they are not ‘true Muslims’.
Unlike other Abrahamic faiths, there is no contradiction in Islam, although there appears to be. However, once you understand the Qur’an’s structure and the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation‘, which states, with Qur’anic authority, that only the last verse on any given subject has authority, the apparent contradictions disappear. Unfortunately what is left is the most savage and violent creed amongst the major religions.
On June the 8th 2016, a Christian blogger called Dom the Conservative posted on her site an analysis of ISIL’s behaviour which showed, again, that the vile acts they perpetrated are absolutely in line with the Qur’an’s instructions. Every single atrocity that comes to light, carried out by groups like ISIL, Boku Harum and many others, is mandated in the Qur’an and not only that, the specific method of killing to be used is described, in detail.
Dom and I would surely disagree about many things; she is a Christian and I am an atheist. But she is an excellent and erudite scholar and she makes her case with passion and rigorous fairness. There is no disagreement between us that the fundamentals of Islam are contained in the Qur’an, along with the Hadith and Sharia, and that so-called ‘extremists’ — whose behaviour is indeed extreme — are just doing as the Qur’an tells them.
Yet in the comments to her post I saw the usual depressing litany of apology and dissembly from Muslims and their helpful idiots. ‘Oh, Islam is not like that.’ ‘Islam means peace.’ (It doesn’t; it means ‘submission’.) Well, all I can say is these people have never studied the Qur’an, have been misinformed about what it says or are lying. (Taqqiya.)
There is only one answer to this; you have to read the Qur’an. So I have uploaded translations of it, in English. I have placed links to these below. Please download, my apologies for their size, and distribute them widely.
Before you read the Qur’an, there are a few things you should know. In the first place, it at first appears resolutely self-contradictory. On any topic, there are peaceful verses and those of appalling violence. It is almost as if there were two writers, hopelessly at odds with each other.
It is entirely possible that there was never a living Mohamed and that the Qur’an was indeed made up by several authors. It wasn’t written down until 80 years after his putative death in any case; but that debate is for another day.
If we go with the standard narrative, Mohamed spent the first part of his life in Mecca, where he was weak and subject to the authorities, and so his preachings were peaceful and calm. After he and his followers had finally caused so much trouble that they were evicted, they fled to Medina, where they discovered highway robbery as a profession and soon moved on to large-scale banditry and genocide. The verses from this period are much more violent than the earlier ones.
Islamic scholars call these the ‘Meccan’ and the ‘Medinan’ verses respectively, for obvious reasons.
(Now you should read this post about the Doctrine of Abrogation, if you have not already.)
Briefly, Mohamed’s followers were aware of the inconsistencies so the Prophet (allegedly) asked Allah, who explained that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he ‘took back’ the original so that he could substitute it with ‘something better’. The earlier verses were not to be forgotten, but they no longer had authority. So only the later verses of the Qur’an remain ‘in force’ — which means, these are the ones that ‘true Muslims’ must follow. This is called the Doctrine of Abrogation, and its effects, when understood in the context of what the Qur’an actually says, are chilling.
But how do you know which is which? The books (Suras) of the Qur’an are not ordered chronologically, but by length. Well, there are clues. The Medinan (violent) Suras are longer than the Meccan ones. The explanation is that the Prophet had more time by then. Secondly, while there are some peaceful verses in the later Suras, there are almost no violent ones in the earlier; so, if you are reading a fair few horrific verses, it’s likely to be later. Then there is geography. If the verses discuss Medina or areas close to it, then they are Medinan.
Many Islamic Scholars believe that Sura 9, which is the most violent, ‘abrogates’ or overrides all earlier Suras. It would do no harm to begin your reading there, in view of this.
Quran – Saheeh International Translation (‘Saheeh’ or ‘Sahih’ just mean ‘reliable.’) This is an approved translation.
Quran by M.M.Pickthall (A solid version made hard to read by the use of archaic English.)
The Koran translated by N J Dawood (This is the most readable version, by one of the greatest Orientalists of his era; but it is rejected by Islamic scholars because Dawood was not himself a Muslim.)
Quran by Yusuf Ali (Another authorised version.)
Word by Word Quran (Relates the Arabic text to specific English words; not really a readable translation but useful for those learning Arabic.)
Quran Transliteration (This is not a translation but an attempt to let the non-Arabic speaking reader have some idea of the sound of the words.)
Finally, you should read this appraisal of the ‘Doctrine of Abrogation’. This doctrine is essential to understanding Islam and how it behaves in the context of the Qur’an. PIG_abrogration_naskh
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The leaders of the patriarchy’s PR machine known as ‘religion’ — elderly men in dresses kissing each other
The patriarchy invented the Abrahamic sky-god death-cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and so these are the most extremely misogynistic of the major religions. Their hatred of women oozes like pus from every page of their texts. Women are slaves, the chattels of their fathers, to be sold off as sex slaves to male owners for whom their only function is to provide male heirs and, perhaps as an unfortunate by-product, replacement baby-factories like themselves.
From within the patriarchy, it is practically impossible to see it. It’s like the old saw: you can’t see the wood for the trees. We all contribute to it, willy-nilly. Just look at your name — or mine, for that matter: Rod Fleming. My name and my father’s name. But wait: why? What did he do? He fucked my mother, that’s all. Just as your father fucked your mother. But that was where his input ended. Who carried you through gestation? Who went through the pain and potentially lethal risk of parturition so that you could be alive? Your mother did. And where is her name? Nowhere. Your legal title is determined by a brief sexual encounter that ended in an ovum being fertilised. That’s it.
So should I change my name? To Rollo, my mother’s maiden name? But wait, her mother was a Martin, the Rollo name came from a similarly brief encounter. In fact, look at your ‘family tree’. It’s all based on male inheritance. If you could trace it back a thousand years — and precious few, if any, can do that — it would still just be the record of the path of forty or so fucks. That’s it. Of the women whose labour — literally — allows it to exist at all, nothing is known. Just the men.
Another elderly man in a dress acting as pimp for the patriarchy
This is so pervasive that we don’t even see it. Yet it is the badge of the patriarchy: the lineage of father through son, though in fact, men are largely irrelevant to the process. One man could, were he diligent enough, impregnate what, ten women a day? That’s over three thousand a year. One man. Just one. If we had a culture that was 99% women, not only would it survive, it would boom, just on the efforts of those 1% of men; but all the actual work would still be done by women. Populations are strictly dependent on the number of fertile mothers.
Consider the other scenario: a culture 99% male. Within a generation or so, this would die out. It has no hope of survival. There just are not enough women to keep it going, assuming they produce babies at the same ratio of 99:1 male to female.
So how did we ever get the idea that men are more important than women are?
The answer is in the web of lies and propaganda spun by the patriarchy and disseminated by religion, philosophy and even science. A lace of dishonesty and deception that has one end: to maintain male supremacy and ensure female subordinacy. That simple.
Plato, the Greek philosopher, can be credited with much of the basis for the modern Western patriarchy, though the rot goes further back in time. Perhaps most importantly, his ‘Middle Platonism’, a discourse of the relationship of humans and deities, was probably the stimulus for Paul the Apostle’s writings, which are actually the oldest texts in the New Testament canon — which is the operating manual of the Western patriarchy.
Plato was an unambiguous misogynist of the very worst order. He believed that like attracted like and so men who were attracted to women were displaying their feminine side. As far as he was concerned, only a man of pure masculinity was fit to govern, which meant that men should never fall in love with women, as this rendered them unfit for office of state. No, women were for the production of babies to continue the patriarchy. They were like cattle to be milked, and servicing them was an onerous task that men had to carry out in order to ensure future generations — of men.
So, men were supposed to love other men. Still, Plato couldn’t quite get himself to go along with the physical side. Why? Because in a relationship in which one man has sex with another, one must give and the other receive. However, the act of being penetrated makes a man into a woman, and for Plato, that was the worst possible thing that could happen. So how did he square this circle? Easy: invent an ideal society in which men fall in love with each other but don’t have sex, while occasionally fulfilling the noxious civic duty of impregnating women whom they do not love, for the future of the nation. Love and sex become separated, and sex becomes shameful and immoral, while ‘love’ — which, remember, for Plato was properly only that between two men — exalted. That is what ‘Platonic Love’ really is, and a better recipe for a sick and dysfunctional society could not be imagined.
This, dear reader, is the cockamamie ‘philosophy’ upon which Western ‘civilisation’ is based, as handed down and modified by the Romans, the Catholic Church, a few other more or less rabid Protestant kirks, the Enlightenment thinkers, imperialist Europe and so on. Result: the United States of America, the most dysfunctional and terminally fucked-up culture on the planet…except for Islam. But while Islam is just as sick and deranged and has the numbers, the USA has the biggest and most expensive killing machine on the planet.
It’s no accident that the most homophobic and sexually repressed culture in the developed world is also the most religious, nor that the religion that infects and animates it is Christianity. This cult was deliberately shaped to serve the ends of the Roman Empire in its conquest of all the cultures around it. Whether or not you believe there was a historical Jesus, it is undeniable that Paul the Apostle set up the Pauline church to fit directly into the political structure of Rome, and that subsequent ‘Fathers’, synods, Councils and committees refined this. So much so that it became the natural choice of the Roman Emperor Constantine when he sought to establish one official religion for the whole Empire. (We discuss this in depth in ‘Why Men Made God‘.)
For a nation founded on the solid imperialist principles of land theft, slavery and ruthless use of overwhelming military force against much weaker opponents (while carefully avoiding situations in which it might get trounced, as happened in Vietnam,) Christianity is a natural choice of religion. USicans have much to thank Plato, Paul and all the other developers of the cult for.
This background in religion and philosophy explains the modern Western patriarchy, as well as how and why it is, right now, attempting to roll back the limited gains made by women in the twentieth century. The misogynistic, patriarchal right seeks to re-establish the status of women as chattels, their sexuality the property of first their fathers and then their husbands, aided and abetted by their close male relatives.
The striking similarities between the Western patriarchy and the Islamic one exist because Islam is itself a half-baked pastiche of Platonic and Roman Christian ideas, with a dose of good old-fashioned barbarism and a few Arab fairy-tales thrown in just to make things interesting. In other words, the philosophical and religious bases of the Western and the Islamic patriarchies are the same, so it is not surprising that they should be so alike. And anyway, there are only so many ways you can say ‘men are better and if you disagree we’ll rape you’.
When George W. Bush described Islam as ‘a fine religion’ many of us though he had finally flown the coop. But in a way he was right: Islam is very similar in its misogyny, homophobia, condemnation of women and absolute insistence on male supremacy to the Southern Baptist cult Dubbya was rendered stupid by — or at least, stupider than he started out.
Indeed it is arguable that in a few limited senses, these cults are even more viciously misogynistic than Catholicism. So Dubbya was praising the similarity between them — which, if you hadn’t noticed, is their hatred of women — and, had somebody not tried to park some airliners on prominent USican landmarks, there’s a good chance that Islam would still have Presidential support. Which just goes to show that birds of a feather flock together.
There would be no divide between the rabid mullahs of Islam and the USican Republican right on a huge range of issues: both condemn contraception and abortion, because they recognise that these represent women’s choices, and neither has any time for that. Both condemn sex before marriage, for the same reason. Can’t have the girls trying out a few partners to see if any actually ring the bell, can we — while, of course, men can fuck blue and be lauded for their manliness. Both hate homosexuality because they recognise, as Plato did, that the sexually recipient partner is, by definition, not a man, at least in the act of sex. Since, in these miserable cults, the most dishonourable thing a man can do is to be womanly, actually performing as a woman in sex is intolerable to them.
This is why the same song is heard from all across the Christian and Muslim world. Even where ‘being homosexual’ is permitted, actually having sex is condemned. Why is the act of sex between two people with male genitalia so reviled? Because in order to carry it out, one of them must become a woman. It has nothing to do with queasiness about the other functions the anus performs and everything to do with the symbolic act of the surrender of manhood in the act of sex. Since ‘being a man’ is the most highly-vaunted status in the patriarchy, rejecting that is to flaunt it.
Even worse and more offensive to the patriarchy is to appear to be a man while performing sexually as a woman. This is the reason why transsexualism, or at least one form, the True or HomoSexual form, has historically been so widely tolerated in the Islamic world; transsexuals are not pretending to be men, claiming status to which, in the patriarchy, they have no right.
(It is deeply saddening to see how, as the poison of Saudi-funded Salafism has spread to Indonesia, that country’s historic tolerance of its colourful transsexual minority has been compromised by extremists.)
All of this hatred and intolerance has one root: misogyny and the establishment of male supremacy – otherwise known as the patriarchy.
None of these attacks on human dignity, nor the suppression of women and their rights, would have been possible without religion, which has served as the ideal form of social control and the most powerful weapon in the patriarchy’s war against women.
Humans may indeed be preconditioned in an evolutionary sense to accept spirituality. The belief in things that we don’t exist may even have uses. As Michael Shermer says, if you hear a rustling in the savannah and run up a tree, and there’s nothing there, then all that happens is you get laughed at; but if you hear a rustling in the grass and think it’s the wind, but actually it’s a lion, you’re lunch. That is a powerful stimulus and we are all subject to it.
However, as we show in ‘Why Men Made God‘ religion is much more than spirituality, or the early cultic practices of shamanism or animism. Religion is an established method of controlling large numbers of people and determining the way they will think and act. It is an organised mechanism through which the church and its leaders may become vastly wealthy. And it is operated by the patriarchy.
God was made by men in man’s image for one purpose alone: to give moral justification for the establishment of male supremacy and the suppression of women. Religion is the mechanism by which this is enforced. It should follow that if we want to enhance the situation of women and roll back the tide of their suppression. alongside those of homosexuals and transsexuals and indeed any other class that the patriarchy oppresses, then we have to name the enemy and face up to the challenge that it presents: and that enemy is called religion.
In order to become a free, tolerant and equal society, the patriarchy must be destroyed and its religions have to be swept away.
The post The Patriarchy made God appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
The Reliance of the Traveller — the Sharia codebook
In Arabic they are ‘halal’ and ‘haram’. Sharia — contained in a manual called The Reliance of the Traveller actually extends to over 1200 pages of text which specify every imaginable action or aspect of life. Everything from how to brush your teeth or how to put on your clothes, to how to beat your wife or kill your enemies. It is, literally, not just unnecessary for Muslims to think for themselves, it is haram (forbidden).
Muslims are obliged to follow Sharia all the time. There are punishments for transgressions ranging from fines to floggings to forced amputations to death. To reject Sharia wholly is de facto to become apostate, which demands a punishment of death.
Sharia is, by far, the most pernicious ideological evil that afflicts the world today.
Please do not take my word for this; I would rather you researched it yourself, for then you will know what Islam, with its debased code of Sharia, really is: the most anti-human and totalitarian ideology the world has ever seen.
So that you can do this research I have made a full copy of the Sharia code available HERE. Please download it and read for yourself. Be warned though, it’s a big file. At present I only have it in .pdf but I will try to make a conversion into .epub, which will be much smaller and easier to read.
A tiny selection of examples, comparing haram (forbidden) with halal (permitted), is below. If you are one of those duped by the platitudes of Islamic apologists or the ridiculous ‘regressive left’, they may surprise you. They certainly give the lie to the fallacy that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. Sharia is much, much greater than the tiny number of examples below but I have made this list to show that it is not just a matter of not eating pork.
I originally made this list using the words ‘haram’ and ‘halal’ but it seems to me that this is a form of dissembly, in using foreign, unfamiliar words. So I have used English translations instead. While ‘forbidden’ is a decent translation of ‘haram’, halal is more difficult. In all cases it means that the action is permitted, but in many it also means that the action is mandated or even obligatory. I have used ‘permitted’ and ‘mandated’. The latter means that it is something that Muslims should do, rather than that which they may do.
Philosophy is forbidden.
Science and technology are forbidden unless they can be used as weapons.
Modern Western lifestyle is forbidden.
All music is forbidden.
All poetry is forbidden.
All representations — photographs, drawings, paintings, sculpture — are forbidden.
All works of fiction are forbidden.
Education in non-Muslim countries is forbidden.
Giving money as charity to non-Muslims is forbidden — but taking it is mandated.
Friendship with non-Muslims is forbidden.
For a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man is forbidden but for a Muslim man to marry a non-Muslim woman is permitted, as long as she converts and agrees to raise any children as Muslims.
For women to show their faces in public is forbidden.
Using women as concubines is permitted.
Husbands raping their wives is permitted.
Muslim men raping non-Muslim women is mandated.
Muslim men marrying girls, Muslim or otherwise, as young as 6 is mandated. raping them at age 9 is also mandated.
Sex with women outside marriage is forbidden but sex with slaves is permitted.
Arguments against Islam are forbidden but preaching Islam is mandated.
Anti-Islamic writers and beliefs, and their followers, are forbidden and should be put to death.
Expressing love for one’s wife in public is forbidden but stoning women to death in public is mandated.
Smoking and drinking alcohol are forbidden.
Killing the innocent is forbidden but non-Muslims are not innocent by definition, so killing them is mandated.
Killing anyone who will not submit to Islam is mandated.
Following any law other than Sharia, despite the local law, is forbidden.
Allowing non-Muslims to permanently settle in a Muslim nation is forbidden but going to a non-Muslim nation for settlement purposes is mandated.
Killing Muslims during war, even by accident, by the adversary, is forbidden but killing innocent civilians of non-Muslim enemy nations, deliberately, in retaliation is mandated.
Men wearing clothes below the ankle is forbidden.
Disobeying a husband’s orders is forbidden but beating a wife is permitted.
Dialogues at Islamic Shura Council, by the Ulema, or between Islamic scholars about how to run a country are mandated, but allowing ordinary people to voice their opinion is forbidden.
Condemning non-Muslims about anything is permitted but condemning terrorists amongst Muslims is forbidden.
Travelling the world is permitted but allowing non-Muslims, even charity workers, into Muslim lands is forbidden.
Shaving off one’s beard is forbidden but shaving pubic hair is mandated.
Waging war against non-Muslims is mandated.
Laws of non-Muslim nations are forbidden but seeking justice from non-Muslim courts is permitted.
Allowing women to work is forbidden.
Democracy is forbidden, but using it to seize power and then destroy it is mandated.
Education for women is forbidden, except insofar as it might help her to run the household for her husband.
Apostasy from Islam is forbidden and punishable by death.
Download: The Reliance of the Traveller
The post Sharia: Halal and Haram appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Christopher Hitchens. Pic: The Montreal Gazette
Hitchens was a true man for all seasons; he could be funny, eloquent and incredibly gracious. But at the same time he was erudite and staggeringly well-read, with a brilliant mind. Enraged, as he often was by religious hypocrisy, he could focus a righteous anger on his adversary that was truly spectacular to watch.
Hitchens, throughout his life, was a passionate atheist. Not just convinced or committed, but passionate. He saw religion as fundamentally anti-human. His low opinion of it was fairly universal but he reserved his most scathing attacks for the Abrahamic cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, sparing or favouring none. They were, as far as Hitchens was concerned, offensive to the conditions of being human in general and to being a thinking individual in particular.
Christopher Hitchens was never cursed with false intellectual modesty and he suffered fools very badly indeed. He made no attempt to hide his own intellect or grasp of the subject to hand, in order to entrap his opponent. On the contrary, he adopted a thoroughly Nelsonic approach to debating which, like the great admiral’s view of the duty of a naval officer, was ‘to seek out the enemy and destroy him.’ Occasionally, you do have to love the English and producing a man like Hitchens is a good reason to. We shall but rarely see his like again.
So to celebrate the great man, journalist, raconteur, bon viveur and atheist, I give you Part One of a collection of his finest rapier-thrusts, posted on YouTube by Agatan Fnd. Part Two will surely follow.
The post Christopher Hitchens’ Finest Moments appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Jews do not read the Bible as if it were literally true and in any case, the Bible is only one part of the foundation of their faith. The Torah, the body of literature at its centre, contains many other documents and traditions that inform Judaism. It is quite possible to be a Jew and at the same time an atheist, and as a matter of fact, many great Jewish thinkers and scientists, notably Albert Einstein, have been exactly that.
Practising Jews are expected to read the Bible but to make their own peace with God; and furthermore there is no promise of extra-terrestrial reward or punishment in Judaism. The reward for a life lived well is the return of the Promised Land — Israel.
This, together with their historically tiny numbers and the historic and ongoing persecution they have suffered, has tended to make them very tolerant, except in matters of the land of Israel itself. For example, while lapidation remains a punishment specified in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Old Testament, it has not been carried out for over 2000 years, as far as we know.
Israel, nominally a Jewish theocracy, is actually a democratic secular state famously friendly towards its gay and transgender populations, despite the scriptural injunctions placed against them. Women — though still reviled by Orthodox Jews — are respected by mainstream Judaism and are regarded as fully equal to men within the State of Israel; as evinced by the numbers of women in its armed forces who have died defending it.
One of the reasons why Judaism is so reasonable is that there are contradictions in Scripture. It is impossible to equally believe everything this says when it directly contradicts itself, as well as observable reality. How could Jahweh possibly have created the sun three days after the Earth? Surely a day is a measure of solar movement? Oy vey, it makes no sense.
The result of this is that most mainstream Jews see Scripture as a guide rather than as a rigid rule-book. This has tended to soften their attitudes. Although there are extremist fundamentalists who do not take this view, they are a minority and have no real power. Mainstream Judaism is inclusive, tolerant and receptive to new ideas.
Let’s look at Christianity now before considering Islam
The Catholic Church Fathers recognised the internal conflicts in Christian texts right from the beginning. During the hundreds of years that it took to define the official ‘canon’ of the New Testament — that is, which of the over 100 then extant books would be included — several compromises were attempted to minimise these.
In the end, the Catholic Church took the view that the Bible was ‘revelatory’ and had to be interpreted by the priesthood. This followed the time-honoured tradition of priestly interpretation of divine revelation, which everyone in the Roman Empire was familiar with. For hundreds of years, lay people were discouraged from reading the Bible themselves. Authority, in Catholicism, comes not directly from the words of the Bible, but from the priestly interpretation of them — this is called ‘dogma’. And dogma can be changed.
Catholics no longer burn people at the stake for witchcraft, insist that the Earth is flat or that the sun rotates around it. While it might take the Church centuries to make these changes, they do happen. The Catholic Church even accepts Evolution and Big Bang Theory — carefully rewriting them as ‘acts of God’. Not only is the Church aware of the problem of internal contradiction, it is aware of the contradiction between the Bible and what can be observed; it is no accident at all that a significant number of scientists have been Catholics, including Gregor Mendel, the ‘father of modern genetics’, who was a friar.
Protestantism, whether of the Lutheran or Calvinist type, specified that each man — and they did mean men — should read the Bible and find his own truth in it. While Protestant church leaders have never been shy to shout their own interpretations from the pulpit, the essence of Protestantism is that followers must reconcile the contradictions between life and scripture, and the internal contradictions within the texts, for themselves. This has led to a thoroughly disparate set of religious practices and the truth is that Protestants cherry-pick the Bible just as much as Jews and Catholics do. I see no queues to lapidate people for eating shrimps.
This means that, once again, most Protestants adapt to social change, to scientific knowledge and to technical developments. There are a few who deny their children medical help because of their religion, but even in religious states today, they are prosecuted.
Awareness of contradictions in the texts, and between the texts and life, then, are essential tools by which the ferocity of religions may be tamed. It allows them to be modernised in the light of new discoveries. There are always extremist fundamentalists, be they Hasidic Jews or the odious offspring of the even more repugnant Billy Graham, but they are not mainstream. They are fringe and they will stay that way.
Islam, unfortunately, cannot do this, and that is why it is the most barbaric and most dangerous major creed today. Yet the Quran is even more riven with internal contradictions than the other Abrahamic texts. So how has Islam managed to remain so firmly rooted in its most barbarous and cruel form? How is it possible for Islamic clerics to claim, as they do, that the Earth does not rotate on its axis?
In the first place, Muslims believe that the words of the Quran are, literally, the words of Allah, the infallible creator of everything. These words are neither revelatory nor metaphoric: they are the literal truth. Secondly, Muslims believe that the prophet Mohammed was to be the last who would ever receive such heavenly wisdom. In other words, the Quran is the last, direct word of Allah, transmitted through the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed, and it will never, ever be changed.
So what about the internal conflicts? Unlike the Jewish texts or the Christian ones, the Quran is ostensibly the work of one man, who faithfully remembered every word told to him by Gabriel, the infallible agent of Allah, who is of course, himself infallible. Contradictions should be impossible.
Except Allah was, apparently, not infallible; indeed he made mistakes and this gave rise to a solution that has forever crippled Islam’s ability to evolve.
This is called the ‘doctrine of abrogation’. When Mohammed was — allegedly — receiving the good news from Allah via the Angel Gabriel, his followers noticed that, over the years, inconsistencies appeared. Mohammed — again allegedly — asked about this and Gabriel transmitted his question to Allah.
Allah’s response was to say that when he gave a verse that contradicted an earlier one, he took back or ‘abrogated’ the older one. In other words it ceased to be the current infallible word of Allah. Only the later one was. Since Allah is infallible, however, the verses remained in the Quran, since at the earlier time, they were the product of his infallible consciousness and so were current then.
So, Allah is infallible but changes his mind; but because the Quran is the last iteration of the word of Allah that will ever be given, according to Islam, then the last versions, whatever they are, are immutable for all time. They can never be changed.
Religiously sophisticated Muslims are generally very careful not to discuss the ‘doctrine of abrogation’ with non-Muslims; and the matter is made worse because the vast majority of the world’s Muslims have never read the Quran, since it is in Arabic and only that version is deemed appropriate for Muslims to study. (There are translations into vernacular tongues but Muslim scholars scoff at these.) The consequence is that many Muslims do not even know about abrogation. But it is core theology.
The ‘doctrine of abrogation’ means that there are no contradictions in the Quran, even though there are verses, or Suras, that contradict each other, because only the last one is valid. But how do we know which that is? The Quran is not ordered chronologically, but by the length of the texts. There is no way at all to know which came first, from the Quran itself. The only way you can find this out is by reading the Hadith, or the commentaries on the life of the Prophet, which explain when each Sura was ‘received’.
Authority in Islam is not from the Quran alone; it comes from the Quran and the Hadith together. The above shows how important it is to realise this. Furthermore, the doctrine of ‘Taqqiya’ instructs Muslims to conceal, lie and dissemble when dealing with non-Muslims, in the furtherance of the faith.
When discussing their religion with non-Muslims, clerics always talk about the Quran. They will quote verses from it left, right and centre. They never talk about the Hadith, for it is here that the true nature of Islam is revealed. The Quran is hopelessly self-contradictory and confusing, with no narrative structure at all. It is only by studying the Hadith that it becomes possible to contextualise and, therefore, understand the Quran and indeed, Islam itself.
Muslim clerics and scholars are perfectly well aware of this and would prefer that non-Muslims did not read and understand the Hadith; this is because doing so will reveal, amongst other things deeply harmful to the PR image of Islam, that the harshest, most cruel and most violent Suras are invariably the later ones: those that still have force and are ‘unabrogated’.
To understand why later Suras are violent and intolerant while early ones tend to be peaceful and accommodating, one must first comprehend that in the early part of his life, when he was seeking followers and was under scrutiny by the authorities at Mecca, where he lived, Mohammed was very conciliatory. This was because it was politically expedient to be. He had not enough followers to challenge the government and he feared that he might be punished if he were too aggressive. Mohammed had no interest in being executed as a troublemaker, and he lived in harsh times. So the Suras from this period tend to be ‘soft’.
After Mohammed and his followers, sure enough, had annoyed the people of Mecca such that they were expelled, they fled to Medina. Here, he and his merry band discovered banditry as a lifestyle and soon were getting rich by plundering camel caravans carrying trade goods. They then began taking whole towns and villages by force. Be under no illusions: these were not heroes taking from the rich to give to the poor. These were criminals robbing, raping, enslaving and killing to make themselves wealthy and more powerful. The Hadith explain all of this in only-too-gory detail.
The later Suras are much more violent and warlike in reflection of this confidence and faith in violence. By this time, Mohammed was a successful brigand, plundering and killing any he challenged. Conciliation was yesterday but today was fire and sword. The Hadith identify which Suras these are.
When pressed, Muslim apologists will always quote the early Suras, even though they know perfectly well that these have been ‘abrogated’. They are recognised as the words of Allah, but they have been cancelled out. So the fact that these may contradict later, violent Suras is irrelevant, since they are no longer the official word of Allah with effect today.
Despite their protestation that these early, abrogated Suras show the gentle side of Islam, to the Westerner unfamiliar with the cult, the same apologists will exhort Muslims to follow the later, ‘hard’ Suras precisely because these have not been abrogated and are thus the effective word of Allah.
There is absolutely no internal contradiction within the Quran, because in all cases of conflict, only the latest Sura is given any value; the others have been abrogated, or, as we have seen, been ‘taken back’ by Allah and replaced. Only the last remains valid. One simply has to identify which is the later Sura on any given disagreement and then the point is settled.
What this means is that Islam has as its underlying principles violence and warfare, to the ends of increasing the individual wealth of Muslims and expanding the territory under the control of this benighted cult and, worse, that these are permanently locked in forever. This is because the last Suras were ‘received’ by Mohammed when he was a successful warlord and leader of a band of armed killers. To call it a ‘religion of peace’ reveals the speaker as either a blatant liar or as ignorant of Islam. Unfortunately there are many of both.
Most of the world’s Muslims do not speak or read Arabic, although they may be able to recite large parts of the Quran. They do so without understanding a word of it, but this is no matter since it is the sound of Arabic being chanted that pleases Allah. And even if they can read Arabic, the Quran is nonsensical without study of the Hadith.
Islam recognises that this is a problem, so it trains Arabic-speaking clerics, well versed in the Hadith, to preach to the masses.
Now you need to understand another issue that Muslims do not like to talk about. In 1683 the bloody tide of Islamic conquest in Europe was turned back by the defeat of the Ottoman hordes at the Siege of Vienna. The liberating forces were led by the Polish King Jan Sobieski, who not only led the biggest cavalry charge in history, but without whom the whole of Europe would have been plunged into darkness and you would not be reading this. (The Poles have never received adequate thanks for literally saving our bacon.) The Enlightenment, perhaps the most vaunted product of post-Renaissance Western culture, would have been snuffed out.
Thanks to the courage of the Poles, in defeating an enemy many times their numbers, over the next century the Muslim world was fractured and the faith itself was menaced by new empires — nearly all Christian.
Jihad is a powerful word in Islam. Up until the defeat at Vienna, it had unquestionably referred to the armed struggle to conquer more territory. While Islam was at its lowest ebb after the triumph of Europe, it was altered to emphasise a ‘spiritual struggle’. But this was pure convenience. The mullahs and clerics looked to the Hadith and saw that when Mohammed was under threat in Mecca, he preached peace and tolerance. So after the fall of their own empires, this is exactly what the clerics did themselves.
Muslims are permitted, when they are so outnumbered that armed rebellion would wipe them out, to live in peace with their neighbours. This has been called ‘Stealth Jihad’. This phase of jihad is indeed a spiritual rather than an armed struggle. It reflects Mohammed’s early years in Mecca, when he and his followers were powerless and at the mercy of the other people in the city. In cases like this Muslims, following the example of Mohammed, should pray and live devout lives, lying low and preparing themselves for the time when their numbers are such that they can resume the armed struggle.
Stealth jihad is what the Muslim world reverted to after the defeat of its armies, but it must be realised that this can only ever be a temporary situation. The resumption of armed struggle is inevitable, a prerequisite of faith. Islam exists to conquer the world and make it Arabic; this can never be changed. When Islam is being complaisant, it is only because it is gathering strength.
It should be clear now that Stealth Jihad is not a softening of Islam at all, but simply a defensive measure. But remember, most Muslims do not speak Arabic and few are really familiar with the Quran, let alone the Hadith. The responsibility of deciding which message Muslims should follow, or even hear, falls on the clerics. For over 200 years they focussed on the moderate, non-violent — but at the same time abrogated — Suras.
A return to violenceToday, empowered by the wealth born of the developed world’s thirst for oil, encouraged by the appalling obsequiousness of Western governments and positively bolstered by the sheer stupidity and ignorance of the ‘regressive left’, the clerical class that once preached the early Suras and encouraged the population to be calm, to submit to the power of others and to cause no trouble, are again preaching the Medina Suras — the ones that exhort violence and armed jihad.
It is vital to realise, right now, that so-called Islamist extremists are not: they are simply preaching the words and will of Allah now in force, which are contained ONLY in the later, unabrogated Suras. They are preaching the ‘true’ version of Islam, the later version, which is, throughout, bloody and violent and exhorts Muslims to kill, enslave and extort non-believers. The cult these men (always men) preach is not extremist within the context of Islam. In fact it is the only true form; and it is to this that all Muslims must revert when they are strong enough to do so without risking extermination. Armed jihad and global conquest are not fringe extremism in Islam: they are its core values.
With absolutely no contradictions in the Quran, which the simple yet diabolical mechanism of ‘abrogation’ ensures, there can be no debate and so, no modernisation. When Muslim scholars argue, they are not doing so over the issue of which Suras are more valid. They only have to look in the Hadith to establish this. They are instead nit-picking over the nuances of meanings of words, or obscure calligraphs in texts. They know what Islam is about; there is no argument there. It is established, permanently, with no opportunity for alteration. And its end is world conquest.
The ‘gentle face’ of Islam is a sham, a ruse designed to persuade an unwary enemy, ignorant of the truth, that Islam will not spread war and violence; that it is peaceful and may be trusted.
This is an illusion. While individual Muslims may indeed be peaceful and trustworthy, they are the fringe. I celebrate those like Maajid Nawaz, who risks his life every day to try to soften Islam; but in a way, men such as he are the extremists, in an Islamic context, for they are furthest from the established doctrinal basis of the cult. That is why they are so viscerally hated by other Muslims. While we must — rightly — be thankful for good men such as he, it is not possible to be optimistic about the chances they have of successfully taming this monster.
In the next in this series I will look in detail at the different forms of jihad and what they mean.
See also: http://ift.tt/1TZUo4e
The post Why Islam Cannot Change appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Angelica Garing
It’s Easter. In fact, this is the 60th Easter I have passed on Earth, although I don'[t remember the first few. Or, for that matter a good selection of those that came after. However, Easter is an important time. It is the beginning of Spring, officially defined as the first full moon after the Spring Equinox and, perhaps more importantly, the moment when the year comes into bloom. I know this might not be apparent in Canada and suchlike airts, but still. You should have left them to the Indians. As the beginning of the year of fertility, Easter is a great Goddess festival and was such, long before it was hijacked by Christians. Indeed it was celebrated in ancient Sumer, 7,000 years ago, when the High Priestess would take a young man as consort for the year. We do not know what his fate was at the end of it. Still it is a time of giving thanks, when we should express our gratitude. And so I do. I am grateful firstly for my four wonderful children, without whom my life would have had no real meaning. I am grateful that I am still here myself, with all my faculties intact and even a full head of hair; so I must also thank my Martin forebears, who all went to their graves with luxuriant thatches. (The Flemings are all bald as coots by 40; I am grateful to have avoided that particular gene.)
I am grateful for something else too. I came to the Philippines in December to meet a particular woman, who regular readers might recall. However it was not as I had hoped and on Christmas Day 2015 we parted forever. For some weeks I dated girls here and really enjoyed it. It was like being at college again, only better. As a mature and sophisticated man, I have confidence that I lacked back then. Dating was a real pleasure and had you asked me in early January I would have said that I would have been happy to go on doing it as long as I had breath. But at the end of that month I met a girl — well, she met me, to be honest. And the upshot of that is that now, on this Easter Sunday, I am grateful that I am passionately and completely loved by an incredibly beautiful young woman, with the face of an angel and the body of Botticelli’s Venus rising. She asks nothing of me; I even have to persuade her to go shopping for clothes. All that she asks is that I have time for her and return the love that she so willingly and generously extends to me. And I am very grateful for that. I do not know where this will go but I can tell you that I have never felt so loved by a woman in my life. Any man who, in later life, finds himself alone and yet desires not to be, will discover, as I did, that there are many beautiful women who will make themselves available. Young, glamorous and sexy. And as long as the flow of money towards them is maintained, they will remain so. Some people call these women ‘high maintenance’. But the fact is that not all women are like that at all. And the harpies who preach from the wings about ‘age appropriate’ relationships are wrong. There are no ‘age appropriate’ relationships. There are only people. If you love someone, that’s it. As I wrote in The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train, your soul is as old as the hills and as young as the dawn; and even curmudgeonly old atheists like me have soul, though we know we don’t have souls. So my advice is this: ignore the Politically Correct whingeing of bitter old people whose lives long since ceased to have meaning, who are winding down into their long wait for death and seize the day. Yes, you’ll meet gold-diggers, but even that’s not all that bad, you know. The rewards can be considerable. Even if she only sees you as a way to have a better life, or to provide for the children fathered by another man, that does not mean she won’t be good to you, nor does it mean that you will not enjoy the experience. In the end, she might love you too. Then again you might, just might, run into the real thing, as well: a woman who really loves you, who doesn’t care that the years have taken their toll and who will nurse you when you’re sick. Who never asks for money, and who says her old clothes are fine, she doesn’t need new — but who will be gracious when you insist. Who goes to market and shops thriftily, so that you and she can eat well together without spending a fortune. Who is as happy to stay home and watch a movie as she is to be dined out — as long as she is with you. Who is smart and will talk about religion and philosophy with you, if you so wish; or whatever you want to discuss, because whatever interests you, interests her. Who is so mesmerisingly beautiful that just looking at her brings tears to your eyes, and who refuses to go to sleep at night without caressing your face with her fingertips. Who even, incredibly though it may seem, says she likes to hear you snoring because it reminds her that you are there, beside her, in bed. Who will turn your sexual dreams into reality and enjoy doing so. Who will staunchly defend you against all criticism and be your protectrice in the face of life’s travails. If you are so lucky as to find a woman like this, then I advise you to give thanks. There is no ‘god’ and even the Goddess is a metaphor; but there is love, and it is precious. Happy Easter. And thank you, Jelly.
The post Happy Easter appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
Stephen Hawking suggests we should build ‘space lifeboats’ to preserve human culture. Here’s why we should not
In recent months there has been an increasing clamour, from well-meaning individuals all over the globe, to build ourselves some lifeboats. By this I mean, build space-ships that could transport human culture away from the Earth. This would be so that our culture might survive the planetary catastrophe that Stephen Hawking, amongst many others, is certain will happen within the next 1000 years.
The most immediate threats we face, however, are not natural but a direct result of human activity itself: global thermonuclear war and climate change. This has come about, in turn, because of the patriarchal culture that has come to dominate the Earth and humanity. And it is only that, patriarchal culture, the agent of our destruction, that would be preserved by the ‘space lifeboat’ scheme. Only the richest and most powerful would find places and the rest of us would be left to die. The patriarchy would escape.
We do not know when the patriarchy first appeared. Possibly as little as 5000 years ago, possibly 10,000, as the remains at Jericho seem to suggest. Maybe it has always been with us. What we can be absolutely sure of is that it was not alone. Matriarchal culture and Goddess-worship, which posited the spirit of the Earth as the primary deity and women as the centre of culture, was dominant throughout much of the world until around 4,500 years ago. We go into detail about this in ‘Why Men Made God’. There can be no question about the pre-eminence of the matriarchy in ancient cultures. It is obvious from the artefacts and mythology that persists from those eras. While patriarchal academics struggle to deny it, the proof is everywhere: before the patriarchy, people lived in peaceable societies with women and children at their centres.
Since the patriarchy appeared as a rival to, and eventual destroyer of, the matriarchy, humanity has lived in a perpetual state of war. At the same time it has poisoned its home with no thought for the future. The first examples of genocidal war that we know of appeared in Sumer in the 3rd millennium BCE, when successive patriarchal kings reigns havoc and destruction all around them. Under 150 years ago the United States of America was perpetrating genocide on those whose land it coveted. Today, USican imperialists arm fanatical patriarchal killers to kill, rape and enslave, and then fight to ‘liberate’ those who suffer from this — all for profit. Nothing has changed. The patriarchy cannot change. It is evil.
Faced with the prospect of destruction or adopting the patriarchal model, most societies changes and the status of women plummeted. There were a few exceptions, for example Sparta, which remained a matriarchy to the end, in Phrygia and in the Celtic world. But the burgeoning power of the patriarchy, which has never hesitated to enslave, kill, and rob from anyone in its path, has meant that today, matriarchies are restricted to tribal peoples. There are many of these but they are not representative of human culture; they give us a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Again, ‘Why Men Made God’ documents some of these peoples and discussed their lifestyles.
If our space lifeboats are, indeed, ever constructed, they will not save many. A few thousand at most might survive a planetary disaster, on their way to another habitable planet, or wandering forever in space. The vast billions of Earth’s children will die.
So we should consider exactly what would be exported by such space lifeboats. It would be the culture that made them: the patriarchy. So the very same culture that has been killing, enslaving and plundering for thousands of years, would be spread, like a toxic miasma, elsewhere.
The Earth will not die because we do: the Earth will be perfectly fine. It is likely that humans, albeit in small numbers, will also survive. So let us consider what that means a moment.
The chances are that our space lifeboats will be lost forever, but if they are not, they risk doing two things. The first is that they might arrive at another habitable planet. Knowing what we do now, we may be pretty sure that such a planet would already have life. Perhaps it would already have intelligent life forms that live in cultures like ours. If it lies with a hundred light-years of Earth, we know they don’t have radio, or we would have heard them. So the chances are that if cultures on such planets do exist, they are living in hunter-gatherer groups, just as we did for roughly 150,000 years.
Now look at humanity’s record. Look at the Americas. Look at Asia and Africa. Our history tells us that we will seize any such planet as our own and kill or enslave the present occupants. It’s what we always do and no reassurance from Stephen Hawking will make that any less likely, because it will not be decent, sincere scientists who fund and control any such mission, but the same men of violence as have carried out genocide so often. They must not be allowed to do this.
Or, let’s imagine that the space life-boats fly off and then, after whatever catastrophe kills off human culture on Earth occurs, they come back.
Humans had a choice at least once before and we made the wrong one. We allowed the patriarchy to exist. We did not snuff it out completely as we should have. A post-cataclysmic human society on Earth would likely be comprised of hunter gatherer groups centred on women and children. They might, with a little luck, recreate the matriarchy as our distant ancestors knew it. They might live in peace, revering the Earth. If we’re lucky.
Are we then to countenance the return of the very patriarchal culture that had, once already, caused so much death and destruction? The one that made the nuclear bombs that killed us? The one that armed rival groups of men all over the Earth so that they could better kill, rape and plunder? The one that deliberately ignored the warnings of climate change and, even worse, spent vast sums doing everything it could first to deny them and then to impede progress to an alternative, so that today, disaster from climate change as an absolute certainty? This culture knows only greed, death, killing and war — why should it be permitted to survive the catastrophe of its own making? Perhaps our descendants will make the same mistake again, but they should be free to make it without the imposition of the patriarchy by men — and it will be men — with modern weapons and firepower and the willingness to use them as they always have. Men who return from space in the lifeboats we allowed them to build, to visit their nightmare on the innocent.
No. A thousand times no. The patriarchy has had its chance. It must not be allowed to escape the consequences of its own greed, cruelty and genocidal nature. It must face them and die.
So, no lifeboats. If they are built, they must be sabotaged. The patriarchy has destroyed the Earth and it cannot be allowed to get away unpunished, to infect another, innocent planet, or to re-infect this one.
Indeed, much that is beautiful will be lost. Our science and our art, our knowledge — these must all perish. The glories of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment…all must pass. This is sad. But far worse would be to allow the leering, green-eyed monster of the patriarchy to survive. It must be stamped out and if it does so itself, then fine, we must accept that, and our fate as its victims. We would die anyway; why allow our killer, the patriarchy, to live on? If there is an imperative left for a doomed culture it is this: we must deny the patriarchy the chance to survive the catastrophe it created itself. It must die with all that is fine and worthwhile in human culture.
No lifeboats. Ever.
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Women wearing the burqa. This garment is not mentioned anywhere in the Qu’ran yet is imposed as a part of Idslamic tradition.
Unlimited sex after death: the foundation of Islam.
The basis of the patriarchy is nowhere better seen today than in Islam. This is not because this cult is intrinsically worse than the other Abrahamic ones, but largely because while the most rabid excesses of the others have become marginalised, in Islam the most obnoxious form is mainstream today.
This is a very dangerous situation because the aim of this form, Salafism, sometimes called ‘Wahabbism’, is the destruction of all civilisation other than the Islamic and the return of the world to the conditions that obtained in the Caliphate a thousand years ago. To this end Islamic forces are rampaging across the globe killing, raping and razing to the ground everything that they find.
Yet we know that people are essentially altruistic. So how is it possible for a cult to motivate them to such focussed evil as it does?
This is what really motivates the jihadist — the promise of a Hugh Hefner-like afterlife, his every sexual urge attended to by perpetual virgins. Frankly he’d be better off blowing a wad in Pattaya
The answer is in the control of sex.
When we researched Why Men Made God we spent a lot of time looking at extant and recently recorded matriarchies. We were struck by how peaceable they were and how calm and pleasant the men were. In these matriarchies the supply of sex is determined by women. Yet it appears that there is enough to satisfy the men and very little friction takes place between them, if any. This compares well to study of bonobos, Pan paniscus, our closest relatives, who also organise in matriarchal groups. The males are contented and non-aggressive.
This shows us the key to the patriarchy’s power. By restricting the supply of sex, it causes competition and violence between men. It can then direct this violence to its own ends — typically conquest and destruction.
To do this, the patriarchy first removed women’s control over their own sexuality and reproduction. This remains the case today. Witness how in the Christian cults, any form of birth control — other than abstinence — is condemned. Look at how the Catholic and various Evangelistic cults try to influence politicians to deny women their basic rights over their own bodies. Look at how sex, in these cults, is condemned as a pleasure. This is happening for a reason, and that reason is social control.
And if you think that is bad, it’s nothing compared to the hideous conditions imposed under Islam. In this cult, high-status men can have up to four wives. There is, generally, a slightly higher number of girl births (53% in favour of girls); but if high-status men can have four wives, this clearly means that low status men struggle to find one. Add to this the concubine system in which high-status men may keep as many female sex slaves as they like in addition to their official wives and it should be clear that for ordinary men there are very few women who might possibly be available. This has been exacerbated for certainly decades and probably far longer, by the practices of aborting female children or killing the newborns.
The inaccessibility of sex is further reinforced by the Islamic customs of making women invisible. Their faces and bodies are covered completely, so that men are denied even the pleasure of seeing them. The lengths to which Islamic ‘authorities’ go in this is ludicrous and would be laughable were it not real. For example, Salman Rushdie recounts how Islamic clerics had decided that it was unacceptable for a woman to wear stockings even under a burqah, since the sound of her thighs rubbing together would inflame men. Everything in Islam is about sex, yet nobody is getting any.
The natural consequence of this should be that men would have sex with each other, but Islam is wise to this and so sex between men is punishable by death. It happens anyway throughout the Islamic world, but the cult does its best to stamp it out, at least in public, and for those who don’t matter.
Then, Islam attempts to eliminate male pleasure in sex using a barbarous procedure called circumcision which removes over half the sensitive parts of the penis. The specific reason for this is to reduce sexual pleasure. This is also practised in Judaism and in the more backward parts of the USA, for exactly the same reasons: the reduction of male pleasure in sex. At the same time Islam in particular sanctions Female Genital Mutilation which removes all pleasure in sex from women.
Why is this happening? The answer is simple: denying men any sexual release makes them more violent. This is why boxers refrain from sexual release prior to a fight. It makes them more aggressive. Islam needs violent, aggressive men to conquer the world, so it uses the same trick.
The other side of this vile equation comes, of course, in the afterlife. There is no trickery more sickening than the religious promise of reward after death, but this is far more vile than anything Christians ever came up with.
In Islam, the only assured way to enter Heaven is by dying in jihad, which means being killed in holy war. There are conditions to this: principally, one must not be killed by a woman. Furthermore, self-sacrifice, as practised by suicide bombers, is the ultimate, highest form of such a death and guarantees instant access to Heaven. To quote the excellent film Four Lions, a suicide bomber is ‘in Heaven before his head hits the ceiling.’
After a lifetime of sexual frustration the Muslim man looks forward to his fantasy playground after death — but only if he dies killing infidels
This Heaven is not the vague place of lights and music that Christians believe in. The Muslim version is very specific. In this Heaven the newly dead warrior is welcomed be 72 girls who are indescribably more beautiful and sensuous than any human woman and who, in addition, have a virginity that is renewed every day.
These girls, these celestial purveyors of sexual pleasure, are called ‘houris’. Now it has somewhat been lost by usage, but the correct pronunciation of the English word ‘whore’ is ‘hoor’ to rhyme with moor and poor, and not with door and floor. (A hoe is what you use to weed your lettuces.) This word is derived directly from the Arabic houri, and means the same thing — a female purveyor of sexual pleasure: a sex slave. Let’s be blunt: a courtesan.
So let us look at what is happening here. In Islam, women are reduced first to property that may be bought and sold, as is the case in other patriarchal religions. They are then completely hidden, in life, from all men except their fathers or the high status men to whom they are sold. Their hymens are made the measure of their property value and a woman who comes to the marriage bed with hers not intact may be stoned to death. There is a whole industry of hymen repair in countries where this abomination is the case and in Indonesia girls who wish to go to university and many other areas of life are obliged to undergo an examination to establish that they are ‘intact’. While this abuse may make the stomach heave, apparently it is all right because it is for ‘religious reasons’.
As a result of this, and the fact that half the sensitivity of the man’s penis has been removed, the principal reward of sex — for those men for whom it actually happens at all — is the forcible removal of a woman’s virginity. This is why Female Genital Mutilation exists — so that men whose genitals have already been mutilated may enjoy the tightness of the closed vagina — until, of course, motherhood fixes that.
Remember that the real meaning of ‘virgin’ is ‘unmarried woman’ which translates roughly into ‘a woman who has not yet given birth’. Having a child of course changes a woman, but in Islamic culture, the man’s sexual delight may only come from a virgin (in the sense of never having given birth). This was why the Ottoman Emperors’ concubines, were they so careless as to fall pregnant, would usually find themselves at the bottom of the Bosphorus; their sexual quality expired, they had no further use.
In this culture, a woman is not understood to have pleasure in sex and instead it is her duty. We see something similar in attitudes in the more benighted parts of that most benighted of developed nations, the USA, where ignorance about sex is staggering.
For Muslim men the pleasure of a woman is all in the taking her virginity. Once a mother — and having acquired the power that a mother has even in a vicious patriarchy — a woman becomes valueless as a sexual partner and men will take another wife or a concubine. This is why the houris are perpetual virgins. The taking of virginity is the ultimate sexual reward in the patriarchal cults and nowhere more so than in Islam. Rape, the forcible entry into a suffering woman, replicates what they believe to be the first act of sex, the loss of female virginity. Pain and suffering on the part of the woman are seen as intrinsic to sex and without it, sex is unsatisfying.
It is also why Islam approves of child brides — the suffering of a girl child penetrated for the first time is so much greater, and her opening is so much tighter. That permanent damage may ensue is irrelevant, since the ‘prophet’ Mohammed married his last wife when she was six and raped her at nine. Just in this month a law proscribing child marriages and forced marriages (of women) was blocked in Pakistan because it was ‘blasphemous’ and ‘anti-Islamic’. We need little more proof of the hideous misogyny of this ghastly cult than this.
So we have, in Islam, a refinement of the Abrhamic patriarchal mind-control systems. While many of the techniques used, such as male genital mutilation occur in other cults, nowhere esle do we see the full panoply, the distillation of control over sex into a method that makes ordinary men into rapists and murderers. While it is true that not all Muslim men are prey to this, the poorer, less well-educated and more religious the culture they come from, the more likely they are to be. Yet even here we must be wary: as Maajid Nawaz has pointed out, in the 1990s in the UK the choice amongst young Muslim men was not whether to become a religious fundamentalist but which flavour one should immerse oneself in. Unfortunately, for these people — principally men — Islam has become a badge of ethnicity, a common shield and buckler against the persecution perpetrated by a white, southern English elite*.
The West would do well to note this. Bleeding-heart regressive ‘liberals’ in particular have to understand that there is no ‘intersection’, no common ground between defending the rights of women and Islam. You cannot say you defend women while protecting a cult that overtly, deliberately and systematically abuses them.
The Salafist form of Islam, which Saudi Arabia has been financially supporting for decades, makes ordinary men into murdering, raping monsters, while turning women into chattels. If there is one consolation in the predicament the world now finds itself in, it is that plummeting oil prices should limit the power of this most noxious of regimes to export its evil, and with some luck may even lead to its destruction.
Nevertheless, there are, today, millions of Muslim men all over the world who literally and sincerely believe that the only hope they ever might have of enjoying sexual pleasure lies in dying while killing infidels and destroying all culture but the depraved one that spawned them. The free world needs to take stock and defend itself. It is all very well to be generous; but when the wolf at the door fully intends to destroy you, it is sheer foolhardiness to welcome him in.
* It is noteworthy that Scottish Muslims appear far less likely to follow this path than English ones; I suspect this is at least in part because they make their common cause with other Scots against the English ruling elite, whereas in England this is not available.
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