This is one of the most concise, eloquent, and accurate statements on the problem with religious absolutism in morality and the superiority of secular, non-absolutist approaches to morality I have ever heard. And it is certainly Dawkins’s best 2 and a half minutes on the topic of morality I have ever heard: Thanks to Lucy. [...]
Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s show ash-Shariah wal-Hayat has an audience of 40 million. He is the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, is a trustee of Oxford University, and is considered a leading Muslim Brotherhood intellectual. He returned to Egypt from exile after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and led Friday prayers on February 18. [...]
Of course I disagree, but I’m sure glad he thinks so and hope more Muslims do too. Your Thoughts?
Gary Bauer thinks Christians aren’t treated as well as Muslims in America because there are greater quantities of art works which use Christian symbols in ways that offend Bauer’s sensibilities than there are ones that use Muslim symbols in ways that would offend Muslim sensibilities: in a variety of contexts, American Muslims are treated better [...]
Gary Bauer displays a hilarious sense of grievance in his article “If Christians Were Treated Like Muslims”. I want to take a few posts to fully dissect all of its self-absorbed, phony, distorted victimhood. The first three sentences merited a full post themselves, so here we go. Bauer starts out with the following falsehood: Few [...]
Bruce Bawer is a gay liberal and the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. And below is a powerful speech. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, at least make time for the first part: The description of the video [...]
An interview from June 10 with the author of Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations: Click through the video to see all 5 parts. Your Thoughts?
(Image: “God Is Great” by Makan Emadi) Betwa Shermer has a really interesting piece about Muslim artists in America who incorporate nudes into their art. Defenses of nudity in art as permissible by Islamic standards: The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not [...]
So despicable. Your Thoughts?
Former Muslims United claim the right to apostasy for American Muslims is in danger: FMU has asked me to note two corrections that need to be made in the article below: Wafa Sultan is the president of Former Muslims United. The right of apostasy pledge was sent to 111 Muslim leaders, not groups. In the fall [...]
An Australian report talking to mostly Muslim women in the first part: In the second video, we have a Muslim cleric claiming that bestiality is legal in America in 28 states, saying that Muslims are “superior beings” to non-Muslims, and that it is just for adulterers to be stoned: Your Thoughts?
Do you like boring propaganda idolizing a self-aggrandizer who was keen on declaring the superiority of his own personal moral righteousness and presuming to speak for “God”? Do you like being yelled at by preachers who substitute volume for intellectual substance to try to stir emotion in you (and then follow up with whispered prayers [...]
Amira Nowaira laments that well over a thousand years ago, Islamic scholarship had more room for rationalists than it seems to have today: Although many of those thinkers, according to Badawi, did not attempt to disprove the existence of God, they lashed out against the notion of prophethood and argued against the privileged position occupied [...]
A brave atheist friend born, raised, and still living in Morroco, who has himself received death threats from his local mosque, wants me to pass this on: There are two ways to deal with the ugly teachings espoused by Mohammed: (1) Gloss over Mohammed’s violent, authoritarian, anti-progressive, and intolerant views and try to persuade Muslims [...]
Creation, a new film about Charles Darwin cannot get any US distributors because of fear of fundamentalist backlash: However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of [...]
Author Sebastian Faulks recently made derogatory remarks about the Koran saying that it lacked an “ethical dimension” and that it did not stack up favorably to the Christian tradition (which is his own): “Jesus, unlike Muhammad, had interesting things to say. Muhammad had nothing to say to the world other than, ‘If you don’t believe [...]
Two weeks ago, I profiled various remarks from Jerry Coyne for the incisive way they challenged assumptions that (1) religion is indispensable for moral progress, (2) that religion is even on balance usually an aid to moral progress, and (3) that moral progress is even something observable over the course of history. Coyne’s remarks were written [...]
Religious authoritarianism strikes again: Mohsen Namjoo, a singer-songwriter who has been described as the “Iranian Bob Dylan”, has been sentenced to five years in prison for recording music that “dishonours” passages from the Qur’an. The sentencing was in absentia, as Namjoo lives in Vienna. The musician was convicted for “his unconventional singing” of the Muslim [...]
Thanks to the Atheist Media Blog Your Thoughts?