ਜਿਸ ਕੁਖ ਦੀ ਗਰਮੈਸ਼ ਮਾਣੀ

ਉਸ ਨੂੰ ਆਖਣ ਮੈਲੀ ਜ਼ੁਬਾਨੀਂ

ਮਮਤਾ ਨੇ ਦਿੱਤਾ ਪਿਆਰ

ਧਰਮ ਨੇ ਕੀ ਦਿੱਤਾ ਇ ?

ਕੱਢ ਲਈ ਤਲਵਾਰ

ਇਹ ਬੰਦਿਆ ਕੀ ਕੀਤਾ ਈ ?

ਅਨਿੰਓ ਰੱਬ ਤੋਂ ਗਏ ਹੋ ਨੱਸ

ਕਾਹਤੋਂ ਰੱਬ ਤੋਂ ਗਏ ਹੋ ਨੱਸ ?

ਤੀਵੀਆਂ ਮਾਰੀ ਜਾਓ ਹੱਸ ਹੱਸ

ਵਿਰਸੇ ਕੁੱਲ ਦੀ ਕਰ ਦਿਓ ਬੱਸ

ਤੁਹਾਨੂੰ ਕੀਹਨੇ ਬਣਾਇਆ ਕਾਜ਼ੀ ?

ਵਾਹ ਮੁੱਲੇ ਨੂੰ ਕਰ ਲਹੋ ਰਾਜ਼ੀ

ਧਰਮ ਨੇ ਆਖਿਆ ਮਾਰੋ ਮਾਂ ?

ਮਜ਼ਹਬ ਨੇ ਆਖਿਆ ਮਾਰੋ ਧੀ ?

ਪੰਥ ਨੇ ਆਖਿਆ ਮਾਰੋ ਭੈਣ ?

ਦੀਨ ਨੇ ਆਖਿਆ ਮਾਰੋ ਜੀਅ ?

No. Atheism is not a form of belief, it is nonbelief. Just like bald is not a hair color.

July 4, 2007 Op-Ed Columnist At a Theater Near You … By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

London

I knew something was up when I couldn’t get a cab. Then there were sirens and helicopters whirring overhead. I stopped a passerby to ask what was going on. He said something about a car bomb outside a disco six blocks from my hotel. A few hours later, I finally found a taxi. The driver warned me that it was nearly impossible to get across town. Another bomb had been uncovered in a car park. Next day, more news: a suicide bomber had driven his Jeep into an airport and jumped out, his body on fire, screaming “Allah! Allah!”

Where was I? Baghdad? Kabul? Tel Aviv? No, I was in England. But it could have been anywhere. The Middle East: Now playing at a theater near you.

But this movie gets more confusing every time you watch it. When you watched it on 9/11 it was about America’s presence in the heart of Arabia. And when you watched it on 7/7 it was about unemployed and alienated Muslim youth in Britain. In Jordan not long ago it was about a wedding at a Western hotel. In Morocco recently it was about an Internet cafe. And two days ago in Yemen it was about seven Spanish tourists who were killed when a suicide bomber drove into them at a local tourist site. Wasn’t Spain the country that quit Iraq to get its people out of the line of fire?

Because these incidents are scattered, we’re growing numb to just how crazy they are. In the past few years, hundreds of Muslims have committed suicide amid innocent civilians — without making any concrete political demands and without generating any vigorous, sustained condemnation in the Muslim world.

Two trends are at work here: humiliation and atomization. Islam’s self-identity is that it is the most perfect and complete expression of God’s monotheistic message, and the Koran is God’s last and most perfect word. To put it another way, young Muslims are raised on the view that Islam is God 3.0. Christianity is God 2.0. Judaism is God 1.0. And Hinduism and all others are God 0.0.

One of the factors driving Muslim males, particularly educated ones, into these acts of extreme, expressive violence is that while they were taught that they have the most perfect and complete operating system, every day they’re confronted with the reality that people living by God 2.0., God 1.0 and God 0.0 are generally living much more prosperously, powerfully and democratically than those living under Islam. This creates a real dissonance and humiliation. How could this be? Who did this to us? The Crusaders! The Jews! The West! It can never be something that they failed to learn, adapt to or build. This humiliation produces a lashing out.

In the old days, you needed a terror infrastructure with bases in Beirut or Afghanistan to lash out in a big way. Not anymore. Now all you need is the virtual Afghanistan — the Internet and a few cellphones — to recruit, indoctrinate, plan and execute. Hence, the atomization — little terror groups sprouting everywhere. Everyone now has a starter kit.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, recently noted in a speech that during the cold war “the enemy was easy to find, but hard to finish,” because the Soviet Union was so big and powerful. “Intelligence was important” back then, he added, “but it was overshadowed by the need for sheer firepower.”

In today’s war against terrorist groups, said General Hayden, “it’s just the opposite. Our enemy is easy to finish, but hard to find. Today, we are looking for individuals or small groups planning suicide bombings, running violent Jihadist Web sites, sending foreign fighters into Iraq.”

I’d go one step further. The Soviet Union was easy to find and hard to kill, but once it died, it was dead forever. It had no regenerative power because it had no popular base. The terrorists of Iraq or London are hard to find, easy to kill, but very difficult to eliminate. New recruits just keep sprouting.

Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists. But it’s been widely noted that virtually all suicide terrorists today are Muslims. Angry Norwegians aren’t doing this — nor are starving Africans or unemployed Mexicans. Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.

This cancer is erasing basic norms of civilization. In Iraq, we’ve seen suicide bombers blow up funerals and schools. In England, seven out of the eight people detained in the latest plot are Muslim doctors or medical students. Doctors plotting mass murder? Could that be? If Muslim leaders don’t remove this cancer — and only they can — it will spread, tainting innocent Muslims and poisoning their relations with each other and the world.

Tell that to Muslims & Jews in the post-Moorish southern Spain, native Central Americans and the so many sects that were destroyed by the mainstream Christians especially during 11-13th centuries, to the Jews in so many pogroms in Europe. These people were all killed because they didn’t convert to Christianity (or a specific version of it).

‘most Christians are fully in favor of liberty.’

Actually if you replace Christians with any other major religion in the above sentence it will be true except ofcourse some vocal sections of Muslims in the recent history.

Rahul,

I have never said Christians are ‘we’ll never bother you if you don’t want to be bothered.’ You have to stretch yourself mightlily to say “Get away from me, I don’t want to hear it.” But the Islamics under Sharia and the Atheists in Communist Russia were not so willing to walk away after a mild expression of disinterest. So, Christians in the three-way cultural war are the most tolerant.

Also, how are we to let you have your freedom from being bothered for ten seconds without a much greater injury to free speech. “I’m sorry, Mr. Christian, you can’t offer a tract to someone on the street because they might not like it.” That is a major injury to free speech to ameliorate a very minor problem.

Bush meaning it as a word? Probably yes. Americans use ‘crusade’ to denote a righteous and bold endeavor to deal decisively with a problem. It has secondary religious aspects, but those are decidely secondary. Blame language drift. I fully expect two centuries from now for the Pittsburgh Pirates to be playing the Lunagrad Jihadi for the Football Championship of the Solar System.

Actually, I think Dawkins, or one of his similar level, has been called the ‘Pope of Darwinism’. There is a community of atheists, and a community of believers. When prominent leaders in a community go one way, you’re entitled to make some conclusions about that community.

You can’t use Fred Phelps because pretty much everyone in the Christian community would have to summon their Christian charity to NOT spit on him. If a ‘leader’ is renounced or reviled generally in a community then that makes the community’s standards clear. Althought, just as with Stalin, it does say something unpleasant about the community he’s from. So you can have Phelps, lunatic hatemonger, and I’ll take Stalin, probably the greatest mass murderer of all time with his competition being Mao, another atheist.

I’ve looked at the arguements for the existence of God. It seems pretty conclusive to me. Or as Dawkins again said about Creationism ‘no matter how counterintuitive’ his Darwinism is ‘we have to keep the divine foot out of the door’. So, I’ll take logic, intuition, and evidence over hand-wavium. I think I may be3 heading toward the personal point where I don’t find arguing about atheism that interesting…the arguement is fairly clearly over. Its not yet to the point of ‘yes the Earth really is round’, tis true.

I’d say the problem with Huxley’s program is that it PROBABLY bears too much of a resemblance to Rezia’s program. A lot of people confuse their personal liberation with dominance over other people (as you did in the free speech/anti-proselytization bit).

Mural,

I read a bit of China, and quit after four chapters. I’m thinking there was some pedophilia, or something really disgusting involved, and on top of that the writing was painful, and the characters were hard to understand.

However, yes, Asimov, as I’ve characterized him ‘a clear drink of water’. He speaks very plainly, and I suspect he’s not nearly as great as he’s been made out to be.

I’d like to write down a list of my ten favorite authors, but that would be impossible. I like so many, and for so many different reasons. However, sadly, I didn’t find Dune that interesting which I know makes me a minority in the SF community. Lets say, I just finished Orson Scott Card’s ‘Empire’. I’m reading ‘Eridahn’ which is a 1970′s slim novel about time travel to the dinos. I’ve opened up again ‘Looking Glass’ by John Ringo. My library might want their copy of ‘West Under the Eagle’?? by Andre Norton back if I can find it. I recently finished ‘Rainbow’s End’ by Vinge (and found it less interesting than most of his novels). And I just turned in ‘The Protector’s War’ by SM Stirling (he doesn’t seem mysogynistic and hateful like he used too although he’s obviously playing to his market by positing a world where Paganism takes over. Niven and Pournelle and Stirling in Dream Park were a lot more realistic when they said that after a disaster, the well-prepared and well-stocked Mormons did very well indeed in spreading their faith.)

Even? Exchange? Hmmm…how about, guy with the Truth gives it to person needing the Truth. No even, no exchange, just the missionary fulfilling the duty laid on him by God. Now, there is a class element going on, true, in the attraction, but…keep in mind that Christianity if it is the Truth is also a more effective way to live (except for the parts where the local Powers that Be hate you for exposing them as scumbuckets, and take revenge on you, and even that is good for the community.)

One fairly obvious example is that Christianity fosters cooperation (a lot of religions do), and I’ve seen a fair bit (Charlie Stross, another SF writer is a recent example) of atheists saying that caring for other people is silliness(to be fair, I’ve also seen a lot of atheists who don’t agree). Well, people are free to take that attitude, but group cooperation really works a lot better for most people, and most of the time.

So, I come to a guy, and say. “Get saved.” He agrees. Now he sleeps peacefully at night, and doesn’t need to drink so much to cope with his fear of death. I also say, “Now that you’re saved, there’s some advice God has on how He wants you to live.” I hand him a Bible. He reads, and finds out that God wants him to accept insult and turn the other cheek. He stops hitting his wife just because she calls him a loser. She stares in complete shock. She becomes a Christian. He learns to love her with all his life at stake. She learns to respect him. They start smiling at each other through the candlelight. Pretty soon, there’s a baby in the local church nursery…in a few years, he’s moved on up to a small house, and out of the trailer he lived in. But more importantly, he, his wife, and his child which follows the parents’ example and gets saved as well, are on their way to Heaven. The economic and social benefits of this are secondary.

This is not an exchange, not primarily. Its a gift which starts from the Giftgiver.

Okay, I think I’ve responded to everyone who responded to moi. Have a nice day. I may or may not come back to respond, but I found much of interest and quite a lot of intelligence here even as it disagreed with moi.

and those who insult islam through free speech must understand that they will probably get shot, blown up, or their asses kicked

Once upon a time, people said they would “live free or die”, and meant it.

Once upon a time, people thought that free speech was something so important it was worth getting shot at, blown up, or their asses kicked over.

and it is a good argument for why western nations should severely limit immigrations from muslim countries. at least if you believe that the ability to critique religion is an essential part of individual liberty. …[or in another comment:] “We don’t have anything against Muslims,” said Oskar Freysinger, member of parliament for the Swiss People’s Party. “But we don’t want minarets… The minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over.”

I never cease to be baffled by this kind of logic. We want to promote individual liberty and religious freedom, we say, and we’re going to do it by picking this one particular group and ensuring they don’t get individual liberty and religious freedom– either by preventing them from displaying their religion in public or by preventing them from entering the country altogether. We’re for individual and religious liberty, we say, except for those people, granting them religious liberty would keep me from exercising mine.

But the problem with all this is that once you’ve established it’s okay to pick favorites, you quickly find you have very little control over which favorites get picked. The reasoning I see Razib using here to advocate limiting the exercise of Islam in western nations is the same reasoning that elsewhere I see southern baptists using to advocate limiting the exercise of atheism/homosexuality/whatever…

I think Richard Dawkins said that teaching creationism was child abuse.

As far as I know this is a bit of an exaggeration of what specifically Dawkins said.

“I’m in Pizza Hut with my son,” said Ms. Khaton, nodding at her 4-year-old and speaking in a soft East London accent that bore no hint of her Bangladeshi heritage. “I was born here, I’ve never been to Bangladesh. I certainly don’t feel Bangladeshi. So when they say, ‘Go back home,’ where should I go?”

Interestingly, why do women choose the niqab over the hijab as an expression of their Muslim identity? Is there an element of provocation/confrontation involved, as one comment in the article might indicate? Or is this what mosques push for?

Looks very much like a vain attempt to discredit anyone who doesn’t agree with or like the Quran. “If you don’t like it(or are transformed, whatever that means…) then you never really understood it.”