I received this email yesterday:
A FORWARD!!
Can a Muslim be a Muslim-American?
My Friends..... I received this from a close friend who was engaged in the protection of our Country prior to his retirement. He was an Intelligence officer of some renown. This is something to ponder...Too many of our citizens think this is a minor problem, and if we ignore it, that it will go away...The threat is real !!!!!.........
Have you ever thought -- Is Muslim-American really an oxymoron? Can a devout Muslim be an American patriot and a loyal citizen?
I forwarded that question to a friend who worked in Saudi Arabia for 20 years. The following is his forwarded reply:
"Theologically, no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon god of Arabia. Religiously, no. Because no other religion is accepted by his Allah except Islam (Quran, 2:256)
Scripturally, no Because his allegiance is to the five pillars of Islam and the Quran (Koran).
Geographically, no. Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.
Socially, no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.
Politically, no. Because he must submit to the mullah (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and destruction of America, the great Satan.
Domestically, no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34).
Intellectually, no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.
Philosophically, no. Because Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and expression. Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or Autocratic.
Spiritually, no. Because when we declare "one nation under God," the Christian's God is loving and kind, while Allah is NEVER referred to as heavenly father, nor is he ever called love in the Quran's 99 excellent names."
Therefore after much study and deliberation.... perhaps we should be
very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both "good" Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you wish.....it's still the truth.
If you find yourself intellectually in agreement with the above statements, perhaps you will share this with your friends. The more who understand this, the better it will be for our country and our future.
The religious war is bigger and more complex than most Americans
currently know or understand
After scanning over this...hmmm...what is a good one word term for religious bigotry...I don't think there is one...if there isn't we certianly need one. Anyway, after cursory reading I composed this reply:
I had a very good friend in college, Eddie M______ (I'm not sure how to correctly spell his last name, really, because I never asked him), he was from Cedar Rapids; he liked to drink, smoke pot and party; and he was a Muslim. In fact, Cedar Rapids, Iowa is home to the Mother Mosque of America, the oldest mosque in the United States!
But bullshit like this e-mail is why I'm an atheist! Fuck Christianity. Fuck Judaism. And fuck Islam. All three are sick, twisted and perverted. If I had my way I'd drop a nuclear bomb on Jerusalem, Mecca and Vatican City! That would shut these religious assholes up but quick. And if the fucking Mormons said boo about it, I'd nuke Salt Lake City to boot! And if that fat fuck Jerry Falwell opened his fat yap, boom-boom Lynchburg, VA and the Thomas Road Baptist Church!
Actually my atheism goes much deeper than merely being anti-organized religion or anti-monotheism, though monotheism is at the root of the world's many problems.
Growing up, I was taught that monotheism was the evolutionary culmination of human relgious thought: First there was animism, the childish belief in spirits or lifeforces in everything; then came polytheism, the ancient Greek and Romans' misguided and superstitious belief in many gods and goddesses; finally, with the ancient Hebrews first getting it right, monotheism! Now why having one all-powerful, all-knowing god was preferable to having many not-so-powerful, not-so-all-knowing gods was never really explained fully to my way of thinking, but I excepted the premise. This, I believe, is as good of definition of "faith" as any: Accepting any premise which cannot be verified or quantified, by empirical measurment or experimentation, as true.
As far as I'm concerned monotheism is mankind's worst invention ever. Here's my thumbnail history of monotheism: A thousand or so years before the "birth of Christ" an paranoid, delusional, megalomaniacal Egyptian king, Ahknaton, invented a "one-god" relgion. Ahknaton's motiving idea was to strip politcal and economic power from anciet Egypt's powerful priestly caste, especially the priesthood of Amun-Ra, therefore he invented one all-powerful diety with himself as its sole mediator. Ahknaton, and only Ahknation had the direct line to god, in other words, much as popes do in our age.
Now here's were things get murky. It seems that a Semitic tribe living in Egyptian territory at that time, gravitated to Ahknaton's way to thinking, for reasons known only to themselves. This Semitic tribe may have been the reminent of the
Hyksos, a people who dominated the Nile Delta region of Egypt nearly a century before Ahknaton's time. And there are tantalizing hints that later pharoahs encouraged Semitic tribes residing on Egyptian territory to migrate into ancient Canaan, now the State of Israel. However, currently historians and archaeologists have no definitive evidence to backup these claims, the Israeli government and elements of the Christian church and Islam continue to stymie archaeological research on Israeli territory for religious reasons.
But let's leave the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Judeans and even Jesus behind and fastforward to the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine is called "The Great" because he was the first Roman emperor to sanction Christianity as the official state religion. The question remains, why? It is on record that his mother, Helena, was a Christian but he never really was. Even his deathbed christening was rather lukewarm, he was just covering all bases. But like old Ahknaton, the idea of holding the one direct line to one supreme god appealed to Constantine. Having this direct line to the one god legitimized Constantine's concentration of all the Empire's political power and economic resources in his hands. In other words, like Ahknaton's "religion," Christianity, with, as one of its central tenents formulated during Constantine's reign, of one and only one individual with a direct line to the one god, lends itself to authoritarian forms of government. Islam, a descendant of Constantinian Christianity, at least in its Sunni guise, lends itself even more so to authoritarianism (this is the only kernel of truth in the above rant.)
By its very nature, monotheism is hierarchical (the supreme one sits at the very pinnacle of the universe followed by kings, popes, priests etc., on downward to the rest of us,)dictatorial (every utterance of the supreme one has the force of law to be obeyed without question,) and authoritarian (only select humans, kings, popes, priests, etc., with the direct line to the supreme one know and understand its edicts which everyone else must obey.)
I stand by my assertion that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are sick. I also stand by my assertion that the "holy spaces" of those three, great sick religions must be destroyed, not necessarily physically by nuclear weapons, though that would get the message across, but demythologized; leaving these so-called "holy cities" with no more religious significance than the Parthenon in Athens or the ruins of Delphi.
The Enlightenment of Eighteenth Century Europe was a reaction to the religous wars and civil wars of the Seventheenth Century. Our American Founding Fathers were products of that Enlightenment, and, as such, philosophically felt that relgion is an agent of disunity and discord, and therefore must be kept separate and distinct from civil discourse and the political realm. In other words, the supreme one orders the unknowable portions of creation while man orders the known. The supreme one rules the out-there, the cosmos, the unknowable future, the after-life; mankind rules the here and now.
But as you can see, from the above email if nothing else, there are now forces afoot, in Christianity, in Judaism and Islam, which wish to crush the past three hundred years of human achievement in the arts, culture and political democracy under the heel of a vengeful and dictatorial supreme one.
It is past time the human race grew up and cast off these dictatorial and imaginary supreme ones, be they Yahweh, Jehovah or Allah. They've been more trouble to us than they have been worth, and have been the root cause of much hatred, war and suffering over the course of two thousand years.
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