Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/09 23:34I know Penn now has a family and it is in his best interest to keep them protected... but...
Wouldn't it be great if he made a Bullshit episode on the Quran? I envision it similar to the bible, except it would focus on attacking the common myth that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is anything but a religion of peace, all you need to do to prove that is to read the Allah damned Quran.
I also found a video documenting this issue, but it just doesn't have the flair that a good Bullshit episode would have: Islam: What the West needs to know
Yes, like Christianity, Islam is full of a bunch of half assed followers who pick and choose their morality from their religious texts. Like Penn says, if you can pick and choose, why follow a religion in the first place?
Now watch as I receive no replies to this post, due to the fear of some Islamist finding this post and taking names...
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
JoMadge
Moderator Karma: 108
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 01:16The safety factor is more than enough reason for Bullshit to *not* tackle this particular subject. Besides, I think the peaceful reputation of that particular religion is on shaky ground in this country as it is.
~JoMadge
P.S. The above comment does not reflect the views or opinions of pennfans.net, Penn & Teller, Goudeau, FreeFM, the pope, Melvin Gibstein, or monkeys - lots of monkeys!
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 10:47Legal disclaimers will not help you infidel!
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
melvin7506
User Karma: -1
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 18:47maf wrote:
Yes, like Christianity, Islam is full of a bunch of half assed followers who pick and choose their morality from their religious texts. Like Penn says, if you can pick and choose, why follow a religion in the first place?
there are / were enough stupid atheists on this planet(pol pot, stalin, kim jong ill) as it is/was the case with religious ones(khomeyni, bush)....
if there were no religions, we people would find other ways to pick a fight.....
so saying that (any form of) religion is the source of all evil on this planet is plain stupid.
it is one source of many....why concentrate on it?
especially if you are an atheist....
be open minded and find the other sources too - leave the believers alone(as they should leave you alone too, of course)
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 19:43You make the same mistake that everyone does about atheism. Atheism is not a philosophy, so it can not be judged as one. Atheism is simply the disbelief in god. It answers no questions other than that one. There are political movements that have had atheism integrated, but atheism can not be judged as a philosophy.
Religion is the base form of philosophy, as it does attempt to answer questions about existence and morality. However, it requires faith to answer some key questions. Any religion that requires faith, is a denial of the mind. Any religion that denies the mind, has the ability to create a dangerous situation where there is a moral leader (eg. Jesus, Muhammad, etc) and A LOT of sheep. Since these sheep are not taught to think, but rather follow, the moral leader has the final say on everything, without question. That is what makes religion an important focus of judgement. Especially since we are taught to tolerate all religions, and ignore the parts of these religions that could be detrimental to our own lives.
I focus on religion because so many people use it as their philosophy. Atheists do not use atheism as their philosophy, they often have a philosophy attached to it, such as Objectivism, Determinism, etc. These philosophies must be judged individually. It is unfair to say that atheism is bad due to philosophical political movements like communism, socialism, etc. You have to judge communism and socialism as a whole. I usually judge a philosophy based on similar criteria that I do with religion. If they deny the mind in important issues, such as morality, then they have the ability to create followers who do not value human life. Philosophies that deny the value of the individual and their life are often philosophies that follow political parties like socialism or communism, both which have murdered millions of individuals.
I chose to focus this particular post on religion because it is something that could effect my life if many individuals continue to make morally gray judgements about religion. We are slowly opening the door up for zealots to take positions of power. Our denial of what their religion stands for is a denial of the mind. And that is evil.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 19:45...and the believers don't leave me alone. Christians are in power in this country, Catholics in others, and Islam in the rest. They threaten individual liberty every day and that is why I can not tolerate their "beliefs". Faith and logic can not exist peacefully side by side.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
melvin7506
User Karma: -1
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 21:24nice point of view you have! I totally respect that....and so should everybody else.....
Mutual respect between all humans is essential.
The "believers" disrespect atheists but the atheists disrespect the "believers".
Exactly that should change.
In my idealistic world view(call it nut point of view) we all should get along!
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/10 21:46Mutual respect, without warrant, is not essential. Respect is earned. Any doctrine, philosophy, political party or religion that teaches violence against unbelievers should not be given an ounce of respect or tolerance.
The only reason that evil exists in this world is because individuals tolerate it. We are taught to tolerate this and tolerate that, without thought. It is understandable to tolerate different view points, but only up to the point where it does not threaten individual freedom and life. As soon as a system of ideals issues a threat against life or freedom, that system of ideals should be exposed for what it really is, spoken out against, and if necessary*, attacked violently.
*in the case of self defense
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
Vlad the Impala
Moderator Karma: 162
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/11 04:25"?you?re simply not allowed to attack someone?s religion. You can attack their politics or their football team, but not their faith. I think it?s very important that this should be seen as complete nonsense. Why shouldn?t people be required to defend their religion?" Richard Dawkinsthere is no possible use for a signature* except to demonstrate how funny/geeky/cynical/pathetic you are.
*including this one
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/11 11:46Good ol' Richard.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
Jabjabs
User Karma: 12
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/11 12:07Ah a classic quote indeed, so true... I'm mostly just posting because I haven't done so in about a month but that's not the point.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
melvin7506
User Karma: -1
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/11 21:00Vlad the Impala wrote: "?you?re simply not allowed to attack someone?s religion. You can attack their politics or their football team, but not their faith. I think it?s very important that this should be seen as complete nonsense. Why shouldn?t people be required to defend their religion?" Richard Dawkins
It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works.
In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, "Who designed the designer?" It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.
Dawkins gets miffed when this is called "19th-century" atheism, since, as he says, the period of their first discovery does not affect the truth of these propositions. But to call it "19th-century" is to draw attention to the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.
This persistence is what any scientific attack on religion must explain?and this one doesn't. Dawkins mentions lots of modern atheist scientists who have tried to explain the puzzle: Robert Hinde, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, DS Wilson, Daniel Dennett, all of them worth reading. But he cannot accept the obvious conclusion to draw from their works, which is that thoroughgoing atheism is unnatural and will never be popular.
Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it's nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that "Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't, but even if he was? the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism."
Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists. The claim that Stalin's atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book, but it has competition from a later question, "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief [atheism]?"?as if the armies of the French revolution had marched under icons of the Virgin, or as if a common justification offered for China's invasion of Tibet had not been the awful priest-ridden backwardness of the Dalai Lama's regime.
One might argue that a professor of the public understanding of science has no need to concern himself with trivialities outside his field like the French revolution, the Spanish civil war or Stalin's purges when he knows that history is on his side. "With notable exceptions, such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people play lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles." Really? "The majority of us don't cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said." Do the Chinese believe in free speech? Does Dawkins think that pious Catholics or Muslims are allowed to? Does he believe in it himself? He quotes later in the book approvingly and at length a speech by his friend Nicholas Humphrey which argued that, "We should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out." But of course, it's not interfering with free speech when atheists do it.
He repeats the theory that suicide bombs are caused by religious schools: "If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior value of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools." Evidence? As it happens, the definitive scientific study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win, has just been published by Robert Pape, a Chicago professor who has a database containing every known suicide attack since 1980. This shows, as clearly as evidence can, that religious zealotry is not on its own sufficient to produce suicide bombers; in fact, it's not even necessary: the practice was widely used by Marxist guerrillas in Sri Lanka.
Dawkins, as a young man, invented and deployed to great effect a logical fallacy he called "the argument from Episcopal incredulity," skewering a hapless clergyman who had argued that since nothing hunted polar bears, they had no need to camouflage themselves in white. It had not occurred to the bishop that polar bears must eat, and that the seals they prey on find it harder to spot a white bear stalking across the ice cap. Of course, you had to think a bit about life on the ice cap to spot this argument. But thinking a bit was once what Dawkins was famous for. It's a shame to see him reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
teen
User Karma: 16
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/12 03:32Atheism for me does come out of philosophical ideas I have. I think if there is a god it does not require my worship, that doesn't make sense. I take acid if that helps you comprehend why I may think there is something to it. BTW God looks exactly like a midget alien in a white Elvis jumpsuit, I shit you not.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
melvin7506
User Karma: -1
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/12 03:40teen wrote: I think if there is a god it does not require my worship.
that's deism you're talking about - my belief
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
maf
User Karma: 41
Re:Bullshit Quran - 2006/10/12 12:02Atheism may come out of your philosophical ideas, but it is not the basis of any rational philosophy.
I just hate when atheism is judged next to individual religions, or even against religions as a whole.
The only judgement you can make about atheism or theism is about the rationality behind each one. Moral judgements are to be left to the ethics of individual philosophies and religions.
and it the case of Islam, the ethics are fucked. Same with Christianity, but not as bad as Islam.
| | The administrator has disabled public write access.
