Category Archives: Religion

On Iran – A Brief Update

On Tuesday March 3rd, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before congress on the need to halt Iran’s nuclear program. Opinions on the program (those will be later) and absurd and slightly hypocritical comparisons aside, one of Netanyahu’s major talking points was the following Tweet from Ayatollah Khomeini:

Taken at face value this Tweet looks pretty menacing; it seems like the Supreme Leader of Iran is making a threat against the Jewish people! That, however, is not what is happening. Iranian officials and Khomeini have previously drawn distinctions between “the regime of Israel” and the Jewish people and these distinctions are crucial in understanding what is going on. The Tweet is specific to the regime that currently in place, namely Netanyahu’s administration, and is calling for the destruction of that regime, that’s it. When the US said that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was in the “Axis of Evil” and must be stopped, the US didn’t mean that the Iraqi people needed to be liquidated; rather the regime needed to change. When the US condemns the North Korean regime, it is not making a normative statement about the ethnic group making up the country, rather it is making a statement on the government that is in place. Similarly, when Khomeini makes a statement about “the regime of Israel” (especially in the context of Israels failure to protect Al-Aqsa, the third holiest Islamic site), he is NOT making a statement about the Jewish people or the ethnic groups that make up Israel; all he is saying is that there must be a regime change and while the word “annihilated” might sound spooky, that is pure rhetoric and doesn’t imply an outside force attacking Israel. Quite literally, Khomeini is doing what all governments do, denounce States they see as evil. That is it.

It’s time to stop giving Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt and critically examine what’s going on between the two nations. For a further, and more indepth, discussion on whether Iran has a nuclear program, whether they want to “wipe Israel off the map”, and whether a nuclear Iran is a good thing, please read the post “Arm Iran – The Case for the Nuclear State”.

No Afterlife? No Problem!

I’m aware I haven’t written anything major in a while and I apologize for that, although I am working on a few big posts that will be finished soon — I promise, but I’ve had this thought on my mind for a few months now and wanted to get it written down and then presented to some fellow Atheist-Humanists.

Below the jump will be a brief discussion on why I find the idea of an afterlife, either Hell or Heaven, terrifying and why the “just being gone” view of death is more comforting than anything else.

 

Continue reading

Thoughts on Charlie Hebdo – A Reply

I originally wasn’t going to write anything about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo because I was under the naïve assumption that there wouldn’t be people posting with the hashtag “#NoTearsforCharlieHebdo” because they’d realize how absurd they were…but I was wrong. Recently, the blog Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism posted an essay by a one Eric Struch wherein he compared Charlie Hebdo to Der Stürmer (a Nazi-era publication) and concluded with “‘freedom of expression’ really is, is just a continuation of colonialism in a new form”. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this after the jump however, I shall quote Struch’s entire post below (image included):

“The inability of liberal ‘humanists’ to understand racism and national oppression, and the transformation of this ostensible ‘humanism’ into a propaganda tool of imperialism:

“If a Filipino Catholic ‘guest worker’ (AKA modern-day slave) in Qatar, who has no rights and probably lives in a non-air-conditioned sweatbox with 50 other workers (and has seen plenty of his fellow workers go home in pine boxes), wants to make fun of the hypocritical way the al-Thani family purports to be ‘Muslim’ while abusing other Muslim workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc.— that’s one thing.

“But in France, which still has a neocolonial relationship to Muslim countries like Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and others, and has housing projects filled with poor immigrants from these countries, where French cops get to go into these projects and get away with shooting whoever they want— then what this so-called ‘freedom of expression’ really is, is just a continuation of colonialism in a new form.”

– Eric Struch

Graphic via IS Horst

#NoTearsForCharlieHebdo

Continue reading