Religion of Peace News
By Dave Hitt on Dec 2, 2007 in Religion
You may already be following the story of Gillian Gibbons, the school teacher who asked her class of seven year olds to name the class teddy bear. They picked the name Mohamed. She was promptly arrested, thrown in jail, and told that she could get 40 lashes for such a heinous crime.
She was trying to teach the kids about animals and their habitats. Instead, she showed the world about animals and their religion.
She was found guilty of insulting religion and sentenced to 15 days, without a beating, and that’s where most news coverage ends. But there’s more to the story – a thousand Muslims, with hate in their eyes and swords in their hands, protested, demanding that she be executed. Over a teddy bear.
And yet, we are told, Islam is a religion of peace.
Meanwhile, we haven’t heard much about the Saudi woman who was raped by seven men and sentenced to 90 lashes for being out with a male who wasn’t related. When she complained about it publicly her sentence was raised to 200 lashes and six months in jail.
She should have just run away. Then she’d only be getting 60 lashes to go with her six months.
And still we are told that Islam is a religion of peace that highly respects women. So respectful that they’ve published a guide that shows the proper way to beat your women.
Why do so many of them despise women? Because those evil women distract men from their prayers. A spiritual leader in Malaysia says men are “abused” by seeing them. “We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen,” Nik Abdul Aziz said. “Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed.”
If their faith is so fragile it can be damaged by a glimpse of a woman wearing something sexy, we may have a new, cheap weapon in the war on terror.
Victoria’s Secret will send free soft core porn to anyone requesting it. Let’s have them print up a few hundred million extra copies every month and air drop them over Muslim countries and communities. Over time Muslim males will collect a secret stash to enjoy over and over. It will take a while, but maybe, just maybe, it will cure them of their insanity.
(Thanks to Dr. Atlantis at the Skepticality forum for the picture.)
I’m waiting for the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode based on this.
“What? No, we named him after one of the kids!”
“Infidel!! Muhammed is not for the bearly ones!! You will die”
“No, wait, really, I wanted to call him Moses!!”
“Oh you done it now infidel!!”
Neil Russell | Dec 3, 2007 | Reply
I admit that I haven’t read the Koran, but I am willing to bet that the crazy stuff that comes from the religion has about as much textual basis and the crazy stuff that comes out of the Christian religion.
Don Venardos | Dec 3, 2007 | Reply
You should check it out. The first chapter is very short: God is Allah, Allah is God, there is no God but Allah, etc.
The second chapter is a long list of everything bad the Jews ever did, and instructions to kill them.
I didn’t get to the third chapter.
Hittman | Dec 3, 2007 | Reply
Thanks, Dave. I will read it, it has been on my to do list for a long time.
Don Venardos | Dec 4, 2007 | Reply
I don’t think that we can really say that Islam is one thing or the other. Obviously different factions in Islam disagree radically with one another.
Heck, Christianity used to also treat women in a similar manner. While we still have mouth-foaming Christian zealots, few people actually practice stoning or anything like that anymore.
Parrot | Dec 6, 2007 | Reply
There is little is Islam that makes it naturally worse than Christianity or Judaism. The problem is more of the surrounding culture. Judaism became a very intellectual and philosophical religion relatively early and Christianity mostly got out of the Dark Ages around, well, the end of Dark Ages. The problem is that most forms of Islam haven’t.
Obviously there are a lot of cool Muslims (I know because I have partied with them) and not all branches of Islam are nuts, but there are way too many branches that are nuts and most of the more laid back branches rarely say anything about how completely batshit much of the religion is.
At least you have the Catholics criticizing the majority of the Evangelicals for rejecting Evolution and you have the United Church of Christ pushing for acceptance of homosexuality.
Harley | Dec 6, 2007 | Reply
“Judaism became a very intellectual and philosophical religion relatively early and Christianity mostly got out of the Dark Ages around, well, the end of Dark Ages. The problem is that most forms of Islam haven’t.”
And in one of the many ironies of history, it was the re-introduction of western europe to the greek classics during the crusades via the preservation of said texts by the islamic countries, that was the genesis of the renaissance – go figure.
Don Venardos | Dec 10, 2007 | Reply
My wife is from a muslim family and although I like her family, her religious community was by-and-large the same as the one I grew up in: a lot of people concerned about their committees, church politics, looking good for their peers, etc. This was in Nairobi, Kenya, only a country-or-two south of Somalia and the Sudan. It’s harder to get media coverage, though, for a boring khane laden with committees more interested in Robert’s Rules of Order than in Rule of Islamic Law.
“Religion of peace” doesn’t fit Islam any more or less than it does Christianity, but I agree with the other posters in saying that it’s more culture than religion. Would Gillian Gibbons have had the same response if she were not an outsider?
Dan Pearson | Dec 14, 2007 | Reply