End the War on Freedom

I really should explain this post, since I have at least one Muslim reader, whom I respect. I post things that elicit strong emotional or mental responses. I don't consider whether my posts will offend people. If you're offended, that's your problem. If I offend you too often or too strongly, you'll stop coming here. Your choice.

I practiced Islam for two years. Went to prayers with other local Muslims. La illaha illa ‘Llah (there is no God but Allah) on every breath (still do that, actually, don't know how to stop and don't want to). It's a very powerful practice. But it opened up a violent place inside that I wasn't ready to deal with. So I went back to my Raj Yoga practice.

I haven't read the Koran and don't know very much about its prophet. I posted the quote because it grabbed me.

But I'm an equal opportunity offender. If I find a good quote about Jesus being a second-rate yogi who wasted his training on parlor tricks (my opinion of his "miracles"), I'll print that too.

Edit comment

http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/famous-quotes-christianity.html
http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/famous-quotes-christianity-2.html

Edit comment

From the Burning Cross links above:

"What is it the Bible teaches us? -- rapine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? -- to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." -- Thomas Paine

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." -- Thomas Paine

"Of all the systems of religion that were ever invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as it respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter." -- Thomas Paine

"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State." -- Thomas Jefferson

"There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." -- Thomas Jefferson

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." -- Albert Einstein

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." -- Mark Twain

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." -- Mark Twain

"During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry." -- Mark Twain

"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it..." -- Mark Twain

"To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to trust the true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of His colossal universe is proof that He is at least steadfast to His purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as the affect man, being equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things, taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live hereafter, he will be steadfast, just and fair toward us. We shall not need to require anything more." -- Mark Twain

"It is my firm opinion that Europe (and the United States) does not represent the spirit of God or Christianity but the spirit of Satan. And Satan's successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips." -- Mahatma K. Ghandi

"As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for socialism is its adherents." -- H.G. Wells

"With soap, baptism is a good thing." -- Robert Green Ingersoll

" Christianity is the enemy of liberty and of civilization. It has kept mankind in chains." -- Ferdinand August Bebel

"From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved --Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal --God is the omnipotent father-- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home." -- Gore Vidal

"I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!" -- Gore Vidal

"Martyrdom is the only way in which a person with no ability can become great." -- Gore Vidal

"When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us close our eyes and pray." When we opened our eyes we had the Bible and they had the land." -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay their hands on everything they can get." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

"There is in every village a torch--the teacher; and an extinguisher--the clergyman." -- Victor Hugo

" It is no accident that the symbol of a bishop is a crook, and the sign of an archbishop is a double-cross." -- Gregory Dix

Edit comment

I haven't read an English version of the Quran for several years, but as I recall it was largely indistinguishable from the Bible, on all three points referenced above. For that matter, Muhammad was not a bandit, he was a traveling merchant, and sources differ as to his literacy. Judging from the Quran, he seems to have been at least superfically acquainted with the religious practices of Christians, Jews and pagans, which would be useful for a traveling merchant. Pavel seems to be going out of his way to be insulting here. To what end, I wonder?

Edit comment