Tag: Religious Intolerance

Do You Know What You Fear?

There is as time when Americans quake in their panties when the word Muslim is mentioned……not so much these days that is until our Fearless leader has to re-Tweet his hateful videos…..or until the next attack that some dildo yells a few words in Arabic and then the whole race is condemned because of stupidity.

Try to keep up.  The beliefs that AQ and ISIS hold dear come from the the teaching s from Saudi Arabia……the vicious aspect of ISIS/AQ come from the teachings of Wahhabism…….you want to hate some Muslims because of their actions then hate the Saudis for it is where the craziness of terrorism originates.

The London Bridge attack and recent bombing in Manchester have again raised the question, what influences jihadists to carry out such horrendous acts?

“Yusuf”, a Muslim in Bradford, like the majority of British Muslims, rightly condemns such terrorist acts as contrary to the teaching of Islam.

“Such acts are caused by Wahhabism and its teaching of hate”, he says imploringly.

Wahhabism, a puritanical Islamic movement, found mainly in Saudi Arabia, originated in the 18th century from the teachings of the fanatical preacher, Muhammad Ibn Abd’al Wahhab.

Rejecting most practices of the majority of Muslims as bidah (harmful innovations), he ordered his fellow Arabs to accept his form of Islam or die.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/what-wahhabism-puritanical-code-islam-10564342

Since all this hatred began I have tried to make  Americans see just what they hate…..it is is not all Muslims but rather those bastards that follow wahhabism the religious teachings of Saudi Arabia.

Do not make all Muslims pay for the stupidity of a few……and Americans need to know who they hate…..as it is now with the leader we have now they just hate for the sake of hate.

The Hidden Cost Of Religious Hypocrisy

We have a lot of religious manure being spread these days…..Christians are firmly behind a pedophile well several pedopiles and they pretend that they are following some precept of Christianity while supporting these people…..they are not as far as I was taught in my early days of Christian training…..Christianity has become a joke to the rest of the world….Gandhi had statement about Christianity….”It is is lovely ideal too bad it has never been tried” (a paraphrase).

Hypocrisy is running deep in religious circles these days….one candidate in the South says that he is running for a seat the God wants him to have….how pretentious is that?

Back to the religious hypocrisy……..

I’m standing and clapping for Bethany S. Mandel’s op-ed in The New York Times today.  If you don’t know her name or her work, she’s a politically and socially conservative Orthodox Jew. As an adult, she was received into Orthodox Judaism by Rabbi Barry Freundel … who, it came out later, was secretly videotaping women as they undressed and entered into the ritual mikvah bath. Mandel was one of those caught on the dirty rabbi’s camera. He’s now in jail. Excerpts from her column:

It’s hard to describe the depth of my feeling of betrayal. As a convert, I wasn’t just another student of Rabbi Freundel. My faith and practice — my Judaism — was shaped by his words, deeds and thought. For those of us victimized by trusted religious leaders, every day is a struggle to disentangle our negative associations of beautiful rituals from the ugly abusers who taught us about their meaning.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-hidden-cost-of-religious-hypocrisy/

I am sorry but religion is killing itself with all its hypocrisy……we need to get back to religious basics….until then it will forever remain a joke.

Closing Thought–22Mar17

Enter The Religious Police!

In countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran there is a group called the religious police….they make sure that everyone follows the religious laws of the land.

There is a growing concern by those with no brains about the establishment of sharia law here in the USA…..first only a moron would believe such bullshit and second…looks like a church in Alabama wants its own police force….

A bill designed to allow a church to have its own police force is moving forward. Alabama’s Senate judiciary panel has passed a measure that would let Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham create the force, reports NBC News. The force would coordinate with local police to protect the 4,100-member church, which has 2,000 students and teachers at two K-12 schools and a seminary on its sprawling campus, says the church’s administrator. He cited the recent attacks on churches and schools as the motivation for the move, while a concerned member tells the AP, “Anyone can wander in here unchallenged at any time.” The bill now moves on to the full Senate.

“Officer presence is the No. 1 line of defense,” says longtime Republican Rep. Arnold Mooney, who introduced the bill and whose wife and daughter work at Briarwood Christian School. The ACLU of Alabama is among those opposing the bill on constitutional grounds, along with another that would allow churches in the state to appoint armed congregants to provide security with legal protections: “These bills unnecessarily carve out special programs for religious organizations and inextricably intertwine state authority and power with church operations.” The AP notes that the police-force bill passed the Legislature last year, but Gov. Robert Bentley did not sign it. Bentley has not said what he would do this year.

Why not hire security guards if security is truly their only concern?

Now if a church has its own police force does that not make them the religious police?

If this is successful where will it lead or where will it end?  If successful this needs to be challenged in court.

Maybe these mental midgets should worry about their own backyard and stop making shit up just to push their agenda of hate.

Just a thought.

That does it for me for the day….I shall return tomorrow with more stuff.

Christians, Can You Hear This?

When some obscure iman or Muslim leaders says something awful the media makes it a story for a couple of days, depending on what is happening, but yet when some prominent Jewish leader has something foul to say….IT IS IGNORED!

AS if NO one wants to believe the worst about this toad and his group dimply because they are in Israel and Israel would not do anything against the US, right?  (Ask survivors of the USS liberty attack)

Sorry but an intolerant prick is an intolerant prick NO matter the religion or the country.

Time for Israel to sack up!  If it is truly a democracy then this should be publicly chastised and this a/hole needs to be held accountable.  But that will NOT happen because he is a JEW and we know NO JEW can do anything wrong.

Of course some well meaning toad will reference “Freedom of Speech”…well that would be a good argument if it help for all the citizens but in this case it does NOT!

Fuck this PIG and Fuck Israel!

Who Is Weaponizing Religious Liberty?

Nothing I like better than a bunch of babbling buffoons that want religion to be part of politics……makes sure that real problems are ignored.

Back in the days, many years ago, it was a joy to be part of the political process….but then we got all these semi-literate d/bags on the Right….let me be more specific….the Religious Right…..that turn the whole process into some sort of religious litmus test and started chipping away at the very rights that we all say we love…..

Now it is just a menage of BS after BS…..if it is not abortion then it is prayer or the whole Christian nation thing…..I would love to punch holes in this bullsh*t but I do not feel the urge to bad mouth otherwise spiritual people……

In more recent years these “people” have turned our religious liberty into some sort of weapon….aimed at the very heart of this republic…..

It takes a right-wing village to turn a cherished American principle into a destructive culture-war weapon.

In 2016, for the second year in a row, more than 100 anti-equality bills targeting LGBT people were introduced in state legislatures, many of them described as measures to protect religious liberty. This flood of anti-LGBT and “religious liberty” legislation is not the result of isolated local efforts. It is part of a larger campaign by Religious Right groups to resist and reverse advances toward equality for LGBT Americans by portraying equality as inherently incompatible with religious freedom. That effort began well before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, but it has kicked into overdrive since.

Religious Right organizations have long equated criticism with persecution, and portrayed legal and political defeats as attacks on Christianity and religious freedom. Efforts to frame opposition to reproductive choice and LGBT equality as religious liberty issues picked up steam with the issuing of the Manhattan Declaration in 2009. This manifesto, co-authored by right-wing Catholic intellectual Robert George, pledged that its signers would refuse to “bend” to “any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.” Since then, Religious Right groups, their allies at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and allied politicians have increasingly framed their opposition to marriage equality, nondiscrimination laws, reproductive choice, and the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act as questions of religious liberty.

Source: Who Is Weaponizing Religious Liberty? | People For the American Way

There are so many that are concerned about the appearance of Sharia law but do not see where there is little difference in Sharia and the extremism that they want us all to follow….

At what point do we return to the ideals of Jefferson, Adams and Paine?  The separation of church and state…..would be a good place to start.

The Secret Behind the Yemen War

For about a year Saudi Arabia with the help of the US has been bombing the crap out of a small country called Yemen.

The most popular reason for this “war” is that the Sunni Saudis were concerned about the rise of the Shia Houthi militias….once the Houthi started having success against the government of Yemen the Saudis felt they had to intercede to protect themselves and the Holy Shrines of the peninsula…..and the only way to do that was to start an all over invasion of the country….but mostly through an air campaign…..

After a year….the Houthi are still fighting and the only major deaths have been those of Yemeni civilians….

But is there more to this war than the protection of some sites?

A recent PBS report about the war in Yemen exposed the secret connection between the U.S.-Saudi alliance and Al Qaeda, a reality that also underscores the jihadist violence in Syria, writes Daniel Lazare.

PBS Frontline’s “Yemen Under Siege,” which aired on May 3, makes for powerful viewing. A first-hand look at the devastation that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other powers have visited on one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, the 35-minute documentary shows families struggling amid the rubble, children dying from mortar attacks, surgeons operating without anesthesia, and other such horrors.

But the most important revelation comes almost as an aside. Interviewing pro-Saudi fighters near the central Yemeni city of Taiz, journalist Safa Al Ahmad suddenly hears shouting. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Who are they? They don’t want me to be here?”

Source: The Secret Behind the Yemen War – Consortiumnews

The US is choosing sides in a religious argument…..this may not be the best way to use our foreign policy.

Religious Freedom In The USA

There is a lot of banter on blogs and other sources about religious freedoms in this country…..it has gotten a little louder after GOP candidate for president Donald Trump made his now famous or infamous statements about closing places of worship and targeting religious organizations……and other candidates have said that they prefer one religion over another when it comes to refugees……

The Economist has a pretty good look at “Religious Freedom And America”…….

Source: The Economist

THIS weekend, some Americans, at least, have been pondering the meaning of religious liberty. January 16th has been designated Religious Freedom Day because it is the anniversary of what Thomas Jefferson regarded as one of his greatest achievements, ranking with the Declaration of Independence: the approval of a statute in his native Virginia which overturned the entrenched status of the Anglican church and set all faiths on an equal footing before the law. Although he was an Anglican himself, of a very free-thinking sort, he admired the integrity of his non-conformist compatriots and came to the view that religious privilege damaged everybody, including the privileged. The statute’s opening lines reflect the American founder’s mastery of language and clarity of thought.

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was his Almighty power to do.

MORE

The Saudis Go Full ISIS

I have pointed out many times here on IST that the actions of the hated ISIS is no different than the actions from an American “friend and ally”….Saudi Arabia……I am not sure if anyone is listening or understanding…..so I keep trying to shed more light on the situation.

Recent events in Saudi Arabia has lead me to try once again to explain why I say that there is little difference between ISIS and Saudi Arabia…..

Source: The Saudis Go Full ISIS – Antiwar.com Original by — Antiwar.com

No matter how one tries to cut it….the Saudis are not acting like a good example for anyone to follow…..their religious fundamentalism is nothing but an example for other fanatics using religion as a cover for their atrocities.

Then there are those that question their so-called war on terrorism……

Containing the scourge of Islamist terror will be impossible without containing the ideology that drives it: Wahhabism, a messianic, jihad-extolling form of Sunni fundamentalism whose international expansion has been bankrolled by oil-rich sheikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia.

Source: Saudi Arabia’s Phony War on Terror – BSNEWS

The question could be asked….just how serious are the Saudis on fighting terrorism?

Then there is another question that could be asked……Is the US to blame for the newest dust up between Iran and Saudi Arabia?

Source: Saudi Arabia and Iran and how we got here – Al Jazeera English

I say yes…..why?  The US turns a blind eye to the human rights violations by the Saudis and by doing so they give a rubber stamp to all their violations…….

I know that is a lot to process……but better now than later……

There is so much more to the Middle East than you will ever get from your nearest TV……it will be too late to try and understand when your child is serving in the next “Gulf” war……if so then does this mash up threaten the Middle East even more?

Source: Saudi-Iranian Rivalry Threatens Entire Middle East | Al Jazeera America

War is coming…..Will Johnny go to war?  (a future post in the making)

Bah! Humbug!

‘Tis the day before Christmas and all through the blog

The day has become a consumerist bog…….

It is that time of the year when people say “peace and joy to the world”….but how many actually mean it from their heart?

These days there seems to be a whole lot of disdain for any compassion…..which is truly sad for I know that Americans are much better than the rhetoric of the day.

But while some are bad mouthing a religion they do not understand….there is a similar discourse by one that they feel some how akin to…..I read an article that I felt I needed to pass on during this season of “glad tidings”…..

Lehava group’s Benzi Gopstein says Christmas not wanted in Israel, and says of Christians: ‘Remove the vampires before they drink our blood’ –

Israeli anti-racism activists have called for an investigation after a far-right Jewish leader urged a ban on Christmas celebrations in the country and called Christians “vampires”.

Benzi Gopstein, who heads the far-right Lehava organisation and has been arrested a number of times, made the comments in an article on the ultra-Orthodox Jewish website Kooker.

“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land,” wrote Gopstein, who lives in a Jewish settlement in Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

He spoke of the “fall of the line of defence of the Jewish people for hundreds of years against our enemies, the Catholic Church.”

“The mission of those vampires and bloodsuckers remains. If Jews cannot be killed, they can be converted,” he wrote.

“We must remove the vampires before they drink our blood once again.”

The Coalition Against Racism in Israel and others have called on authorities to investigate Gopstein.

In August, Israeli police questioned Gopstein after he condoned torching churches amid an uproar over recent hate crimes, including the firebombing of a Palestinian home that killed a small child and both his parents.

On June 18, an arson attack occurred at a shrine on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel where Jesus is believed to have performed the miracle of loaves and fishes.

Israeli prosecutors have charged three Israelis in that case.

Lehava claims to fight for Jewish identity, in particular by opposing marriages between Jews and gentiles.

This pervert and those that think along those lines are destroying this world with their hatred…..it is not limited to one religion or the other…..maybe the world needs a little more compassion and understanding….it could not hurt…..at least in my opinion……

You see stupid is everywhere…….tolerance is in short supply….even in this season of joy……

Speaking Of “Good Christians”

My friend over at “Lines by Liming” turn me onto this story…..and after I read about it I have to concur with his humorous take of the story…..

Hobby Lobby?  Remember them?  They will not let you work for them if you happen to be gay….they find same sex marriage abhorrent…..or to terminate a pregnancy…..and they are a good Christian organization…..remember them now?

According to them…..a woman does not have a right that is Federal law……but this is somehow just fine……

The Museum of the Bible being built in DC by the Christian family behind one of the nation’s biggest arts-and-crafts retailers is coming along nicely. Maybe too nicely, per law enforcement sources, who tell the Daily Beast that the Green family—the ones whose Hobby Lobby chain claimed a big victory last year when the Supreme Court ruled it didn’t have to provide insurance for employee birth control—has been the subject of a four-year federal investigation for “illicit importation of cultural heritage from Iraq,” per the Daily Beast. That comprises hundreds of clay tablets, thousands of years old and inscribed in ancient cuneiform, allegedly smuggled out of the Middle East and shipped to the Greens’ Oklahoma City home base in 2011. The tablets and tens of thousands of other artifacts are for the museum, set to open in 2017 as “one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts, objects, and artifacts.”

The problem with the Iraq tablets is that, as museum head Cary Summers puts it, there was “incomplete paperwork” attached, though the Daily Beast points out that a simple logistical issue wouldn’t have dragged on so long. Instead, someone looking to bring in artifacts that should never have left their country of origin may have purposely undervalued the antiquities so they could be smuggled into the US. An unnamed source tells the Daily Beast the FedEx forms were marked “hand-crafted clay tiles,” with a value of around $300—which is “technically accurate, but … vastly underestimates their true worth, and … obscures their identification as the cultural heritage of Iraq,” the site notes. Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green tells the Daily Beast, “Is it possible that we have some illicit [artifacts]? That’s possible,” but adds they didn’t knowingly act illegally.

So is it okay to STEAL?  That is exactly what they are doing…stealing another culture’s history…..I believe there is something written down about stealing, right?

But because they are a “good” Christian group these laws do not apply to them…is that about it?

Stealing history of a people is by far the worse type of rape…the rape of a culture…there is NO excuse for this…..religion or otherwise……There is NOTHING “Good” or “Christian” about the theft of a country’s heritage….PERIOD!

Speaking of “good” Christians…..look at what that mental midget Pat Robinson has to say about a guy who ran Guatemala…….

Robertson gushed over Ríos Montt, claiming that he was the real victim because he was targeted by liberals just for being a good Christian.

“I know Efraín Ríos Montt, who was the president there,” Robertson said. “He’s a terrific guy, he was with the El Verbo Church and they had a marvelous government but the left got after him and he couldn’t survive. They just went after him and attacked him and attacked him, the United States State Department went after him, it was terrible.”

Rios-Montt is a good person because he went to a Christian church?

Let’s look at this “good Christian”……….

“At the height of the bloodshed under Ríos Montt, reports put the number of killings and disappearances at more than 3,000 per month,” Patrick Daniels of the Guatemala Solidarity Network noted. “Such was the extent of the violence that in 1999 the UN commission concluded that it constituted acts of genocide.”

His regime specifically targeted indigenous communities with violence and displacement, and in 2013 Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide for crimes committed against the Maya Ixil community. “Hunger, systematic rape and forced displacements were all used as tools of war against the Ixil people,” the BBC reported. However, the conviction was overturned due to a legal technicality and Ríos Montt was later declared unfit to stand for retrial.

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-hails-guatemalan-dictator-charged-genocide#sthash.Ba0VQhpU.dpuf

Yep…..”Good Christians” every one!
There is something to be said about all these “Good Christians” and none of it positive.