Sharia: Halal and Haram

sharia

Originally posted 2016-06-03 19:10:03.

The Muslim legal code called Sharia specifies everything that is ‘mandated’ and ‘forbidden’.

In Arabic they are ‘halal’ and ‘haram’. Sharia — contained in a manual called Sharia Law. (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).

sharia

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 Law. (The Reliance of the Traveller)

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The Goddess in The Philippines

goddess-philippines

Originally posted 2014-03-10 13:59:50.

The Goddess is a big deal in the Philippines and goddesses are out in strength there this week. The occasion is the closing rounds of the Universities Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) women’s volleyball tournament, held at Smart Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City. Teams with names like De La Salle Lady Spikers and Ateneo de Manila Lady Eagles, the Tigresses, the Lady Warriors and the Lady Bulldogs battle it out in front of huge, enthusiastic and thoroughly partisan crowds. And these girls aren’t kidding; this is serious stuff.

 The audience is mainly young – but everywhere in the Phils is mainly young. That’s only to be expected in a country where the population has increased by a factor of ten in fifty years. And there are as many men here as women. Filipinos are as passionate about volleyball as Scots are about football.

 This is hard sport, and women are seen as true warriors.

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The ‘Ontological Argument’= busted

Originally posted 2014-01-17 01:32:12.

This is sometimes called the attempt to define god into existence, and was first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033—1109). This original version was busted by Kant and Hume amongst others, but lo and behold, it resurfaced after several reworkings. While modern apologists are mightily proud of the shiny new gloss this has given the argument, it still devolves to the same thing:

A thing that can be imagined to exist, must exist, if it is imagined to have certain properties.

Clearly this is nonsense. However the dense fug of philosophical obscurantism is, as usual, used to hide the central argument, so let me expand what it says:

God is a being greater than which none can be conceived (unsubstantiated premise.)

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The Realpolitik of Islamism

Originally posted 2013-06-30 21:26:45.

 

Realpolitik
Realpolitik: the Battle of Vienna

It is now over twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall; for many young people, the Cold War, of which it was the most compelling symbol, is no more than a history lesson. In my desk here I have a small piece of concrete, with paint on, which was recovered from that wall and sold as a tourist trinket. It is perhaps the most telling one I have.

Our children do not, as those of my generation did, live in daily fear of being blown to pieces by atomic bombs or dying an agonising death from radiation sickness. They do not walk into their schools to find posters saying “Better Dead Than Red” on the walls, nor do they crowd around flickering television sets alongside their anguished parents, watching as Kennedy drew his line in the ocean, and curled his finger around the trigger of nuclear Armageddon. And for this we should all be very, very thankful indeed. No child should have to live with nightmares like those. Continue reading “The Realpolitik of Islamism”

Abortion: the egregious slaughter of the innocent

Originally posted 2020-05-09 01:27:49.

We generally agree, as humans, that human life is sacrosanct. It is one of the greatest cultural condemnations we can deliver, that ‘human life has no value’. Yet abortion does precisely that: it places the value of human life at zero.

According to a report by Worldometer,  a reference website, about 40-50 million abortions are performed worldwide each year, which works out to be about 125,000 abortions every single day. Abortion is the single biggest cause of human death. This figure comes from the WHO. Anyone who is not disgusted by that statistic should be ashamed.

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Islam and the death of freedom

Israeli soldiers.

For several years now I have not been writing much about Islam. Partly this was because my interest was elsewhere. However the recent murderous attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians, many of them children and even babies, have forced the issue. None of us can stand by and watch this demonic genocide without protest.

Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after the 1967 War and had maintained control, although it had mistakenly allowed Hamas and Hizbollah to establish Islamic schools within these areas.

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Inanna and Jesus: a tale of syncretisation

Originally posted 2018-09-20 06:25:57.

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 culture or tradition, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they had been evolving for thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples carried it forward.

So we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins.

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Islam: Read all about it right here!

islam

Originally posted 2021-02-23 17:43:03.

I’ve just refreshed my page that contains free downloads of all the major texts of Islam. For reasons that remain unclear, this page suffers frequent attacks. It’s almost as if Muslims don’t want people to read their texts…silly idea, no?

Actually, no. Islam does not want you to read the texts. Muslims go to great lengths to prevent you and condemn any version of the texts not written in Arabic. This, they say, is because ‘Allah’ speaks Arabic and so any translation of his words is blasphemous. However, a suspicious person, not me, of course, might argue that it sounds very much as if they don’t want we kuffars to read the texts at all. I wonder why that might be, if it were the case?

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