87.0736% extremist
by Capt. Fogg
New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.
85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.
Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.
They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.
They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.
Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.
Cross posted at Human Voices
New York Rep. Peter King thinks there are too many mosques in the US. I don't know whether that's true. I can only say that I've seen exactly one since I was old enough to know what a mosque was and I've been old enough for a long time. But Representative King is a Republican, a part of Guiliani's campaign and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and so has a personal financial interest in the marketing of hysteria and the promotion of irrational sectarian hatred.
85% of them, however many of them there might be, are controlled by extremist leadership, says Representative King. 85% -- although that number is probably there because it sounds like statistics but would be impossible to confirm or deny -- and besides, extremism is a relative and thus easily invoked term. Extremism can, according to traditional Republican values, be good: "no vice" as that icon of Republican virtue and multiple felon Spiro Agnew once told us. All in all, it's not a good argument, just one of the few left at the bottom of the barrel of bullshit.
Of course I think there are far too many Churches in the US and 87.0736% of them are extremist in that they are promoting the restriction of civil rights according to the teachings they invent for the purpose of undermining democracy and liberty and justice for all. They've succeeded in requiring our children to acknowledge their pantheon of bizarre deities and to swear that magic beings are involved in the government of the US. They have succeeded in replacing our coinage with little copper and paper religious engravings and they are constantly telling us what we can read, see, say and investigate; whom we can spend our lives with, how we can define our families, what we can teach our children about science and mathematics.
They not only promote wars and violence, they teach us that religious wars and violence are good when done in defense of an almighty dictator and are happy to provide all the fictitious history you could ever want to benefit their crusades and their war against science, math, physics, history, law, logic, cosmology, geology, paleontology, meteorology, statistics, probabilities and the origin of species through natural selection.
They promote the kind of mental illness that would allow, for instance, Mitt Romney, a follower of one Joseph Smith: demonstrable liar, forger and sexual pervert, to elevate his campaign to deny civil rights to people his sexually perverted and somewhat unclean looking prophet didn't like. It allows extremist followers of a Roman Bishop like Rudolph Guiliani to close a public museum for Blasphemy because he didn't think we should have the right to view a painting of a magic virgin who has babies with invisible gods that didn't adhere to the precise iconography of his church.
Too many Starbucks, too many SUV's and burger joints and way too Goddamn many churches.
Cross posted at Human Voices
Labels: Mitt Romney, religion, Rudy Guiliani
posted by Libby Spencer at 9:47 AM
4 Comments:
he's sort of right. Alot of the mosques are funded by the Saudis. The places are often very scary and unfriendly. I mean, imagine if every christian church in say Africa was funded by Pat robertson or some other snake handling weirdie.
In the uK it's worse though because they don't keep them in check at all. You can see the same insane crap on msulim tv that you can in the middle east. prachers inveighing against the west and all that. IN the west. DOn't kid yourself. American hegemony is why we are caught in the crossfires of this thing but islam has it's own problems and motor for terrorism as well.
Amen Fogg.
Lester, I don't know from mosques but the few people I know that practice Muslim faiths are gentle and kind people. And I've seen some pretty insane crap on the fundie TV programs, much more extreme than Muslim rhetoric. The only difference is the Christian fundies don't call it jihad, they call it missionary work. It amounts to the same thing.
Oh I meant to say fabulous post Fogg.
All praise gratefully accepted.
Of course I'm not happy about Saudi influence on Islamic education around the world, but I'm not happy with any religious efforts to subvert the truth and rile up the population anywhere.
Robertson and the late and certainly damned Falwell are good examples of militant extremism and have produced their share of terrorists, mad bombers and murderers. That was my whole point.
I think though, and I'm not the first to say it, that the US Muslim population is far more integrated or assimilated than the populations of the UK or Germany. They also tend to be more affluent and enjoy more opportunities.
People leading good lives and with expectations of improvement don't blow themselves up. It's no accident that Christian fundamentalist extremists tend to live in the poorest, least educated and most hopeless areas and the same may apply to all.
The US is a far better melting pot than any European country I know, although the Republicans don't seem to like it..
Post a Comment
<< Home